Tuesday, October 14, 2003
In other news, I've just watched one of my favourite scenes in movie history again; the moment in Blue Velvet when Dean Stockwell's narcissistically louché and threateningly camp drug-dealer-come-pimp mimes along with Roy Orbison's strange and beautiful "In Dreams", using what looks like a miner's lamp as a fake microphone, his smoking-jacket-suited frame draped against a doorway. Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, the very essence of psychotic for the rest of the film, stands only inches from Stockwell, his being wracked by some inner turmoil and long-repressed trauma, mouthing every word. Is it a homoerotic scene? Very possibly you could read it that way, but the charge between the two men is emotional rather than physical. The balance of power between the two men is strange; moments before Stockwell begins his performance he pops a pill in Frank's mouth, like a mother feeding a helpless infant, but it's Frank's inner furnace and his resultant inability to remain incapacitated by the allure and emotional resonance of the song that ends Stockwell's mime, positing power very much in his hands, giving the audience jurisdiction over the actor. Who the director and stage-manager of this spooked, cathartic rendition are is up for debate; Frank stands apart from Kyle Machlachlan's idealist hero and his own henchmen who form the bulk of the audience, but the performance is till very much for Frank, everyone else's presence is merely incidental.
10/14/2003 11:24:00 am
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