The Mysteries of Dorothy Vallens: On Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet”

Isabella Rossellini’s legacy has a lot to do with her role as Dorothy Vallens in “Blue Velvet”. Vallens is sweetly captivating and elusive, like the best characters in film noir, and eludes logical, concrete explanations as we delve further into his mystery. Rossellini is always proud of what he accomplished as Vallens, and considers it the most complex performance of his career, but when “Blue Velvet” was released in 1986, it disappointed audiences and critics alike.

Even the naming of the website caught on, and Roger Ebert took David Lynch to task for apparently being wrong. Although he admired her courage, she wrote that Rossellini was “humiliated, slapped, humiliated and stripped in front of the camera,” but she has always resisted the idea. In a recent interview on the Ladies of Lynch podcast, she said, “There’s a myth that directors manipulate actors and take young virgins and make them do things they don’t want to do, and it perpetuates this idea that diminishes the role of acting, and women in general.

As critics and cinephiles, we sometimes give too much credit to the auteur theory, and it robs actors of their agency as creators of films made by male geniuses. Rossellini was not subservient to Lynch’s opinion but he sided with him as an equal partner. He accepted the ideas of other artists, and Rossellini described the atmosphere of the Lynch set as one of great trust and grace, allowing everyone to try. It’s a credit to his intelligence, his risk-taking, and the depth he finds that Vallens isn’t just an object or a fulcrum to propel the surrealism of Lynch’s volatile world; he is a complex individual who escapes easy categorization or psychological analysis. He is a mystery, because he was conceived as one, not only by Lynch, but also by Rossellini.

Rossellini first sought to distance himself from the legacy of his parents—Hollywood actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini. She was a TV reporter and then a model before becoming an actress, and while modeling, she began to realize that she had a talent for the screen. She took up modeling as a form of acting with a style that was not unlike that of silent film stars.

He was in a few pictures before meeting Lynch, and they spontaneously met for dinner one evening. The two began a conversation about the ups and downs of their ongoing film careers, and he became interested in one of her scripts, “Blue Velvet.” Rossellini found the script unusual and fascinating, and after reading it, asked him if he would agree to give him a screen test with costar Kyle MacLachlan, who would play Jeffrey Beaumont, an amateur sleuth and voyeur.

The audition ends up being the pivotal moment of the film, when Dorothy finds Jeffrey in his closet, and she and Lynch quickly realize that they share the same visions of this desperate but not helpless character.

“Blue Velvet” follows Jeffrey returning from college to the town of Lumberton after his father’s illness. He finds a severed ear in an open space that leads him to the ouroboros of pain hidden under his beautiful home. He dives deep into the smallest details of the criminal underworld that brings him to the apartment of torch singer Dorothy Vallens, whose husband and child have been held captive by the madman Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper).

Lynch’s film remains relevant and vibrant because it still evokes unease, and much of this filters through the shifting dynamics of vulnerability and passion in Rossellini’s performance. In that pivotal scene of discovery, the film takes us to the heart of the mystery when Jeffrey’s investigation leaves him trapped behind a closet inside Dorothy’s apartment. Lynch occasionally shows his film influences, and in the accompanying shot, he evokes the voyeurism of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) as he stares at Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in “Psycho” (1960), and as in that proto-slasher, our voyeurism does not feel safe. Jeffrey watches Dorothy undress, and with the closet door opening, he is revealed to be the opposite. He threatened her with a knife, but returned her to the room when she heard Frank coming up the stairs.

It was then that Jeffrey saw something shocking. Over the next few minutes, Frank orders Dorothy to continue the ritual rape, and the lines blur between his disgust and his enjoyment of the situation. We later find out that Frank has been visiting her for a long time, wanting her to do the same to him.

After Frank leaves, Jeffrey comforts Dorothy, and her sadomasochistic relationship with her peers begins to take shape when he asks her to stay. It would be a statement if Jeffrey only watched her undress, or if it was only the fear of being caught that fueled the tension, but the scene continues, and with each new revelation, the balance of power between Jeffrey and Dorothy keeps evolving until it is difficult to get a clear idea of ​​how we should feel about it. This is in large part due to Rossellini’s unusual choices to show us Dorothy’s happiness amidst the chaos of her private life.

