DAVID LYNCH STARES DOWN LIFE’S DARK SIDE

Moods and textures, both physical and emotional, have stuck to film director David Lynch’s brain like acrylic paints on an artist’s canvas. There are the bright, pleasant colors from a safely satisfying childhood in Spokane, Wash., and Boise, Ida., and the dark, horrific colors from a jolting young adulthood spent in Philadelphia.

The problem, or the gift, is that when Lynch becomes the artist himself, he draws equally from that palette and creates something that sends unprepared audiences into shock. One can imagine a person going to see “Blue Velvet” because he likes the song and coming away feeling that he had gone to a wedding and seen an execution.

It’s hard to recall the last movie that stirred such a wide range of emotional response. The film--which includes images that rank among both the most repellent and most appealing ever put on the screen--prompts laughter that is simultaneously nervous, hearty and mocking.

Afterward, people stand around debating whether the film is a masterpiece or trash. Whether Lynch is a genius or a lunatic. Whether they had seen Small Town, U.S.A., turned upside down, or simply peered under a rock.

Lynch is taking all this in with apparent glee. He has struck nerves in an era when most film makers are aiming for flesh. After “The Elephant Man” and “Dune”--a good movie and a bad one, both done on assignment--the 40-year-old director has dug into his own psyche again and found more of the stuff that produced his cult hit “Eraserhead.” And it’s been a hoot.

“Making (‘Blue Velvet’) was the best time I’ve had since ‘Eraserhead,’ ” Lynch said, as he prepared to leave last week for the Boston Film Festival. “I like the fact that people are talking about it.”

Critics of “Blue Velvet” find the contrasts too sharp and too bold to be believable. The truth is they are not very subtle. One moment you are looking at a brilliant red flower framed against a spectacularly blue sky, the next you’re following beetles underground, or watching ants crawl around on a decomposing human ear.

On the surface of the story, we see a young man and a teen-age girl (Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern) falling innocently in love, while the same man is being seduced by a masochistic chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) who, in still a more bizarre relationship, welcomes the violent sexual abuse of a drug freak (Dennis Hopper).

To Lynch, who looks as if he has just stepped out of a Baptist revival tent, the two worlds--the safe and the insane--exist side by side. Or top and bottom.

“This film is a trip into darkness and back out again,” he says. “There are things lurking in the world and within us that we have to deal with. You can evade them for a while, for a long time maybe, but if you face them and name them, they start losing their power. Once you name the enemy, you can deal with it a lot better.”

Lynch chose small Lumberton, N.C. (pop: 17,800) as the setting for “Blue Velvet” because he liked the name, he could use the local signs and official insignias for free and because it was close to Dino De Laurentiis’ Wilmington studio where he was shooting interiors.

It also reminded him of the Spokane neighborhood where he spent his first seven years. Lynch has not been back to that neighborhood (“I don’t want to go back, it will spoil certain memories for me”), but he can recall it in minute detail--the park across the street, the big ponderosa pine in the side yard, the old cars driving down the street.

More to the point, he remembers the moods and the atmosphere.

“I remember having to take a nap after lunch and it was like a dream. It would get real quiet in the neighborhood. It would get kind of toasty with the sun, but not too hot. The toys in the rubber swimming pool would kind of drift and move about in the wind every now and again. Things seemed to be happening at a distance, not right beside me. It was very peaceful.”

Fast-forward 15 years. It’s the late ‘60s and Lynch, a young artist, is living in a a tense racially mixed inner-urban area of Philadelphia. A trip into hell, he calls it.

“It’s the worst city I have ever seen,” he says. “I loved it, but it was absolutely corrupt, decaying and crime-ridden. . . . I never felt so much fear and anger.”

During the five years Lynch lived in Philadelphia, his house was broken into twice and on one occasion, a bullet was fired through one of his windows. One afternoon, his wife walked out of the house with their daughter and saw the body of a young boy who had just been shot to death 50 feet from their front door.

Lynch had been spared that sort of urban reality for his first 20 years. His father, a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, kept the family on the move, from Spokane to North Carolina to Boise to Alexandria, Va. The sudden introduction to the Dark Side had an oddly liberating effect on him.

“I am pretty sure I never had an original thought until I was 21,” Lynch says. “Then I sort of clicked in a way that was inspiring to me. Before that, I was on Gilligan’s Island. Then I was ripped violently off Gilligan’s Island and submerged about 4,000 feet below the surface of the ocean and staring out into all this darkness and these strange creatures swimming by.”

That was the beginning of a career of juxtaposing images, both on canvas and on film. “Eraserhead,” a repulsively surreal story about an urban misfit and a spastic girlfriend sharing a dingy apartment with a half-human baby, is what Lynch calls his “Philadelphia Story.”

With “Blue Velvet,” he’s added the pleasant textures from his childhood and made something that, taken literally, is even more disturbing. It is a profile of rural America as a microcosm of urban America. It is a black comedy, a gothic fable and a cautionary tale rolled into one. What it says is that while small towners cling to the notion that they are safer than their big-city counterparts, the geeks have landed.

It is also an advisory against the acceptance of “safe” violence, the slaughter-as-entertainment ethic governing most television and film producers and it puts more than a few bruises on the standards of beautiful flesh and easy sex offered by the mass media.

The two scenes creating the most talk from “Blue Velvet” involve Rossellini. In one eerie, funny, ugly scene, Rossellini--lighted like a marble statue in a park--is seen standing naked on a lawn in the middle of the night.

It is a jolting image, just the way it is composed. (Lynch says the image has been with him since a naked lady, muttering to herself, suddenly appeared one night and walked past him and his frightened younger brother in a Boise park.) What is more jolting, perhaps, is the condition of Rossellini’s body. This is not what we’re used to seeing in movies, and Lynch says a lot of people have actually complained to him about it.

“One of the sickest things to me is when people say, ‘How can you show her naked like this, she looks so bad, she’s not a Playboy bunny’ . . .The same people turn around and say, ‘Why aren’t there more realistic things in movies?’ I want to show a lot of things in films, not just plastic Hollywood things. Women feel so good about Isabella doing that, I think. They say, ‘Thank goodness, somebody had the guts to go out and do something that isn’t plastic.’ ”

The other conversation starter from the movie is a scene where Hopper, who lowers the screen freak to a new depth, punches Rossellini’s character in the face, screams at her and stuffs a wad of blue velvet in her mouth while sexually assaulting her. She somehow finds this enjoyable.

“It is this thing I think is possible where a victim becomes a participant in this violent and dark sexual thing,” Lynch says. “She’s a victim, but something has happened. The two feed off each other.”

That scene takes a lot of people over the top. The contrasts between good and evil are stark enough, but for those of us--in the vast majority, it would seem--whose childhoods were not as gentle as Lynch’s, nor our comings-of-age quite as harsh, there is not a lot to identify with in “Blue Velvet.”

Nonetheless, it is one of the most provocative films of the ‘80s, one that should keep people talking right up to Lynch’s next movie, “Ronnie Rocket.” The title character of that one is a three-foot-tall midget who wears an Elvis Presley wig.

Hmmm.