Blue Velvet

After getting Hollywood gigs, one that was successful (The Elephant Man) and one that was a disaster (Dune), David Lynch returned to his oddball origins with 1986's Blue Velvet, which was at the time a very polarizing film with critics, but is today generally regarded as a classic of surrealism.

The film has many of Lynch's tropes, such as a reliance on things disgusting and a fascination with the artifice of performance--we get a few musical numbers, which are almost as weird as the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead. Mostly it's an example of the lifting of the rock on idyllic small-town America, where just below the picket fences insects and worms are crawling.

"I don't know whether you're a detective or a pervert," Laura Dern tells Kyle McLachlan. He's both. McLachlan plays a young man, home from college because his father is ill, sticking his nose where it doesn't belong after he finds a severed human ear in a field. Lynch takes the template of a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery and makes it seamy, as McLachlan worms his way into the life of nightclub singer Isabella Rossellini, who is under the thumb of a sadistic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper).

Blue Velvet (the title comes from the song by Bobby Vinton) is full of creepy scenes. McLachlan, a voyeur at heart (and so is Dern, in her own way, as she is the daughter of a police captain and listens in on his business, which gets the ball rolling) spies on Rossellini as she undresses. She discovers him and has him strip at knife point, and then wants to have sex with him, but asks him to hit her. The scenes with Hopper go way over the top, as he sucks on nitrous oxide and calls Rossellini "Mommy" while clutching a piece of blue velvet. Then, in the scene that is most akin to Eraserhead, Hopper takes McLachlan, whom he has caught sneaking out of Rossellini's apartment, to a friend's (Dean Stockwell), who wears make-up and performs a lip synch of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams." If you haven't left the theater by this point, you're probably with the spirit of Lynch's strange view.

The film angered some people, especially due to a scene late in which Rossellini is nude and disoriented. The DVD even includes a clip of Roger Ebert expressing his disgust, as the found this scene humiliating. But he seems to miss the point that if she had been dressed, he may have felt better about her, but the scene wouldn't have been as shocking. Blue Velvet earned Lynch an Oscar nomination for Best Director, but I remember Leonard Maltin, on Entertainment Tonight, expressing his disgust about this, as he said the film made him want to take a shower.

After my second viewing of the film, some thirty-three years later, I find Blue Velvet holds up and is probably Lynch's best film. "It's a strange world," many characters say, and with Lynch it certainly is. Blue Velvet is, at least, linear and makes some sense, which can not be said of some of his later films.