Blue Velvet

Copyright 1986, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

What an odd person David Lynch is. I'd say "must be" in place of "is," but when the guy has his own website and announces the daily weather in his slightly off-kilter voice, it's not really up to me to guess, but for us to know. Even before 1986's Blue Velvet, Lynch had shown a predilection for the weird with movies like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Dune. Despite those films' strenghts (and the latter film isn't chock full of those), it was Blue Velvet that got Lynch into the mainstream.

This extremist pitch-black satire works on a lot of levels and fails on just as many. That Lynch had the idea for the film, that the idea was written, that the script was made, that the film was distributed: all of this goes to Lynch's credit. Could a film such as this be made today? Wouldn't there be an outcry over Isabella Rossellini's painful nude scene? What of the famous sequence where Kyle MacLachlan watches Rossellini get vilified by Dennis Hopper, the villain of the film? So, again, that this movie was made is worth applauding. No, it may not be your cup of tea, but let's be honest: this kind of audacity is rarely seen in movies anymore, and it's good to be reminded of the dark possibilities of film every once in a while.

That said, the film is wildly overwrought and not without its flaws. The first 45 minutes of the film, the pre-Hopper scenes, move slowly, almost too much so. Yes, MacLachlan's Jeffrey Beaumont (a classic 1950s-style name, no?) finds a severed human ear and sneaks his way into Rossellini's apartment, but once Hopper, as Frank Booth, comes onscreen, peeked at through the slats of a living room closet, the movie kicks into high gear. Up to this point, the audience can't be too sure of what's going on, what's to come. Even when Hopper first arrives, can we predict that, in 30 minutes' time, we'll see Dean Stockwell in kabuki garb lip-synching to Roy Orbison? As ridiculous as that sounds, that scene in particular is a highpoint the film doesn't reach ever again.

Maybe it's Lynch choosing to be linear that's a failing of the story. It's obvious that he revels in the vulgarity that Booth represents, he's intrigued in having a clean-cut American boy like Beaumont potentially be tempted, seducted into perversity. And yet we still have to find out who the owner of that severed ear is, and Booth must be captured for his hideous wrongdoings. In his later works, specifically Mulholland Drive, Lynch isn't interested in a straight-line plot. Yes, if you take the time to think it through, Mulholland Drive makes some kind of sense, but the experience of that film is far more powerful than the experience of this film, aside from a few shocking scenes and Hopper's galvanizing performance, one that probably saved his career from obscurity. For that, watching Blue Velvet is worth it, but there's not much else aside from ambition and the promise of something darker and more layered from an auteur like David Lynch.

Two and a half stars out of four