Vanilla varnish on rot
Blue Velvet
Directed by David Lynch
1986
“But in my heart there’ll
always be
Precious and warm, a memory
Through the years
And I still can see blue velvet
Through my tears”
Intentional irony, I think, that a song with sweet and tender lyrics serves as the theme for such a dark film, David Lynch’s 1986, “Blue Velvet.” It’s the one that established David Lynch as, well, David Lynch. He had an early cult film success, “Eraserhead,” and made a splash with “The Elephant Man” (which earned him a directing Academy Award nomination), but with “Blue Velvet” he created a little style that was uniquely his own, enigmatic thrillers populated with eccentric characters. These neo-noirs have an almost experimental feel with edgy and often violent content. “Velvet” set the standard for most of the Lynch works that followed, especially his infamous TV series “Twin Peaks” and the more recent “Mulholland Drive.” I caught up with the “Blue Velvet” at the AFI’s 80’s revival series and was again struck by this oddball film that is both highly entertaining and more than a little disturbing.
The opening scene is (justifiably) famous for its startling imagery, setting the tone for everything that follows. The lush, fifties style credits roll over a luxurious swath of… blue velvet, of course, as the Bobby Vinton croons the title song. Cut to scenes of idyllic Lumberton: in dreamy slow motion we pass by white picket fences, happy firemen waving, children crossing the street in orderly fashion, all as the sun shines brightly over everything and everyone. Nothing bad could happen in a place like this. That is, until the camera focuses on a man watering his lawn: he clutches himself and falls to the ground. The camera pans below, through the stream of water now haphazardly spraying, going underneath the ground, revealing swarms of warring insects (beetles?), a pretty clear sign that something sinister lurks beneath Lumberton’s sunny surface.
Lynch refers to the plot as “The Hardy Boys go to Hell,” an entirely apt description. Our hero Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), the son of the stroke victim, returns home from college to look after his ailing dad and the family hardware store. He stumbles upon a mystery when he comes across, of all things, a severed ear in an abandoned lot. Playing amateur sleuth and enlisting the aid of Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of the local police detective, Jeffrey finds out that there’s a whole side to sleepy Lumberton of which he was unaware. He encounters mysterious torch singer Dorothy Valens, played by Isabella Rossellini, (her husband is the one with the missing ear) and drug kingpin/sadist/madman and all around bad dude, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Jeffery’s looking for a little excitement and gets more than he bargained for.
Let’s just say, Frank’s not someone you’d want to run into on the street in broad daylight, much less in a dark alley. One of the most frightening characters ever put on film, Hopper is over the top, shouting his dialogue (mostly a stream of obscenities) and inhaling some kind of gas through a mask. And yet, he’s so nuts that Hopper is able to make him peculiarly funny at the same time. Rossellini’s Dorothy is beautiful and tragic, a dark femme fatale to contrast with virginal blonde heroine Sandy. But Lynch doesn’t make the mistake of making his heroes bland. MacLachlan and Dern are able to put an eccentric spin on their characters that makes them intriguing in their own right.
And the world of “Blue Velvet” is pretty wacky all around, from the sunny “Leave it to Beaver” surface to the dark underbelly. I’m never sure when the story is supposed to be taking place: there are girls wearing poodle skirts and pony tails, firemen in old fashioned trucks, the perfectly manicured lawns and the cozy homes. Is it the fifties? Or some time and place parallel to world we know? Then there’s the “bad” side of town, Dorothy’s seedy apartment building, the warehouse where a drug deal and a murder take place, and the “This is It” brothel, the setting for one of the oddest scenes in the film, a stop along the way on a nightmarish midnight drive Jeffrey is coerced into taking with Frank. The capper is when a fey, makeup wearing Dean Stockwell lip synchs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” holding a work light like a microphone. Trust me; it’s even stranger than it sounds.
Since the release of “Blue Velvet,” David Lynch has made several works with eccentric characters and inscrutable plotlines. His most recent, “Inland Empire,” starring “Velvet’s” Laura Dern, was shot on low budget digital video and released independently by Lynch himself. Whether he works with a studio again or continues to release more movies on his own, it’s clear that he’ll continue to have something odd and surprising up his sleeve.
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