RE: Richard Schickel

Apologies for posting late. I fell asleep and just woke up.

Even though Blue Velvet may be difficult to understand or involve more effort to interpret than people might want, thereby negating the very purpose of its existence, I still believe that Lynch could not have made the "meaning" clearer. Lynch knows his stuff, and if he could have simplified it to convey the same message with the same impact, he probably would have (and he even could have still made it really weird to suit his personal tastes).

When I watch movies that have been adapted from novels that I have read, for example, I generally don't like them. No matter how well made they are, there always seems to be a loss of richness, as if all the little details that aren't significant to the plot's outer shell, but which make up its soul, have been vacuumed out. It's not the screenwriter's fault. However more popular going to see a movie is than reading a novel to the majority of contemporary North American society, when you look at the situation, analyzing film is significantly more taxing, at the very least exponentially more ambiguous, than reading a book.

Novelists are lucky in that they have the advantage or at least the ability to be more explicit, just from the very nature of their available language. Words can be ambiguous, as we have studied in Eagleton; however, for the majority of literate people, it is still easier to distill the essence of a vague word than it is for a cloudy image. At least this is true in our society, which stresses direct communication; other cultures may be more perceptive in different situations (Sharee knows what I'm talking about from our CSD class). Basically what I'm trying to say is that Lynch utilized the "language of film," as Boorman says, with all "the rhythm, the flow, the imagery" to the best of his ability. Blue Velvet is a well-crafted film, even if I have the sneaking suspicion that I may not like it very much.