FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE David Lynch - Blue Velvet


Luckily there is always nice weather and since our Filmkunstbar Fitzcarraldo is still closed, I have retired to the country. To the Berlin suburbs, where many, many garden fences have been erected. Somehow it reminded me of the white garden fence in Blue Velvet...

I regularly watched Blue Velvet with my band. As a teenager. That's because the film is as immature as teenagers. Blue Velvet contains some very emotional scenes, very painful and hurtful. It almost seems as if they belong to another movie, a melodrama. But Blue Velvet is a satire, a black comedy. David Lynch's film has two levels of reality. On the first one we find ourselves in Lumberton, a small town in the 50s, where the inhabitants talk as if they had grown up in a TV series. The second level tells the tortures of sexual bondage. Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) husband and child were kidnapped by a madman named Frank Boothe (Dennis Hopper). Frank has kept Dorothy as his sexual slave ever since - meeting her most secret desires and preferences. While the plane of Lumbertown is told with almost expressionless irony, the plane of sexual hostage-taking reaches a terrible depth of cruel realism. The very first scene of the film refers to both levels. A man is watering his lawn when he suffers a stroke and falls to the ground. The camera follows the insects in the grass and dives into the shallows hidden beneath the surface. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont, the son of the sick man who comes home to check on his parents. He begins a romance with the blond small-town beauty Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), the daughter of the local police chief. Jeffrey finds a cut off human ear. His attempt to find out the secret of the ear leads him to the apartment of the singer Dorothy Vallens. He witnesses how Dorothy is haunted by Frank Boothe, the pervert who takes drugs with a nitrous oxide mask. Dorothy discovers the secret witness in her bathroom after Frank disappears. To his amazement, she threatens Jeffrey with a knife in order to be tormented by him. Jeffrey beats Dorothy. This scene has so much power that we expect Lynch to explore the abysses of this incipient relationship. Instead, he devotes himself to the satire of his small town of Lumbertown, whose surface is of such ridiculous smoothness that we must expect shallows below. Blue Velvet has become a dark comedy, not a relationship drama. Dorothy Valens is not the center of the film, although her scenes move us the most. Lynch gives Dennis Hopper's Frank the most attention. Frank is supposed to scare us, but the truth is we have to laugh. Hopper's career, which had already stagnated before Blue Velvet, then catapulted him into the front row of Hollywood's character mimes. Blue Velvet ultimately makes fun of himself. The human drama serves the sole purpose of making the subsequent black comedy seem even more absurd. Because Frank is a monster; Dennis Hopper, however, is so good that we have to laugh. Many of my generation know his dialogues by heart. When Frank yells "Heeeeineken!" Frank has a point. Heineken is really not a good beer. I told you Blue Velvet was a very immature film.