I can’t figure out if you’re a detective or a pervert ✵ Blue Velvet - ANGELS AND MONSTERS ✵ 1975–1991 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Thriller, mystery

DIRECTOR

David Lynch

WRITER

David Lynch

STARS

Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern

BEFORE

1957 Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window explores the nature of voyeurism as a wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors.

1977 Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead is a surreal horror shot in black and white.

AFTER

1980 The Elephant Man is Lynch’s sensitive real-life drama about a disfigured man.

2001 Mulholland Dr. is Lynch’s neo-noir LA mystery about an aspiring actress.

Rich, haunting and subversive, Blue Velvet is the story of a college student drawn into the seamy underside of his hometown after he finds a severed human ear in a field.

Since his extraordinary 1977 debut with Eraserhead, David Lynch has become a genre unto himself, a master of combining the shocking, the comic, and the surreal in what feel like visions straight from the subconscious—cinematic dreams (or nightmares). If anything, Blue Velvet is one of his more straightforward movies, without the complex structure of his later masterpiece, Mulholland Dr. Instead it follows the structure of an old-fashioned film noir, as the curious but strait-laced young student Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) falls for the wholesome Sandy (Laura Dern), but is also attracted to the nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), who is trapped in an abusive relationship with the psychopathic villain Frank (Dennis Hopper). This dynamic is clearly a throwback to the noir era, although Lynch adds a very modern take on sexual deviancy and voyeurism. The repulsion we feel in witnessing Frank’s perversions is amplified by Lynch’s fondness for noir tropes, so that the audience is made to feel that he is corrupting something familiar to them all.

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Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds himself trapped in Dorothy’s closet when Frank arrives. He must look on helpless at what unfolds.

The horror beneath

One of Lynch’s favorite stylistic themes is the artificiality of postwar Americana and the darkness that lies beneath it. The opening scene pans through an idealized suburban yard, with neat, white picket fences and blooming flowers, the owner of which suffers a stroke while watering his plants. The family pet rushes to drink the water from the discarded hose, while the shot pans deeper into the grass to reveal a colony of ants foraging relentlessly. The surface world is a veneer of happiness, below which there exists baseness, struggle, and violence.

This theme is continued in the director’s use of music. From Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet in the title track to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, Lynch hijacks innocent songs of romantic longing and juxtaposes them with Frank’s broken sexuality, going so far as to have him quote the lyrics while he beats up Jeffrey. It’s almost as if the music’s innocence is as much of a lie as the seemingly perfect front yard from the prologue.

Blue Velvet approaches horror in a new way. Its depravity derives not from guns and gore, but from sex used as a vehicle for the worst aspects of humanity. The hero, Jeffrey, is seen hiding in a closet, a voyeur peeping at Dorothy. Frank is threatening physically, but his sado-masochism is what makes him terrifying. This key moment, placing us in the closet with Jeffrey as he watches Frank rape Dorothy, is one of cinema’s most unsettling examinations of sexual deviancy, as well as being the moment when Lynch perfected his distinctive themes, tones, and darkness.

“You’ve got about one second to live buddy!”

Frank Booth / Blue Velvet

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The blue velvet of the title is a robe that Frank forces Dorothy to wear as he rapes her. Typically for Lynch, a beautiful thing is used for a corrupt end.

DAVID LYNCH Director

David Lynch was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, a small town not dissimilar to those featured in his movies. His debut feature, Eraserhead, was a cult success that took him to Hollywood, where he directed The Elephant Man and Dune. The latter was a flop, but he reestablished his career with the critical success of Blue Velvet and the surreal TV series Twin Peaks. He has since followed a singular path, creating movies that could only ever have been made by him.

Key movies

1977 Eraserhead

1986 Blue Velvet

1990 Wild at Heart

2001 Mulholland Dr.

2006 Inland Empire

What else to watch: Peeping Tom (1960) ✵ Eraserhead (1977) ✵ Lost Highway (1997) ✵ Mulholland Dr. (2001) ✵ Inland Empire (2006)