Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
There are few filmmakers working today with a voice as immediately identifiable as David Lynch. His long-rumored return to Twin Peaks (titled Twin Peaks: The Return) inspired a cult-y zeitgeist this past summer, spawning hundreds of articles and thousands upon thousands of words as fans and critics went through the show frame by frame in an effort to discern whatever secret meaning Lynch and his collaborators had encoded into the surreal imagery.
It’s easy to forget that once upon a time, David Lynch was nowhere close to a brand of his own. After riding a wave of critical and commercial success with The Elephant Man, Lynch became lost in the studio morass with Dune, a film so dense and hard to follow that theaters actually handed out glossary cards before the film with explanations for all the weird terminology that was going to be banded about. Dune flopped and Lynch has largely disowned it.
Which brings us to Blue Velvet. Eraserhead and The Elephant Man set the tone, but Blue Velvet is the film where the ‘David Lynch’ that haunts American culture really comes into focus, with its examination of voyeurism and violent misogyny, its depiction of the seedy underbelly of seemingly-chipper suburban communities, Laura Dern crying, and its inversion of classic film noir archetypes.
Blue Velvet inspired both passionate support and scathing, furious criticism. Roger Ebert was particularly upset by the film, accusing Lynch of outright misogyny for the treatment of Isabella Rossellini’s character (Ebert was generally negative with regards to all things David Lynch, up until Mulholland Dr. wowed him and led to a reappraisal. But he never did develop any appreciation for Blue Velvet).
Today, Blue Velvet is regarded as a classic. It remains perhaps the most well-known performance by Dennis Hopper (as the psychotic, nitrate-huffing Frank Booth) and has been hugely influential on film, music, and television.
So sit back, relax, as the Two Cents crew does a dance in the dark with this candy-colored clown. — Brendan
Next Week’s Pick:
It’s Halloween time!! Speaking personally, my favorite time of the year for Two Cents because we roll out a veritable smörgåsbord of spoopyness — new and old, classic and underappreciated. And to make things fun, neither Brendan nor I have seen them all so there’s an element of surprise for us, too!
We’ll announce the full lineup shortly but to kick things off, it’s an encore salute to the late, great George Romero! We recently covered Night Of The Living Dead and we’re following up with its (second) sequel Day Of The Dead. It’s currently streaming free on Vudu! To watch on your TV, just grab the app for your enabled game console or smart device.
https://www.vudu.com/movies/#!content/463777
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight Thursday! — Austin
Our Guests
Blue Velvet is the sort of film more invested in the journey than the destination. The film explores themes and ideas similar to other David Lynch projects, particularly in the way it peels away back the veneer of small-town Americana to reveal the seediness and corruption lurking beneath the surface. The anchors of the film are Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and Frank (Dennis Hopper), who are initially offered to us as polar opposites — MacLachlan as the kind, somewhat naive would-be investigator and Hopper as the sadomasochistic evil at the center of the town’s underworld. Also impressive are the performances of Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy and Laura Dern as Sandy — the two women who enter Jeffrey’s life at roughly the same time.
Much of the film is surreal, at times even upsetting. But like Jeffrey we are unable to stop pulling at the threads of the mystery — but even in its conclusion there is nothing like a clear resolution. After multiple viewings I’m still not entirely sure how sincerely I should take the ending. While initially the dark, threatening world of Frank Booth and his associates seems nightmarish, the effect of returning to the bright “normal” reality of Jeffrey and Sandy’s families ultimately feels just as dreamlike. To that end, the film’s resolution seems deliberately unsatisfying. Frank Booth may be gone, but the underworld that created him is still there waiting to be uncovered again. (@T_Lawson)
Adrianna Gober:
My favorite scene in Blue Velvet is the sequence at Ben’s house. It’s fraught with menace masquerading as comic relief, taut with overwhelming, unpleasant sexual tension; not just the obvious between Frank and Dorothy, or even the eroticized antagonism of Frank towards Jeffrey that later reaches a horrifying fever pitch, but in Ben’s hypnotic, tender performance of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” Ben croons into a droplight and Frank falls apart, in their secret, shared ritual. It’s inspired subtextual storytelling, but it also speaks to one of the film’s larger concerns: personal and sexual identities blur into an amorphous mess of confusing signifiers, and it’s difficult to gauge just where any character’s intentions — -sexual or otherwise — -truly lie.
