The Lynch Who Stole Christmas: Blue Velvet (Dir David Lynch, 2h, 1986)

There is something dark at the heart of middle America. David Lynch knew this better than any film-maker. His films, but for The Elephant Man and Dune, as well as all three seasons of Twin Peaks run on it, that energy of quiet menace at the edges of suburbia, the secrets held in the rough parts of town, the goings on behind the picket fences and closed doors of your neighbourhood, whilst never quite stepping away from the veneer atop them, the diners and lodges and general stores and 50s cars and rock and roll and Americana. It has, of course, many imitators: chief among them Tim Burton, who added (American) Gothicism to the mix, and has banked off his Lynch-lite visual sensibilities and outsider-vs-society narratives ever since to mixed effect, but few have been able to match the original at his best, in the nightmarish noir of Blue Velvet.

Appropriately enough, Blue Velvet begins with exactly what I've described above, Lynch's DOP, Frederick Elmes's camera slowly descending from the meticulously kept roses and white picket fences and retro fire engines and carefully kept lawns of suburbia into the violence and disturbing underbelly of the soil beneath it, in which insects crawl and devour one another. Well, what Blue Velvet actually begins with is blue velvet, a great cinema-style curtain of it that ripples and billows over the credits. At once evoking theatre drapes, the dress that is worth by Rossellini's singer, Dorothy Vallens when she performs, and the scrap of cloth, presumably torn from that dress, that becomes fetish object for sadistic gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has a violent and sexual relationship with Vallens, threatening her husband and son as coercion, so, in a single shot, the film's mix of cinematic, kitsch and sexual violence are all introduced with the shimmering cloth. 

From here, via the hospitalisation of his father, who collapses on his front lawn in a grim tableaux, we are introduced to Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey; finding a severed ear on a vacant lot, he is soon, together with Laura Dern's Sandy, drawn into this underworld, and quickly meet its chief figures, including Vallens and Booth. It is Sandy, the daughter of the local police detective, John Williams (George Dickerson) who initially begins their detective work, believing the severed ear is connected to her. The severed ear is the implicit sense of violence, the darkness beneath, a tunnel into which Lynch and Elmes' camera slides, the soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti, who would work on every subsequent Lynch work a drone of dread, but also explicit violence, the severed ear a stark indication of what is to come even before the arrival of Booth. 

As Jeffrey and Sandy begin to investigate the tangled web of their town's criminal underworld, so the noirish sensibility is in full effect. Rossellini is every inch the femme fatale, seductive and dangerous and troubled at once; her introduction, singing the titular song, made popular by Bobby Vinton, whose version haunts the film's soundtrack, is arguably the most famous sequence of Lynch's entire career. Rossellini's performance is a stylish marriage of music, cinematography, Lynch's love of Americana and the 1950s and 1960s and the film's narrative meeting in a perfect moment where the noirish seeds of temptation for Jeffrey, and his fascination with Dorothy begins. This relationship will soon turn physical, Jeffrey sneaking into her apartment and promptly found by Vallens, her unpredictable and troubled relationship with physical intimacy soon turning dark. Against this is the first of Lynch's great villains, Frank Booth. 

The start of a late-career comeback for Dennis Hopper that would see him playing outlandish villains from Waterworld to Super Mario Bros to True Romance, and a role the actor all but begged Lynch for, exclaiming, in a sentence more disturbing than anything the on-screen Booth says," I've got to play Frank! I am Frank!" Hopper, truly, is fantastic in the film, a bizarre, idiosyncratic performance, a warped gangster that seeming arrives out of the nightmares of the American Midwest, an insane lunatic who swings back and forth between a childlike personality and a violent screaming sadist who has some of the nastiest one liners in cinema. Yet there is something electrifying about watching him throughout the film, this unpredictable avatar of evil and chaos capable of turning on a dime, brought to tears by the genuinely weird scene of Dean Stockwell's Ben lip-synching to Roy Orbison, complete with light up lamp as microphone, and brutally assaulting Jeffrey and Dorothy in the very next scene.

Booth is that great Lynchian treatise on evil writ large; Booth is evil, Lynch's visual style and Hopper's demented performance are in no denial over this, Booth introduced huffing an unknown drug from a mask throughout his performance, but he is emblematic of something deeper, and more unsettling. Booth is not an antithesis to all of this, in the way that Twin Peaks' BOB is, evil born ultimately from perhaps the most violent act of the entire American 20th century, and set against American culture, its people, and small town America suburbia. Frank is a far more unsettling, and familiar, evil, an evil born not of some elemental Other but from the same suburbia that our protagonists inhabit. We see Frank Booth moved by pop music, we see him swig a beer, we see him roar his car around on a joy ride that terrifies Jeffrey and Dorothy.

Lynch is clear; evil is not separate from the great sense of the hallowed Americana, evil is not some outside force, evil likes the music you like, drinks the beer you like; Lynch simply shines a light into the corners of American culture and illuminates the creatures that crawl through it. This is the nature of noir as a genre. Yet, through the form of Frank Booth, these picket fences, these songs, the ephemera that make up American culture, become outlandish, and frightening - this may be Lynch's most personal work, but also among his best, a mixture of noir, and a disturbing glimpse into the dark underbelly of the American way of life. 

Rating: Must See

Blue Velvet is available via BluRay from Universal and streaming from Netflix

Next week, we continue our tribute to the great David Lynch in the violent dreams of celluloid, and join Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart.