Film Calendar

Bracing, Upsetting and Vital
BLUE VELVET at 30
By Patrick Z. McGavin
From the moment it first appeared—
voluptuous, staggering, startlingly funny—
David Lynch’s fourth feature BLUE VELVET was
a film so rich in its meaning and associations
the movie achieved the sublime and
unaccountable.
blue velvet STARTS june 10.
SEE PAGE 10 FOR DETAILS.
Lynch was working in very personal and knotty
material. It was never sensationalized or cheap.
It was always a work fixed in time, of Ronald
Reagan’s “Morning in America,” except that
here was also a work that transcended time.
Woody Allen called it the best film released that year. Roger Ebert panned it. “It’s an anomaly—the work
of a genius naïf,” Pauline Kael wrote. The movie is again front and center thanks to a digital restoration
marking its 30th anniversary.
BLUE VELVET is unmistakably a work of its maker’s interests and preoccupations. The artistry is not Lynch’s
alone. The velvet and deeply saturated color photography of the cinematographer Frederick Elmes is
exceptionally vivid and suggestive. The great sound designer Alan Splet brings a great aural richness eerily
synchronized to the intricate visual design. Lynch’s soundtrack, of Roy Orbison and Bobby Vinton, is also
just right, aided by the unsettling and intoxicating score of Angelo Badalamenti.
The casting is perfect, and the secondary characters, like Dean Stockwell’s epicene gangster, are memorable
and frighteningly alive. MacLachlan gives a remarkably shaded turn that is both open and self effacing. The
long limbed, gorgeous Dern is a revelation. In the greatest performance of her career, Rossellini gets lost
in the part of Dorothy, tragic, beautiful and soulful. Hopper brings such a sexual menace and cruel energy,
his handsomeness was never used to such powerful effect. A gifted filmmaker in his own right, Hopper
had a wounding, sharp gift of language, gesture and intonation. He makes Frank’s derangement deeply
human and recognizable.
BLUE VELVET was never about shock. It opened up Lynch’s underground aesthetic to a wider audience. It
was art, bracing, upsetting and vital. How magnificent to once again celebrate its existence.
Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago writer and film critic. His reviews, essays and film festival reports have
appeared in Cineaste, filmjourney.org, RogerEbert.com and the London film magazine Empire. He also
maintains the film website www.lightsensitive.typepad.com
Lynch always wanted the film to be his follow up to his extraordinary 1977 black and white debut,
ERASERHEAD. He needed to prove himself with larger budgets, and he turned out his sharp and pungent
adaptation of THE ELEPHANT MAN. Lynch’s DUNE was a legendary folly, but a necessary one in his
evolution as an artist that demonstrated his uncanny ability to collapse boundaries between the avant
garde and the industrial cinema.
A trained painter, Lynch had a genius instinct for working through the abstract and the unconscious. I
disagree with Kael. The naïvity was always a cover to make his ideas more accessible. He stylized his images
but always located the dark humor, like the opening sequence where a man watering his lawn suffers a
stroke and Lynch undercuts our sympathy by having the neighboring dog voraciously lap up the jutting
water coming out of the hose.
The three decade anniversary reissue is telling, because part of what made the movie so unnerving was
how Lynch seamlessly suggested the past superimposed over the present tense—his vision of social rot and
transgression underneath the placid surfaces echoed the key works of Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock.
The movie’s fictional Lumberton, summoned through brilliant production design and painstakingly detailed
sets, has an eerie authenticity.
Lynch also deftly merged tones and mood, upbraiding the coming of age story with much darker
implications coloring a horror noir that intertwined self discovery with intimations of sex, kink, violation
and surrender. “I don’t know if you’re a pervert or a detective,” Sandy (Laura Dern) tells Jeffrey Beaumont
(Kyle MacLachlan), the protagonist. A college kid, Jeffrey discovers a detached human ear that kicks the
plot in motion.
Jeffrey is ensnared into a criminal underworld as his fantasies and avid need for experience collapse against
two strikingly realized figures, the alluring and damaged torch singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and
the crime boss Frank (Dennis Hopper). The celebrated 20 minute centerpiece brought about by Jeffrey’s
sexual initiation with Dorothy, touching on voyeurism, emotional vulnerability, corruption and death,
throbs with a hallucinatory power.
18 Music Box Theatre May-June 2016
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