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BLUE
VELVET
10/10
USA
1986
director
/ script : David Lynch
producers include : Dino De Laurentiis
cinematography : Frederick Elmes
editing : Duwayne Dunham
music : Angelo Badalamenti
lead actors : Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis
Hopper
with : Dean Stockwell, Priscilla Pointer, George Dickerson, Hope Lange,
Brad Dourif, Jack Nance
115-120 minutes
Re-released
in the UK as an appetite-whetter for Mulholland
Dr., Blue Velvet’s classic status is safer than ever. It’s
regarded as one time Lynch somehow got everything right: a dark, disturbing
drama exploring the corruption and horror behind small town America’s
white picket fences… perhaps, according to some, the most savage cinematic
critique of the Reagan era. There’s just one problem – these descriptions
don’t fit the film we see up there on the big screen. Supposedly an erotic,
subversive psychological thriller, Blue Velvet is much closer to
crazy comedy: a spoofy teen-noir, or an adolescent’s warped vision of
‘adult’ movies.
It’s
difficult to keep a straight face, right from the early moment when college
student Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) finds a decaying human ear in a
field. He takes it to a cop neighbour, Detective Williams (Dickerson),
and Williams’ daughter Sandy (Dern) tells Jeffrey that the ear is somehow
connected with a case involving sultry nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens
(Rossellini). With Sandy’s help, Jeffrey breaks into Dorothy’s apartment
and spies on her as she’s visited by her brutal lover, Frank (Hopper)
– but he’s soon discovered, and finds himself drawn into a mysterious
world of crime, desire and obsession…
Hopper’s
ferocious performance is now the best-known aspect of Blue Velvet:
Like Joe Pesci in GoodFellas, it’s an electrifying turn that lifts
the film to a different level whenever he’s on screen (how amazing it
now seems that Hopper was Oscar-nominated as supporting-actor for another
1986 release, the forgotten Hoosiers.) The gas-inhaling
Frank is a scary figure, but just as Blue Velvet is
a weird sort of thriller, he’s a very strange sort of gangster: how many
crooks, in real life or movies, refer to drugs as ‘drugs’? What does Frank
actually do?
We
never understand what Frank’s nefarious schemes involve, and Lynch is
equally hazy about the exact nature of his S+M relationship with Dorothy
– is he even aware of how much Dorothy comes across as loving and needing
Frank, or rather ‘a Frank’, in her life? This is, in fact, a film which
the wholesome Sandy could have made: intrigued by the idea of ‘deviant’
behaviour, she knows very little of its reality.
This
would explain why, when she and Jeffrey go to a high-schoolers’ dance,
a slow, smoochy number is played almost as soon as they arrive – such
a track would normally be deployed right at the very end of the
evening.
And,
if the movie really is a product of Sandy’s imagination, this would
explain the curiously detached way her initial, dull boyfriend Mike is
presented – though he’s mentioned often, we only actually see him twice:
the first time he’s wearing an American football helmet, separated from
Sandy (and her new world) by a wire-mesh fence. The second time, when
he’s been ditched and chases after Sandy and Jeffrey’s car, Lynch only
shows him in oddly reticent long shot.
By
this point, Sandy has firmly moved on to the blank-slate Jeffrey (“Jeffrey
Nothing,” he impulsively calls himself at one stage). He’s her surrogate
- and ours too – enabling her to dip her toes into the wider world, but
while he endures a series of terrifying situations, he never actually
comes up against any convincing version of experience, let alone corruption.
Instead, he encounters ever more fantastical forms of innocence (Frank
included) culminating in a blindingly optimistic finale which sees the
bright picket fences of suburbia strengthened rather than undermined.
As
a mature, complex drama, then, Blue Velvet is a non-starter. But
we’ve had plenty of complex, mature dramas over the years: Lynch takes
cinema further, into much stranger, more unfamiliar territory, and this
is why his achievement hasn’t dated over the years. For two hours he sustains
an intoxicating mood of giddy psychological surrealism, balancing absurdity
and horror; reckless emotional chaos and cold technical precision – his
crew’s technical contributions are flawless.
It’s
as if he’s free to transfer his preoccupations and neuroses directly onto
celluloid, miraculously intact and unmediated by rational considerations.
Even the most basic awareness of Velvet filming reveals the haphazardness
of his methods (of major directors, perhaps only Lars Von Trier leaves
as much to improvisation and chance) and while this network of visual
and verbal ‘clues’ appears to be an analyst’s dream, rational analysis
is the last thing the film needs. Lynch probably neither knows nor cares
what his work is ‘about’, and perhaps we should all start taking his familiar
Jimmy-Stewart-from-Mars pubic “persona” at face value.
Blue
Velvet is no more ironic than it is allegorical – if the ending seems
too happy to be true, that perhaps says more about our viewing habits
and expectations than Lynch’s intentions. Great directors don’t have
to combine the psychology of a Freud with the street smarts of a Sam
Fuller. There’s no shortage of ironic satirists in cinema these days:
take Lynch literally, and you take him seriously. Watching Velvet and
Mulholland, you realise it’s the only way this glorious,
freakish talent makes any kind of sense.
28th December, 2001
(seen Dec-26-01, Filmhouse, Edinburgh)
For
shorter review click here
by Neil
Young
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