In honor of the 40th anniversary of my personal boycott of the Academy Awards, I thought I'd revisit (again) the film that started it all, David Lynch's 1985 masterpiece Blue Velvet (that is, the fact that the film wasn't nominated for Best Picture led me to take an oath never to watch the Oscars again - a promise I've kept for four decades). I don't know what needs to be said about this film, one that I consider a top five selection. What struck me last night was how many iconic, unforgettable scenes there are in, including the scenes that you'd actually like to forget. As I've long opined, there were movies before Blue Velvet, and after Blue Velvet - just as their was TV before Twin Peaks, and TV after Twin Peaks. The other thing that I thought about last night was that I used to show his film during my adjunct days at Franklin College in the late 1980s, before I headed south to Atlanta for my first full-time gig at DeKalb (soon to be Georgia Perimeter) College. Not only did my students like the film and as part of a discussion sort out the deeper symbolism - but they also sat there and didn't crumble, start crying, or run out of the room. That is, they acted liked university students tackling difficult material. In my Nature of Evil class in the fall semester I showed Lee Tamahori's 1994 film Once Were Warriors, which is a film I've shown in several classes over a twenty year period at Champlain. It's a difficult and often brutal film, but it's also one of the most decorated films in New Zealand history - and for a reason. It gets at profound issues of misogyny and poverty and racism and a painful colonial legacy. In this last fall semester my students competed with each other, in an almost performative fashion, to see who could run out of the room more often. It was a pathetic performance, especially since I had actually given them something I abhor, a series of trigger warnings. What the students don't understand is that all this concern about their feelings and emotional health is not actually about their feelings and their emotional health. Rather, it's a decades long process by corporate America to make them more compliant consumers, and, as we're sadly seeing right now, more compliant in their submission to authoritarianism. Film, more than any other medium, is fueled by an emotional intensity and immediacy, and when we warn the viewers of unpleasant things that are going to happen we're doing incredible harm to the films. The director made a decision to tell their story a certain way, and I'm playing a role in destroying that vision when I warn the students about unpleasant aspects in the way the artist pursued their craft. But, again, it's more than simply tampering with the artistic integrity of an artist. When we dilute the message we're telling the students that they can't deal with unpleasant or complicated or ambiguous scenarios, and it is currently gutting education. Heaven forbid, I'd hate to think the mass faintings that a showing of Blue Velvet would inspire. When you grows up glued to your phone, your used to answers that are presented simply and definitively and entertainingly and comfortably. Unfortunately, life is not like that. Trump may be a unique cult figure, but he's not entirely an outlier. He presents simplistic and entertaining answers to complex and unpleasant problems, and when we decided to stop challenging our students, to make them uncomfortable, we laid the groundwork for the nightmare we're living through right now. Obviously, Blue Velvet is required viewing. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
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