Blue Velvet – the ugliness and beauty of David Lynch

The great American director David Lynch died last week. His uncompromising and often surreal approach created some of the most powerful and memorable cinema and television of modern times. Some advertising too.

Everything I know about advertising I learnt from the movies #9

One of my favourite movie scenes is from Blue Velvet – one of my favourite films – directed by David Lynch. It pretty much captures the essence of him: a surreal juxtaposition of darkness and light, ugliness and beauty.

In this particular scene the psychopathic Frank Booth, chillingly played by Dennis Hopper, drags Kyle Maclachlan’s clean-cut college boy, Jeffrey, around to his friend Ben’s apartment, together with their entourage of typical Lynchian weirdos, misfits and future Donald Trump voters.

Elvis Presley once told Roy Orbison that he had the most beautiful voice he had ever heard. And, as Orbison’s hauntingly beautiful In Dreams plays on the cassette player, the “so fucking suave” Ben camply mimes to it, using an inspection lamp as microphone. Frank stands by his side, transfixed and tortured by the beauty, before switching the cassette off and shouting: “Let’s fuck! I’ll fuck anything that moves.”

Like much of Lynch’s work Blue Velvet scratches underneath what seems to be only a thin veneer of beauty. He takes the sacrosanct image of the American small town – all mom, dad and apple pie – and reveals a dark underbelly. He turns the American Dream into a nightmare.

David Foster Wallace, sent by Premiere magazine to the set of Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, described his approach as, “a particular kind of irony, where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Though he dared to be different, to shock and confuse, he also shocked by crafting beautiful films with linear narratives, such as The Elephant Man and The Straight Story. He was predictably unpredictable.

But with many of his films, like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, you leave them thinking WTF happened there? They mess with your head  and make you question what was ‘real’ and what wasn’t. Or if any of it was real. Like Twin Peaks, which changed TV drama for good, and for the better, and which we’re still trying to figure out over 30 years later.

From his first feature film, Eraserhead, he was the ultimate Hollywood non-conformist. He wasn’t beholden to genre or narrative structure, he just went his own unique way, never pandering to commercial pressure. Of course the nature of advertising is pandering to commercial pressure, as its primary objective is to sell.

So, given all that, you could quite understand why no sane advertising client would want to let David Lynch anywhere near one of their TV ads. Except that they did. Fashion labels like Gucci, Armani, cosmetics brands like Dior and Lancombe, as well as car brands like Honda, Nissan and Citroen lined up to work with him. Perhaps most notable of all was his suitably surreal spot for Playstation 2, in which a man with duck’s head welcomes us to “the Third Place.” 

Director Ron Howard paid tribute to Lynch as, “a gracious man and fearless artist who followed his heart and soul, and proved that radical experimentation could yield unforgettable cinema”. If you want to create unforgettable advertising you also sometimes need radical experimentation.

David Lynch was never compelled to make sense, only to make you think. Our job in advertising is the same: to make a powerful impression on audiences, for our clients’ brands. By sinking into a sea of sameness, relying on the same tired tropes, we never will. 

Many directors can do beauty. An awful lot can do ugliness, but David Lynch is one of the few that combines both so uniquely. He once said: “what people find ugly, I find beautiful.”

He showed us what lies beneath, what can be inside all of us, that fortunately most of the time never gets out. In that sense he exposed an essential human truth that most of the time we pretend doesn’t exist, because it’s too scary to contemplate. Like the Matrix, before the Matrix.

Maybe David Lynch got out at the right time: there could be rather too much ugliness over the next four years. As advertisers we shouldn’t try to hide it, but use it celebrate and amplify the things that make life beautiful, to make something different and unique. Memorable and powerful.