Blue Velvet
1986
David Lynch
Thanks to all those who attended karaoke/kidnapping night, it's been fun! Check out our thoughts below!
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Kait
I have a lot of half-baked thoughts about this movie that I don't have the brain power to articulate in this blog post. Most of these thoughts are about the film's depictions of sexual violence, sadomasochism, the intersection of sex and trauma, power, and sexual deviancy.
Here's what I do have the brain power for: 1) I did not like this movie, but I did like Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper's performances. I also loved that dude Billy? Who smoked that long cigarette and did that lip sync performance that brought Hopper to tears. Hopper sniffing gas before engaging in his horrific sexual violence was also a nice touch—chilling and very, very depraved. Dark as hell. But overall, I found the movie doesn't live up to the hype. It's gross and trying too hard. 2) I read Roger Ebert's review of this movie (which he stood by years later even when all these other critics called this movie a masterpiece), and 100 percent agree with this part in particular re: Rossellini:
"She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film."
Yeah, that about sums it up for me.
2 pukes out of 5
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Sam
David Lynch is genuinely curious of all aspects of life. Unfortunately, most of the time, those interests don't align with mine.
Blue Velvet is so Twin Peaks-y in many ways. Beyond the obvious Kyle McLaughlin solving a crime element, Lynch does such an incredible job world-building small-town Americana. The lumber life, diners, and oddball stuff is always so good. And he also can craft a captivating crime thriller that hooks you in. Plus, like the TV show, he employs Angelo Badalamenti to score.
Then he has to ruin it by making it so fucking weird. He loves exploring the darkness below the apple-pie surface, which is fine and certainly worthy. But the paths he takes on sexual violence, doom, and human dialogue always throw me for a loop. I want to enjoy his sensibilities—and as his pandemic Twitter reflections indicate—he seems like such a thoughtful guy. And I'm not asking to be spoon-fed a by-the-numbers detective caper. But his route on reaching conclusions is always so twisted that I mostly am bored waiting for stuff to happen.
That said, there's a lot to like here. Dennis Hopper as the (confusing as to why) huffing (gas? oxygen?) bad guys works well as pure evil for no reason. Love McLaughlin, who has pretty good chemistry with the underwritten Laura Dern and the confusingly written Isabella Rosalini. And the ultimate showdown is pretty fun.
I just want Lynch to be something that he's not. And that's OK for both of us.
3 stars
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Allison
Okay, I still haven't seen Twin Peaks, and this might be a hot take, but I think this David Lynch fellow may be a little bit weird.
Jeffrey Beaumont is a pervy little chino-clad freak. Home from school (presumably undergrad, although Kyle MacLachlan reads much older), he combats his hometown boredom by wandering around town, playing kid detective, and sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. If it were me, I simply would not pick up the dismembered ear. Through his meddling, Jeffrey meets Sandy Williams, a virginal, rosy-cheeked little freak. With Sandy's feigned reluctant help, Jeffrey becomes entangled with lounge singer Dorothy Vallens, a sultry yet deeply troubled Italian freak. Throughout the two-hour freak parade, everyone (including the audience) is tormented by Frank Booth, the freakiest freak of them all.
Much like Hellraiser (previously on Never Seen It...), Blue Velvet seeks to draw parallels between pleasure and pain. But also like Hellraiser, the movie isn't really saying much, just pointing at literal depictions of pleasure and pain and going "see? the same." And exactly like Hellraiser, I will forever side-eye anyone who tells me their favorite movie is Blue Velvet.
Listen, I'm not a prude. I'm not particularly squeamish. But after Dogville, Hellraiser, and now Blue Velvet, I think I've reached my limit on cinematic sexual violence.
Ultimately, I wanted more of everything the movie didn't explore. The weird shack at the edge of town. The two guys who work at the hardware store—what's their deal? Who was that baby in the opening scene? Why was Frank in a costume? The movie was fine, Dennis Hopper's performance will stick with me for a long time (for better or worse). I only just got the song out of my head. I'm still willing to give Twin Peaks a try.
3/5 immaculate Laura Dern crying faces
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Zach
There is no one like David Lynch. He's like Wes Anderson, but for fucked-up situations. He has the same attention to detail for every single thing in his movies. He is deserving of the moniker they use for certain movies from certain directors: "From the mind of David Lynch." Because his mind is unlike any other, and I've never watched anything like I've watched from David Lynch. That includes Twin Peaks. Portlandia saw the power of Kyle McLachlan, too, just like Lynch did.
