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, F...
