Blue Velvet (1986)

 

Some filmmakers have such a distinctive style that we've come to call that style by their name: Hitchcockian, for example, or even Spielbergian. The late, great David Lynch belongs in that kind of rare company, as anyone could tell you after watching Blue Velvet (1986), a most distinctively Lynchian film. The film begins (and ends) with images of seemingly placid small-town existence, but then we burrow under the ground (literally and figuratively) and discover some rather harsh truths about such calm exteriors. The plot is a relatively straightforward narrative. In fact, it's quite linear in its method of storytelling, but as the film progresses, events just seem to get weirder and stranger and odder as we learn more and more about what's going on in the seemingly peaceful town of Lumberton. The trajectory of the story just keeps seem to keep getting farther and farther away from whatever we would consider realistic. Sadomasochism, sexual violence, murder, drug use, voyeurism -- it's really quite a list of vices that the film depicts. What constitutes "normal" begins to shift and morph until, at times, you wonder how you wound up in such a surreal environment. All of this begins with the rather common event of a young man (Kyle McLachlan, at the peak of his beauty, as Jeffrey Beaumont) returning home after his father has been hospitalized. You might be expecting a different story than what emerges, though, when Jeffrey discovers a severed human ear on the ground near his family home. He goes to the police, reconnects with a teenage girl he once knew (the lovely Laura Dern as Sandy in a very early screen appearance), and begins plotting to find out whose ear he located. That leads him to a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy Vallens, a brave and shocking performance) and the man who may have kidnapped her husband and son: Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, giving all he has to the role). Frank is the catalyst who upends the narrative beyond recognition, and the film veers into some even darker, even weirder directions after his first appearance. None of this is necessarily meant to make you feel comfortable, by the way. What can you make of what happens in Blue Velvet? So much seems to be -- shall we say? -- off-kilter. Lynch was also the screenwriter for the film and what you see on the screen is his vision of... something. It's not always easy to comprehend the meanings of some of the images you see and the sounds you hear. I mean, you'll never quite listen to Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" the same again after watching Dean Stockwell and then Hopper lip synch to it. The same is also true for Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet," performed here multiple times by Rossellini. Then again, perhaps Lynch is trying to suggest to us that we've been seeing and listening to everything the wrong way anyhow. Like I said at the beginning, Lynchian. Indeed.

Oscar Nomination: Best Director (David Lynch)