Summary:
After finding a severed ear in a vacant lot, Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) becomes drawn into a mystery in the town of Lumberton. Jeffrey and Sandy (Dern), the daughter of the local police detective, begin investigating a woman named Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini), who is somehow connected to the case. Jeffrey soon finds himself hiding in a closet in Dorothy’s apartment, watching intently while a psychopathic stranger named Frank Booth (Hopper) visits her and engages in a disturbing sexual interaction. As the story unfolds, Jeffrey becomes increasingly drawn to Dorothy and her dark sexuality, while Sandy declares her love for Jeffrey. Frank later catches Jeffrey with Dorothy, and forces them both to accompany him to the apartment of Ben (Stockwell), who is holding Dorothy’s young son hostage. Frank beats Jeffrey and leaves him lying in a lumberyard. Jeffrey recovers and returns to Dorothy’s apartment where he finds the aftermath of a violent confrontation, including the dead body of Dorothy’s husband, he of the missing ear. Frank returns to the apartment and hunts for Jeffrey, but Jeffrey shoots him. A disturbed Jeffrey ultimately repudiates the dark world he has glimpsed, reconciling with Sandy and her hopeful worldview. Dorothy is reunited with her son.
Analysis:
One of the most important American films of the 1980s, Blue Velvet has bewildered and divided audiences since its release. A mystery film that hardly bothers to solve its crime, a teenage love story with sadomasochism, a film that completely remakes the meaning of the songs on its needle-drop soundtrack, Blue Velvet seemed completely original to most moviegoers when it appeared in 1986. The film proved so influential that one could say it changed the tone of a certain kind of US cinema, broadening the art film beyond the domain of European filmmakers and preparing the way for the American independent films to come in the 1990s.
At first, the film inspired either lavish praise or outrage and disgust. While some critics gushed about the film’s greatness (J. Hoberman, Pauline Kael), others found its violence unredeemable (Roger Ebert). Initial theatrical audiences famously squirmed in their seats, yelled at the screen, or walked out in droves, even while others sat transfixed and dumbstruck. Blue Velvet is that rare thing: a film that has the genuine ability to shock and haunt the viewer. In the context of the 1980s, Blue Velvet stood out; its moderate success at the box office demonstrated that a segment of the commercial audience in the USA would occasionally be receptive to challenging material. In the context of the 2010s, it has become clear that this is one of the more accomplished American films of recent decades, a film that is trickier than it seems.
To the uninitiated (or analysis-averse), film criticism sometimes seems redundant, an exercise in rehashing what already appears so obvious. Lynch himself encourages this sort of untutored attitude, always attributing his method to intuition. When speaking of his films, he has said, ‘I don’t know what a lot of things mean. I just have the feeling that they are right or not right’. 1 However, Lynch’s films are hardly naïve; in fact they virtually cry out for interpretation. While many things in Blue Velvet seem plain and clear, this bluntness is in fact one of Lynch’s techniques and it is anything but simple. The film opens with a famous montage of happy small-town life complete with white picket fence, bright red and yellow flowers, and waving fireman, only to descend into the dirt and insects swarming underneath the neatly mown grass. Thus in the first four minutes, the film announces that it will unearth the dark underbelly of American life. In case we didn’t get it, the film’s protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont says later: ‘I’m seeing something that was always hidden’.
This kind of symbolic obviousness is a signature Lynch trait, and once one understands that this film can and should be read flatly, what feels disquieting begins to look quite logical. Dorothy wears a wig: she is deeply uncomfortable, and wants to disguise herself. A bird holds a worm in its mouth at the film’s conclusion: Sandy’s sunny dream-world perspective has won out, but the dark side is still present. These heavy-handed symbols reflect Lynch’s interest in banality and naïveté. But despite the obviousness, there is still that uneasy feeling, and this is the important thing: the film’s affect. If 1980s audiences were already well able to interpret obvious meanings in film, today’s audiences are even more suspicious of such blatant symbols. Blue Velvet works with its audiences’ knowing gaze, enticing us in with familiar images, and then disorienting us by making those familiar images seem strange. In more ways than one, Blue Velvet disturbs with its peculiar explicitness.
