By Alice McIntyre
Blue Velvet (1986) is the fourth feature film directed by David Lynch, and a new favorite of mine.
It follows Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student returning to his hometown of Lumberton, NC in the wake of his father’s near-fatal stroke. During his visit, he finds a severed ear in an abandoned lot and takes it to local detective John Williams (George Dickerson). Jeffrey is soon informed that he can’t learn anything more about the investigation as it’s now an official police matter. His curiosity about the ear spurs him to team up with Williams’ daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) to find out more in secret.
Jeffrey soon learns that the husband and son of lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) have been kidnapped by a sadistic drug dealer named Frank (Dennis Hopper). Frank forces Dorothy to perform a variety of sex acts, with the safety of her husband and son at stake. Jeffrey soon becomes not just an interested party but an involved one.
The film quickly gets characteristically “Lynchian,” which is to say, weird. Frank frequently inhales an unknown gas, and when under its influence exhibits a sexual duality between the “daddy” and “baby” aspects of his personality, compounding his already-erratic behavior. Within mere moments, Frank can switch between these dual aspects, between cruel dominance and infantile regression—and in both cases feels a deep shame and self-consciousness, violently objecting to Dorothy looking at him. Frank also suffers from a paraphilic obsession with Dorothy’s blue velvet robe (hence the title): he stuffs it into his mouth as well as hers, compels her to wear it when taking her and Jeffrey on a joyride, cuts off a piece to gag Dorothy’s husband with before he kills him, and more. One can’t help but wonder how Frank happened, what created such a character.
The strangeness of Blue Velvet isn’t limited to a single character’s Freudian impulses, but permeates the atmosphere Lynch creates. The world of the film is both dreamlike and neurotic, drowning the viewer in its haunting score and sound effects, oft-repeating motifs, and excellent visuals.
What I see in Blue Velvet is in some sense an inversion of the themes found in the slasher films popular during the same period. Whereas Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees were forces of nature visiting vengeance upon deviant teenagers for drug use and promiscuity, Frank Booth is the rot underlying seemingly idyllic American life. He is aided by the “Yellow Man” Tom Gordon (Fred Pickler), the partner of Detective Williams, who had been providing him with confiscated narcotics to sell. This collaboration between institutions and criminal elements would be echoed in real events two short months after Blue Velvet made its debut, in the form of the Iran-Contra affair being made public. The Reagan administration had facilitated the clandestine sale of arms to Iran in order to fund the anti-communist “Contra” insurgents in Nicaragua, a number of whom engaged in drug trafficking to fund their activities. Those activities included “a distinct pattern” of of murders, kidnapings, assaults and torture of civilians, according to a 1985 report by human rights lawyer Reed Brody.
Lynch once said that Blue Velvet was a “film about things that are hidden—within a small city and within people.” In this Lynch achieves a key aim of Surrealism, to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” By means of the unsettling and unreal, Blue Velvet conveys a deeply human story about evil, personal growth, and power.
It certainly is a strange world.
Verdict: Damn Good/10.
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