Blue Velvet (1986)

 Hello and welcome back for another round of the Criterion Challenge to close out July.

First, my apologies again for the shorter entry last time. Been working with some tech difficulties (non-film related piece of advice - Dell laptops are not your friend!) Also, the more I looked at the film through this particular lens, the more I realized my takeaway was 'This movie is great, but damn if time hasn't left it a grim aftertaste.'

I would still recommend giving it a watch, just - bear in mind, with the angle I was trying to write that from, it got kind of darker than I intended. It's still a great time in its own right.

In hindsight, this is probably NOT the best way to set up an entry on Blue Velvet, but we're rolling, so too bad!

 

 
Like last time, I knew this movie was a definite pick for this theme. Which, given it's David Lynch, is amusing to me - for as much as his work has been studied, scrutinized, debated, and picked apart in film circles - Blue Velvet is arguably one of his most straightforward feature. So much so that, in discussing it with a friend recently for this, she put it best saying it's a movie that lets you know what it's about within the first few minutes.

Granted, it doesn't just say it, but the visual language is clear enough: opening with a scene of sunny, everytown Lumberton, USA, subsequently disrupted as a man has a stroke, collapsing in his yard. From his fall, Lynch keeps cutting closer, moving past him to the insects scrabbling in the dirt under the pristine green grass.

That single beat encapsulates the journey protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont (Lynch alum Kyle MacLachlan) will find himself on. Digging past the charming hometown he grew up in and remembered to discover the dark, rotting underbelly hiding under the smalltown charm, best embodied in the psychopathic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in one of the definitive roles of his career.)

It's certainly not a particularly new idea to fiction - Stephen King alone could put together a mini-library about the number of works he's done that dissect the assumed morality of small town America - but it's clearly an idea that resonated for Lynch. So much so that it became one of the major threads he dug into with the series Twin Peaks years later.

All the same, there's something striking about how it's addressed in Blue Velvet - particularly because it feels almost uncharacteristically straightforward for Lynch. The movie has several of his stylistic tells to it, and some of the direction and editing gives certain scenes a dreamlike feel even if the story itself is meant to be seen as more 'real' than the subsequent TV series that shares its themes and some cast members.

That 'real' aspect is, I think, part of what I've found myself dwelling on the most this time around. Particular with regards to the dynamic between Jeffrey and Frank.

One of the things that really strikes me about Frank as a villain in this is that, thematically, he's not presented as an outsider. He's not some 'other' who's come in to corrupt the pure people of Lumberton. The implication is that Frank, and just about everyone around him could easily be just that person down the street. In fact, the one figure in the movie that could almost be seen as an 'other', Isabella Rosselini's Dorothy Vallens, is herself a victim of Frank and his group.

It's honestly the scariest part about Frank - he's not framed as some strange outside monster. Just based on what we see, he could be a home-grown, all-American maniac that Jeffrey simply never noticed growing up. In fact, there's a scene between Jeffrey and Dorothy that even seems to suggest that there is the potential for someone like Jeffrey to become like Frank if he lets himself.

Which is where I come to the weirdest realization I took away from this rewatch - despite this being easily the darker the two movies watched, thematically, I came away from this with a slightly more optimistic sense than I did with watching Lost in America through this lens.

A big part of this is due to the fact that, ultimately, though this movie is about that darker heart under 'wholesome' America, it's also a movie that advocates the idea of not ignoring it, trying to confront it for what it is. The movie makes it clear that Jeffrey's own attempts to investigate it nearly get him killed at multiple points, but it also puts him in a position where he can't simply ignore everything he has seen and learned over the course of the film.

Yeah, in the end, it almost feels a bit too clean (as partly shown by the discourse over the fake robin in the final scene - a prop that Lynch has admitted was born of function rather than theme) but there is still something oddly encouraging about that stance in this day and age. Framing it not as an act of machismo or anything like that, but simply recognizing it's the right thing to do.

No. Really.
For all the discourse over whether the clearly
fake robin symbolized a false happiness,
Lynch admitted they just weren't able to get a
live robin the day of the shoot. This was the solution
from props.

And again, coming into this after reflecting on Lost in America and realizing "Wow, we learned nothing from this," there is a certain strange sense of therapy that comes with a movie that flat-out says 'It's out there, and pretending it isn't won't make it go away.'

Okay, so that brings an end to a thematically darker month than I intended.

Tell you what? Pack your bags everyone. We're going on a vacation next month.

Better yet, we're going on a couple of vacations!

So see you guys again in August, where we're taking some trips.

Till then!