Some Drivel On...Blue Velvet

“Man, oh man,” says Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) after waking up from a bad dream. It’s a funny line and an even funnier line reading, a little aw shucks, a little gee whiz, epitomizing “Blue Velvet’s” (1986) hazy dreamworld somewhere between 1950 and 1980, like if George McFly had been pulled from his peeping tom escapades into a psychosexual nightmare. That’s essentially what happens when Jeffrey returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton to see his ailing father (Tom Harvey), a wry red herring, as it’s not this familial strife that sets in motion a reckoning but Jeffrey discovering a severed ear in the grass. “It had to be an ear,” writer/director David Lynch would remark, “because it’s an opening.” I suppose that’s true but taken in context with Lynch’s opening images of swaths of black insects buzzing just beneath the finely manicured lawns of small-town paradise, I thought it more emblematic of how Jeffrey essentially puts his ear to the earth to hear the thrum of the underworld below.

Though Jeffrey takes the ear to a police detective (Dean Stockwell), he also blithely decides to open his own faux investigation into the severed organ with the detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) as his co-amateur sleuth, their clue leading them to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with whom Jeffrey becomes romantically entwined too. Indeed, “Blue Velvet” is a movie of contrasts and there are none more striking than Sandy’s pink costuming and Dorothy’s blue, the former like a wholesome prom queen, the latter a noirish femme fatale. MacLachlan furthers those contrasts by alternating his persona between a cocky college student back home when Jeffrey is with Sandy and a scared overgrown kid when he’s with Dorothy, no more a child yet not quite a man. In that way, “Blue Velvet’s” most famous sequence, the one in which Jeffrey hides in Dorothy’s closet while sadistic drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped her husband and child, holding her in bondage, terrorizes and tortures her, becomes nothing less than Lynch’s version of the wardrobe in Narnia, a window into the bewildering, tantalizing, traumatizing world of adults.

The scene is also our introduction to Frank, a character virtually reduced to nothing but animal urges. “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” he screams at one point. And there is something about the way Hopper says this line, just as he memorably barks “Pabst Blue Ribbon” to indicate his beer of choice later. The words don’t come out at the right tempo, or something, bringing to life the character’s terrifying impulsiveness, the way Hopper makes him feel like he’s not acting out instructions in the script but following his own muse. He’s such a big presence, in fact, that his demise feels anti-climactic. He needed to be devoured by a black hole. The antidote to Frank is Sandy, played by Dern with an All-American innocence that is slowly compromised, though not quite shattered. Her unforgettable monologue about dreaming of a world in darkness only for robins representing love to effuse it with a bright light is elevated by Angelo Badalamenti’s score into the realm of a fairytale. And yet, as “Blue Velvet” ends, flowers bloom, robins arrive, spring has come, love has triumphed. Is it real? More than any time in my life, I came away wanting to believe it was.