Her relationship with Jeffrey becomes a stranger, as the mystery unfolds. She intends to free her husband and her child, and expose Frank to the local police department, but inside the mystery their meeting continues in the room. Lynch uses slow motion and close-ups to show both the degradation into a Freudian mire of sadomasochistic roles. In one of their sex scenes, Dorothy is nearby after she persuades Jeffrey to hit her. He reluctantly agrees, and Rossellini composes a reaction that looks good and satisfied the violence. We know it’s wrong, but because we bring our own character into the picture, the repulsion of the action actually has the power to deepen the oblique psychology of the character in a way that is fully integrated with the way Rossellini wants us to see him.

Lynch placed mystery above all else, but Rossellini needed something to spice up his performance and give him an image of the character he was playing. On the Ladies of Lynch podcast, she explained that she used her imagination to create a backstory, and that she felt that Dorothy was more vulnerable because she was from another tribe and didn’t have a mother to run to with her problems.

During production, he also read several books about the psychological effects of Stockholm Syndrome. When he brought that information to Lynch, he wasn’t interested in what it meant for his relationship with Frank or Jeffrey, but he was open to exploring it. He quickly realized that the way he approached the character was in line with how he thought of Dorothy as someone trapped in a very dark place.

Rossellini obviously took that description to heart and gave the actor the choice to embody that darkness with a body language that is sad, yet trembling, and that owes to what he learned as a model. “Blue Velvet” revolves around the canal, continuing into the abyss, and the black hole the viewer enters when viewing this image comes from what happened to Dorothy. He is the eye of mystery; a creature of despair, and its arms seem always outstretched in protest, or want. She has gone out of love for her husband and son, and their capture has made her world worse. He has accepted that darkness in his darkness as a way of coping, but it has interfered with his ability to feel pleasure, and he has begun to self-harm in response.

There’s a difference between movies about sexism and movies about sex, and “Blue Velvet” remains shocking because it’s honest about its irreverence and the power of rap. There there is people like Frank, and it is a credit to all involved that they are not moved by the consequences of his behavior and its impact on others. It would be dishonest of the experience of those who have heard what Dorothy has to soften the image. A film like Blue Velvet and a performance like Rossellini’s must make us feel uncomfortable in order to be respectable. They hold tightly to her experience by showing us that Vallens is a woman who is not immune to her emotions and her vulnerability in the open. This is evident in the scene where he wanders confused, naked on Jeffrey’s lawn. His posture and Rossellini’s performance could not be revealed in that scene, and it is difficult to take in this picture without wanting to look away.

In his memory The dream roomLynch said the photo was removed when Lynch was a child when he and a close friend saw a battered and naked woman walking around. It was the first time he saw a woman naked, the feelings of helplessness that came out of him made his friend cry. They knew something was wrong, and we know it when we look at Dorothy Vallens. Lynch tries to find the difference between the kindness she often gives her women in trouble and the darkness they face. This quality always made me feel like he was on our side. In the case of Vallens, it makes the beauty of her union with her child seem more vivid. The blinding light of love seen in his many twisted but sincere happy endings can only be understood when there is a time when the light is not felt.

Dorothy Vallens was the first of Lynch’s “troubled women,” but she remains a mystery even when contradicted in that book. It’s not easy to sympathize with her as the martyred teenage queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992), and she’s not at all hopeless as the Hollywood dreamer Betty (Naomi Watts) in “Mulholland Drive” (2001). Rossellini’s Vallens has a deceptive quality that is as poignant and curious as anything in a Lynch film. She can be inviting and intoxicatingly charming, as when her voice soars cautiously through Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” at The Slow Club, and she can be menacing as a postmodern femme fatale when we’re swept up in sexual perils inside her apartment.

With this role, Rossellini compromised her image as the modest, dignified young beauty she had cultivated as a model and as Ingrid Bergman’s child. He brought to life all the pains and joys of Lynch’s small-town American id with the forbidden texture of his sensitivity and the depth of his ambiguity. Rossellini’s dramatic performance set the stage for all the actors who would enter those dark and mysterious places we call Lynchian.