Velvet of color

Another of my recent movie viewings was Blue Velvet.

The movie starts off with some artificial-looking scenes of a small town, Lumberton, NC, being idyllic. (The movie was filmed in Lumberton and Wilmington, about an hour and a half away.) Suddenly, an older man watering his lawn suffers a heart attack, causing the man's son Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) to return home from college to visit the stricken man.

Jeffrey can't be at his father's side the whole time, so he goes for walks around, and it's on one of those walks that he finds something shocking that's going to change his life: a severed human ear! He takes it to the police, as ke knows detective John Williams (George Dickerson) through Williams' daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). Williams suggests that Jeffrey not discuss the case with anyone, while a trip to the morgue reveals that there haven't been any dead bodies coming in missing an ear.

Jeffrey isn't really satisfied, so he enlists Sandy's help. A little bit of researching suggests that a lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini) might have something to do with the case, so Jeffrey comes up with a ruse to get into Dorothy's apartment and get a copy of the key. However, when he comes back that night he misses Sandy's signal that Dorothy is on her way up, and Jeffrey gets trapped in Dorothy's apartment, hiding in her closet.

Unsurprisingly, Dorothy finds Jeffrey, but before they can finish hashing out why Jeffrey is there, Dorothy gets a visit from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Dennis is a psychopath who huffs ether and is using Dorothy for his own sexual plaything, even though she's married. Jeffrey pieces things together and gets the impression that Dorothy's husband and son have been kidnapped by Frank and his men for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Jeffrey investigates further.

Blue Velvet was directed by David Lynch, which is a sign that you're in for something out of the ordinary. The story is mostly good and, although it has a few logic holes, would mostly work as a standard-issue mystery. Lynch, of course, turns it into something else, a trip into a strange, depraved world. Dorothy doesn't want to have sex with Frank, but she seems perfectly willing to get it on with Jeffrey, something which would destroy Sandy if she found out.

There's also the trip into Frank's psychopathic world, which involves a bizarre visit to a man Ben (Dean Stockwell) who sings a demented version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams". Why anybody would want to be one of Frank's henchmen is, however, left unexplained. I was also beginning to wonder whether Mr. Williams was a corrupt cop in with Frank.

The story would stand on its own, and I didn't really have much of a problem with the extremely adult sexual themes or even Frank's depravity. The one thing that really bothered me, however, was Lynch's direction, which at times comes across as deliberately stilted and distracting from the story. The opening scenes (reprised at the end) are one example, as is the finding of the ear. This, however, is Lynch's style, which may not be to everybody's taste.

My first experience with David Lynch was back in the early 1990s when Twin Peaks was all the rage. I was in college at the time, and large groups of students would gather together and watch together in the dorm lounges, since TVs in individual rooms weren't much of a thing. I could never get what people saw in Twin Peaks. I've never seen the movie that wrapped up the story lines from the show, and reading some reviews of Blue Velvet, I see I'm by far not the only person who didn't get Twin Peaks.

Blue Velvet stands on its own, however, as a visually and narratively interesting mystery. It may not be for everybody, but it will certainly interest a lot of people.