Lend Me Your Ears

Actually, trouble has been brewing between Gauguin and van Gogh ever since Quinn first showed up at Douglas's rural French house and started complaining about Douglas's cooking and housekeeping. In this sense, Lust for Life can be viewed as a Post-Impressionist, monaural The Odd Couple, with Paul Gauguin/Anthony Quinn playing the role of the meticulous Felix Unger while Vincent van Gogh/Kirk Douglas plays the part of the slovenly Oscar Madison. Now that I think of it, both the Odd Couple movie and "The Odd Couple" TV series, good as they were, would have been a whole lot more enjoyable had either Walter Matthau or Jack Klugman chopped off his ear and walked around the apartment with a bandage wrapped around his head. Though in the best of all possible worlds, both of Jack Lemmon's and Tony Randall's ears would have come off.

Although Lust for Life earns innumerable cultural brownie points for being the first major motion picture to feature a severed ear in a prominent thematic position, it is not a very satisfactory mutilation scene, particularly when compared with subsequent ear slashings, such as those in The Last Temptation of Christ or Reservoir Dogs. For one, we do not actually see the ear get chopped off with the straight razor; Douglas performs the home surgery off-camera, and even after the ear has come off, we only see its reflection in the mirror. More disturbing still, one never gets a very clear sense of why van Gogh was driven to committing this act of self-transmogrification rather than taking things out on someone else. Did he think he was punishing Gauguin by chopping off his own ear? Was he cutting off his ear to spite Gauguin's face? Why didn't he simply chop off Gauguin's ear? Or Gauguin's nose? Another thing: If investors in the late '80s were willing to pay as much as $36 million for a bunch of sunflowers painted by a man most famous for cutting off his own ear, think how much that same painting would be worth if he'd cut off his dick.

Let us leave Starry, Starry Nightmare now and examine the subsequent history of cinematic auricular trauma. From 1956 until 1986, the human ear, as a focal point of dramatic action, vanished from the silver screen. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, but good taste can certainly not be the explanation. For whatever the reason, detached ears did not take center stage in motion pictures again until 1986, when David Lynch released his cult creep classic Blue Velvet. The movie opens with placid, reassuring images of Middle-American suburban life: attentive crossing guards, friendly firemen, happy schoolchildren, white picket fences, a man having a heart attack. But then a shadow falls across the screen as preppy Kyle MacLachlan, back from college to visit his ailing dad (the guy who had the heart attack), stumbles upon a hairy, moldy, insect-infested ear in the woods. Gingerly inserting it in a plain brown-paper bag, MacLachlan transports it to the police station where the chief of detectives tells him, "Yes, that's a human ear, all right."

This is where Blue Velvet parts company with Lust for Life. In Lust for Life, the audience knows all along that the ear-chopping scene is coming sooner or later, because we all know that the real-life Vincent van Gogh did actually chop off his ear. But after the ear has come off, the moviemakers drop the whole unsavory subject; they don't try to play it for laughs. Not so in Blue Velvet, where the bodyless ear becomes a powerful element in the movie.

"What can you tell about a person from their ear?" MacLachlan asks the town coroner. "Are you the one who found the ear?" Laura Dern subsequently asks the Kylemeister in one of the great pickup lines of all time. And when the coroner tells MacLachlan, "We'll check the morgue records, but I don't recall anything coming in minus an ear. The person may still very well be alive somewhere," it signals to the audience that something very troubling is taking place here. Surely, the coroner is suggesting, anyone unlucky enough to have his ear cut off, or anyone unlucky enough to have a loved one whose ear had been cut off, would immediately report it to the police. This isn't the sort of injury--say, a boil, or herpes--that one simply ignores.

In Blue Velvet, the severed ear also functions on a metaphorical level, when we are introduced to Isabella Rossellini, a mysterious lounge lizardess whose husband has been abducted--and had his ear chopped off--by the sex maniac Dennis Hopper.

Here, the severed ear is important for two very different reasons. One, after listening to Isabella's brutal rendition of the Bobby Vinton classic "Blue Velvet" during her nightclub act, it becomes apparent to the audience that she will never be able to raise any serious ransom money if she has to depend on her voice. Two, only a person who was missing at least one ear could possibly derive any pleasure from listening to her singing.

Ears also play an important role in Blue Velvet because without them, Kyle MacLachlan would not be able to make any sense out of the dream Laura Dern describes to him after he asks why there is so much trouble in the world. As she puts it:

"In the dream, there was our world. And the world was dark because there weren't any robins. And the robins represented love. And so along this time there was just this darkness, and all of a sudden thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So I guess it means there is trouble till the robins come."

Laura, as usual, is a big help.

From Blue Velvet, we naturally segue into Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Why? Because Blue Velvet is a movie about a small town with big problems where someone gets their ear cut off, and it also contains a scene where a likable young man (MacLachlan) is kissed on the lips by a creepy actor he would prefer not to be kissed by (Hopper), just as The Last Temptation of Christ is a movie about a small town with big problems where someone gets their ear cut off, and it contains a scene where a likable young man (Willem Dafoe) is kissed on the lips by a creepy actor he would prefer not to be kissed by (Harvey Keitel).

But first, some indispensable Biblical background. There are four different versions of Christ's arrest on the Mount of Olives on Holy Thursday (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) but only St. Luke's version of the Gospel describes the scene where Christ miraculously reattaches the right ear of the High Priest's servant after St. Peter has chopped it off. Perhaps because the ear-cutting scene did not go over so well in Lust for Life, or perhaps because they were basing their screen-plays on the Gospels written by the other Evangelists, neither Nicholas Ray in his 1961 King of Kings nor George Stevens in his 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told include the ear-cutting scene. (In Stevens's defense, a director forced to cast John Wayne as the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross, intoning the words, "Surely, this was the son of God" is already trying the audience's patience enough without confusing the issue through audial anguish.)

But clearly the ear-lopping incident was far too wonderful an opportunity for the Roman Catholic Mob Director Marty Scorsese to pass up. Actually, Scorsese's ear-chopping scene is relatively tasteful, considering what immediately precedes it: Harvey Keitel, cast as a red-haired Judas with a Bensonhurst accent, kissing Willem Dafoe (Jesus of Nazareth) full on the lips. After witnessing a scene as unsavory as that--Jesus seems plenty surprised by the kiss--it's hardly surprising that one of Christ's disciples should whip out his knife and hack off the ear of the High Priest's hapless servant. Interestingly, the disciple uses a nifty uppercut to lop the ear off, creating the impression that this may not be the first time he's done this sort of thing. The ear fragment comes off cleanly, bloodlessly, and tumbles to the ground where Christ, who also seems to be used to this sort of thing, picks it up, reattaches it, and then goes on his merry way being taken into custody and crucified. Inexcusably, the man with the restored ear doesn't even thank Jesus. One other thing: unlike the revolting, hairy ear in Blue Velvet, the ear fragment that Dafoe retrieves from the ground in Last Temptation looks incredibly cheesy. I mean, where's the blood? What, were you saving it for Joe Pesci in GoodFellas, Marty?

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