Elevator Pitch
On his way home from visiting his father in hospital, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds an ear in an abandoned lot. Jeffrey and his neighbour Sandy (Laura Dern) investigate. They discover that the ear belongs to a man called Don Vallens. The drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) is holding Don and his son hostage in order to have a hold over Don’s wife, nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Concerned about Vallens and menaced by Booth, Jeffrey takes everything he has found out to Sandy’s father, a police detective. In the end the police raid Booth’s hideout, Jeffrey shoots Booth, Dorothy is reunited with her son and Jeffrey and Sandy end up together.
Told this way, the plot of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet sounds like a conventional Hollywood movie: a pair of spunky young people do what the staid authorities can’t and solve a mystery, bringing the bad guys to justice and setting right the world. This may account for the polarized reception that Blue Velvet had on its initial release, because it is very much not that kind of film.
It may be seen now as one of the greatest films ever made (number 85 on the Sight and Sound list, chart fans) but at the time there were accounts of people walking out and of arguments breaking out in the audience during showings. One man apparently fainted but insisted on seeing the end of the film. This is undoubtedly because Blue Velvet is not a conventional mystery film. It is violent, horrifying and disturbing. But that does not mean that it is instead a conventional horror film. It is sexually violent, morally horrifying and emotionally disturbing. It is a psychological mystery, a social horror.
The film sets out its stall right from the start. It begins with an almost parodic vision of the American suburb: white picket fences, roses, a fire truck with a dalmatian, Bobby Vinton singing ‘Blue Velvet’. Then Jeffrey’s father has a stroke while watering freshly planted grass seeds and is left writhing in the dirt as a baby toddles unconcernedly by and a dog plays with the freely spurting hose. The camera dives into the grass beneath Mr Beaumont and uncovers a world of teeming horror, heaving knots of insects wetly scrambling over each other in the darkness.
This is the kind of thing that gets Lynch called ‘surreal’ which is both ironic and entirely accurate, since he is pursuing the surreal in its purest form: the super real, the real reality, not the one we generally experience. A lot of the time our brains are relying on what they already know to smooth our passage through the world: conceptual short cuts and symbols like white picket fences, roses and robins, schmaltzy pop songs. Lynch insists on seeing these things as they truly are, which is often upsetting.
1986 was also the year Stand By Me was released, another film in which young people discover the truth beyond their suburban world. The bullies and domineering fathers of Stand By Me are scary but ultimately conventional movie villains. Dennis Hopper’s portrayal of Frank Booth, in all its grand guignol sexual turmoil and furious, inarticulate violence, makes his true inner horror real.
Delights
All of which was catnip to a certain kind of young cinema-goer in the late ‘80s of high concept, low brow Hollywood fare like Top Gun (1986) and Highlander (1986). There were, of course, plenty of art house films of the period, like Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986) and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), but these looked like art house films. They were black and white, unconventionally shot stories of unconventional characters acted by unconventional looking people like Tom Waits or Peter Falk. These were very much the inheritors of the New Hollywood movement of the ‘70s.
Blue Velvet was none of these things. It was shot in the saturated colour of a mid-century Douglas Sirk melodrama, featuring striking, movie star level actors in what at first glance appeared to be a thoroughly conventional story. It felt like an object of the ‘80s, bright and full of ‘60s pop music and yet, at the same time, it tore away those colourful surfaces to reveal the dark truth we all suspected lay beneath. It was not ‘morning again in America’. In the words of Frank Booth, ‘Now it’s dark’. Blue Velvet felt like an art house movie for our generation, an articulation of everything that felt wrong with the morally repressive, economically neo-liberal conservative mainstream.
Moreover, in its odd affect and stilted, parodic dialogue, it became endlessly quotable, another one of those movies that slipped into your idiolect and became a sort of password, instantly recognised lines of dialogue, the quoting of which immediately reassured you that you were probably among the like-minded. Start singing Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’, and if they grabbed a light to shine in your face, then you were probably among friends.
The author entertaining annoying fellow cast members at a wrap party at some point in the early ‘90s
Discomforts
Male friends, most likely.
One of the things that Blue Velvet has in common with some of its New Hollywood predecessors, like Taxi Driver (1976), is that, as a film considering the nature of masculinity in a misogynist patriarchy, it ends up being full of that misogyny itself.
One friend of The Metropolitan pointed out to me that when Dorothy Vallens comes back to her apartment from her singing gig and takes off her dress and wig, she nevertheless keeps her high heels on, something no woman who was trying to make herself comfortable would do. Surely it is merely a coincidence that we are then treated to a sequence of Isabella Rossellini tottering about on her heels in her underwear.
