Indie Focus: Blue Velvet
"Daddy's coming home!" Shocking, violent, funny and uncomfortably erotic, Blue Velvet (this week's Indie Focus) remains Hollywood's darkest vision of small-town America's dark underbelly. Young Kyle MacLachlan is the callow youth whose infatuation with beautiful nightclub singer Isabella Rossellini leads him into a life-and-death struggle with the oxygen mask wearing boogeyman Dennis Hopper, one of cinema's scariest monsters.After the flop of Dune, David Lynch took a tiny budget and complete artistic control so he could put his most nightmarish fantasies up on screen. A deceptively simple story is laced with trademark Lynchian psychosexual weirdness, a grotesque gallery of bad guys, the most crackling dialogue this side of film noir and, most unnerving of all, a sweet teenage love story. The forced weirdness of his latest movie, Inland Empire, doesn't come close to what is on offer here.
Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) one day stumbles upon a severed ear in a field and privately investigates the case, against the advice of his girlfriend's police detective dad. This investigation takes him into the haunted forest of Dorothy Vallens' apartment, where he witnesses the monstrous pimp and drug dealer Frank Booth (Hopper) abusing the fragile lounge singer. Making himself Dorothy's guardian angel, Jeffrey discovers the horrific reason Frank holds the battered woman in his grip, but must fear for his own safety and the safety of his "good girlfriend" Sandy (Laura Dern) when Frank discovers Jeffrey's snooping.
Blue Velvet could be written off as an X-rated Elvis fifties B-movie - an average Joe is torn between a good girl and a bad girl, and must walk on the wild side before realizing that bland conformity is better than living fast and dying young. All set to a soundtrack of killer rock n' roll tunes (although In Dreams has never sounded as creepy as when lip-synched by the sexually threatening Dean Stockwell).
Lynch is canny enough to realize this and litters his the movie with references to film noir, "bad boy" movies and The Wizard of Oz, but brings to the orgy a wild, diseased imagination. Freudian imagery abounds (Jeffery is the little boy to Dorothy's mum and Frank's dad), a vicious thread of sado-masochism still shocks (the damaged Dorothy weclomes her torture) and Jeffrey, the film's hero, is a peeping-Tom who feeds on the same power lust as his nemesis, Frank.
Lynch assembled an incredibly trusting cast (Val Kilmer turned down the role of Jeffery, claiming the screenplay was pornography), all spouting Lynch's most subversive and profane dialogue (samples: "He put his disease in me." "Mommy, baby wants to f*ck".)
The impossibly fresh-faced MacLachlan and Dern make a nicely unironic couple, mirrored by the destructive Frank and Dorothy. Isabella Rossellini would always be associated with the role of Dorothy, and Dennis Hopper found the role his career had been waiting for - virtually every performance since, from Speed to Land of the Dead, has a touch of Frank's disease in them.
This is a dark view of male/female relationships, made all the more troubling because it is Lynch's most gorgeous film. Legendary cinematographer Frederick Elmes shoots Blue Velvet as Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch, creating the iconic image of Dennis Hopper sucking in Amyl Nitrate through a oxygen mask to fuel his insane lust and Isabella Rossellini smiling as she is violated.
Unsurprisingly, no studio would touch Blue Velvet back in 1986 so producer Dino De Laurentiis had to form DEG to release the film independently. He was rewarded with a modest box office hit, a Oscar nomination for Lynch as Best Director and a genuine masterpiece that shocks and thrills more than twenty years later.
So, hide beneath the covers with someone you love and tune in on Sky Movies Indie on Tuesday 12th June at 10.45pm.
Rob Daniel
