Retrospective: Blue Velvet
After scoring a surprise hit with The Elephant Man and a fascinating failure with Dune, Lynch returns to Weird Shit territory with Blue Velvet. While the film at first blush can feel like a return to the abstract horror of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet is David Lynch's most classic Hollywood film to date. Lynch's love of 50s American pop culture is all over the film, from its title song to its use of seemingly every other Fifties pop ballad to the affect of nearly every character.
Kyle MacLachlan's turn as Jeffrey Beaumont is classic Hollywood: a college boy returns to his hometown in North Carolina and uncovers an awful secret. MacLachlan's committed sincerity complements Lynch's recreation of Fifties America, where boys and girls (Laura Dern) dance to Roy Orbison and go for a malt at the local diner. We begin to see Billy Wilder's influence on Lynch for the first time here, with Wilder's sincere and slightly twisted outlook on Fifties America reflected by Lynch's even more sincere and twisted perspective on the period. As Eighties America was an attempt to reiterate Fifties America, Lynch's timing couldn't be better.
The structure is a straight lift from the greatest Hollywood movie of the Fifties, Hitchcock's Rear Window. MacLachlan turns voyeur in an attempt to unravel the mystery of the private life of lounger singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), whose name obviously reflects rock 'n' roll icon and teenage plane crash victim Ritchie Valens. The first act closes with the revelation that Vallens is the victim of repeated rape by the biggest psychopath in films, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). At this point Blue Velvet transitions from edgy Hardy Boys mystery to skincrawling horror, as Booth holds the lives of Vallens' husband and child over her head to force her to indulge in his sick sexual fantasies.
Blue Velvet marks even more firmly than Eraserhead the point where Lynch becomes a documentarian of the True America, a clandestine dystopia where kind and warm people live in a society built on concealed violence against women and children (the plight of Black people is frustratingly left out of this equation for the most part, a failure Lynch will struggle to rectify across his career). If Eraserhead established Lynch as a curiosity of American filmmaking, Blue Velvet is where he becomes a force to be reckoned with: somebody who can capture lightning in a bottle twice. The first masterpiece is tricky enough; the second one is rare indeed. America has rarely churned out a piece of popular art as uncomfortable yet gorgeous as this one. Dennis Hopper's performance is unlike anything else in the movies; quotable, hilarious, and excruciatingly frightening. With its extraordinary script, directing, performances and nauseously suspenseful editing, Blue Velvet isn't only magnificent; it introduced us to a world where monsters excoriate Heineken before the robins come back.