A sullen man from the Rose House, wearing an impeccable shirt and a pair of carefully tied ties, adjusts his chaotically tousled hair. Those who have seen his soul have not been surprised by such contradictions for a long time. He taught the whole world that every face has a wrong side.
The man grew up in a forester family on a remote farm and grew up amidst the racial fires of urban Philadelphia. He always changed the women he loved, but he preferred not to leave his cozy home for them. Even death came to him in two guises at once: an irreversible natural disaster and a destructive habit.
David was always drawn to that light, his own world and that of others. He painted paintings in which the last refuge found stuck insects and sculpted sculptures from bird skeletons found on the side of the road. But he never liked cinema — art that was too lifeless, trapped in dark and musty cinemas. Living on the move was nicer to him than dying.
When David was young, American cinema stank with expired Westerns, and European cinema with boring post-war reflection. This is partly why he invented his own. Tactile like blue velvet and fragrant like Douglas fir trees in Washington State. And alive, like a still warm corpse.
In fact, David is very good at death. He knows Dick Laurent is dead and has seen who killed Laura Palmer. He believes in karma and rebirth, and death is not permanent for him. And he knows that his genius is at being a conductor of hovering ideas that will come sooner or later, because waiting for eternity can't be long.
And when David left, he left the portals behind him. They're like black holes that are too easy to slip into and dissolve into molecules. Through these mysterious gaps, an unreal world of frightening imagination and rejecting lust seeps into everyday life.
David's fictional realities have nothing to breathe because the air is full of caustic suspension exhaled by the factory chimneys. The industrial noise in the background is like a living creature that strives to launch its tentacles into the auricles and lay eggs right in the brain. David has been wandering around the labyrinth of a factory that makes erasers out of others' heads for decades.
Everything around us is sticky like fuel oil; there is no lulling velvety in sight. The walls of apartments infected with deadly organisms breathe to the beat of the residents. The whole world around these plants itches with an existential itch, as if life was an accidental mistake on the conveyor chain.
Only blue velvet, sewn by David to Shostakovich's symphony, is not a fabric that is pleasant to the touch, but leather torn from reality. But he didn't just tear the veil off the idyll, but threw his hands up to the elbows into the world's wound and turned it inside out. Which is why even the color has become false. The grass on the lawns is now too green, and the night is not black, but bluish to match the bruise that shows through the makeup.
Nevertheless, the whole space is shrouded in love — a beautiful feeling that makes hearts beat. But it smells of gasoline, dirty roadside motels and cheap drugs, because the object of sublime anxiety is hardly worth the effort. At best, love will leave a couple of fractures, and at worst, it will kill all living things around.
If David draws an empty highway, it's bound to lead nowhere. Or it doesn't lead at all, but absorbs everything that touches the roadside. And yet, a car rushes across it without brakes at a speed not on the speedometer, and a gag bound conscience trembles in the trunk.
This world is a maze of broken mirrors where all turns lead to dead ends. You can't follow the saving voice calling from the phone booth in it, because the phone is pressed to the dead man's ear. You should not look for answers here, because there is nothing but a smoldering mountain of questions around. When the car disappears in the dark, it turns out that “nowhere” is a real destination from which you will not be able to return.
Despite the brutality of his imagination, David only inspires others with a sense of harmony. His colleagues draw inspiration from him and the opportunity to touch creativity that flows and changes, rejecting any framework. It's a pity that Rita, whose fate is stuck on the Mulholland Drive in Southern California, can't boast of treating herself the same way.
For her, Hollywood is not a city of dreams that come true, but a sweat-smelling dressing room where faces slide down in line with cracked makeup. The girl arrives here with a smile ironed on a hot iron, but it is not the American dream that awaits her around the corner, but the table of a drunk surgeon ready to cut any person in two under the spotlights.
All these worlds resemble a crooked mirror that reflects the hidden, and cruel villains are not monsters at all. Because true monsters breathe the stench of these worlds with puppy enthusiasm and dig up twisted poetry in them in an attempt to justify the crimes that are happening on the screen.
David's stories are footage of one film torn to pieces and scattered across eras. He doesn't build worlds because he doesn't see himself as a god or a prophet. In the clothes of an ordinary man, he digs crooked tunnels under reality itself, where one accurate question acts as a portal to another universe, sounds become flesh and colors give their names.
This perverted storyteller's death is not at all over; rather, it's just another notch for editing. Laura Palmer dances detached in the Red Room, Frank Booth sings along to a false melody in velvet hell, Diana Salvin dissolves into the haze of Hollywood Hills. No one dies until the projector chews on the faded film. And even then, the story will start all over again.
An untitled movie is playing on repeat in the cinema hall. It has no plot, because the script was thrown away a long time ago, and the actors do whatever they want, because the director is not against experiments. Specks of dust froze in the projector's beam, unable to understand the story or leave the session. But there is no reason to be afraid, because the creator of this stupid world is dead, and death is just a bad joke from a man who once forgot to shout: “Cut!”
