Film Review - Blue Velvet

Film Review:

Blue Velvet

WHEN Lynch broke out onto the scene with his smash-hit horror Eraserhead, he thrilled teenagers looking to grab onto their dates in the cinema and wooed the maturer audience with a sweet romantic story of a couple overcoming a situation laden with conflict. It even had a cute baby! After that came the Academy nominated biopic Elephant Man, and some failed movie for nerdy fucks (who even reads anyway?). In 1986, he returned to form with the taut and sexy thriller Blue Velvet. What a hoot!

This Ain't Your Daddy's Noir

ONE day, young Jefferey (Kyle McLaughlin) finds an ear in a field near his home whilst on the way back from a hospital visit. Intrigued, he takes it to a neighbour of his who works as a detective for the police force. He is then approached by the policeman's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), who tells him more about the case. At the centre of the intrigue is the sultry Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), and fuelled by a need to be part of the mystery, Jefferey hatches a plan to sneak into Dorothy's apartment - what he sees in there, however, drags him into a world he is not ready for.

So far, so cliched right? You've seen this story; read this story before. Blue Velvet hits all of the same plot points, and even most of the same character points that you would were you to sit down with this premise and plot out the most hackneyed version of this story.

And yet...

Psycho Sexua-Oh God What?

THIS steamy thriller may have the trappings of a sexy story about the criminal underground, but everything about the steamy elements feel horrible and perverse. Famously, Lynch not only struggled to get the film made, but there were widespread reports of audience walkouts. Prominent critics wrote in disgust of the events and tone of the story - and yet, it has been considered one of the great contemporary American films for over two years now. The film got a reaction at the time, and retains its power.

The key to this is because the shock tactics the movie employs are not your usual shock tactics. Lynch doesn't get in there and just turns things up to eleven, as it were: at least, not in any conventional manner. He plants seeds. He creates unease in a way only Lynch can. The opening to this film is one of the most iconic in contemporary cinema, with its picturesque placid suburban setting, which unfolds slowly into something much darker.

Jeffery himself is a personification of the insidious nature of the sexual aspect to the film - even more so than the iconic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). In some ways he could have been your traditional bland main character. Certainly, he has no really well established motivation for getting involved in the story, and is even handed much of the early about the plot by other characters. There is, however, something subtly off about him, in much the same way there is something off about everything Lynch's hand touches. At one point Sandy, now besotted, tells him to drop the investigation. "I can't tell if you're a detective or a pervert," she says in another scene. He's definitely the latter, although it is arguable that within the confines of Blue Velvet that both are the ostensibly the same thing. He stalks and leers his way through the movie exactly like a pervert, and it becomes sort-of clear that whatever is driving him, even he can't put a name to.

There's one famous set-piece in this movie that anyone who has heard of the film has probably heard about to various degrees of detail. It's a testament to the character work, filmmaking and understanding of the psychology of the conflict. You can see a truck coming straight at you, but when it hits you it still hits like a truck.

In Dreams

SOMETHING about David Lynch's world building allows him to just do things in a film no one else can. His films often have a real anachronistic sensibility. Blue Velvet feels like it was set in the eighties using eighties genre conventions, written by a time traveller from the fifties. Everyone talks a bit funny, shares a common sentiment of what is proper and what is normal, and it's off. There's obvious big examples of this, but it's the small choices that are the most effective. Background extras, production choices; be it a carpet or wallpaper or a strange choice of outfit.

Perhaps the most striking moment is the In Dreams section of the film. It comes at a moment of real peril, where Blue Velvet is beginning to really feel like a gritty Eighties crime drama, where it looks and feels like a conventional movie. Then they cut a to a flat, wide shot of a scene supposedly in a bar, but appears in actuality to look like an old person's home. The whole scene plays out like an absurdist play - it never works to actual deflate the tension, but it certainly twists and distorts it. At a moment where the plot seems to really be plotting in, Lynch seems to drag us into a strange dreamscape, but not even any old dreamscape either: this feels like a 100% Lynchian dreamscape.

ACTING

IF there is one thing entirely unsurprising about the cultural impact of Blue Velvet, it is that Dennis Hopper's performance as the villainous Frank ingrained itself onto popular culture. Whenever Frank is on-screen he dominates it. He shouts and screams and goes on monologues that feel like they would play well with an audience that is obsessed with the dark glamour of the Batman villain The Joker. It has been remarked on that both Hopper and Isabella Rossellini give very, very strange performances - in general, everyone in the movie seem as if they are caught in their own strange dream, but for both of them it is especially pronounced

Rossellini as Dorothy always seems like she's on something. She has an odd voice, almost kermit-y, and an accent that appears wane and drift strangely. Much like the domineering Frank, she seems on a very different wavelength not just from everyone else, but from the world in general. Her actions, her speech patterns: a performance that would be outright bad in a different movie. Yet, within this movie? Just works.

Where Convention Meets Madness

ULTIMATELY, Blue Velvet is one of those "auteur" films. It is impossible to understand where the film ends and Lynch's own crackpot psyche begins. Many filmmakers seem to strive to be as original as ever, but Lynch carries with him something unremittingly strange and stylised. Blue Velvet hits all of the notes you expect to hit, but also hits lots of strange notes along the way. The trick is that somehow things never actually go properly off the rails, whilst always seemingly like it's gone completely off the rails all together. Lynch might be the best plate spinner in the world whose act seems to consist of smashing plates, all the whilst keeping them all intact.

Highly recommended if you're a filthy fucking pervert or something else. Like, you know, a eunuch, if those still exist.