This movie feels like a precursor to Twin Peaks. It has much of the same energy and same vibes (McLachlan, Julee Cruise songs, Angelo Badalamenti making music), but more intensity. Twin Peaks can channel that intensity because it's a multi-episode show; Blue Velvet needs to perform its mission quickly. But it feels like a full experience, anyways. I like the way the camera zooms into the flowers and the fire truck in the beginning and in the end. It makes this feel like a full work of art.
Still, it's a hard movie to watch. Lynch creates a world, and you have to step into it. You kind of want to look away, to have things wind down. You want Jeffrey to leave Dorothy's apartment. You want the scene where they kidnap Jeffrey to end. You want to look away when Dorothy walks down the street naked. And yet, even with that, it's still compelling, because of the way it contrasts with the day-to-day life we all live. The way the soulful songs play during the insane scenes, the way people interact—you want to look away but you can't. Why are the interactions between Jeffrey and Sandy so strange feeling? I don't know, but they are. They are unsettling and creepy, even though it is, on the surface, just showing some young love.
I wanted Ben to come back. There was something about his cool-catness, his singing of the Roy Orbison song that I really liked, his overly white face. At the end, I couldn't tell if he was the one that had been murdered in the apartment until I saw the missing ear.
I have to admit that I'm a little slow when it comes to understanding movies, so I didn't get every detail, and the Wikipedia plot summary helped me out a little bit. But it didn't take away from the movie at all. And I understood more than I gave myself credit for.
I do wonder why they didn't kill Jeffrey when they had the chance. What was the point in leaving him alive?
I've been meaning to watch this movie for a long time, but always resisted, I think because I knew it would be somewhat difficult to process. I'm happy I have all of you to process it with.
Grade: 4.5/5
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Joe
I knew this was a David Lynch flick and I knew I was going to have a lot to say, since that's sort of the guy's thing, right? Give 'em a lot to think about (or blog about). But so I think the truly shocking thing was how relatively straightforward this whole thing was. The word "relatively" is doing some incredibly heavy lifting here, of course, because this wasn't necessarily an easy film to watch, and it still contains depths that most directors couldn't even dream of plumbing. I'm saying compared to at least two other Lynch movies I've seen (Mulholland Drive and probably Eraserhead too), this is pretty straightforward. It has a plot. It makes sense as a cohesive story.
Not that a movie needs to have a plot or a cohesive story, I'm just saying. I was surprised, that's all. I was expecting to not understand anything, and I think I understood most of it. Some lingering questions, like what did it mean (thematically, literally, or both) to begin the movie with a shot of Jeffrey's dad having a stroke and then showing all those creepy crawlies under the earth? Is this just to put the plot in motion, or is there a reason that the bugs are here? But even there, I could probably take a stab at the figurative language the film is using, like the bugs are there and on the cut-off ear to show that Jeffrey is uncovering the gross underbelly of his hitherto suburban life. Whereas, ya know, when I was done watching Mulholland Drive, it was more like: what in the living FUCK did I just WATCH?
I like that Lynch had both modes within him, the completely inscrutable and the much less inscrutable. It makes me want to watch more of his filmography, and then maybe even Twin Peaks. I think if I had watched four of his movies and felt the same way I felt after Mulholland Drive, I might've hung up my hat and called it a day. Likewise, if I had watched four films that felt exactly like Blue Velvet, then I'd have nothing bad to say but might lack the motivation to see more, because the surprise wasn't there. At this point, I do not have a single fucking clue how I'd react to seeing Lost Highway or Inland Empire or whatever. I have no idea what they would do to me, or if they would do anything to me at all. And that's exciting, that there is a director who made a breadth of work that would keep me on my toes like that.
Hoping to talk more about the "what it all means" in the comments today, now that we juiced the numbers a little, and are starting with a movie that begs for that sort of conversation post-credits. So I won't write too much about that (I have also been warned that the length of my writing in these spaces creates some undue pressure on others to write in similar lengths, and I don't want to give the impression that you should feel pressured to write at any length at all, I honestly just appreciate when you show up). But I did want to touch on something that Ebert brought up, which I guess was infamous enough that it made the Wikipedia blurb.
Basically, he accused the film of being misogynistic. And far be it from me to defend a film that I honestly feel traffics in those themes in irresponsible ways. I want to be taken to task in the comments over this, but I don't know. It didn't feel like Blue Velvet, or Lynch himself, was being misogynistic in any way. The crux of the argument for misogyny being that Isabella Rossellini's character Dorothy Vallens was abused to the point where she was asking for abuse and that she had no agency because of this. Which is mostly true, but I don't think at any point Blue Velvet was making the argument that this is okay.
The larger point, I think, was that it put Jeffrey in an uncomfortable situation, because he understood at once that she was being abused (and the outsized villainous presence of Dennis Hopper's instantly iconic Frank Booth should make this clear to the audience as well), but when he tries to help her (e.g. putting a blanket over her), she pushes him away. She in fact asks him to hit her too. Not only does this go against Jeffrey's established kink (voyeurism), but it also flies against his notion of being a helpful person, since she has been conditioned to not know how to accept help, and only knows the pain. So I can see how it would be confusing, especially if you're standing mostly naked in a closet and you just saw King Koopa huff gas and act like a baby while he sexually assaults some.
I don't think Dorothy Vallens is meant to be a fully fledged character. I also don't think that you can make valid movie criticisms about things that aren't in a movie. There are no fully fledged female characters in Blue Velvet. I don't think that makes it misogynist. I just think it makes it a specific type of movie. I don't think it lacks value because of that absence. Well-rounded and exciting female characters are fucking great, and I love when movies feature them. I also love when movies feature cool skateboarding tricks and dogs that play basketball and scenes with teenagers drinking cheap beer out of kegs, but I don't think every movie has to feature those, especially when that's not the point.
But I'm glad that Ebert said it, because it at the very least made me examine my own largely positive reaction to Blue Velvet. His review made me feel something, even though I didn't agree with it. It's fun that movie criticism can function in the same way that movies themselves can, in the way that the best ones make you feel. I felt intrigued, occasionally thrilled, occasionally appalled, all emotions that are indicative of good film. I just wasn't confused all that much, which was the real shocker here, all in all.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
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GROUP AVERAGE GRADE: 3.3 pukes out of 5
More PBR (no Heineken) in the comments, come join us!
(NEXT TIME: Kait tees us up for a journey through Face/Off.)
7 comments:
I want to say that I appreciate the perspective given in this blog post to the pressing matter of sexual violence. I think what I've leaned on in the past (and here in this very post) is the question of "what is the movie trying to say?" And my interpretation would be that Blue Velvet is not trying to glorify sexual violence, it's trying to paint it in a very dark light, as it should.
But what I'm getting the sense of here from others is that sometimes that question isn't enough. That it's okay to ask what the movie is trying to say, but also to ask what we the audience are hearing and seeing with our own eyes. That if the movie is presenting horrifying things as horrifying, that it's still okay to question whether the movie is at the same time indulging too much in those horrifying things.
I don't think that David Lynch was trying to paint the plight of Dorothy Vallens in a positive or even softened light at all (neither does Isabella Rossellini). But I do 100% buy the notion that watching Blue Velvet would be too much for the reasons stated by viewers in this post.
I want to also add the sexual violence against Jeffrey to the conversation. That disturbing, non consensual Frank kiss that I would bet progressed to more than what was shown on camera. At least that was my impression of that scene especially when we consider Frank’s eroticized rage. Which, if I’m playing therapist, seems to be connected to some deep, unhealed childhood wounds. Something about those emotional songs being a trigger, there’s something about Frank flipping between being a baby and Dorothy the mommy and then not letting her call him baby, only daddy. Franks fucked up, that’s obvious, and I found myself curious about what’s influencing him. Is this movie looking at Freud’s Oedipus complex? Idk about all that. But I do enjoy the thought exercise of what if we make Dorothy and Frank’s sexual encounter totally consensual? Then we have Jeffrey watching two adults get into some real kinky shit. Which he clearly liked (even when it was non consensual mind you because he was aroused and intimate with Dorothy RIGHT AFTER the sexual assault). I just have to wonder, how would that kind of kinky scene have been received? That obviously changes the whole plot but that still ticks the box of it being a movie about the “dark underbelly” of the suburbs. Sometimes I wonder if Jeffrey ran into the arms of Laura Dern because he couldn’t face his own “darker” sexual desires.
