Blue Velvet (1986) movie review

Blue Velvet starts in an ordinary, American suburban town where a man working on his lawn, suddenly has a heart attack. His son, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) looks like an ordinary young American man who’s reasonably upset due to his father’s condition. Things start to turn from ordinary to bizarre then becoming stranger and nightmarish as you watch mesmerised.

Jeffrey finds a severed human ear in an empty space near his house. Detective Williams thanks Jeffrey for his discovery and sets him on his way. His piqued curiosity is further ignited when the detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern, giving a sensitive performance) shares some facts about the case as she can hear into her father’s office through her room. Little did she know that Jeffrey fancies himself to be an amateur detective. She says a name keeps coming up in her father’s conversations about the investigation, ‘Dorothy Vallens’, a lounge singer who lives alone in an apartment building nearby.

Jeffrey and Sandy are quite attracted to each other and look like the perfect couple if it weren’t for the fact that she has a boyfriend. Their relationship as a result stays strictly based on the case of the severed ear. It’s not an unfair assumption that Jeffrey plans to stake out Dorothy’s apartment to dig up more information. But, it’s a flimsy one. The man is almost excited about hiding in a strange woman’s apartment. Whatever he may have imagined, he certainly didn’t imagine what would happen next.

There are very few movies that provide the thrilling effect this one produces while Jeffrey is in Dorothy’s apartment that first night. The room, draped in shades of red, resembles what it must feel to be on the other side of the rabbit hole. Hiding in a cupboard, looking through a slit in the door, Jeffrey is as enthralled as we are. How can Jeffrey’s suburban neighbourhood and this apartment exist in the same town?

I surmise that was the jumping-off point for Lynch when writing Blue Velvet. This dichotomy is also expressed with the title song ‘Blue Velvet’ performed by Bobby Venton at the start of the movie while the camera travels through Jeffrey’s house as his parents are living their average American middle-class life versus when Dorothy performs it in the nightclub as a misty-eyed Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) watches.

Besides that, Lynch’s protagonist and antagonist are genuinely interesting creations. One has a hard time understanding either of them and yet, one can’t wait for them to make their next move. The two are thoroughly mismatched, leaving the audience in a constant state of unease for Jeffrey’s well-being as his actions keep getting riskier. Hopper’s performance as the shouty, sweary and highly volatile Frank is up there with the best horror movie villains. In fact, horror is a recurring motif here, even as the street where Jeffrey and Sandy take walks discussing his project looks ominous enough for Michael Myers from Halloween to jump out from a dark corner. 

Isabella Rossellini is utterly convincing as Dorothy, someone who’s been traumatized for so long that they’ve forgotten who they are. MacLachlan as the vessel for Lynch’s twisted imagination is simply brilliant. Blue Velvet is filled with bizarro characters like the effeminate pimp/drug dealer Ben, played by Dean Stockwell or the man in the yellow suit called ‘the yellow man’. 

In Blue Velvet, Lynch goes to the lengths of human perversions that Hitchcock didn’t dare to. He perfectly puts you in a mood, splashes cold water on your face and puts you in another. A true cinematic visionary, he tells a lyrical, fever dream with images that stick in your mind refusing to let go.