When I first saw Blue Velvet (1986) I didn’t “get it”—and knew that I didn’t get it. I was 16, in my sophomore or junior year of high school. I can’t remember if it was before or the summer where I holed myself up in a dark room during a family reunion and obsessively watched all of Twin Peaks for the first time. But it was around then that I found out about David Lynch, and that the two works were artistically intertwined.
Blue Velvet didn’t sit right with me. It was odd in a way I couldn’t place—violent and terrifying, yet idealistic and sentimental. It was a film of contradictory instincts: the perfect image of Americana and the darkness that comes up from the blades of manicured grass. Lynch’s world is ultimately sappy, bugs will still rise up from the earth to swarm its sweet nectar. This is an image he’d describe as defining, where he found during his upbringing in the perfect postwar American suburbia that there was still rot and decay behind even the most well-crafted and maintained facades.
Another image that would haunt Lynch is when he and his brother came across a naked women sitting on the side of street. He was 10 or 11 at the time. He knew something was wrong and wanted to help, but didn’t what to do. He’d eventually bring this moment to the screen when Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) emerges from the dark, naked and beaten, shattering the melodrama that is unfolding in front of her. All of a sudden the teenage disputes going on are interrupted by something too real, too serious. Simple romantic follies are devastated by the actual violence creeping around the corner, the one that they dare not look around in order to preserve their sensibilities.
Lynch’s work is not unprecedented here. These disruptions can be found in the Technicolor teenage masterpieces from Lynch’s own youth, like the shocking sexual violence in Splendor in the Grass (1961) or abrupt interruptions of death in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the latter of which especially would influence Blue Velvet, with Dennis Hopper’s character running through the wreckage of a mansion with a flashlight in pursuit of James Dean, much like how Hopper’s Frank Booth dawns a flashlight to terrify Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont. What makes Lynch Lynch (or perhaps what makes something Lynchian) isn’t strictly new, but a coalescence of ostensibly opposite aesthetics: pictorialized Americana and outright decay. These images are magnets bouncing off of each other, but that’s because they’re not opposites but the same thing, one nestled within the other, part of a larger whole that’s as apparently self-contradictory as Lynch’s own strangely optimistic politics.
What made Blue Velvet work for me as a young cinephile (and I don’t mean “work” in the immediate sense, as, again it didn’t for me initially—I mean it in a retrospective way with regards to the effect it had on my thinking) is how its journey is direct, simple, and easy to translate into Freudian terms: the ego (Jeffrey) wrestles between the id (Frank) and the superego (his love-interest’s policeman dad, played by George Dickerson). This Freudian trifecta is even highlighted through the beers they drink, with Jeffrey’s middle-of-the-road tasting Heineken, the notoriously cheap (before its hipster reclamation) PBR for Frank, and the “king of beers” Budweiser for Dickenson’s policeman. It’s these kinds of symbols that are easy to grab onto for more unmoored viewers. It allows a puzzle-box entry point against the deeply unnerving images, ones that feel like they emerged from a nightmare, like a lobotomized man still standing while blood runs from every orifice, or again that haunting image of Dorothy Vallens emerging naked in the suburban streets. This cocktail of dueling instincts—the logical and emotionally ineffable—enabled an obsession in me, one that was a serious spark. It became a hard movie to show to people, partly because it was so personal and partly because I knew how I reacted for the first time, and was afraid that might be the last for others.
I revisited Blue Velvet for the first time in years the night that Lynch died. It was comforting to know it was still there, in all its flawed glory. Blue Velvet isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it’s certainly “the last real earthquake in American cinema,” as Guy Maddin described it. It’s a film that sent enough electricity through the wires to trip the breakers, short the circuits, even cause a transformer or two to blow. It’s a film of an American cinema that never really came to fruition in the main stream, although it was possibly a possibility at one point (lest we forget, Lynch was effectively “classically” trained by the AFI). It’s a testament to Lynch’s prowess as an artist that one of his projects that serves as a draft for a much greater work can still stand to be touted as one of the Great American Films.
Lynch would’ve turned 79 yesterday. David Lynch is gone, yet somehow I feel he’s still with us. More through his work, which we’ll always have, but also I can feel him in the air, hiding in the wind that blows through the trees that births Laura Dern’s character out of the darkness.