There are, theoretically, story reasons for this. One reason is that she isn’t making herself comfortable but instead preparing for a visit from Frank Booth, one that will turn out to be horrific. The other is that she is being watched by Jeffrey, who is hiding in her closet (sic). The high heels are part of the sexualisation of Jeffrey’s ‘investigation’, which becomes an inquiry into the mystery of himself, as a maturing man.
The film might be forcing us to confront Frank Booth’s misogynist, violent masculinity, but it means that we are not just watching him commit a sexual assault, but we are watching it from a male point of view. While the film does insist that the female characters are just as complex as the men, they are still largely there as symbols within a man’s story.
Can We Show The Kids?
Blue Velvet, in other words, contains ‘opinions of its time’. And also the style of its time. One of the Metropolitan kids has watched it and declared it not as good as Twin Peaks (1990), which is an entirely valid assessment, and I think I can see why. Blue Velvet feels more identifiably an ‘80s film than Twin Peaks is obviously a product of the ‘90s. It feels like it is in much closer conversation with the culture and mores of the period than Twin Peaks, which is more interested in establishing its own, distinct universe.
On the other hand, Blue Velvet is one of those rare things, a Hollywood auteur film. After Lynch directed Dune (1984) for him, producer Dino De Laurentiis gave him complete free rein to make the film the way he wanted, with the single stipulation that it be no more than two hours long.
That single limitation perhaps turned out to be the magic ingredient, as it forced Lynch to remove almost half of his first cut. As a result, the film is both highly focused and more elusive, full of references and symbolism that the audience themselves must work to understand. In other words, a work of art, which requires us to sit forward and engage emotionally, morally and intellectually, rather than a piece of ‘sit back’ entertainment.
Is It Still Worth It?
Here’s an example of that symbolism: when Jeffrey first finds the ear, covered in ants in a patch of waste ground, we zoom into it. Then, after the story is done, we zoom back out, this time from Jeffrey’s ear, as he lies in a garden listening to the robins. Which is to say that the main substance of the movie happens between two ears: inside a head. We are, as the Roy Orbison song has it ‘In Dreams’.
This accounts for its sense of heightened realism, the way innocent settings like apartment building corridors become imbued with a sense of menace, the way that nature becomes disturbed around Frank: thunder rolls, creatures roar, candles gutter. It’s there in one of the greatest edits in film history. As Frank roars his animalistic challenge to the world: “I’ll fuck anything that moves”, he entirely vanishes from the frame, leaving behind an empty room. He escapes from the film, defying the logic of the medium, pre-empting the film’s own next cut to the speeding car. It is the action of a dream in which jumps of place and meaning happen precipitately but never quite break the structure of the experience.
But whose dream is this? Jeffrey Beaumont’s perhaps? This is his adventure, after all. Indeed, his story is weirdly reminiscent of the hero’s journey of Star Wars (1977), in which the similarly naïve but righteous Luke Skywalker sets out to rescue a woman held hostage by a sadistic father figure with a breathing problem. Even more weirdly, George Lucas originally approached Lynch to direct the Star Wars sequel Return of the Jedi (1983), which would have improved the Star Wars franchise immeasurably but undoubtedly have driven Lynch insane, so we’re probably better off without it.
It is no mistake that Frank Booth enters Jeffrey’s life only after Jeffrey’s own father is removed from it, and insists that Dorothy call him ‘Daddy’. Frank Booth appears to be an ‘alpha’ male, but his insistence on terms like ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ in his sexual assault of Dorothy Vallens reveals him for what he is, an underdeveloped baby, a thing of inchoate urges and appetites, untrammelled by rationality or morals. Blue Velvet is, in part, the story of Jeffrey wrestling with his own masculinity, ultimately rejecting Frank’s childish egotism for an adult engagement with the world.
On the other hand, if we are to take the journey between those two ears literally, then the place we are travelling through is Jeffrey’s hometown of Lumberton itself. This is the dream of a small town, an American Dream. As such, it is both a nightmare, full of greed, selfishness and violence, and also an unattainable fantasy of Norman Rockwell suburbs and happy families.
But it is also the dream of the audience. Hollywood is, after all, the dream factory; the cinema, the dark place where we see jumbled visions of the real world full of symbolism and portent. Blue Velvet is one of those disturbing dreams that stays with us into our waking life, that asks us to re-examine our reality. After all, as Jeffrey and Sandy keep pointing out, ‘it’s a strange world’. Far stranger, even, than Blue Velvet.
And if Lumberton isn’t enough, there’s always Twin Peaks:
Big Night In
The first thing I did, on moving into our shared house in the second year of university, was to head down to Granada and hire a TV. The last thing I did before I left a year later was forget to cancel the hire. This was a bad choice.