The Blue Velvet 'Ingrid Bergman Mashup Thought Experiment'

Because one good Lynchian turn deserves another: "I found myself intensifying the experience of Jeffrey's scenes with Dorothy with a kind of conceptual narcotic inhaler: it involved, ahem, imagining Isabella Rossellini was her mother and that Kyle MacLachlan was actually playing this love scene with Ingrid Bergman. And it is very easy to do – not merely because Rossellini looks and sounds so much like Bergman, but because of the film's intense noir atmosphere. Perhaps I need therapy. But there is something in the infectious and mesmeric weirdness of David Lynch which makes it feel all right." [The Guardian]



Comments

  • Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston says:

    Little (8-year-old) Jeffrey having sex with Dorothy and through her into the Mother ... that's pretty close to my experience of the film (so some corrobation that you don't need therapy, Peter). The "disorienting palimpsest" for me wasn't so significant a factor; what WAS was empowered, sadistic Frank, who isn't blanched at thrusting through the "Mommy" vagina into the uterus: by the fact of their sex, their both being male, little Frank is still tethered to him, and so thereby find his way back out of the woods.

    (It's mostly all there, guys.)

    Thought this was done before '86. Probably because it reminded me of Graduate, and of Updike's first books after college where he tests himself against his mother -- including The Farm.