Few films are so perfect in conception, so evenly rendered from beginning to end, that they stand as complete works of art. The ones that become classics aren’t those without flaws, but those with a handful of individual moments that imprint themselves forever on the world’s collective consciousness.
If there is a recent film whose assorted parts burn themselves onto the human imagination with more permanence than any other, it may be David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” the acclaimed 1986 psychodrama which has been recently reissued in a Special Edition DVD.
The scenes and images composed for the film are so vivid that, love it or not, it displays the type of visual and emotional texture that is impossible to jar loose from your memory.
In recalling the aesthetic landscape of “Blue Velvet,” one first pictures the surreally bright, off-kilter feel of Lumberton, the fictional logging town in which the story is set. The fire trucks are almost too red and the lawns too neatly manicured to be real. Of course, that’s because by night the town is a nest of horror and perversion.
Young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), the film’s delicate protagonist, finds that out the hard way after becoming trapped in the apartment of a lounge singer named Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini).
While hiding in Dorothy’s closet, he is shocked to witness a mysterious man named Frank Boothe (Dennis Hopper) barge into her place, inhale a profuse amount of laughing gas and then proceed to beat and rape the singer in the middle of her living room floor.
The raw electricity of this, the most famous scene in “Blue Velvet,” has gone a long way toward immortalizing the entire movie. It also raises some important questions about the characters. Where, for instance, is Dorothy’s son? Before he molests her, Frank lets her speak to her son on the phone to verify that he is alive. Has the kid been kidnapped by Frank and a third party? Is this why she capitulates so easily to the abuse?
After befriending Dorothy, Jeffrey determines to resolve these questions, setting out with a pal from the neighborhood (Laura Dern) to investigate the matter further. His queries involve him in increasingly greater danger, until, finally, the tension culminates in another terrific, hallucinatory scene in which a drug-addled Frank rewards the boy’s snooping with a midnight joyride at knifepoint. In a wonderful touch, Lynch sets the scene’s tearse climax to the incongruous strains of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.”
As Dorothy and Jeffrey grow intimate with one another, MacLachlan and Rossellini succeed wonderfully at projecting the vulnerability drawing them together. Hopper, as the source of that vulnerability, plays Frank as a sort of human wrecking ball – a machine without remorse, whose single-minded goal is the absolute psychological and physical destruction of others.
Still, Lynch is ultimately the star of this picture. Aided by Angelo Badalamenti’s rhapsodic score and cinematographer Frederick Elmes’ oversaturated compositions – maintained in their original anamorphic ratio on the new DVD transfer – the director establishes a baroque noir universe to contain these wounded characters that is viscerally overwhelming.
As the movie progresses and the themes grow darker, the sunny fraud of the early Lumberton shots almost disappear from the visual scheme of the film. Longer shadows, stronger contrast and stranger colors take their place, making some later scenes in “Blue Velvet” feel practically satanic.
Because Lynch deals in style over substance almost religiously, the plot doesn’t add up to as much as its visual component, but when you’re in the right damp mood, the film is still pretty nourishing.
While most critics thought it was a major accomplishment upon its release in 1986 – and many now consider it the very best film of the decade – a small but sizable contingent despised everything about “Blue Velvet,” from its twisted characters to its cheeky black humor. In his famous dissenting review, Roger Ebert was so outraged by the film that he actually likened Lynch to the Hopper character just for making it.
But a decade and a half after the hype and controversy have died down, “Blue Velvet” is still a force of nature, just like its villain. It refuses to be brushed aside as an art-house curiosity, a bump along the road to a smooth-edged, conformist Hollywood future.
To the contrary, the film’s legacy only continues to grow wider, transfixing new audiences like the baffling and beautiful fever dream that it is.
