Re: Thoughts On The Universe
Posted by:
Skylark
()
Date: May 14, 2009 07:09PM
Blue Velvet has some fantastic scenes, but I always thought the ending, that last shot, was a little too on-the-nose and hence a bit lame; simplistic, not deep. In turn, the lameness/obviousness of that last shot somewhat retro-infects, to an extent, my opinion of the film as a whole (despite its several individually brilliant scenes).
For me, Eraserhead remains his finest work - his most inspired, and profound effort.
God, birth, romance, intercourse, pregnancy, child-bearing and rearing, death, and the afterlife. In that order. (God - some sort of demented god or creator, not the I AM/Uncreated Being of the Bible - is the scar-faced man grimly, furiously pulling the lever at the beginning of the film, or at least so I've always thought.)
I have a pet theory, but am not enough of cineaste to know if I'm right. And that is, that Eraserhead had a somewhat revolutionary impact on the use of sound in film -- in particular, in its peculiarly effective and highly original use of ambient background sound to create a mood or effect (I'm thinking of Lynch's use of various sorts of background electrical hums and machinery noises). Certainly, background sound other than music has been used effectively in film almost since the invention of sound (one thinks, offhand, of the scene in the windmill in Foreign Correspondent, which makes such effective use of the sound of creaking wood; or the sound of the rainstorm during and after the battle in Seven Samurai; of course, there are many such examples). But it seems to me that Lynch took it to a different level, and achieved a new kind of effect that no one else ever had before.
There's an analogy, perhaps, to what Griffith did with film editing -- he was not the first to employ such effects - to cut between different perspectives to advance the narrative - but despite the existence of nominal precedents, there's little question that Griffith developed the grammar and language of editing virtually ex nihilo.
I'm not sure I have the critical lingo - well, in fact, I do not - to distinguish what Lynch did from what, say, Kubrick did in 2001, but I think there is a rather significant difference. Kubrick made use of somewhat similar effects with background, ambient types of sound (I'm thinking mainly of the long HAL sequences without dialogue or music), but they were mostly to the end of evoking a futuristic atmosphere. Without question, Kubrick's craftsmanship here was outstanding, and very fresh and creative. But Lynch, in Eraserhead, was doing something quite different -- something truly *new*.
In turn, I think young mainstream Hollywood filmmakers like Lucas (and Ridley Scott in Alien) picked up on what Lynch was doing and ran with it, finally mainstreaming it to the point where such effects are, nowadays, commonplace. But no one used sound quite like Lynch prior to Eraserhead.