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Blue Velvet
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This film is not currently available on DVD. Film Description A severed ear embroils clean-cut MacLachlan in a nightmarish underside to respectable suburban America. With Hopper deliciously terrifying, Lynch's direction inventive and assured, this sensual and voyeuristic mystery-thriller is one of the most deservedly acclaimed films of the 1980s.
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Review by Mike McCahill on 2nd March 2004
Conceived at the height of Reaganite family values, at a time when most movie teenagers were fretting about what to wear to the prom, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet remains genuinely disturbing – a rare English-language riff on the violence of sex, and what happens when bodies come together after dark. In yet another era of stifling political and cultural conservatism, it now comes back – in the form of this Special Edition – to haunt us again, like a refrain of the Bobby Vinton song from which it takes its title.
More so than the experimental Eraserhead or the overblown Dune, this is the film which established Lynch’s name: a murder-mystery with echoes of the director’s later Twin Peaks yet linear enough to sate those befuddled by Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr.. That said, a brief synopsis of the plot only points up how far off the beaten path it strays: Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), a young Dale Cooper, stumbles across a severed ear in a field and, while investigating the discovery with his small-town sweetheart (Laura Dern), becomes involved in a semi-sadomasochistic relationship with Italian
chanteuse Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and her brutal gangster lover (Dennis Hopper).
Alternately swooning and nightmarish, it’s sufficiently multi-layered to merit multiple viewings. Lynch’s sound design should give home cinema systems everywhere a workout, and the film is full of easily missed verbal and visual puns which tend towards the disconcerting rather than funny: look again at the tangled hosepipe in the opening scene which appears to match the valves of Jeffrey’s stroke victim father, and listen out for the chainsaw in the local radio station jingle which might initially seem banal but suggests more extremities are liable to be lopped off before the film’s end. As Dern herself remarks: “It’s a strange world, isn’t it?”
View more reviews by Mike McCahill
Review by Wolfram Parge on 28th March 2003
One of the last surrealists the cinema has left, David Lynch's films are infused with a sense of humour and fear, a fear that is in awe of the condition of being human. Kyle MacLachlan is the inquisitive hero, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose life becomes irreversibly entangled in the dark underside of American suburbia following a strange discovery. Soon he is having an affair with a disturbed nightclub singer, falls in love with a detective's daughter and sees peculiar sexual gratifications closing in around him. Isabella Rossellini is terrific as the chanteuse dressed in blue, flanked by Dennis Hopper's brutally violent Frank. Dean Stockwell performs an iconic moment as the unfortunate Ben, singing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", in this timeless and lyrical vision of an erotic cancer which haunts people's hearts.
View more reviews by Wolfram Parge
Article - "David Lynch"
by Alex Jenkins
Tuesday 1st January 2002
With Eraserhead in 1976 David Lynch emerged as a filmmaker; his style seemingly fully formed. He now stands firmly in the midst of directors who have an approach so unique that others are judged by their work. And yet, a 'David Lynch' moment is a term frequent... View article in full
Article - "Douglas Sirk"
by Alex Davidson
Wednesday 3rd January 2007
Douglas Sirk remains one of cinema's sharpest observers of human nature, and the string of melodramas he made in the 1950s, although glossy and colourful on the surface, reveal a cynical and pessimistic view when examined more closely. Although his movies were derisi... View article in full
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