Peeping on Dorothy from behind the wall of her closet, after shes already caught him, threatened him with a knife, and explored the possibility of going down on him, Jeffrey watches as this woman is tortured by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who beats her and calls her mommy before getting high on gas and stuffing a blue velvet sash in each of their mouths and savagely fucking her.

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Published 2 years ago on July 8, 2019 By Chuck Bowen Share Tweet Blue Velvet on the Criterion Collection T he most direct metaphor in David Lynchs canon arrives early on in his 1986 landmark film Blue Velvet.

After an opening credits sequence set against blue velvet curtains and accompanied by Angelo Badalamentis swooning score, Lynch offers up a montage of iconic images of Americana, including gleaming white picket fences, a fire truck with a dog, and roses that gleam with a feverish red hue.

Bobby Vintons version of the title song serves as the soundtrack to these images, and, with this song, Lynch signals both his yearning for and disbelief in this idyllic worlda conflict in emotions that would drive his subsequent film and television productions.

In case this conflict is lost on viewers, Lynch ends his montage with a father collapsing from a malady as he waters his front yard, and the camera homes in on blades of grass, pressing further into the ground until we can see black insects festering underneath the surface.

Its too simple to say that Lynch yearns for a society that could be likened to that of The Andy Griffith Show s Mayberry, even though much of his work is a viscerally textural paean to vintage American manners and artifacts.

The 1950s-era puritanism that partially drives Blue Velvet and its TV offspring, Twin Peaks, would most likely bore Lynch on its own.

Lynch is attracted to duality, to the contrast of the sweet and sour textures of purity and perversity, and Blue Velvet was the filmmakers first pure articulation of this desire.

The film is also one of the definitive explorations between the cultural links of the 50s and 80s.

In the 80s, American horror cinema was mining the communist paranoia of the 50s, indulging in violence that at one point could only be implied.

These films now play as a reaction to how President Ronald Reagan exploited Americas yearning for a return to a golden age, a dream version of an earlier time cleansed of various atrocities, such as internment camps and hate crimes.

Reagan was selling a fantasy while committing his own atrocities, such as ignoring the ravages of AIDS on the gay community, while Lynch and other directors, such as John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, were telling a kind of truth.

And, indeed, Lynch has always understood a primordial and insidious human quality: the satisfaction of conformationof successfully following social rules regardless of their potential implications, and committing to a mythology of country.

In Blue Velvet, this idea is most beautifully embodied by the scenes between Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sandy (Laura Dern).

Investigating the mystery of a severed ear that Jeffrey discovers in a field, the couple regularly meets at a diner, drinking sodas and, in Jeffreys case, eating what appears to be a grilled cheese and fries.

The pleasure that Lynch takes in the old-fashioned-ness of all this, with Jeffrey and Sandy playing a variation of the Hardy Boys, is palpable.

These scenes are so overwhelmingly earnest that certain critics missed the point, describing them as shrilly satirical.) With his father, Tom (Jack Harvey), immobilized, Jeffrey confronts his blossoming adulthood, and so Sandy partially represents his yearning to return to the simplicity of high school, which suggests the longing for an idealized dimension that drives, at large, this production thats so resolutely set in a timeless dimension and abounds in obsessive fairy-tale imagery that suggests an X-rated Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production.

Yet Jeffreys also a man now, and most men need more than nostalgic puppy love.

Drifting away from Sandy, the ear leads Jeffrey into an underworld, to Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosellini), a tormented lounge singer whos the plutonic ideal of the male fantasy of the experienced older woman, whos forced to sing Blue Velvet over and over in a club with an ardor that rivals Vinton himself.

Where Sandy is gorgeous in a trim, blonde, idyllic prom queen way, Dorothy is a bruised brunette with ripe red lipstick (it matches the roses from the films first scene), a chipped tooth, and a sensual fleshiness that knocks the film off its nave axis.

Dorothys apartment, which is of course on the wrong side of the tracks, is one of Blue Velvet s many masterpieces of irrational set design.

Primarily represented by the oval shape of a living room that segues into a small kitchen, the apartment abounds in deep reds, blues, and blacks that are morbid as well as titillating, explicitly suggesting a strip clubs back room while subliminally representing a womb.

This set somewhat prepares us for the films audacious tonal U-turn.

When Jeffrey wanders into this apartment, the sense of danger is intense, yet Lynch surpasses all expectations with what is still the wildest set piece of his career.

Little Girl In Blue Velvet 1978