Despite these moments of apparent transparency, and perhaps because of its powerful affect, Blue Velvet (like all of Lynch’s work) has been subjected to many different interpretations, and a veritable cottage industry of Lynch analysis has sprung up over the decades. Depending on who one reads, Blue Velvet is a critique of American suburban life, or it demonstrates the Freudian concepts of the Oedipus Complex or the Primal Scene, or it enacts violence against women, or it depicts a child’s eye dream of sexuality, or it is a brilliant example of postmodern cinema, replete with references to film history and popular culture – and so forth. And certainly, Blue Velvet is a postmodern film, filled with references to film noir (with its moodiness, crime, and a mysterious woman at the centre of the plot) and to other films (The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), and It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)). Despite these influences, however, Blue Velvet manages not to feel like an empty exercise in referentiality, but instead it creates an affect that is powerful and distinct. Part of the film’s singular importance is due to the way it resonates with so many cultural hot points – and yet despite all this, it still holds together as a tightly woven, formally brilliant film.
So: the film unearths the dark underbelly of small-town American life, yes, but there is more to it than that. Rather than locating its crime and horror in an outside location, the film finds the dark side at home, in Lumberton, literally in the family garden. Blue Velvet’s reinterpretation of familiar places (home), familiar stories (the crime film or film noir) and familiar characters (the smalltown boy, the girl next door) makes banal things look perverse. As several writers have pointed out, this is precisely a dramatisation of the uncanny: making the familiar look unfamiliar. A phantasm of American family-values ideology, Blue Velvet’s sunny small-town world has been dubbed ‘Lynchtown’ by critic Michel Chion, and it can also be found in several of Lynch’s other works, especially his 1990–91 television program Twin Peaks. It is well known that the places Lynch dramatises are often amalgams of his childhood home – Spokane, Washington, in particular. But Lynchtown is more an imagined place than a real place; Lynch masterfully exploits the cinema’s ability to create uncanny locales that feel one step removed from reality, and the point seems to be this: in Lynchtown, despair is all the more horrible because it is found at home. What’s more, the evil in Blue Velvet is not merely personified by the town psychopath Frank Booth, who rapes and kills and cuts off ears; the same drives are also revealed inside Jeffrey, who, like Frank, hits Dorothy during sex. ‘You’re like me’, Frank says to Jeffrey, and this is the truth that makes Jeffrey cry.
For years, the film was vilified by feminists for its depiction of violence against women – and from a certain perspective, rightly so, for the film does not apologise for its characterisation of Dorothy Vallens, a woman who is brutally abused, and seems to enjoy it. The film has been criticised for dramatising all the masculine biases of the Oedipal dynamic: Dorothy functions primarily as a spectacle (she performs in a nightclub, she is spied on by Jeffrey), and she embodies every cliché about mysterious, incoherent femininity. Sandy, on the other hand, may be intelligent and just as interested in solving the crime as Jeffrey, but she is so buttoned-up and square that she functions as Dorothy’s opposite, the other half of the film’s all too familiar binary construction of woman as either virgin or whore. On the other hand, this too can be interpreted as part of the film’s encounter with the familiar – the virgin/whore dynamic is not questioned by the film, for certainly Blue Velvet makes no pretence at political consciousness, but rather this familiar constellation serves as the stable ground of stereotype, if you will, that allows the film to take its viewer into forbidden realms of sexual desire and dread.
