Movies - Blue Velvet

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	Movies - Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet is a 1986 film directed and written by David Lynch. The film begins with the protagonist discovering a severed human ear, which he takes to the police. He begins to investigate the matter himself, and discovers a seamy underworld within his quaint suburban town.

Synopsis

The film begins with Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan, coming home from college after his father has a stroke. While crossing a field he discovers a human ear and takes it to the police. His curiosity piqued, he begins investigating the matter himself. In the process, he discovers that within his quaint suburban town exists a steamy underworld of kinky sex and brutal violence.

The film operates on a number of levels, coming on as both a detective mystery and a kitchen-sink drama. The film depicts a tangled relationship which transpires between Jeffrey, his sweetheart Sandy Williams (played by Laura Dern), who is the daughter of a detective, and Isabella Rossellini's femme fatale Dorothy Vallens.

The relationship is twisted into even sharper relief by the character of Frank Booth (played by Dennis Hopper), a maniacal gangster who gets off by physically abusing others, breathing amyl nitrite, and playing Roy Orbison's song, "In Dreams", preferably all at the same time. (Amyl nitrite was suggested by Dennis Hopper; it was helium in Lynch's original script.)

Symbolism

The most consistent symbolism in Blue Velvet is an insect motif introduced at the end of the first scene, when the camera zooms in on a well-kept suburban lawn until it discovers, underground, a swarming nest of disgusting bugs. This is generally recognized as a metaphor for the seedy underworld that Jeffrey will soon discover under the surface of his own suburban, Reaganesque paradise. The bug motif is recurrent throughout the film, most notably in the horrific bug-like oxygen mask that Frank wears, but also in the excuse that Jeffrey offers when he first gains access to Dorothy's apartment: he claims he is an insect exterminator. One of Frank's sinister accomplices is also consistently identified through the yellow jacket he wears. Yellowjacket happens to be the name of a type of wasp. Finally, a robin eating a bug on a fence becomes a topic of discussion in the last scene of the film.

The severed ear that Jeffrey discovers is also a key symbolic element; the ear is what leads Jeffrey into danger. Indeed, just as Jeffrey's troubles begin, the audience is treated to a nightmarish sequence in which the camera zooms into the ear canal of the severed, decomposing ear. Notably, the camera does not reemerge from the ear canal until the end of the film. When Jeffrey finally comes through his hellish ordeal unscathed, the ear canal shot is replayed, only in reverse, zooming out and revealing that this ear belongs to Jeffrey, as he relaxes in his yard on a summer day.

A number of scenes contain red drapes or curtains, a popular recurring image for Lynch, especially prominent in Twin Peaks.

History

Blue Velvet was made in 1986, shortly after Lynch's artistically troubling film Dune
, which ran into various problems during shooting and eventually became a commercial and critical disappointment. Drained from such a harrowing ordeal and frustrated over the whole mess, Lynch took some time off to develop a more personal project that he had been working on while filming Dune. Surprisingly, Dino de Laurentiis decided to give Lynch another chance, but only with the stipulation that he take a cut in his salary and work with a reduced budget of only $6 million. In return, the young director could have total artistic freedom and control over the final cut of the film.

Blue Velvet's origins ultimately lie in Lynch's childhood a period of his life spent deep in the forests of Spokane, Washington. If Lynch's childhood memories inspired the setting of Blue Velvet, the actual story of the film originated from three ideas that crystallized in the filmmaker's mind over a period of time. Ideas for Blue Velvet had begun to form in Lynch's head as early as 1973. After finishing The Elephant Man
, he met producer Richard Roth over coffee. Roth had read and enjoyed Lynch's Ronnie Rocket script but did not think it was something he wanted to produce. He asked Lynch if the filmmaker had any other scripts. Lynch only had ideas. "I told him I had always wanted to sneak into a girl's room to watch her into the night and that, maybe, at one point or another, I would see something that would be the clue to a murder mystery. Roth loved the idea and asked me to write a treatment. I went home and thought of the ear in the field." For the filmmaker, the severed ear was the perfect way to draw Jeffrey into a secret world that lies at the heart of Blue Velvet. The third idea that came to Lynch was Bobby Vinton’s classic rendition of the song "Blue Velvet."

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Movies - Blue Velvet

Synopsis

Symbolism

History

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