Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Not the first time either, swee’pea, my cynical self wants to interject. In Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, Dern’s previous encounters with Lynch’s dream generator, she was just as flummoxed as she is here. Can’t be accidental, these utterly clueless resolutions, and in fact Dern’s undoubted ingenue appeal has a lot to do with the Svengali-Trilby dynamic that’s apparently been working itself out (in contrast, say, to Isabella Rossellini, who after a pair of canny collaborations with Lynch transferred her dark, antinomian intelligence straightaway to Guy Maddin land, not to be silly putty in anyone’s hands, I guess).
“What’s my motivation?” wasn’t the issue there, nor is it for Lynch-Dern, though in Dern’s case “can’t live without it” (meaning the wonderful ogling camera) translates roughly as “aaiieee, get that damned thing out of my face!” As Judith Lewis wrote in LA Weekly, Dern “has suffered, vexed, fought, escaped and died, and she has probably spent a greater proportion of her screen time with her face twisted in pained confusion than any other actor alive.” The horror! the horror!—though for both on-screen Trilby clones, from the 30s and the present, whether horrified or rapt, that obscure object at the end of the transformational gaze will always be . . . precisely nothing at all, just a blank spot on the Method/motivational map!
