Isabella Rossellini’s legacy is primarily tied to her role as Dorothy Vallens in “Blue Velvet.” Vallens is deliciously captivating and elusive, like the best characters in film noir, and she eschews rational, clear interpretations as we delve further into her mystery. Rossellini remains proud of what she accomplished as Vallens, and considers it the most complex performance of her career, but when “Blue Velvet” was released in 1986, it scandalized audiences and critics alike.
It even struck a chord with the namesake of this website, and Roger Ebert took David Lynch to task for perceived misogyny. While he admired her bravery, he wrote that Rossellini was “degraded, slapped around, humiliated, and undressed in front of the camera,” but she has always argued against that line of thought. In a recent interview on the Ladies of Lynch podcast, she stated, “There’s a myth that directors manipulate actors and take young virginal women and make them do things they don’t want to do, and it perpetuates this idea that diminishes the role of acting, and of women in general.”
As critics and cinephiles, we sometimes ascribe too much legitimacy to the auteur theory, and it robs actresses of their agency as creatives in films made by male geniuses. Rossellini was not acting in submission to Lynch’s vision but aligned with him as an equal partner. He welcomed the perspectives of his fellow artists, and Rossellini described the atmosphere of a Lynch set as one of great trust and kindness, which allowed everyone to experiment. It is a credit to her intelligence, her risk-taking, and the depths that she plumbs that Vallens is not merely an object or a fulcrum to channel the surrealism of Lynch’s moody worlds; she is a complex figure who evades easy categorization or psychological interrogation. She is a mystery, because she was conceived as one, not only by Lynch, but also by Rossellini.
Rossellini initially sought to carve a path for herself away from the cinematic legacies of her parents–actress of Hollywood royalty Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini. She was a television reporter and then a model before becoming an actress, and while modelling, she began to understand that she had abilities suited to the screen. She considered the act of modelling to be a stylized form of acting that wasn’t separate from what the silent film stars were doing.
She was in a few pictures before meeting Lynch, and they met each other by happenstance over dinner one evening. The two struck up a conversation about the ups and downs of their ongoing film careers, and she became interested in one of his scripts, “Blue Velvet.” Rossellini found the script unusual and tantalizing, and after she read it, she asked him if he would be willing to give her a screen test with costar Kyle MacLachlan, who was set to play Jeffrey Beaumont, an amateur sleuth and excitable voyeur.
The test wound up being the pivotal moment of the film, when Dorothy finds Jeffrey in her closet, and she and Lynch quickly realized they had the same ideas for this desperate but not helpless character.
“Blue Velvet” follows Jeffrey returning from college to the town of Lumberton after his father falls ill. He discovers a severed ear in an open field that leads him to an ouroboros of pain hidden underneath his idyllic homestead. He burrows deeper and deeper into the microscopic details of a criminal underworld that brings him to the apartment of torch singer Dorothy Vallens, whose husband and child are being held hostage by the maniac Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).
Lynch’s film remains vital and vibrant because it still elicits discomfort, and much of this is filtered through the shifting dynamics of vulnerability and sensuality in Rossellini’s performance. In that pivotal scene of discovery, the film takes us to the center of the mystery when Jeffrey’s investigation leaves him stranded behind a closet inside Dorothy’s apartment. Lynch occasionally shows his filmic influences, and through a rhyming shot, he evokes peeping Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) as he stares at Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in “Psycho” (1960), and like in that proto-slasher, our voyeurism doesn’t feel safe. Jeffrey watches Dorothy undress, and with the opening of the closet door, he is exposed as a pervert. She brandishes a knife and threatens him, but ushers him back into the closet when she hears Frank coming up the stairs.
It is then that Jeffrey witnesses something truly shocking. For the next few minutes, Frank commands Dorothy through the motions of a ritualistic rape, and the lines blur between her disgust and her enjoyment of the scenario. We later learn that Frank has been visiting her continuously for some time, demanding the same perverse scenario from her.
After Frank leaves, Jeffrey consoles Dorothy, and her own sadomasochistic sexual relationship with her peeper begins to take shape when she asks him to stay. It would be cliché if Jeffrey only watched her undress, or if it was only the fear of being caught that was powering the dramatic tension, but the scene keeps going, and with each new revelation, the power balance between Jeffrey and Dorothy keeps evolving until it is difficult to get a clear perspective on how we should feel about it. This is in large part due to Rossellini’s atypical choices of showing us Dorothy’s pleasure within the mayhem of her private life.
Her relationship with Jeffrey becomes stranger, as the mystery unravels further. He intends to free her husband and child, and reveal Frank to the local police department, but nested inside the mystery are their continued encounters in the bedroom. Lynch uses slow-motion and close-ups to show both of them degrading into a Freudian muck of sadomasochistic roles. In one of their sex scenes, there is a close-up of Dorothy after she has begged Jeffrey to hit her. He has reluctantly acquiesced, and Rossellini composes a reaction that looks positively radiant and satisfied by the violence. We know it’s wrong, but because we bring our morals to the picture, the repulsion of the act actually has the power to deepen the oblique psychology of the character in a way that is fully integrated with how Rossellini wants us to see her.
Lynch prioritized mystery above all else, but Rossellini needed something to anchor her performance and give her a portrait of the character she was playing. On the Ladies of Lynch podcast, she elaborated that she used her imagination to create a backstory, and she felt that Dorothy was especially vulnerable because she was a foreigner and didn’t have a mother to run to with her problems.
During production, she also read several books on the psychological effects of Stockholm Syndrome. When she brought that information to Lynch, he wasn’t interested in the specifics of what it meant for her relationship with Frank or Jeffrey, but he was open to exploring it. He quickly saw that the way she approached the character was in sync with how he was thinking of Dorothy as someone trapped in a very dark place.
Rossellini obviously took that description to heart and endowed the character with choices to embody that darkness through an expressionistic body language that was dazed, yet nervy, and indebted to what she learned as a model. “Blue Velvet” circles down the drain, ever further into the abyss, and the black hole that a viewer enters when watching this picture emanates from Dorothy’s experiences. She is the eye of the mystery; a creature of desperation, and her arms seem to always be outstretched in protest, or in want. She has been turned inside out by love for her husband and her son, and their kidnapping has made the shape of her world very morbid. She has welcomed that darkness into her sensuality as a way to cope, but it has confused her ability to feel pleasure, and she has begun to hurt herself in response.
There is a distinction between movies about sexism and movies that are sexist, and “Blue Velvet” remains shocking because it is honest about misogyny and the power dynamics of rape. There are people like Frank, and it is a credit to all involved that they do not flinch from the ramifications of his behaviour and its effect on others. It would be dishonest to the experiences of those who have felt what Dorothy has to soften the portrait. A movie like Blue Velvet and a performance like Rossellini’s have to make us feel uncomfortable in order for it to be honorable. They hold true to her experiences by showing us that Vallens is a woman with no protection from her emotions and her exposed vulnerability. This is crystalized in the scene of her when she is roaming around confused, while nude on Jeffrey’s lawn. The shape of her situation and Rossellini’s performance couldn’t be more exposed in that scene, and it is difficult to take in this image without wanting to look away.
In his memoir Room to Dream, Lynch said that this image was lifted from Lynch’s own childhood when he and a close friend of his saw a battered and naked woman walking around the neighborhood. It was the first time he had seen a naked woman, and the helpless feelings that it brought out in him made him and his friend cry. They knew something was wrong, and we know it when we look at Dorothy Vallens. Lynch strives for a contrast between the grace that he often affords his women in trouble and the darkness they experience. This quality has always made me feel like he was on our side. In the case of Vallens, it makes the beauty of her reunion with her child seem that much brighter. The blinding light of love seen in so many of his twisted but sincere happy endings can only be understood if there is a time when the glow can’t be felt.
Dorothy Vallens was the first of Lynch’s many “women in trouble”, but she remains strange even refracted in that canon. She isn’t as easy to empathize with as the martyred teenage prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992), and she doesn’t have an ounce of the optimism of Hollywood dreamer Betty (Naomi Watts) in “Mulholland Drive” (2001). Rossellini’s Vallens has a beguiling quality that remains as nightmarish and curious as anything in a Lynch film. She can be inviting and intoxicatingly lovely, like when her voice carefully goes up a half-step when she purrs through Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” at The Slow Club, and she can also be ruinous as a post-modern femme fatale when we are swept up in the sexual wreckage inside of her apartment.
For this role, Rossellini took risks with her image as a poised, dignified young beauty she had cultivated as a model and as the child of Ingrid Bergman. She brought all the torments and pleasures of Lynch’s small-town American id to life with the forbidden textures of her sensuality and with the magnitude of her ambiguity. Rossellini’s extraordinary performance set the stage for all the actresses who would venture into those dark, mysterious places we call Lynchian.
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