BLUE VELVET (1986)
Reappraisal by Jerry Saravia
Of all of David Lynch's films, I find myself ranking "Blue Velvet" on a lower meter. It's a good, blazingly original film that is also wholly uneven, sometimes obscene and not nearly as tasteless as it has been regarded. I also find "Blue Velvet" to be underwhelming, as say compared to "Eraserhead" (his
greatest film) or "Lost Highway," at least in retrospect. It's just that the other Lynch films have themes that are more complex and disturbing than this perverse take on suburbia.
"Blue Velvet" was released back in 1986 and was highly controversial for its time, mainly due to graphic scenes of torture and sex perpetrated by its main antagonist, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). There was also much talk about the sequence where Isabella Rossellini (Ingrid Bergman's daughter) is naked and publicly embarrassed with teeth marks and cigarette burns covering her entire body. The sequence itself doesn't serve much purpose other than to shock and we don't know how she arrived at this state (we can surmise it has something to do with Frank). Rossellini also endures several beatings by Frank Booth as a helium-sniffing psycho, the helium of which prepares him to beat and rape Rossellini. There are also numerous close-up shots of ants and cockroaches littering the screen as if they are aware of something beyond our knowledge.
The story revolves around a murder mystery that is more or less explained involving a kidnapping of a child and Rossellini's husband suffering the loss of an appendage. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey, a college student visiting his picture-postcard hometown of Lumberton when, one day, he discovers a severed human ear on his usual walking path (hence, the loss of that appendage). He contacts the police and then decides to investigate on his own. This all leads to the apartment of a distraught singer, Dorothy Vallens (played by Rossellini), who is always singing "Blue Velvet" at a nightclub. Frank is the deranged psychopath who tortures her, and the scenes between the two of them are as startling and effective as any other scene in the film. As Jeffrey veers further into this S & M world with the help of a policeman's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), things get much weirder especially when Dean Stockwell shows up as Ben, a pale-faced, lipstick-wearing drug dealer who loves to sing Roy Orbison songs (Frank is a big fan of Orbison and Ben's suaveness). Both Stockwell and Hopper must hold the record for spouting more f-words on film than Eddie Murphy (at least back in 1986).
"Blue Velvet" is a fascinating, intriguing film that still doesn't quite mark it close to greatness. The elements of the mystery seemed warped to me the first couple of times I've seen it but now it makes more sense - drug-dealing, murders and police corruption are self-evident here. The performances are mostly shouting matches, especially between Hopper and Rossellini, but they definitely shock to such a degree that you can't help but want to sympathize and care for Rossellini's Dorothy. I initially said years ago that Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern merely react than act but that is not true at all - they do have some ounce of chemistry together and they have more than one exquisitely subtle scene (the cafe scene is excellent, and I love Dern's reactions to Rossellini wrapping herself around MacLachlan). I still don't completely buy the movie's ending with a robin appearing at a window, nicely foreshadowed by Dern in an earlier scene, though I did like seeing the wasp in its beak. That gives the indication that ugliness is still around the corner of any suburban street, you just have look for it.
For whatever strange reason I cannot comprehend, I still liked "Blue Velvet" because nobody has ever produced or directed anything like it prior to its release. There isn't anything you can easily compare it to. It has moments of horror but it is not a horror film. It has moments of humor but it is definitely not a comedy. It has noir trappings (writer Barry Gifford, who later worked with Lynch on "Wild at Heart" and "Lost Highway," called it phlegm noir) but it is not quite noir at all. It has the ants as a metaphor of what is buried deep in our society that remains a secret (The policeman's reactions to the severed ear and Jeffrey's discoveries seem to yield something unsavory about him). It is definitely Lynch's wildest endeavor (at least at that time) and, somehow, strangely compelling.
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