Trouble ‘til the robins come
Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst! Blue! Ribbon!
“I had a dream. In fact, it was the night I met you. In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren't any robins and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was just this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So, I guess it means there is trouble 'til the robins come.”
An eighteen-year-old Laura Dern - I believe she actually has a side ponytail in this scene - delivers the above monologue, seated in a car, outside of a church, while organ music is playing in the background. On paper, it looks like a thing that an eighteen-year-old with a side ponytail would say to a boy with whom she is trying to Talk About Serious Things. But this monologue still made me freeze up when I heard it about an hour in to Blue Velvet, the 1986 David Lynch film I watched for the first time this week.
You should know that this monologue comes shortly after That Scene, an especially gruesome and uncomfortable rape scene between Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini, one so intense that I can’t imagine how the scene would have played in a regular-ass movie theater in the 1980s. After Blue Velvet came out, Rossellini got dropped by her modeling agency and her former schoolteachers, all Italian nuns, wrote to her to tell her they were praying for her. That Scene is the point where both the audience and Kyle MacLachlan, who thought that they were in a quirked-up small town mystery, realize that they are instead in the middle of hell.
As I mentioned in an earlier piece, Roger Ebert hated Blue Velvet, writing in his original review:
“Those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what’s wrong with the movie. They’re so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But “Blue Velvet” surrounds them with a story that’s marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it’s all part of a campy in-joke…the movie is pulled so violently in opposite directions that it pulls itself apart. If the sexual scenes are real, then why do we need the sendup of the “Donna Reed Show”? What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.”
And yes, the quirked-up small town scenes and the dark sexual slavery storyline make for a film that is, for lack of a better term, tense and unsettling throughout. There’s a reason this film was so polarizing. But I - who have the benefit of knowing what David Lynch would do in the back half of his career and reading a whole bunch of retrospectives on him last week - disagree with Ebert's view on “what we're being told”, because Dern's monologue about the robins is telling me something different. After you see all of that misery on screen, after Kyle MacLachlan watches from a closet Isabella Rossellini get raped by a psychopath, you’re desperate for any hope that there’s a better world than this one. And you get that hope from Laura Dern, the idea that there is still this wide-eyed wonder-filled world where love is the only thing that will make any difference. Lynch gave us two worlds, but I don’t feel like he was saying that the love-filled world, the world with singing robins and new crushes and towns where people care about each other, was just a facade for the nightmare world. Both worlds are real, both worlds exist in the same place right now, and we’ve got to figure out how to live in the right one and bring as many people with us as possible.
When Laura Dern tells a horrified, permanently scarred Kyle MacLachlan that there’s only going to be trouble ‘til the robins come, when Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan are dancing with each other at a house party to “Mysteries of Love” late in the film and falling in love while Julee Cruise sings about people falling in love in the middle of the darkness, you hope that better world is real, even if it sounds like something that only silly teens would believe in. You hope that there’s a blinding light of love that is going to make a difference. You hope the robins are going to come. I liked having that hope this week.