Ambiguity is at the heart of Blue Velvet; the film inhabits the space “in dreams” where reality and fantasy are virtually indistinguishable, and we’re never quite sure of what’s real. This unreality sparks a permanent state of uneasiness and dread we can’t quite shake, and Lynch seizes this vulnerability to hammer at uncomfortable truths. Foremost, the ubiquitous presence of evil in the world. Nothing and nowhere is safe from its poisonous touch; your suburban idyll can collapse into Hell at any moment — — it probably already has, you just don’t know it yet. Secondly, but no less significant, is complicity. When Shelly tells Jeffrey, “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert,” she might as well be speaking directly to the viewer. With Blue Velvet, Lynch doesn’t just confront exterior boogeymen, he forces us to confront the evil inside of us all. Like Jeffrey’s family transfixed by the violent crime drama on television, we willingly participate in Jeffrey’s morbid voyeur/investigator routine, staring from our own closet at the horror unfolding, but unable to look away and unsure if we really want to. Frank calls Jeffrey’s bluff — — and ours: “You’re like me.” (@jeerthelights)
The Team
David Lynch is an asshole… but, fuck, do I love him so! Twin Peaks: The Return was the most frustrating, brilliant, gorgeous, and annoying thing on TV in ages — likely of all time. However, it once again avowed Lynch’s desire to wrestle with pain and trauma in insightful and interesting ways. Also, it once again allowed the viewer to wrestle with questions of sexual trauma and some truly despicable cosmic forces.
No one embodies the deplorable darkness of humanity and the personification of these cosmic evils better than Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth. Portrayed by Dennis Hopper with pitch perfect insanity, Frank is perhaps cinema’s most frightening monster ever put to celluloid. While such creeps have been a staple of Lynch’s work — others include Dafoe’s Bobby Peru (Wild at Heart) and Twin Peaks’s Bob — the daddy of them all (pun intended) is Frank.
The film is an incredible neo-noir where we see Kyle McLachlan begin to create his future Dale Cooper persona with Lynch, Laura Dern and Isabella Rosalina both shine, and tone matters more than story — though, the story is compelling. While all of these things make the film what it is as a whole, I still come away with the most lasting effect as feeling violated by the monster of Frank. He is the legacy of this film and a huge part of Lynch’s legacy. (@thepaintedman)
While Blue Velvet is not my favorite Lynch film (it’d be tough to top Mulholland Dr., if only for the extremity of Naomi Watts’ performance in that film) it’s the one that first springs to mind when I think of ‘David Lynch’. There is imagery in this film carved out of nightmare, pure, none moreso than each riff on Roy Orbison’s haunting rendition of ‘In Dreams’. You’d think it couldn’t get any creepier than Dean Stockwell’s lip sync, but then you get that lady gyrating on top of a car while Dennis Hopper beats Kyle MacLachlan half to death on a lonely country road in the deep of night…yeah, like I said: nightmare.
Anyone who sits down to watch Blue Velvet expecting this earlier, more ‘normal’ version of David Lynch to deliver a narrative that fits together like a puzzle, well, ‘normal’ David Lynch is still David Lynch. While earlier drafts of Blue Velvet apparently did give explanations for much of what transpires here, the finished film treats its characters less like human beings and more like primal forces of Good, Evil, Victim, etc. Doing so allows the film to go to operatic extremes of emotion (especially Dern and Rossellini), without ‘going over the top’. Or maybe it does go over the top, but that’s where David Lynch belongs. In the clouds, in the ether…in dreams. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
First time watcher here. I’m admittedly a bit of a novice with Lynch, having seen only a couple of his better known films and virtually none of his television work, but I definitely enjoyed and appreciated this one.
Blue Velvet certainly has some weirdness and a flair for the surreal, but is much more grounded and approachable than I had imagined, with our protagonists feeling like real people in an increasingly bizarre situation as Kyle MacLachlan’s character (and to a lesser extent Laura Dern’s) starts out on a fairly innocent bit of investigation that gets more strange and dangerous the deeper he gets. Meanwhile Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper are on opposite sides of the mystery’s ugly core as manic, tortured victim and cruel (and surprisingly funny) predator.
One of the more interesting elements to me is that MacLachlan and Dern are young people right on the cusp of adulthood (she in high school, he slightly older) and at times are basically kids as the story requires, like children out of place in a grown-ups’ game. (@VforVashaw)
Watch it on Amazon:
https://www.vudu.com/movies/#!content/463777
Next week’s pick: