The trilogy made up of “Eraserhead”, “Elephant Man” and
“Dune” showed us the first David Lynch. The type of director who in his first
steps had shown to be a profound connoisseur of classical cinema but also a
skilled weaver of postmodern atmospheres, a director capable of being universal
despite the profound authorship of his proposals. After concluding this
trilogy, Lynch undertakes another great challenge, the strange and fascinating
“Blue Velvet”, which Woody Allen himself, among others, said it was the
best film of that year, 1986.
Due to the failure of “Dune” Lynch believed that Dino de
Laurentis would not produce a film of his, but he was wrong, when
reading the script of 'Blue Velvet' (a script that took many years to master),
Laurentis was amazed and prepared to give him another chance, after that the
difficult production of this masterpiece began.
Thirty three years ago, this fictional film, a little
strident in its visual and plot proposal, appeared before the world of cinema.
A film which according to important critics of the time, catapulted David Lynch,
as one of the most promising filmmakers of his time. However, due to his films
done previously, he showed the interest and the selective acuity when narrating
things visually; it could be said that he carried through a totally
postmodern way of narrating us his strange stories, full of uncertainty and
with a fortuitous sensibility of a great lucid story.
This is the first time that Lynch was introduced into a nightmarish
world, caused mainly by the brutal presence of characters outside the law, as
well as the mentally unbalanced. According to his own words, the story came from
the 1964 song 'Blue Velvet' by Bobby Vinton, and then a series of associations
between a cut ear and a clandestine voyeur occurred. It took him a long time to put the
pieces together, but what interested him most was to show the nauseating underground of a seemingly idyllic society (impossible not to remember the
beautiful 'Twin Peaks', which traces something similar), in a disturbing
journey by a man who can be curious.
What we normally see in a typical American film in terms of rigor of structure, we would hardly find it in the premise that David Lynch showed us; a story with a nuance totally unusual in
the classic narrative of cinema, what would be considered in a formal
term, "auteur cinema."
The first images of this film are unforgettable. After some
very elegant titles of credit, on a blue velvet curtain, and with the music of
Angelo Badalamenti (who works for the first time with Lynch, admirably, for
a collaboration as mythical as the one Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann had), we
go into a fade with the blue sky (we will also end with the blue sky), and some
images of the bucolic suburban place where the action will take place, a place
where the firemen walk with a smile (more tranquility would is impossible), to
conclude with a man who has a heart attack while watering his garden.
With the help of actors such as Kyle MacLachalan, Isabella
Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern, they contributed with their great
acting skills to the plot. Taking it to situations that place you in complete suspense full of uncertainty but well marked by music and editing, even within
the crude analytical situation about the characters and the vicissitudes to
which they are subjected. Afterwards,
Lynch's camera enters the soil of that garden, and observes thousands of
insects and cockroaches. More expressiveness would be impossible.
In a truly masterly way he has united the two worlds: the
apparent and luminous, and the hidden and tenebrous. And with that event, the
man who suffers an attack, a casual event, begins the story, because it will be
his son Jeffrey (the great Kyle MacLachlan, in his second Lynch film after
'Dune') the driving force of the action, the in between character in a
Derridian sense, when least expected, the action that precedes it, a totally
closed shot focuses on a hole in the ground finding a cut ear full of ants (with
the inescapable reference to Luis Buñuel) that will be the beginning of a
terrible mystery in which he will not be able to avoid being involved.
Jeffrey is a good boy, responsible and hardworking, who is
attracted to the dark side of existence. He wants to taste that fear and that
darkness, the sordid and he's going to get a good portion of it. This is a
classic figure of "film noir", the innocent man who will be involved
in a nightmare because of the morbidity that a woman, or a mystery, or both,
produces. Soon he will also meet the daughter of the detective in charge of the
case, the wonderful Laura Dern (really, the favorite actress of this director).
Sneaking into the apartment of the beautiful and mysterious
singer Dorothy Vallens (a sensational Isabella Rossellini), Jeffrey will start
an adventure in which a psycho gangster (formidable, unforgettable Dennis
Hopper) will horrify you with all kinds of perversions, weird sex, wild
violence and in short, the absolute evil that Jeffrey longed so much to experience and
that now he will suffer this in his own flesh. He wants to learn things, even if
that means taking risks. His reckless plan will almost cost him his life, but
he will try to maintain his bruised innocence in the process.
From that experience that we speak of is intertwined with
the character Frank Booth, a psychopath. For everything he does
where his alteration is suffocated by an oxygen tank which he carries with him
wherever he goes. That degree of upheaval can be seen in Jeffrey with his
constant visits to Dorothy Vallens with whom he goes to in search of sex, and a
desire to subdue her by physically and verbally assaulting her. Dorothy Vallens
in the face of suffering of her kidnapped son lives in total dichotomy with the
anguish and the desire to be beaten when she meets Jeffrey. By using this female that way in the movie, Lynch shows us the use of violence as a method of
survival, feeling and purification. He will then meet the detective’s daughter
who will be key in what Jeffrey is trying to investigate. We can say that this
type of cinema goes beyond an artistic approach. For this film David Lynch
received an Oscar nomination, however more than anything it was the criticism that
catapulted his ideas and he was able to continue this type of work in later
years.
Stylistic features
With the complete complicity of Frederick Elmes, with whom
he had already worked with optimal results in “Eraserhead”, Lynch deploys a
serene but steely staging, in which very sharp profile planes are common, and
then turn them into frontal planes in which the horror, or beauty, of the
situation, finally reveals itself. Photography is beautiful and brave, being
able to combine the luminous with the gloomy, which is the theme of the film.
There is also a desire to emulate a certain cinema from the past, in the form
of photographing, for example, Laura Dern, as if she were a star of the
twenties.
This is the first time that we have entered into one of
those Lynchian atmospheres that have made him famous and that have been
imitated so many times. Among all environments highlights, it is the Dorothy
Vallens apartment, the beginning and end of the whole plot. It is an apartment,
in which a disturbing red predominates, and with the characteristic Lynch
furniture that makes us uncomfortable. That apartment is the door to another
world, and its fundamental closet (place of hiding and perversion) remains
engraved on our retina.
Lynch moves like a fish in the water in this convoluted and
evil story, and is able to build tension and suspense with great skill. The
film is not as wild as 'Wild Heart', nor as frantic as 'Lost Road', but just as
tense and strange. Lynch opposes, with music and planning, the sweet and tender
Sandy and the tragic and sensual Dorothy as two very different women who will
give Jeffrey very different aspects of sensuality and love. This triangle is
made of characters that Lynch understands and respects, and there lies an
opportunity, unlike the assassin Frank, who has no chance of redemption.
This film is unquestionably one of Lynch’s masterpieces, who
enters a stage of maturity and gets his first Oscar nomination for best
director. He had to give up part of his salary, and he was forced to rewrite
the story to cut costs, but he got what he wanted: total artistic freedom and
access to final editing. This personal triumph consolidated him as an
established author in the United States, and his fabulous criticism gave him
the confidence to dive more energetically into that twisted universe that he
continued to investigate in the coming years.
Directed by David
Lynch
Produced by Fred
Caruso
Written by David
Lynch
Cast:
Kyle MacLachlan
Isabella Rossellini
Dennis Hopper
Laura Dern
Hope Lange
George Dickerson
Dean Stockwell
Music by Angelo
Badalamenti
Cinematography Frederick
Elmes
Edited by Duwayne
Dunham
