When Ben, a campy yet cruel aesthete, mimes to Roy Orbison\'s “In Dreams,” a window opens onto the mystery of Blue Velvet. David Lynch\'s 1986 classic of the id is often like a dream and a nightmare. But the peculiar logic of dreamtime is only one avenue into an endlessly fascinating film that refuses to fit within any Hollywood genre but draws from many, including thrillers and teen romances and the impossible bright clarity of 1950s CinemaScope. I\'ve always suspected Alfred Hitchcock\'s Shadow of a Doubt might have been at the root of Lynch\'s vision of the shadow side of the idyllic.
The irony of Blue Velvet was always easy to spot, but the intentions behind it are harder to discern. In the film\'s setting, the small town of Lumberton, the yards are edged by gleaming white picket fences and the grass is Astroturf green. Lynch wants us to chuckle at the firemen who wave as their bright red engine rolls down the lane, but his vision of a Norman Rockwell America is loving as well as amusing. It encompasses loss and regret as well as a profound realization of the darkness. Andy Hardy would have been comfortable in Lumberton, but Andy never came across a human ear while strolling through a field.
Lynch isn\'t always subtle. After Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds the ear, the key that opens the plot, the camera burrows into the earth, a literal underworld teeming with black beetles. Right, Blue Velvet lifts the stone and shows what crawls beneath. But at other times the director works with greater understatement, allowing us to feel the strangeness of Lumberton. With a touch of hallucinatory realism, Lynch insinuates oddness at every turn. An unusual number of vintage cars are on the streets and it\'s not always easy to tell from appearances when the story takes place. Some of this is deliberate temporal disorientation and some may just be postmodern mix and match. The criminal gang Jeffrey eventually encounters includes members who could have stepped from film noir, the Manson Family and \'70s Charles Bronson. Both Ben and the criminal overlord, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), obviously shopped in cool resale stores.
Booth remains one of the most demonic characters ever seen in American film, utterly callous and arbitrary, drug addled and crippled by a sexuality rooted in some unimaginable childhood trauma. He has imprisoned the nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and uses her in bizarre sadomasochistic rampages. The voyeuristic Jeffrey finds himself torn between Sandy, the blond, all-American girl next door (Laura Dern), and Dorothy\'s exotic, damaged sensuality. Once again, Lynch has posed darkness to light, yin against yang.
The banality of the dialogue between Jeffrey and Sandy, and of a culture that could embrace a song like “Blue Velvet” is intentional, yet the irony isn\'t harshly satiric. In Blue Velvet there is comfort in banality, maybe even a measure of goodness, if the banal represents the opposite of the underworld of Frank Booth and his companions.
Blue Velvet: The 25th Anniversary Edition includes nearly an hour of deleted scenes.
