Blue Velvet (1986) - film review

Outwardly, Lumberton appears to be the model American small town – law abiding, tidy, peaceful.  But surface impressions can be deceptive, as college student Jeffrey Beaumont discovers one fateful summer.  Not long after his return home to help out in the family business when his father has a stroke, Jeff comes across a severed human ear on a patch of waste ground.  He takes the ear to police detective John Williams and is surprised when the latter insists that he keeps quiet about the whole business.   Jeff’s curiosity is aroused when Williams’ daughter, Sandy, reveals that the severed ear may be connected to a mysterious cabaret singer Dorothy Vallens.  One evening, Jeff breaks into Dorothy’s apartment, but is caught when the singer makes an unexpected return.   Threatening him with a knife, Dorothy forces Jeff to strip naked.  Before she can seduce her captive, another man enters the apartment.  Jeff hides in a closet and watches in horror as Dorothy is physically and sexually assaulted by her visitor, a man named Frank Booth.  The next day, Jeffrey relates what he has discovered to Sandy.  Booth is a vicious, drugs trafficking gangster who is holding Dorothy’s husband and child hostage so that he can go on abusing her.   Determined to help Dorothy, Jeff returns to her apartment.  Just as he is leaving, Frank and his bully boys turn up and decide to have some fun, with pretty boy Jeff providing the entertainment...

David Lynch’s best, darkest and most controversial film to date, Blue Velvet divided critics when it was first released and yet it became in instant cult classic, redefining and reinvigorating the film noir thriller genre and influencing a whole generation of filmmakers.   Arguably the most subversive American film of the 1980s, it challenged expectations over what was acceptable in mainstream cinema – some critics praised it for its daring and originality, others dismissed it as cheap and vulgar.

In plot terms, Blue Velvet is little more than a traditional film noir thriller, with all the familiar noir motifs – an uncorruptible hero, a femme fatale, a noxious villain and a sinister web of intrigue binding these three together.  However, Lynch’s highly individualistic approach, which combines bizarre surrealism and brutally explicit (to the point of visceral) realism, makes it uniquely different.  The result is a film that is both compelling and deeply unsettling.  The director is clearly influenced by Hitchcock in the way he uses the camera to involve the spectator, making him or her a willing voyeur in the unfolding drama.  

Lynch gets the best out of his cast, particularly his fairly inexperienced leads Isabella Rossellini and Kyle MacLachlan (the latter had starred in Lynch’s earlier sci-fi mishap, Dune), although it is Dennis Hopper who steals the show as the unremittingly bad, mad and dangerous to know villain, Frank Booth.  The slight lack of confidence that Rossellini and MacLachlan betray in their performances works to the film’s advantage, adding an edge of vulnerability to their characters and heightening the threat posed by Hopper and his henchmen.  

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Blue Velvet is the way in which it portrays small-town America.  With its immaculate lawns and faultless picket-fences (not to mention the robot robins), this setting appears artificial, and ludicrously so, when compared with the vicious underworld which exists right along side it.  When Jeff enters the latter, via the device of the severed ear, he resembles a latter day Alice in Wonderland, but in reverse – he is going from a world of fantasy and illusion (or rather delusion) into a world of vice and suffering.  The film is obviously intended as an attack on the complacency and naivety of the American bourgeoisie, offering a potent reminder that just beneath the surface there lies something very nasty and very dangerous, and we ignore it at our peril.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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