It’s easy to imagine that David Lynch – cinema’s premier practitioner of surreal dream weaving – was always incredibly steadfast in his abilities when it came to delivering his singular visions. However, after coming off the infamous mega-flop that was his attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune, the man who gave us the monochromatic fever dream known as Eraserhead and beautiful tragedy of The Elephant Man had seemingly been put off his game by Sandworms and Kwisatz Haderachs. This thankfully wasn’t enough to deter super producer Dino De Laurenitis, who sucked up Dune’s losses like a champ and bankrolled the pompadoured visionary’s next movie, Blue Velvet.
As a result, Lynch was not only able to emerge from the flames of Dune (which I’m actually pretty fond of), but he managed to deliver arguably his signature movie that not only crystallised his traits perfectly, but along with Twin Peaks and Mullholand Drive, it’s probably the film he’s most recognised for. Prepare to fall beneath a silken touch that’s deceptively brutal.
After his father is suddenly rendered bed bound after a near-fatal attack of some mystery medical condition, college student Jeffrey Beaumont returns home to the sleepy and safe suburban town of Lumberton, North Carolina. However, among the white picket fences and friendly neighbours, there’s something rotting at the heart of this community and it takes the jarring, physical form of a severed human ear that Jeffrey discovers while walking home from the hospital.
Sticking it into a brown paper bag and delivering it to local police detective John Williams (no relation), Jeffrey suddenly gets the idea in his head that he’s going to solve the case and starts by hanging out and flirting with Williams’ daughter, Sandy, who tells him that the ear has something to do with a lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens. Before you know it, the precocious twosome have decided to find a way to sneak into the singer’s apartment while she’s out to search for clues, but after a little snafu involving Sandy keeping watch, Jeffrey suddenly finds himself tumbling down a rabbit hole of murder, sex and shocking degradation when he’s discovered by a clearly traumatised Dorothy as he hides in her house.
We soon discover that the source of her pain is one Frank Booth, an utterly deranged psychopathic drug lord who huffs gas from a canister in his pocket and who has a fixation on poor Dorothy that requires him to regularly visit to unload his vicious, carnal desires upon her. Utterly horrified, yet completely transfixed, young Jeffrey realises that this is no longer some carefree mystery to solve and that there’s a fair amount of incredible danger closing in around him. Yet, after feeling a deep need to save the tormented Dorothy, he heads further into the rot of Lumberton to discover what the hold Frank has her.
If there’s a quickfire way to discuss the virtues of Blue Velvet, it’s undoubtedly that it’s the first film that really locked in what a David Lynch film could be. While Eraserhead, with its industrial groaning and deformed babies, was Lynch’s imagination at full force, The Elephant Man was more contemporary and Dune was the director trying to channel his themes through the prism of a huge blockbuster. However, with the haunting crime/mystery of Blue Velvet, you can tell that Lynch had finally managed to harness his peerless style and themes into something of a sweet spot that straddles the various states of dream logic that proves to be both utterly beguiling and shockingly repellant. When stripped of the director’s hocus pocus, the story of a college student and a high schooler who discover organised crime in their idyllic town sounds like movie of the week kind of stuff; but freed from the limitations and pressure of the big studio machine, Lynch delivers something that went on to foreshadow almost everything he made after.
Obviously, Twin Peaks found a lot of its origins in Lumberton, what with the concept of some sort of ghastly, deranged, surreal evil lurking just out of sight while friendly neighbours say howdy-doo (literally represented here by the camera slowly delving into the perfect, vibrant, green grass to reveal a nest of writhing bugs), but what really burns its way into the cortex is how well the director manages that tone that genuinely feels like you’re trapped in a dream that progressively going bad. The first half hour of Blue Velvet frequently feels like you’ve just dozed off and your dreams are delivering you into an overly cheerful, innocent world that still feels a little off, but resembles the sort of picturesque existence you’d get in a 50s sitcom. However, as Kyle MacLachian’s painfully smug Jeffrey locks in further to his gruesome discovery, the tone begins to change and get evermore threatening as his happy-go-lucky investigation (and our dream state) first turns uncomfortably sexual and then dives headlong into flat-out nightmare.
This is instigated by the discovery of Isabella Rossellini’s incredibly damaged Dorothy, and Dennis Hopper’s legitimately terrifying Frank Booth who both takes the notion of a villian and a damsel in distress and sprints with it into truly horrifying territory.
Like poor Jeremy, as we delve deeper into their stunningly messed up dynamic, the more unsettlingly drawn in we become and once Hopper’s mad dog villain takes centre stage, we’re in for a panic inducing ride into a nightmare state that’s impossible to shake. Be it Frank’s shocking rape of Dorothy as a stunned Jeremy watches through the slats of a closet like a paralysed voyeur, or the numerous unnevering quirks he has, Booth is an antagonist only Lynch could come up with and only Hopper could perform. Be it his use of exaggerated swearing (“You fucker’s fucker!”), his habit of falling into a childlike haze to certain songs (watching Dean Stockwell creepily lip sync to “In Dreams” while an enraptured Frank looks on is surely a top 3 Lynchian moment of all time), or his baffling love of a particular brand of beer (“Heineken!? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”), he’s a like a sleep paralysis demon on a bender. In fact, once a battered Jeffrey is ultimately vomited out the other side of a night out with Frank and his cackling goons, Blue Velvet admittedly struggles to maintain that level of intensity and almost begrudgingly has to get back to rounding off its crime plot. Still, things still continue to be reliably weird as this twisted story comes to an end.
When it comes to tapping into that world of dream logic that Lynch excelled in, Blue Velvet stands as one of his best, and aside from providing many, indelible moments that sear themselves into the subconscious, it also remains the launching pad for the rest of his career. In fact, virtually everything that the director made can be directly traced back here via a direct, blue, velvety line – and nothing, but nothing feels quite like it.
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