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Blue
Velvet
(1986)
After the critical and commercial failure of
Dune (1984), David Lynch returned to his own turf
with this surreal and dark mystery. Set in the small town of
Lumberton, USA, the film tells the story of Jeffrey Beaumont
(Kyle MacLachlan) a young, clean-cut, college student who returns
to his home town to take care of his father who has suffered
a heart attack. While out walking, Jeffrey discovers a severed
human ear lying on the ground and hands it over to the police,
but his own curiosity gets the better of him. With the help
of Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of one of the police detectives,
Jeffrey is led to sultry night-club singer Dorothy Vallens
(Isabella Rosselini). Becoming increasingly drawn to her, and
hiding in her wardrobe to spy on her, Jeffrey discovers she
is being coerced into a bizarre sado-masochistic relationship
with vicious gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), and soon
himself deep within Frank’s twisted world
of abduction, sex, drugs, abuse and murder.
This is often classed as one of the great films of the 1980s and certainly deserves
it’s status as a modern classic. The film’s memorable opening
sequence is a montage of images of a peaceful, all-American
town (white picket fences, beautifully kept gardens, a friendly
school crossing guard, friendly firemen waving at the camera),
before the camera moves in on a perfectly kept lawn to discover
a seething violent mass of insects killing each other. The
idea of a world of darkness and violence, lurking just beneath
the surface of the peaceful, ordered normality is one of the
main themes in the film.
Jeffrey finds himself not only caught
between two women, but two worlds: clean-cut, blonde, girl-next-door
Sandy representing the peaceful, calm, safe, everyday
world, and tormented, masochistic Dorothy representing the
dark side, the hidden depths of strange violence and perversity.
In one scene in the film Sandy tells Jeffrey: “I can’t make
up my mind if you’re a detective or a pervert”. Jeffrey is
certainly a voyeur, who gets involved more to satisfy his own
curiosity than anything else.
Of course the most memorable
character is Dennis Hopper as the truly loathsome Frank Booth,
a foul-mouthed vicious demon given to taking hits of some unidentified
gas from a portable oxygen mask (Lynch originally wanted it
to be helium, but Hopper insisted the gas should by Amyl Nitrate).
Apparently Hopper was desperate to play the role, telephoning
David Lynch to say “I am Frank!”, which scared Lynch quite
a bit (although according to Lynch: “Fortunately he was someone
else too”).
This film is packed with typical Lynchian weirdness,
including a memorable scene where a deeply strange Dean Stockwell
mimes to Roy Orbison’s song “In Dreams”.
-Robert
Foster
Other
Thoughts: Mark Moreland 
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All contents ©
2004-2009 Thoughtsonfilm.com |
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Director:
David
Lynch
Writer: David
Lynch
Starring: Kyle
MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Isabella Rosselini, Laura Dern
Distributor: De Laurentiis
Entertainment Group
Runtime: 120
min
Rating: R
Release Date: September
19, 1986
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