How David Lynch’s twisted ‘Blue Velvet’ changed Jarvis Cocker’s life
Many of the best songwriters have a cinematic quality to them, painting vivid stories with their lyrics in the same way that a director allows a detailed narrative to unfold on screen.
Jarvis Cocker has always had ties to the world of film, dating back to his days of studying the art form at university. It was ultimately music that took hold of Cocker, however, and as his career as the vocalist of Pulp took off, so did his ability to immerse himself in various cinematic endeavours, too.
The band donated the song ‘Mile End’ to Danny Boyle’s classic drug-fuelled tale Trainspotting in 1996, which contained unforgettable lyrics like “The fifth floor landing smells of fish/ Not just on Friday, every single other day.” You can basically smell the stench of the place through the song, with Cocker’s description of a dingy London flat making for the perfect accompaniment to the grimy film.
In more recent years, Cocker has become a frequent collaborator of Wes Anderson, appearing in beloved movies like Fantastic Mr Fox and performing as a French crooner named Tip-Top for The French Dispatch (we even got a whole album of covers out of that). Cocker loves movies, finding the intoxicating world of cinema just as exciting as the sonic landscapes he can just as easily lose himself in, but there’s one movie he believes “changed [his] life”.
Appearing in the Criterion Closet, Cocker picked out some movies that he loves, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is one that he feels very strongly about. It’s a shocking and rather twisted film, featuring one of the most demented and hysterical villains in cinema history in the form of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth. The “Baby wants to fuuuck” scene is one of the boldest things both Lynch and Hopper ever committed to film.
Released in 1986, the film instantly captivated the young Cocker, as it continues to do today. He explained, “It gave a picture into a world that sometimes was familiar from watching TV – seeing all white picket fences and America as portrayed through the films of the ‘50s and the ‘60s. But then you add this kind of violence and sexuality in it, which was really unusual.”
Certainly, Lynch’s film blends the stereotypical image of a perfect vision of America, with a blonde girl next door, perfect red roses lining the garden, and birds chirping in the garden, before undercutting this with extreme darkness. A severed ear, bizarre sadomasochism, sexual violence, and perversion all come to a head in Blue Velvet, where nothing is quite what it seems. Lynch tells us this with a very clever lip-synched performance of ‘In Dreams’ by Roy Orbison, courtesy of Dean Stockwell’s Ben, which brings psychotic Frank Booth to tears.
“Not long after that, I left Sheffield, and went to film college – I studied film, fine art filmmaking down in London at St Martins – and I think I wrote an essay about this as part of the entrance exam. It changed my view of films, and it also changed my life,” Cocker revealed.
The movie reveals the harsh realities of the world that are so often tucked away in suburbia. For the first time, Cocker left his native city and headed out to the capital, surely aware that – as Blue Velvet suggests – it’s a dark and complicated world out there, and secrets can only stay buried for so long.
