Wednesday, February 25, 2009

So while I was doing my work sample, I stumbled across this quote from Isabella Rossellini in an NPR interview she did about fifteen years ago after Blue Velvet. And in light of the discussion about pornography (I am loving all of your posts tonight) I decided to post simply the excerpt:

"[Lynch] wanted Dorothy to walk in the street of Wilmington, where we shot the film, naked and convey a sense of terror instead of sex appeal. And when he was talking to me, there was a photo of Nick Ut's that I remembered. It was a photo of a young girl in Vietnam. She has been a victim of an napalm attack and her clothes have been completely torn off her body and she has skin hanging and she's completely naked. She walks in the street with the arms outstretched. It's such a helpless gesture. I couldn't think of anything else but this absolute helpless gesture and walking like that. See, if I would have walked covering my breasts, or covering myself, it meant that Dorothy still had some sense of pride, still had something in her to protect her. That woman had to have lost everything. And so she had to walk completely exposed, just saying, 'help me.' I took the gesture from that photo and used it. I hope that I conveyed the same sense of despair. I wanted to be like raw meant. My nudity was like raw meat, like a butcher, like walking in a butcher and seeing a cow hanging, you know, a quarter of a cow hanging."

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