It’s a blue rose case.
The opening image of this week’s Daredevil: Born Again is taken straight from the iconography of David Lynch, in the form of the blue-colored flower used to designate paranormal investigations in the world of Twin Peaks. When the image resolves, we see it’s a flower in a garden, but that the garden is surrounded by the bars and towers of a prison yard. This feels like a play on another famous Lynch image, that of the verminous insects writhing beneath the pristine red roses and green lawns of the all-American suburb in Blue Velvet. This time, however, the darkness is on top. Maybe that’s appropriate these days.
This isn’t the only Lynchian moment in the episode. Several times, as we follow the mass-murdering marksman nicknamed Bullseye as he’s transferred to general population in prison, escapes, and arrives at Mayor Fisk’s black-and-white ball, the screen takes on a blue tint. When Matt Murdock takes the bullet Bullseye intended for Fisk, the screen is hypersaturated with red. It’s reminiscent of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, respectively.
Lynch’s work ties to what writers Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are up to in this episode only in the loosest possible sense. Maybe you could stretch and say the dual personae of both Murdock/Daredevil and Fisk/Kingpin are just the superhero genre’s way of exploring the same fissures in identity that Lynch’s Hitchcockian doubles did in the two aforementioned horror masterpieces. Or maybe Vincent D’Onofrio’s raspy stop-and-start voice reminds you of Robert Loggia growling his way through Lost Highway as the similarly, let’s say, romantically possessive gangster Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway.
But I don’t think you need to be doing the same kinds of things David Lynch did to borrow the tools he used to do them with. Indeed, that’s where many soi-disant “Lynchian” films and TV shows go wrong — aiming for his thoughtful, sensual surrealism and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “whoa, that was weird” at best. Why not stick a blue rose at the beginning of a TV show about a blind lawyer’s blood feud with both a gangster the size of Shaquille O’Neal and an assassin who can spit out his own tooth hard enough to put an eye out with it? Why not do big beautiful things with color just because they’re big and beautiful things you can do?
I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.
Tags: daredevil, daredevil: born again, decider, TV, TV reviews