Blue Velvet (1986)

I didn’t like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet the first time I saw it. That was a long time ago, I’m now more accustomed to his work and I’m now much more open to unconventional filmmaking. Also, the first time you watch a movie you focus on the story. When you watch it again you focus on how the story is told. And on the style.

So I figured it was time to give Blue Velvet another shot.

I can now see so many things to admire in this movie. I’m still not entirely sure about it, but that’s the way David Lynch’s movies are. If you think you understand one of his movies that’s a sure sign that you don’t understand it.

I do love that opening sequence. It tells us what we need to know. We have left the real world. We are now in David Lynch’s world. And it does this cleverly and subtly. Everything about the town of Lumberton is wrong. Just slightly wrong, but still wrong. This is like reality, but shifted off-kilter. At first you think Lynch is aiming at satire but that is not his agenda. He’s pulling the ground from underneath us. From now on we cannot assume that anything we see is to be taken at face value.

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is a normal high school kid. Like everything else in Lumberton he’s so normal as to be disturbingly abnormal.

He finds an ear. A human ear. In a field. He takes it to the cops, to Detective Williams (George Dickerson). Jeffrey figures he’s stumbled upon a murder.

He meets a sweet girl, Sandy (Laura Dern). She’s so sweet as to be pathological. She’s the daughter of Detective Williams. She has overheard something that suggests that this case has something to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey and Sandy decide to play amateur detective.

The fact that this clue was something Sandy overheard is significant. Jeffrey is playing detective but he’s like someone trying to make sense of a play but he’s only seen a brief brief scenes, and who then ends up becoming part of the play. But he doesn’t know what the play is about, he doesn’t know if it’s a comedy or a tragedy or a romance or a murder mystery. And he doesn’t know if he has walked in in the middle of the first act or the middle of the third act. He doesn’t know if the other characters are heroes or villains.

The audience of course is in the same boat. We don’t know at first what kind of movie this. When we get to the end, we still don’t know. But we’ve had a wild ride.

There’s a definite interest in voyeurism here, but to an even greater extent than in other notable movies about voyeurism this is voyeurism in which everything seen or heard may be totally misinterpreted. To gather evidence he breaks into Dorothy’s apartment and hides in a wardrobe. Sandy is perhaps not quite as innocent as Jeffrey. She wonders if Jeffrey just wants to spy on Dorothy in hopes of seeing her naked. It’s possible that Jeffrey isn’t quite sure of his own motives. We have to suspect that Sandy might be right.

Jeffrey really isn’t prepared for what he sees. He witnesses a sadomasochistic sexual encounter between Dorothy and a very very scary man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey is naïve, good-natured and not too bright and he’s sure he knows what’s going on. Jeffrey thinks Frank is an evil man and Dorothy is being brutalised and abused. He just can’t figure out why Dorothy seems to enjoy it.

Jeffrey is both right and wrong. Frank is a monster. But Dorothy does get off on playing the submissive role in sadomasochistic sex. Jeffrey will discover that when he later has sex with Dorothy. She wants Jeffrey to hurt her. He does hurt her. Now Jeffrey is really disturbed. Jeffrey isn’t equipped to deal with any of this.

The twist is that Dorothy seems to get aroused by the sex but she’s not an entirely willing partner. Maybe Dorothy doesn’t understand her own motivations. Maybe people in general don’t understand their own motivations.

What is really going on in this movie is open to debate. It does seem like Jeffrey has found himself in a different realty, or a different non-reality. It’s as if he’s left Lumberton and now he’s in Frank Booth’s world. But the opening sequence has alerted us to the fact that we, the audience, are already in a different realty, or a different non-reality - the hyper-real shifted reality world of Lumberton. There would seem to be several layers of non-reality happening. It is of course also possible that each of the major characters inhabits his or her own world. Even after he has slept with her Jeffrey cannot comprehend Dorothy’s world. Perhaps he simply cannot enter her world.

Initially I had serious reservations about Dennis Hopper’s performance which veers perilously close to self-parody. This is however a movie you have to think about. If you see Frank as not really a human villain but a monster out of a nightmare (or even a fairy-tale monster) his performance makes more sense. And some of the other bizarre performances start to make sense. Characters in a dream behave according to dream logic.

In fact this movie makes more sense when you stop trying to make sense of it. Surrealism doesn’t obey the conventional rules of storytelling or of characterisation.

There’s quite a bit of black comedy which serves to undercut even further any illusions we have that this is the normal everyday world. Of course it’s also possible that Lynch is suggesting that the everyday world which we believe to be ordered and logical and rational is in fact chaotic, illogical and irrational. We are already in a dream world. All of which helps to explain one of the central mysteries, which is Dorothy’s tendency to behave in such odd unexpected ways.

Blue Velvet impressed me much much more this time around. It’s a perplexing provocative but fascinating movie. David Lynch really found his voice with this film. He found the style and the techniques which he would exploit with such success over the next fifteen year. Blue Velvet is like a dry run for Twin Peaks. Very highly recommended.