Of all of David Lynch's films, I find myself ranking "Blue Velvet" on a lower meter. It's a good, blazingly original film that is also wholly uneven, obscene and tasteless to the core. The latter terms are not meant as a critique - Lynch at his best is always obscene and tasteless. But I also find "Blue Velvet" to be underwhelming, as say compared to "Eraserhead" (his greatest film) or "Lost Highway." It's just that their themes are more complex and disturbing than this perverse take on suburbia.
"Blue Velvet" was released back in 1986 and was highly controversional for its time, mainly due to graphic scenes of torture and sex. There was also much talk about the sequence where Isabella Rosselini (Ingrid Bergman's daughter) is naked and publicly embarrassed, while teeth marks and cigarette burns cover her entire body. There is no question that Lynch has always had trouble protraying women in a positive light, but the sequence is pure misogyny serving no purpose in the entire film. Rosselini also endures several beatings by Dennis Hopper as a helium-sniffing psycho. There are also numerous close-up shots of ants and cockroaches littering the screen as if they are aware of something beyond our knowledge.
The story revolves around a murder mystery that is never quite explained or resolved. Kyle MacLachlan plays a college student visiting his picture-postcard hometown, Pemberton, when one day, he discovers a severed human ear on someone's lawn. He contacts the police and then decides to investigate on his own. This all leads to the apartment of a distraught singer (played by Rosselini), who is always singing "Blue Velvet" at a nightclub. Dennis Hopper plays the deranged killer who tortures her, and the scenes between the two of them are as startling and effective as any other scene in the film.
As Kyle veers further into this S & M world with the help of a policeman's daughter (Laura Dern) things get much weirder especially when Dean Stockwell shows up as a Kabuki transvestite. Both Stockwell and Hopper must hold the record for spouting more obscenities on film than Eddie Murphy.
"Blue Velvet" is a fascinating, intriguing film but it is not completely successful. The elements of the mystery are so warped that I gave up after a while trying to follow it. It is true that some of Lynch's later work was more confounding and that it did not bother me much, but this mystery is actually more conventional and, dare I say, realistic so I did expect to be able to follow it. The performances are mostly shouting matches, especially between Hopper and Rosselini. Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern merely react than act, except for one exquisitely subtle scene at a cafe. Plus, the uplifting ending negates the darkness that preceded it, though I did like the shot of the bird with a wasp in its mouth.
For whatever strange reason I cannot comprehend, I still liked "Blue Velvet" because nobody has ever produced or directed anything like it prior to its release. There isn't anything you can easily compare it to. It is definitely Lynch's wildest endeavor and, somehow, strangely compelling.
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