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By Root 843 0

it’s difficult to convey the dread, drawing-in power of a film about which you know nothing in advance, which belongs to no genre (though it would inseminate its own genre), where you have no idea where the next scene is going because you have no idea what’s yet to unravel in the scene still playing. To be a Blue Velvet virgin was to have your consciousness porously flooded with invasive forces that subsequent audiences were slightly spared, having read the reviews and having had the violet nightscape prepared for their arrival. We were unprepared, which elated those who loved the film and pummeled those who were less intoxicated, me being in the latter camp, the sight of a naked, bruised Isabella Rossellini staggering across the lawn crossing a line into exploitation, as if she were meat that had climbed off the hook. But unlike at 1900, I questioned my own squeamishness more here, and shared the transporting moment of Roy Orbison on the soundtrack, his skying lamentations part of the soundtrack of my youth, a portal into a higher plane. Pauline’s response was pure elation spiked with relief and vindication, since she had been instrumental in David Lynch’s getting hired as director of The Elephant Man, perhaps the most tender exploration of Otherness, of the spark of divinity embedded in even the most deformed, ever achieved on film. It was a freak show that panned up to the firmament, at the forgiving stars, which may have been more than reviewers and audiences expected, given their grudging responses. After the garish disarray of Dune, which I saw with Pauline and of which I remember mostly giant worms and warts, Blue Velvet proved that Lynch hadn’t lost his idiosyncratic eye and nerve. Once we were out on the sidewalk, reacquainting ourselves with reality after being held lidded inside the warped glass of Lynch’s strawberry preserve jar, Pauline said, “It might make a wonderful date movie. I wonder what was in Dennis Hopper’s inhaler.”

“Insecticide,” said Veronica Geng, a New Yorker humorist and editor who was scarily, sexily talented and thinky, an electrical storm waiting to happen.

We repaired to wherever we repaired, and afterward, back at her hotel room, Pauline let the film’s publicist know how much she loved the film. Later the phone rang. It was the publicist reporting that she had told Lynch of Pauline’s reaction and Lynch had said, like Red Skelton signing off on his variety show, “God bless.”

Instant feedback didn’t always produce abundant thanks. I remember sitting with Pauline through The Savage Is Loose, a Robinson Crusoe tale of primitive survival with an incest angle that was directed by George C. Scott, who shared campfire duties with his real-life wife, Trish Van Devere, whose name reminded me of silk slippers skipping down the foyer and whose demure beauty and dimples seemed designed for ingenue comedy. Unfortunately for her, us, and anyone else watching, Lubitsch humor had no place in this Darwinian allegory that was like Gilligan’s Island goes Lord of the Flies; Scott suffered, Van Devere suffered, we all suffered, the movie a loud, grueling lecture-demo where each apprehension you had about the plot and characters was fulfilled on schedule with a thud. Afterward, we were worn-out, eager for the solace of something poured into a glass over ice, when a publicist approached Pauline before we reached the hallway to the elevator. It was a violation of protocol to waylay Pauline or any reviewer immediately after a screening to pry out a response, but the young woman obviously had her instructions.

“Miss Kael, Mr. Scott is eager to know what you thought of the picture. Is there anything I can tell him?”

“Tell him to bury it,” Pauline said without hesitation or glint of hostility, the bell-like chime of her voice more damaging than any wrecking ball.

The publicist smiled, pricklings of panic at the corners of her eyes, as if her mind were checking to make sure she had heard right. One did not envy her task. It would not be fun playing messenger and telling General Patton that he was being advised