Blue Velvet 1986

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