David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is a frightening, darkly funny thriller, worth the discomfort it causes. Our reservation is its treatment of Dorothy, whose suffering sometimes becomes another opportunity for a startling image.
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet makes a frightening, absorbing thriller out of a young man’s curiosity about lives he does not understand. Lynch, who also writes the screenplay, takes seriously the possibility that an apparently innocent observer might want to see something terrible. We are encouraged to sympathise with Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan, before we can be sure what he wants. He is drawn into the sadomasochistic relationship between Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth in a small American town.
The opening does much of the work. Frederick Elmes photographs the white fences and firemen with a cleanness that makes the town’s good manners look slightly rehearsed. A man collapses in his garden, and the sequence goes beneath the lawn to the insects. We were horrified by that collapse, because the clean, orderly surroundings have made us feel so safe. Duwayne Dunham’s editing gives the change in scale its force, moving from the familiar public view of a town to something its inhabitants would rather not inspect.
Patricia Norris’s production design is just as important to that first impression of respectability. The town looks arranged to reassure us, and its neatness makes the sexual violence more difficult to dismiss as something belonging to a different sort of place. Angelo Badalamenti’s music adds tenderness as well as apprehension, which helps the film avoid becoming merely a succession of provocations. That tenderness matters when the performances are being pushed towards such extremes.
MacLachlan is well cast because his apparent decency does not settle the question of what Jeffrey wants. He gives the curiosity enough eagerness to make our concern for the young man uncomfortable; being drawn into danger does not automatically make him blameless. Laura Dern, as Sandy Williams, brings a directness that helps the film’s gentler feelings survive its taste for the grotesque. Neither performance needs to announce the strangeness around it, and that restraint gives Lynch room for the much broader performances of Rossellini and Hopper.
Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper make that pushing difficult to watch. As Dorothy, Rossellini gives distress a volatility that resists the comfortable expectation of how a victim should behave. Hopper’s Frank is frightening because the excess feels wilful: the performance leaves us watching for what he might permit himself next. Rossellini keeps Dorothy’s distress present even when Hopper threatens to dominate our attention.
Our reservation is that Lynch sometimes seems more interested in what Dorothy’s suffering can do to an audience than in allowing her a life beyond it. Rossellini supplies much of the complexity, and the force of her performance should not exempt the writing from scrutiny. Some of the shocks feel calculated, particularly when her distress is being used to unsettle Jeffrey.
The film also works as a crime thriller, which matters. Its story gives us something to follow when the behaviour becomes strange, and Lynch keeps the prospect of discovery worrying. The humour has room to be funny without reducing the danger to a joke, a difficult judgement that the actors repeatedly get right. Watch it with someone prepared to talk about Dorothy afterwards.
