It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (12 page)

Or so it seemed as I sat in that second screening of
Blue Velvet
, surrendering to the awful beauty of its phantasmagoria (‘In dreams, I walk with you’ sings Roy Orbison) and being engulfed by a wave of shame and rapture, repugnance and delight which my naïve political correctness could no longer seek to deny. While the scenes of sexual degradation and despair remained almost unendurably harsh, an amazing transformation had occurred during those other moments which Roger Ebert had dismissed as ‘cheap shots’. Having finally surrendered to the horror of
Blue Velvet
, I found myself unexpectedly touched and moved by the very elements that had formerly repelled me. The real revelation was my reaction to a much-quoted scene in which Laura Dern’s Sandy recounts her vision of ethereal robins, a scene which Ebert doutbtless had in mind when citing the ‘sophomoric satire’ and ‘campy in-jokes’ of
Blue Velvet
.

‘I had a dream,’ Sandy tells MacLachlan’s straight-faced Jeffrey as Angelo Badalamenti’s suspended score surges in
quietly choral tones.’In fact, it was on the night that I met you. In the dream, there was our world. And the world was dark because there weren’t any robins. And the robins represented
love
. And for the longest 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 that means there is trouble till the robins come …’

Seeing that speech written down it looks like the goofiest garbage any actress ever had to deliver, and indeed the first time I saw
Blue Velvet
I interpreted it as nothing more than smart-alec satire. But the second time, having succumbed to the film’s dark spell, I took it literally …
and I bought it
! My heart swelled, my soul surged, my eyes teared up, and I was gone, gone like a turkey in the corn. By the time Dean Stockwell grabbed that cabin light and started lip-synching ‘A candy-coloured clown they call the sandman, tiptoes to my room every night …’ I was buzzing like a horsefly. Audiences watching William Castle’s 1959 shocker
The Tingler
and experiencing the bum-shaking thrills of ‘Percepto’ (buzzers hidden in selected seats, folks) couldn’t have been more vibrantly thrilled!

Years later I interviewed Lynch for
The Culture Show
and felt duty-bound to tell him how much I had hated
Blue Velvet
first time round, and how I’d stormed out and written a review that said it was garbage. I meant it as a compliment, although thinking about it now it may have seemed unnecessarily confrontational. Certainly there was a moment
in my rambling eulogy when Lynch looked genuinely concerned as to where I was going with all this. But, bless him, he stuck with me and by the time I got to the bit about going to see the film a
second
time and realising that it was a masterpiece after all he seemed to be on board. That’s how it looked to me, anyway.

What I was
trying
to say was that this really is ‘a strange world’, and somehow my polarised love/hate responses to
Blue Velvet
perfectly proved that point. Lynch seemed to agree, particularly when our conversation drifted into a discussion of
Lost Highway
which had received some of its best reviews in Paris from critics who had been shown the reels in the
wrong order
. It was amazing, we agreed, how the human mind could impose order upon chaos, seeing patterns where there are none, finding meaning in meaninglessness – and vice versa.

Tangentially, I had a strangely similar experience with Marc Evans’ psychological thriller
Trauma
¸ which I saw in the company of Radio One’s long-standing film critic James King. The film largely takes place within the mind of its (deranged?) protagonist, played by Colin firth, and boasts an elliptical structure which mirrors the temporal dysphasia of his inner turmoil. Except, of course, it doesn’t; the reels just got mixed up in the projection booth the first time I saw it. I remember with horrible clarity how James complained afterwards that the film ‘made no sense’ and how I berated him for his simplistic demand for a ‘linear narrative structure’. I remember, too, the sense of skin-crawling embarrassment I got when receiving a text message from the producer explaining that the film had been projected the
wrong way round, and asking if I would watch it again in the right order. Worse still was the fact that, after that
second
screening, I remained convinced that I had enjoyed the movie more the first time.

To Lynch, who genuinely believes that ‘we live inside a dream’, this all made perfect sense. And somehow, through the absurdity of my reactions to his work, and to Evans’ film, and to all the movies that I now claim to love and cherish, we seemed to have found common philosophical ground. Plus, Lynch had complimented me on my choice of tie which I took to be the highest accolade since he was a man who used to like ties so much he would wear
three
at once. Now he wears none.

Over the years I’ve interviewed Lynch on several occasions, for
Q Magazine
, for BBC radio and TV, and most recently on stage at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National film Theatre) in London. During that encounter, I talked to him about the ‘sweetness and innocence’ of
Blue Velvet
– the same film that had sent me storming from Manchester’s former premier porno cinema in a huff of politicised anger all those years ago. Back then the film had seemed irredeemably corrupt, the jarring juxtaposition of brutal psychological realism and corny insincere Americana epitomising the maxim that ‘postmodernism means never having to say you’re sorry’. Now here I was waxing lyrical about its utter
lack
of irony, particularly Sandy’s dream of the robins.

