Tourist Magazine

Watching David Lynch's Blue Velvet on the big screen a week or so ago, something struck me as odd. It wasn't the severed ear crawling with maggots, you understand, or the greasepaint-laquered Ben, soft-spoken and terrifying, a candy-coloured clown with a utility light; it wasn't the overweight prostitute go-go dancing on Frank Booth's car, or the heaving multitude of oil-black insects under the sweet, suburban lawn. These things, if I 'm honest, were old hat to me, both onscreen and embedded in pop nostalgia - the cultural consciousness erupts in one queasy shudder when 'Blue Velvet' plays on the old-timers' radio, although in truth, it never does anymore. No warm-voiced, easy listenin' jockey worth their salt wants to remind us that "Mommy! Baby wants to fuck!" on a dreamy Sunday afternoon, I suppose, or to invoke the image of a foul-mouthed, oedipal rapist over afternoon tea. More nitrous, Vicar?

No, the thing which I found odd - anachronistic, even - was this: in the scene in which Jeffrey and, by extension, the audience, watch Dorothy Valance undress, the elastic waistband of her underwear is cutting into her body. Just a little, almost imperceptible indentation in the flesh, and yet it's there, writ large by a cinema projector. Jennifer Aniston's underwear would never dig into her flesh. Sarah Jessica Parker is toned to within an inch of her life. Megan Fox's bikini briefs always sit on her skin as though they're made of air, like clouds protecting the modesty of some big-titted, lip-augmented seraph in an adult version of Fantasia. When Rossellini kneels, however, wracked with emotion in the aftermath of a brutal sexual encounter, the keen eye notices the smallest dappling of orange peel on her skin; when she appears, beaten and traumatised beyond the limits of sanity, naked on a suburban porch, her breasts sag just a little, like those of most women older than nineteen.

These were things you'd be more likely to notice in a lover after a long period of intimacy than in a woman you'd never met, and yet I couldn't help recalling them after the lights went up. It wasn't that Rossellini wasn't beautiful, of course, or that her rangy body and pearlescent skin weren't desirable, inciting as they had so much furtive masturbation and grindhouse lust from the slobbering, cult-movie masses. Just imperfect, I guess, as though she'd somehow slipped past the all-seeing eye of the Hollywood machine, a real woman landing in a fucked-up, Lynchian dreamscape to be beaten, humiliated and degraded, a half-unwilling visitor to Sodom.

“My nudity was like raw meat, like a butcher," she had said of the iconic scene in which she appears, full-frontal, on the police detective's lawn. "Like walking in a butcher and seeing a cow hanging, you know, a quarter of a cow.”

Except that here, Rossellini wasn't a quarter-cow, or a hundred pounds of raw meat. Nor was she Woman with a capital W, the way that Angelina Jolie is, or Halle Berry, or any woman ever described with any variant of the phrase 'screen Goddess'; she was simply woman, no capital, like myself, pale and trembling and in too-tight undergarments. Put Naomi Watts in peril, and I'll blithely chew popcorn and call it entertainment. Have Cameron Diaz portray a kidnap victim, hair ruffled just so, and I'll scarcely spare a thought for what complex eroticism might lie behind her case of Stockholm syndrome. A chainsaw held above Elisha Cuthbert's taut, bronzed abs isn't cause for much more than a channel change.

But that mark - that momentary elastic mark - suggested fallibility, which shook me to the core. If a supposed screen-siren could be left with the same ugly red welts as the rest of us, simply by virtue of putting on underwear, what other damage would leave its mark, too? It was the filmic equivalent of pinching yourself to prove that you're dreaming, only to feel sick to your stomach when it stings. In 2010, women in cinema have ceased to be in any way identifiable as human beings, buffed as they are beyond all feasibility, tanned and Tracey Anderson body-blitzed, and injected with plastic to keep everything - their breasts, their faces, their mouths - as young and as still as is possible. Cosmopolitan may try to tutor us on how best to be like them, but a woman whose bra is a pinch too small is unlikely to achieve Hollywood Stunna status. Why should we care, then, what happens to these apparent aliens on celluloid? The sight of a child yanking the head from a Barbie doll does, after all, very little to titillate, and any real beauty has more than a touch of the beast. Women in film who symbolize nothing but easy sex and easy-access attractiveness to such a polished, robotic degree invariably seem like characters in a violent cartoon, and we no more expect them to perish at the mercy of their assailant than we expect Wile E. Coyote to be killed by a two-ton weight or a piano, or Eva Longoria’s ageless eyebrows to move in a moment of personal tragedy.

To put it in Lynch’s own vernacular; when it comes to female leads, modern cinema seems to require that we connect with the human equivalent of a lush, verdant lawn for eighty-five minutes, even in instances of mortal peril. Which is fine, I suppose, for a popcorn thriller. But it won’t hold my interest until I discover that – just like the rest of us – that self-same, self-satisfied lawn is just crawling with black, shiny vermin beneath.

Philippa Snow