by David Lynch said: “The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is.” His female characters are shockingly unknowable and beautiful, complex and full of emotional intensity. They are never just victims of circumstances, but play a key role in determining their fate. They are often selfish and self-destructive at the same time. As Lynch advances her dangerous desires and obsessions, he gestures toward archetypes: the femme fatale, the girl next door, the damsel in distress. Then he overthrows them in the topsy-turvy logic of dreams.
In the unsettling, multi-layered Lynch universe, external beauty and facades of normality masked decay. His work explores the dangers of intimacy, the intimacy of danger. The way he communicates not only the character but also the story through the medium of clothing is the stuff of both film and fashion history.
“Blue Velvet”Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini) is a glamorous nightclub singer drawn to the glitter of darkness. Her casting capitalized on Rosselini’s personal story as the daughter of Ingrid Bergman, a radiant beauty of the Golden Age of cinema best known for her tragic characters. Dorothy’s beauty conveys power while ensuring her objectification and exploitation. She is abused by the murderous Frank Booth, who has kidnapped her entire family, and begins to live out his perverted desires on her body.
In this scene, her dress is made of crumpled blue velvet, a soft, feminine and exceedingly fragile material that has been manipulated; The result is a fabric that is even more beautiful and bright due to its distressed look. Dorothy’s victimization is complicated by the fact that she derives pleasure from deviance.
It is unclear whether she is a tool or the puppeteer on stage. Are her expressive, sex-soaked performances moments of liberation for Frank, where she is in full control, or are they another ingredient in a cycle of violence? A clue to her ambiguous desires may lie in her red pumps, reminiscent of another Dorothy, an innocent girl caught and carried away by a cyclone after dreaming of escaping her bleak reality and crossing over to a magical land to go to the rainbow. Each of the Dorothies’ ruby slippers hints at the possibility that the power to control her fate was hers from the start.
Twin Peaks Laura Palmer is the teenager next door who leads a dark secret life. Her signature oversized cardigan — a nostalgic throwback to the 1950s 1950s, a seemingly innocent time when family values were obscured by racism, McCarthyism and the shadow of nuclear war — begs the question of what lies beneath. Her body itself is full of unspeakable impulses: to drugs and abusive relationships with men. When it becomes clear that she is not the picture-perfect girl, her checked and heavy knitwear gives way to a tight, tiny black cocktail dress. There is no more padding. The girl of the past gives way to the woman of the moment. At least for the remaining time.
At some point, Laura appears in a nightmarish red room. The centerpiece of her ensemble is a colossal brooch encrusted with jewels. The eccentric proportions, the large ornament that dominates the thin dress, indicate the crucial asymmetry of her character. Doom weighs on her and she is prepared for a tragedy – one that she is drawn to. Jewelry is totemic in the show: another female character wears a horseshoe with the prongs facing down, costing her good fortune.
In Domestic EmpireNikki Grace is played by Laura Dern, herself Diane Ladd’s daughter, and repeats the film’s troubling duplications, interweaving of roles and references to a bygone Hollywood. Fittingly, Dern plays Nikki, an actress who melts into the characters she plays. The complex layers of the narrative reflect its gossamer self: scenic transitions are confusing, the deviations from reality into the land of dreams are never clear.
Watching a particularly disturbing dream sequence, the dizzying pink and yellow stripes of Nikki’s tank top are cut across the neckline, the rhythmic pattern breaking before moving on, a hint of their disjointed personalities, confusing the eye that searches in vain for continuity. In the promotional shots for the film, Nikki wears a pink bathrobe, in a state somewhere between dressing and undressing, intimately exposed, half-naked but not quite erotic, and holding the reins of her sexuality in her hand. The film never offers a satisfactory answer; She is a wealthy actress, a housewife and a homeless prostitute all at the same time. These feminine archetypes are indivisible, they are intertwined.
In Mulholland Drive, Lynch dismantles female archetypes most thoroughly by taking two characters and breaking them down into four. He plays blondes with pearls and button-down sweaters against dark-haired vampires with scarves that evoke urban legends of women whose heads are held in place by a green ribbon. As the women continue to deteriorate and divide, and blonde Betty destroys herself and becomes “Diane,” her hairstyle reminiscent of Princess Diana, who had died just a few years earlier. Once again Lynch sets new standards by taking his acting with illusion and reality and with the tragedies of female role play to the noblest level, that of royalty.
The film has always dealt with images of women. As if we were watching rolled film strips whir and click reel after reel in a Super 8 projector, we can see before us the progress of silent Lillian Gish, the helpless victim on a piece of ice floating down the river, plunging over a waterfall; to Garbo’s mysterious recluse, who is just as aloof and distant whether she is a courtesan or a Soviet envoy, but would have those deeply soulful eyes; to Marilyn’s sexual innocence in the fifties and sixties, glamorous and gold-digging; to Lynch’s explosion of everything that came before.
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