Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Blue Velvet / USA / 1986

For years I’ve grappled with David Lynch’s gorgeous and deeply troubling Blue Velvet on home video, and for years I’ve harbored the suspicion that the film would be better appreciated on the big screen. I didn’t know how right I was until I got a chance to attend a repertory screening last night. It’s not just how Blue Velvet’s lush widescreen visuals and bold colors fill the eye. There’s also the rich, multilayered sound of the film: Angelo Badalamenti’s distinctive score; repeated bits of dialogue; a range of (generally creepy) sound effects; and, of course, innocuous pop songs given unexpected menace. In a darkened theater, safe from the many dangers of video viewing – interruptions, distractions, fullscreen transfers, and the pause button – Blue Velvet truly engulfs its viewers. Even the audience’s audible reactions are part of it, rising and falling with the rhythm of the film. Tense silence and nervous titters accompany Blue Velvet’s most distressing and notorious moments; relieved laughter greets its frequent bursts of surreal humor.

Blue Velvet is suited to being an uneasy shared experience; it’s a story about voyeurism that implicates its viewers as much as its peeping protagonist. In the midst of the infamous, violent scene that announces the arrival of Dennis Hopper’s vile Frank Booth, Lynch cuts back to Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont pressed up against the slits in the closet door, watching as intently as we are. “You’re like me,” Frank tells Jeffrey in a chilling instance later on, one made all the more potent because in addressing Jeffrey, he’s sort of addressing us too.

If the theater only amplifies Blue Velvet’s most discomfiting qualities, it also makes the film’s ostensibly optimistic conclusion (square, middle class innocence and harmony restored to such a degree that one senses Lynch’s tongue drifting toward his cheek) that much more jarring. No amount of good cheer can get us to really shake off the horrors of what we’ve already seen. Perhaps that’s why the film’s final words come from the tortured lounge singer Dorothy Vallens, played so effectively and uncompromisingly by Isabella Rossellini. An echo of her singing the title song – the bit about seeing blue velvet through her tears – leaves a bittersweet taste. It feels like an indication that all has not been forgotten, the depravity of our very strange world not swept quite so easily back under the carpet.

Full review by Rumsey Taylor/Leo Goldsmith’s Thoughts

by Victoria Large | Source: 35MM Print
04 Dec 2007 9:58 PM | Submit Comment