Blue Velvet is the best film I've ever seen, along with the handful of other best films I've ever seen. It has this visual style that became David Lynch's signature for the rest of his career, although it was never quite so openly naked, clear and illuminated as with this film, which is like a noirish trip into the sleazy, wasted back alleys and hidden dens of a seemingly idyllic small American town. All white picket fences, green grass and smiles on the outside, Jeffrey is sucked into the innermost void of his town after he discovers a severed human ear hidden in a field on his way back from visiting his father in hospital. In the opening of the film his father is watering plants in his garden while Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" plays. The camera then descends to the ground and through the grass shows ravenous bugs consuming the decay and dirt that falls from above.
Upon turning in the half-decayed ear, Jeffrey is eager to know more so he goes to see the town police chief, who warns him away from the case but only feeds his natural curiosity. He meets Sandy, the chief's daughter, who might as well have stepped straight out of Grease or something. Like Twin Peaks, Lumberton is a town with one foot in the 1950s. Together they decide to go sleuthing because they're youngsters with a lot of free time and why not? Plus, as Jeffrey says, who would suspect two such outwardly innocent and well adjusted youths to sneak into a woman's apartment and dig for dirt? They don't even question their intentions, they just want to find out, and the law is broken very easily by Jeffrey's intense inward curiosity. He doesn't question his intentions so he can truly discover them, there's no second guessing or doubt so his foray into the underworld is complete and revelatory. He crosses the line when he sneaks into Dorothy's apartment and hides in her closet, witnessing her get undressed and bow to the floor in distress. He sees her at her most naked, but she finds him and and then he is stripped naked. The nudity in this film is sexual but the sexuality is also metaphorical. Jeffrey is no longer the observer but the participant, and his mere act of observance forces him into action seemingly against his will. Naked and with a knife pointed at him he is no longer in the safety of his corner, and as events unfold he painfully discovers his own complicity in the cruelty and horror inflicted by the nitrous oxide huffing monster Frank, who it turns out has kidnapped Dorothy's wife and child so he can force her to do things for him. Frank is a beast, but is he the devil? Rather the opposite, if the film is to be viewed non-literally as I view it. If anything Frank is the life and soul, unashamed and the great performer and demonstrator, totally humble and beyond all judgement, a god, or a part of it. He is Jeffrey's inner doppelganger, the beast that makes the whole machine go, and as Jeffrey crosses that line further and further, he transforms more and more into Frank, though plagued by shame, doubt and fear. He meets Sandy to tell her what he's discovered. Shocked, she tells him about her recent dream in which she describes robins descending on a dark and desolate world and spreading light and love. If Frank represents the demon derailer of Jeffrey's subconscious, Sandy is the angel driver. Whereas Frank is unashamedly evil, Sandy is unashamedly good. He is Jeffrey's inner doppelganger, the beast that makes the whole machine go, and as Jeffrey crosses that line further and further, he transforms more and more into Frank, though plagued by shame, doubt and fear. This is the real disease of Jeffrey's psyche, his denial and shame, not Frank's monstrous demonstration of power and control, although it is that illusory pride, vanity and desire for power that feeds his shame and keeps him weak and vulnerable to attack from Frank and his horde.
As though set up by Dorothy, Jeffrey is found by Frank upon leaving her apartment. He refused to go for a ride with Frank and his crew, but Frank doesn't hear the words "no thanks." They have no meaning to him. "Ride" is all he does. They take Jeffrey to Ben's place, a light purple lounge with green curtains that is sparsely populated with old ladies, hookers and beer bottles. Jeffrey, afraid and hesitant, stands around confused and bewildered, allowing himself to freely be bullied by Frank's gang of misfits, who threaten him and tease him. Ben is a weird looking androgynous curly haired man in make-up played by Dean Stockwell, the only man Frank seems to worship. He holds a light to his mouth and mouths the words to "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison, until Frank has enough and takes leave screaming that he'll fuck anything that moves. Frank hates the dissonance between the sight of Ben mouthing the words to In Dreams and the sound of the song itself. It tears at something in him, and fires up his greed, his need for something vital, like destruction and performance. Frank has totally succumbed to his own impatience and greed, his nitrous-oxide fuelled dissociative episodes only priming and strengthening it. When Jeffrey feebly confronts Frank when he fondles Dorothy Frank makes an example of his weakness and takes on the role of the pretty lady of Jeffrey's desires and fancies, vaguely and grotesquely morphing into Dorothy, donning lipstick and kissing him, playing the mother Jeffrey still clings to, before finally destroying that image by beating him senseless.
Blue Velvet is of course very entertaining on a surface level, a great thriller, although on this level lacking in plausibility. Delving below the surface I think it's an exploration of one man's psyche, Jeffrey being forced to confront his devil through a series of escalating situations. All of it is plausible because it is all tied together by a strange psychic force. Alan Splet's incredible ambient sound design intermingled with Angelo Badalamenti's great score gives voice to that. Each character is a demonic or angelic manifestation of his psyche, and he is forced to reconcile them and finally come clean, which he does when Dorothy reveals how he "put his disease in her," before an appalled Sandy. Dorothy appears to carry a lot of diseases, so it is only by becoming responsible and saving Dorothy from Frank that Jeffrey can cure his illness. As the police raid Frank's place, Frank disguised as a well dressed man reveals himself and chases Jeffrey up the stairs to Dorothy's apartment for the final confrontation. Finally Frank is killed when he opens the closet (Jeffrey opening the door to himself?) and Jeffrey and Sandy embrace. He awakens out of the ear into a sort of unreal paradise version of Lumberton, a bright, vibrant surface full of animatronic robins devouring bugs and gawking old people. Suddenly the ordinary life Jeffrey found so dull to pursue the bugs that tainted his eye is seen anew as a heaven. Jeffrey redeemed from within and grown up is free and in heaven everything is fine, but the underworld still exists as we see mother reunited with child and hear Rossellini sing "but I still can see blue velvet through my tears, into the blue sky.
It really is a contender for "best film ever made." That the medium can produce a work of art like this in an entertaining mystery thriller says something. This was the first film I saw that showed me what the medium could really do at an age when 80s action flicks dominated my sight.
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