‘The thing I absolutely love about that scene,’ I told a benevolently smiling Lynch, ‘is that when Laura Dern
describes her dream, she’s
not
doing it in a goofy way, but in a
real
way. This has been written about often as ironic, but to me it seems completely sincere and not ironic at all. You do really
mean
it, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Lynch, in his clipped ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ chirrup.’We all have this thing where we want to be very cool and when you see something like this, really kind of embarrassing, the tendency is to laugh, so that you are saying out loud that “This is embarrassing and not cool!” and you’re hip to the scene. This kind of thing happens. But we also always know that when we’re alone with this person that we’re falling in
love
with, we
do
say goofy things, but we don’t have a problem with it. It’s so
beau-ti-ful
. And the other person’s so forgiving of these beautiful, loving, goofy things. So there’s a lot of this swimming in this scene. At the same time, there’s something to that scene, a
truth
to it, in my book.’

Love. Beauty. Truth. All the things Ebert (and I) had thought were missing from
Blue Velvet
.

Yet there they were all along – staring us right in the face.

By the time I left Manchester at the end of the eighties, I wasn’t sure
what
I believed in any more. I had discovered that my judgements about movies were irredeemably flawed; I had learned that doctrine rarely coincided with desire; and I had come to accept that freedom of speech meant allowing people to say the things you
don’t want to hear
.

On the night before I shipped out to London, I trekked to Salford Quays on my own to watch a late-night screening of Clive Barker’s lively horror romp
Hellraiser
, now widely regarded as the best British horror film of the decade. And as I sat there watching Clare Higgins lusting after the freshly flayed corpse of her reanimated boyfriend and wincing at the sight of giant fish hooks tearing strangulated faces apart, I realised that very little had changed since the days when I took refuge from the horrors of school life in triple-bill X-rated all-nighters at the Phoenix East finchley.

When everything else was uncertain, gore cinema never let me down.

Pass me that chainsaw.

‘London is dead, London is dead, London is dead …’

So said Morrissey, but only after he’d severed his Salford Lads Club alliances and headed for the beautiful South, finding musical solace in the (metaphorical) arms of Boz Boorer whom I personally credit with putting his ailing career back on the road to glam-stomping longevity. And if Morrissey could run off to the smoke and be a Polecat then I was pretty sure that I could too. After all, we had the same hair.

So, after bailing out of Manchester,
City Life
, Men Against Sexism et al., I found myself back in my hometown, tired of politics and hungry for work. Although my written output at
City Life
had been less than prolific, I
had
remembered to keep copies of
everything
I had
ever
had printed, and so at least I now had a ‘portfolio’. The exact form of this portfolio was peculiar – having been a devout fan of both The Clash and
William Burroughs as a kid, I had become besotted with the cut-up aesthetic (which now masquerades as the video ‘mash-up’) and decided that my work would be best presented in a manner which reflected this avant-garde appreciation. So, armed with a crisp £5 note and a collection of
City Life
s I proceeded to a West End newsagent wherein I photocopied a selection of my finest reviews and studiously ‘ripped and remixed’ them to conjure a creative collage of work which was then photocopied
again
to give it a rebellious post-punk agitprop feel. Written down this looks pretty stupid, particularly in an age when photocopying itself is seen as slightly less exciting than the purchase of a new ballpoint pen. But this was 1988, and back then I was really ‘pushing the envelope’.

Really.

Here was what I knew: every John, Jack and Mary wanted to work for a hip listings magazine, and to get paid for writing about watching films. Since the job itself wasn’t exactly rocket science, you had to have
something
to mark yourself out from the crowd. My ‘something’ was that ridiculous piece of thrice-photocopied paper – that, and the fact that I actually showed up
in person
and simply refused to take no for an answer. I figured that if I was persistent enough, in the end it would be easier for them to give me work than to have to keep turning me away. And in the end, I was right.

The first office upon whose hallowed doors I solemnly banged like Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the church door was that of
City Limits
. For political reasons,
I
really
wanted to work for the nominally co-operative
City Limits
, but there was simply no room at the inn – for which I remain retrospectively grateful.

My next stop was the
New Musical Express
which by that time had moved from its funky bohemian offices on Carnaby Street to the altogether more corporate surroundings of IPC Towers on the South Bank. Whereas legend once had it that any old wino could roll in off the street to have a pee in the stairwell and end up reviewing the new album by ELP, now you had to get past a doorman and negotiate a lift to the fourth or fifth floor where you would be met by a ‘receptionist’ who would ‘buzz’ whoever it was you were hoping to meet while you waited in the foyer. Remember that scene from
King of Comedy
where Rupert Pupkin sits like a plank in the foyer of Jerry Langford’s TV show while endless others are ushered silently past him? It was like that – except I was no De Niro. In the end, I wound up handing my post-punk photocopy over to the receptionist and leaving with promises to ‘call back’ – never an effective technique.

Only slightly disheartened I proceeded forthwith to the Southampton Street offices of
Time Out
in Covent Garden. As I mentioned previously,
City Life
had styled itself as a ‘cross between
Time Out
and
Private Eye
’ and we had been sending each other complimentary copies of our respective magazines for several years. In fact, some of the freelance contributors who wrote for
Time Out
topped up their income by filing for regional mags such as ours, and thus I had been blithely subbing copy by Nigel floyd (who was a stalwart of the
Time Out
film section) without ever having set eyes on
him since my arrival at
City Life
. Despite the lack of personal contact, I believed that I had some connection with
Time Out
and therefore felt emboldened to stride into reception and announce my arrival as if everyone should automatically know exactly who I was.