Music plays a central role in David Lynch’s filmography, deployed in both diegetic (in-universe musical or dance performances) and extradiegetic (where the music is just background, not acknowledged by characters) ways to define the scenes that have become cemented in our imagination.
“For Lynch, musical appropriation is a semiotic and memorative tool to actively engage his audience, rather than a signpost by which to convey markers of time, place, or demographic,” writes Katherine M. Reed in Music and the Moving Image.
In this context—original compositions by frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti aside—Roy Orbison’s repertoire is of particular relevance, with his songs “In Dreams” and “Crying” featured in pivotal scenes in Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). Both films deal with dark realities in which they’re set—the former, suburban Lumberton, North Carolina; the latter, Hollywood—and are presented as variations on the tropes of film noir.
Despite Blue Velvet being titled after another song, the two scenes featuring Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” are the most readily identifiable in the film. The first occurs in a lip-synced performance where, at the bidding of Frank (played by Dennis Hopper), Ben (Dean Stockwell) mimes Orbison’s “candy-colored clown” lyric using a trouble light as a microphone as the original 1963 mono recording provides an audio track, ostensibly from the diegetic source of a cassette player.
“Unlike the reuse of the film’s title song, Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ is transformed through its incorporation in Blue Velvet, a process commented on by both Orbison and Lynch,” writes Reed. “In fact, Orbison fought against the inclusion of the song in the film on the basis of this transformation.”
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In the second scene, after leaving Ben, Frank continues his kidnapping “joyride” with Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan). After pulling Jeffrey out of the car, Frank puts a cassette into a tape deck, smearing lipstick across his own face before singing Orbison’s song.
“‘In Dreams’ creates a bridge between the comforting Leave It to Beaver-like world of Lumberton in the daytime and the threatening, dangerous Lumberton inhabited by Frank,” writes Reed. As in the opening scenes, “these performances show the underbelly of the world we construct, but ‘In Dreams’ is set apart by its ability to powerfully call up these associations while at the same time unsettling the viewer with the visual element of each scene.”
While “In Dreams” sets the stage for the tensions underpinning Blue Velvet, the appearance of “Crying” in Mulholland Drive challenges the audience’s interpretation of the film’s entire plot. Mulholland Drive’s Hollywood appears like a dream world, and “Crying,” performed by singer Rebekah Del Rio in the Spanish-language a cappella version “Llorando,” exposes the film’s first act as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the character Betty Elms a.k.a. Diane Selwyn (played by Naomi Watts). This illusion is made clear from the start of the performance when the emcee declares, “No hay banda; there is no band. It is all an illusion.”
“Singing in the same range as Orbison on the 1961 Monument recording, Del Rio’s rich alto is almost incongruously low,” observes Reed. “Even without previous knowledge of the song, it seems an odd choice for a female vocalist, as she mimics Orbison’s vocal performance fairly faithfully.”
Del Rio’s version differs from the original in three central and related ways, all determined by the shift in performer: timbre, language, and rhythm. “At once familiar and oddly different, Del Rio’s performance undermines the illusion of reality that is inherent in cultural memory,” writes Reed.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that Del Rio is, in reality, a singer: in fact, she’s billed under her own name, as if the performance were taking place in real-world Los Angeles. This enhances the film’s intent of exposing the falseness of constructed realities. Additionally, the lyrics—in which Orbison describes a spurned lover who meets his former flame again, realizing that his feelings have not changed—mirror the second half of the film, even though the audience isn’t yet aware of that.
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At Club Silencio, where “Llorando” plays, “both audiences are invited to rethink what they have accepted as fact.” In the latter half of the movie, the audience comes to understand that the meteoric Hollywood rise of ingénue “Betty Elms” is really just a fantasy of embittered “Diane Selwyn”.
The use of Orbison’s repertoire in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive shows how music can push mainstream Hollywood film beyond its traditional boundaries.
“Lynch succeeds in working with an outdated Classic Hollywood style to some extent, as in Blue Velvet’s obvious homages and many of Mulholland Drive’s images and sound,” writes Reed. Employing nostalgic tropes as embodied by Orbison’s songs subverts those movies from their own cinematic tradition, thus marking a departure from standard film noir.
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