Blue Velvet - Cinepinion

BLUE VELVET
Directed by: David Lynch
Internet Movie Database Entry for full details

GRADE: A- (3.3/4)

1986.

Blue Velvet opens with a gorgeous montage of Americana, from fire trucks to crossing guards, but soon a man is dead and the camera goes deep into the lawn grass to reveal some nasty, monstrous beetles. Carrying on in the tradition begun by Edgar Lee Masters, Lynch sets out to expose the dark secrets of small town USA.

This, however, is David Lynch we’re talking about, so the dark underbelly is not quite as tired as it is in so many other films and on TV. Yes, it has to do with sex, drugs, violence and crime, but it’s far more frightening than those words connote. In the diegetic universe of David Lynch, beneath the surface lurk conspiracies that are deep, dark, and dangerous, hinged on keeping young lovers apart.

Jeffrey (Kyle Machlachlan) is home from college visiting his hospitalized father. On a walk home from the hospital through a field, he discovers a human ear, and with the help of Sandy, a police detective’s daughter (Laura Dern), he embarks on his own investigation of its origins. He soon becomes involved with Dorothy Vallens, an exotic sultress (Isabella Rosselini), and a part of the kidnapping scheme to which she is victim. Jeffrey, as a stand-in for Lynch with his buttoned top-button, comes across as genuinely confounded by the existence of evil in the world. As he often repeats, "it's a strange world." One might even say wild at heart and weird on top.

But the film is about more than the seediness that secretly resides in suburbia. Sandy remarks to Jeffrey, regarding his insatiable curiosity, “I don’t know whether you’re a detective or a pervert.” In truth, like the movie watcher, he's both; like many of Lynch’s other films, Blue Velvet has spectatorship on its mind. For example, there is a scene in which Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment; when she surprises him by returning home, he hides in a closet and watches her through the slats on its door. Like Norman Bates watching Marion undress, he spies her while she talks on the phone and walks around nude. When she discovers him, however, the tables are turned on the voyeur – he is forced to strip and stand embarrassed before her. "How would you like it if I stared at you?" the film seems to ask. Not very much, sir.

But then Dorothy begins to make love to him at knifepoint, and it seems that the fantasy of every filmgoer is about to be fulfilled – intercourse with the on-screen sex object. Their coitus is soon interrupted, however, by Dennis Hopper in one of the finest and creepiest entrances in film history. While Hopper rapes Dorothy on the floor, he demands, using his fists as exclamation points, that she not look at him. He, too, it seems understands the degrading effect of the gaze. -- Henry Stewart

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