Classic Movie Review: 'Blue Velvet' and Remembering David Lynch

Blue Velvet

Directed by David Lynch

Written by David Lynch

Starring Kyle McLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern

Release Date September 19th, 1986

Published January 20th, 2025

The passing of legendary director David Lynch caused me to want to look at one of his films that I have always found daunting and unpleasant. Blue Velvet contains a performance by Dennis Hopper that is among the most unsettling, unpredictable, and bizarre that I’ve ever seen on screen. Well, that’s what I felt as a 21 year old film critic learning about movies and arrogantly flying in the face of more conventional opinions. I was a hotheaded contrarian but one who chose his battles. Blue Velvet became a battleground for me because it was beloved by many respected film scholars. But, the reality of Blue Velvet was that it and specifically, Dennis Hopper's abrasive and hard charging performance, had challenged me in a way I wasn't ready for.

Blue Velvet isn’t exactly entry level film studies. The thick layers of trauma, sentimentality, delusion, and sexual dysfunction that define Blue Velvet require a mature perspective. Lynch’s approach often needs a more scholarly eye than what mine was at 21 years old and with no experience in film school. I had also previously seen Eraserhead and found it so off-putting that I could not finish it, which I am certain colored my opinion of Lynch’s work as I approached Wild at Heart and then Blue Velvet, both films I was simply not ready to process.

It was until I saw and fell in love with Lynch’s Mulholland Drive that I finally got David Lynch. Mulholland Drive is an impenetrable film that defies any conventional explanation of plot or characters. It’s a dreamy, atmospheric, mood piece that you must surrender yourself to in order to understand its pleasures and the skill needed to bring it to life. This caused me to reevaluate Wild at Heart, another film I fell in love with, but not Blue Velvet, I still wasn’t ready to return to Blue Velvet.

With Lynch’s passing however, and another 20 years or so of coming to understand David Lynch, I found myself finally prepared to revisit Blue Velvet and I am so glad that I did. Blue Velvet is a perverse masterpiece, an-ahead-of-its time examination of the underbelly of American popular culture. The film pre-sages our voyeuristic cultural obsession with true crime stories by taking an average Joe American and having himself completely surrender to his curiosity over murder and being the narcissistic main character hero of his own story.

That main character, by the way, is a lantern jawed young college kid named Jeffrey Beaumont. The last name is intentional, it’s a reference to actor Hugh Beaumont, the father from the picturesque 1960’s sitcom, Leave it to Beaver. David Lynch loves these kind of bread crumbs that lead you where he wants to go. It’s similar to the opening visual of Blue Velvet which is the sun rising on a perfectly manicured lawn and the evocative sight of a blindingly bright white picket fence, straight out of the American dream.

Jeffrey has returned to his small town home because his father has fallen ill. The injury to the father is indescribably confusing but the point is only to get him out of the way in a fashion so that he can’t advise his son from doing something foolish that ends up pressing our plot forward. After visiting his father in the hospital, Jeffrey stumbles across a human ear in a field of weeds. He decides that the right thing to do is to bag up the ear and take it to the police where he will turn it over to his father’s neighborhood pal, Detective Williams who can take it from there.

But something about the ear burrows into Jeffrey’s mind. He quickly becomes obsessed with questions about whose ear is it? Where did it come from? Why was it cut off? He tries to ask the Detective about the case but he gets blown off. However, the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), all blonde hair and naive innocence, has a room right above her father’s office. When she sees Jeffrey she courts his favor by giving him a few of the details that she’s managed to overhear. The main piece of information surrounds a woman named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a nightclub singer who may be a suspect in the case.

This information further drives Jeffrey’s obsession and since Dorothy’s apartment is also in their neighborhood, Jeffrey enlists Sandy in helping him get inside the apartment so he can snoop around for more clues. She’s reluctant, but she agrees and soon Jeffrey has stolen the keys to Dorothy’s apartment and finds himself hiding in her closet when she comes home sooner than expected from her nightclub performance. Dorothy soon discovers Jeffrey’s presence and what happens from there is a David Lynch style upping of the ante that you will need to see for yourself.

Eventually, the real suspect is revealed to be Frank Booth, a low life criminal who comes into the movie like a battering ram of malevolence and four letter words. Where Jeffrey's world is that of sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet, Frank Booth is a modern creation, the curdled result of all of the failed promises of the American dream combined with severe sexual trauma, and a psychopathic urge to cross any and all boundaries in search of psychic relief from his long term emotional damage.

Booth represents the real world, the then modern America of the mid-1980s barreling into and through the idealized Leave it to Beaver fakery of the American dream. Frank is disease, violent crime, and corruption in human form. Where people want to see the world as white picket fences and a chicken in every pot, Frank Booth is an unending stream of obscenity barreling forward from the newly blazed trail of 24 hour news channels and the burgeoning cable TV and home video markets bringing the previously inaccessible world of crime and perversion into suburban homes for the very first time.

Hopper comes crashing into Blue Velvet like a man with his hair on fire, eager to set everyone else on fire with him. It's a performance that would define Hopper's career and doom him to playing watered down, more palatable variations of Frank for the rest of his career. But that only underlines the forceful power of Frank Booth. He is a raging fire of violence and pornography that perhaps could have been dealt with in a more just society that didn't try to sweep people like him under the rug or pretend tat they simply don't exist.

The only thing that can stop Frank Booth is the conventions of a movie from the 1950's. Blue Velvet crafts a world of technicolor familiarity from a time when the Hayes Code assured that Hollywood movies would always end with the upholding of American values, a return to the calm of the status quo as dictated by the powerful to sedate the masses, and with good aways overcoming evil. Thus, Lynch enacts an unbelievable ending that serves as a witty parody and ironic rebuke of the simplistic moralizing of that period of American movies where the good guy always gets the girl and saves the day.

Blue Velvet is a sneaky, sly, jab at Reagan Era America. While Reagan sold the notion of returning to the America that boomers grew up in, a safe retreat from the memory of losing in Vietnam, high profile assassinations, and the sexual revolution, David Lynch used his sharp wit in Blue Velvet to undermine that notion and remind us all that our innate curiosity and the voyeuristic influence of television had already eroded the fantasy of the 1950s to reveal the ways the American dream had failed to fully paper over the dark heart of America, the crime, corruption, and immorality that was rotting beneath the white picket fence illusions of the American dream.

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