This is why this movie had me thinking about things like sexual deviancy and sadomasochism. Did Dorothy genuinely like being hit by Jeffrey when they banged? Or is she internalizing the sexual assault trauma? These are interesting and important things to explore especially in a society that prioritizes shame and fear and God and objectifying women when discussing sex and nudity and the like. But, the movie just doesn’t do a good enough job for me in tackling any of that.
I don’t necessarily think Lynch was being misogynistic by using sexual violence in the film. I do think the movie falls short in saying anything empowering about women, though. Why couldn’t Dorothy be a more fleshed out character instead of being flung around as the trauma sex doll literally everyone beats on? Even Jeffrey who was VERY INTO Dorothy holds her naked abused body in the detective’s house all embarrassed being all like “sorry, she’s insane, I’ll explain it all later” when it’s become clear to Laura Dern that the two of them fucked. Justice for Dorothy, man! I know she gets her son back, which is great and all, but her husband is dead, she endured literal hell for an unknown amount of time, and will she continue to sing blue velvet at the nightclub after all that? Probs not so she probably doesn’t have a job. Meanwhile, Jeffrey and Laura Dern live happily ever after with a lovely bird that’s eating the bad bug. Good conquers evil! Whatever, been there done that.
I buy all these takes, Kait. Feels like it comes down to how much are we willing to believe Lynch is self-aware about all this. Like, I agree that you can view the bird eating the bug (the robin underlined by Laura Dern as a symbol of love and the bugs being shown at the beginning as a symbol of danger or dirtiness) as corny as fuck and cliché. But what a devil's advocate might propose is that this was purposefully corny, that we've seen the seedy underbelly of this suburban town, and we, like Jeffrey, can't go back, even if we try to convince ourselves that it's over, the bird is eating the bug. The ending did nothing to wash away the horrific scene of baby Hopper fucking mommy, and I think that could be the point.
If I were making that argument, which I'm not even sure that I am.
Okay I'm now convincing myself of this take.
1) the bright vivid imagery is repeated at the end, and we're supposed to feel differently about it now.
2) the scene with Mike trying to fight Jeffrey felt like out of your typical romcom, and then Dorothy running into that scene naked and scared felt surreal and frightening, like the image of this town as romcom-esque being irreparably torn down.
I totally agree that this does come down to whether Lynch was self aware about these things. I like the idea that we come full circle after seeing the hellscape and while the imagery is the same, those flowers may not smell as sweet so to speak. I’ll buy that, Joe.
A week later and I still have lots of questions. Why didn't they kill Jeffrey when they had the chance? I also really relate to Allison's points. What's the deal with the hardware store guys? Why is Ben so alluring and with white face powder? What WAS the point of Frank in a costume?
And on a more disturbing note - why is the ending so hopeful (as Kait alluded to)? Dorothy's husband was brutally murdered, she was raped, she's been through the worst hell a person can go through. Yes, she is with her son, but that final shot doesn't allude to any trauma that might still exist.
Sometimes I think Lynch just likes to be weird for the sake of being weird. Which I can very much appreciate. But I do wonder if there's a deeper explanation here for all of this.
As far as why the ending is hopeful, I'm sticking with my theory as stated above that the hope was supposed to be ironic, that you, as the audience, are supposed to see these presentations of hope and think, "wait... that's not right." Hence the repetition of the same bright, happy images. They look different this time, only because of what you experienced.
I think for the rest, you're right in that a lot of it is "weird for the sake of being weird." I like when movies do things like add characters akin to the hardware guys, because it fleshes out this world. Is it IMPORTANT to the plot to have them in there? No, not at all. But it's fun to have weirdo details along the edges. It somehow makes it feel more real. Like you wouldn't walk into a hardware store and see two workers attached at the hip and one of them was blind and them immediately have it explained to you what their backstory was, right? It's just a detail to color your own world too. I feel like the Safdies have these elements in their movies too. Lots of characters like that in Marty Supreme, where you're like "what's the deal with them?" and the fact that you asked the question and didn't get an answer is actually the whole point.
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