The question remains, however, whether Blue Velvet’s use of familiar, even cliché motifs is ironic or sincere, and this point of tension is where the film most seems to confound audiences in the current moment. Many viewers today feel that the film’s depiction of the sunny side of life (the neatly mowed lawns, Sandy’s dream about the robins) is merely a parody, and they find the mechanical bird with the worm at the end of the film to be a mocking joke that subverts the conservatism of this robotically happy world. However, some critics have questioned this interpretation, arguing instead that while the film does contain some irony, it is mostly sincere, that Sandy’s dream of robins is not a parody but a genuine alternative to the horror of Dorothy’s life. At least one film scholar has perceptively tied this sincerity-in-irony tone to a post-punk aesthetic that conjoined the profane and the sincere: ‘Lynch’s films were among the first to move beyond postmodernism’s ironic, parodic appropriation of historical genres and narrative conventions … to this day readings of Lynch as ‘ironic’ persist because irony has become the dominant form of reading in [our] culture’. 2 In other words, even though one can easily interpret Blue Velvet’s happy ending as ironic, it might be more intriguing to instead consider the implications of the film’s potential sincerity. Again, such a reading privileges Lynch’s interest in clichés, banality and improper fantasies. As irony moved into the mainstream by the 1980s, Lynch was already way ahead of the irony game; although there is currently much disagreement on this point, it has become apparent to some viewers today that this is a film that disturbs with its sincerity.
Finally, one cannot discuss this film without mentioning its soundtrack. From the moment Jeffrey Beaumont first discovers the severed ear in a vacant lot, this film announces itself as concerned with sound. Sound effects are hugely important in this film, but even more innovative is the film’s use of music. Pop music soundtracks had become increasingly common since late 1960s films such as The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) made them popular. In the 1980s, films such as The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985) and Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutsch, 1986) used pop music to quickly evoke a teenage emotional landscape; in these films, the audience is moved in synch with the music. In contrast, Blue Velvet uses music against the grain, so to speak, evoking a familiar mood in order to reinterpret it. When Ben lip syncs ‘In Dreams’, for example, the wistful sadness of the melody and lyrics take on a sinister, sexually ambiguous element due to Dean Stockwell’s enigmatic performance. Lynch did not invent this technique, but borrowed it from Kenneth Anger’s seminal experimental film Scorpio Rising (1964), which had revolutionised the use of pop music in film decades earlier. Blue Velvet uses songs from a previous era, a practice that is much more common now than it was in the 1980s (see The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005), or any of Wes Anderson’s films). All the major songs in Blue Velvet, in fact, were popular in 1963 when Lynch was 17 years old, which adds to the film’s strange sense of nostalgia. While most movies today still use music as an ancillary element, a backdrop that merely accompanies the visuals, Blue Velvet’s music is anything but subordinate to the images; rather, Lynch uses music as a discrete component that is just as crucial in shaping the film’s meaning as the visuals. This use of pop music as counterpoint has rarely been equalled in commercial American cinema.
Jennifer Peterson
Notes
1. Laurent Bouzereau, ‘Blue Velvet: An Interview with David Lynch’, Cineaste, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1987, p. 39.
2. Nicholas Rombes, ‘Blue Velvet Underground: David Lynch’s Post-Punk Poetics’, in Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (eds), The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, London, Wallflower Press, 2004, p. 72.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: USA. Production Company: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Director: David Lynch. Producer: Fred Caruso. Screenwriter: David Lynch. Cinematographer: Frederick Elmes. Editor: Duwayne Dunham. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. Cast: Kyle MacLachlan (Jeffrey Beaumont), Isabella Rossellini (Dorothy Vallens), Dennis Hopper (Frank Booth), Laura Dern (Sandy Williams), Hope Lange (Mrs Williams), Priscilla Pointer (Mrs Beaumont), George Dickerson (Detective John Williams), Frances Bay (Aunt Barbara), Ken Stovitz (Mike), Brad Dourif (Raymond), Jack Nance (Paul), Dean Stockwell (Ben), J. Michael Hunter (Hunter), Jack Harvey (Tom Beaumont), Dick Green (Don Vallens), Fred Pickler (The Yellow Man), Philip Market (Dr Gynde).]
Further Reading:
Michael Atkinson, Blue Velvet, London, BFI, 1997.
Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian, 2nd ed, London, BFI, 2006.
Lynne Layton, ‘Blue Velvet: A Parable of Male Development’, Screen, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter 1994, pp. 374–92.
David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley, London, Faber and Faber, 1997.