‘Blue Velvet’: The David Lynch film that changed David Foster Wallace’s life
The landscape of contemporary literature owes a lot to David Foster Wallace, the innovative American author whose works – such as Infinite Jest – completely revolutionised the field. While the literary masters of the past obviously shaped Wallace’s unique artistic sensibilities, Wallace was also influenced by auteurs like David Lynch, whose singular approach to popular surrealism paved the way for multiple generations of like-minded artists.
One particular David Lynch masterpiece changed Wallace’s life forever when he first saw it, opening his mind up to a different kind of experience. That film is none other than the 1986 psychological thriller Blue Velvet, a dizzying journey into the bowels of American suburbia that exposes the violence and ugliness that lurks beneath the facade of white picket fences and well-manicured lawns. It’s a quintessential Lynchian gem, full of layered symbolism and a deep understanding of the human condition.
During a conversation with Charlie Rose, Wallace explained how moved he was after watching it for the first time. The writer recalled how lost he felt in grad school, especially because he had been inspired by avant-garde artistic frameworks, but his professors were all working within the domain of realism. His student projects were being rejected, and he felt a personal crisis that made him question his artistic identity. Then he saw Blue Velvet.
While explaining the unique kind of surrealism present in Lynch’s movie, Wallace compared the movie to the works of Alfred Hitchcock. The writer elaborated: “Blue Velvet is a type of surrealism — it may have some — it may have debts. There’s a debt to Hitchcock somewhere. But it is an entirely new and original kind of surrealism. It no more comes out of a previous tradition or the post-modern thing. It is completely David Lynch.”
Wallace continued: “Lynch very much helped snap me out of a kind of adolescent delusion that I was in about what sort of avant-garde art could be. And it’s very odd because film and books are very different media. But I remember — I remember going with two poets and one other student fiction writer to go see this, and then all of us going to the coffee shop afterwards and just, you know, slapping ourselves on the forehead. And it was this truly epiphanic experience.”
Although Blue Velvet wasn’t as experimental as Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead, it represented a significant shift in the director’s filmography. By applying his artistic vision to an incredibly relatable theme like American suburbia, Lynch developed his command over the domain of popular surrealism.
Watch the interview below.
