Blue Velvet may be the movie for which the “Beyond Horror” series was conceived—I can think of no movie not conventionally classified as horror that deserves the label more. It’s frequently referred to as a mystery or a crime drama. But it’s horror through and through, from the chilling opening to that final, darkly ironic shot.
Let’s talk about that opening for a minute. It’s a masterpiece of style and mood. Backed by the Bobby Vinton track that gave the movie its name, we open on shots of idyllic small-town Americana: white picket fences, fire trucks with waving firemen, schoolchildren crossing the street. Then another seemingly bucolic scene: a man watering his lawn. From there the scene grows increasingly menacing—the man falls to the ground with a heart attack, and the pleasant strains of “Blue Velvet” become distant as Lynch pans and zooms to penetrate into the death, decay, and darkness just beneath that green grass.
This one brief scene contains the entire logic of Blue Velvet, and indeed of all of Lynch’s work: the banal contains the horrifying; the pleasant face of middle-class American manners is the thinnest of masks atop a face of evil.
What follows is a story combining a voyeuristic Hitchcock plot and an idealized 50s portrayal of small town life—plus something else that’s all Lynch’s own. It’s about Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan), a college student who comes home to his small town of Lumberton to help care for his ailing father—the heart attack victim we saw earlier. While walking home from the hospital, he finds a severed ear in a field and brings it to the police. Then, out of boredom or idle curiosity—it’s never quite clear—he decides to launch his own investigation, with the help of Sandy, the policeman’s daughter (Laura Dern).
It’s a setup straight out of the Hardy Boys, with two young people investigating a crime seemingly for the excitement of it. But as Sandy and especially Jeffrey dig deeper, more sinister motives begin to assert themselves.
Eventually the amateur sleuths are led to a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini)—the echo of Richie Valens is perhaps deliberate, part of the film’s strategy of investing non-threatening bits of Americana with dark undercurrents. Jeffrey sneaks into his apartment and, through a sequence of concealment and exposure that’s positively Hitchcockian, is led to observe an act of sexuality and violence that’s darker than anything the film has contained up to that point.
It’s this sequence, of Jeffrey voyeuristically watching while Dorothy is terrorized by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) that makes us start to think that there’s not only a darkness at the core of this town, but also something rotten hiding just under the surface of Jeffrey’s gee-whiz exterior. What’s he thinking? Will he intervene to stop the violence unfolding before him? Or is he too much of a coward? Worse, is he getting off on what he’s seeing?
Are we?
That’s probably the most widely discussed scene in Blue Velvet, but it is hardly the most unsettling. Part of Lynch’s genius is that he keeps his audience off-kilter with abrupt changes in tone. Some scenes are deliberately hackneyed; others, humorous; and still others darkly terrifying. But the way Lynch moves from one mode into another without warning means that even the humorous or mundane stuff can seem scary on some level. This comes to a head in what I think is the most unpleasant and scary sequence of all, when Frank and his goons take Dorothy and Jeffrey on a joyride through the city’s underbelly. Tonally, it’s a masterpiece, swinging wildly from humor to terror and back again, with even a banal earlier conversation about Jeffrey’s favorite beer coming back as a simultaneously menacing and wildly funny bit of dialogue—but God, is it ever unpleasant to watch.
The plot threads come together in a climax that I will not reveal for those who haven’t seen the movie. All I’ll say is, have a good look at that final shot. Is this a happy ending—or just another darkly ironic reminder that evil lurks beneath beauty?
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