Blue Vel­vet (1986)

David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Vel­vet says that we’re all evil in some aspect or anoth­er. This evil might man­i­fest itself as rag­ing vio­lence, exem­pli­fied by Den­nis Hopper’s thou­sand-yard mani­ac, Frank Booth, who cruis­es around the quaint town of Lum­ber­ton with a per­son­al man­date to fuck any­thing that moves.

On the oth­er side of the coin is our ama­teur gumshoe hero, Jef­frey Beau­mont (Kyle MacLach­lan), the soft­ly-spo­ken, clean cut kid who wades into Frank’s under­world armed with an eerie erot­ic fix­a­tion, a macho death wish and a fond­ness for Heineken beer. Caught in the mid­dle is Isabel­la Rossellini’s Dorothy Val­lens, a sad-eyed lounge singer who gives her­self over to phys­i­cal abuse in a bid to save her kid­napped son.

Per­haps ​“evil” isn’t the right term to describe Dorothy. She’s frac­tured and bruised, dri­ven to the cusp of insan­i­ty. The film is often seen as explor­ing the iron­ic jux­ta­po­si­tion between friend­ly small­town Amer­i­ca and the nas­ti­ness that lurks beneath its wipe-clean sur­face. Yet 30 years down the line, the film appears to be more about thrill-seek­ing than it is about evil. Blue Vel­vet is a sto­ry about the things we do to enter­tain our­selves with­in a vac­u­um of art and cul­ture. Jef­frey is a clos­et weirdo, unin­ter­est­ed in sports tri­als and proms and the well­be­ing of his own paral­ysed father.

When he finds a sev­ered ear in the long grass, his sub­se­quent jour­ney isn’t one pow­ered by civic con­cern, but a feel­ing that he final­ly has some­thing to do with his time. Frank, too, has tak­en own­er­ship of Lum­ber­ton, not because he wants to, because he can. Blue Vel­vet is about how Amer­i­ca is an idea, a sur­face, an indis­tinct image. It’s about the sim­ple ways we can cor­rupt that image for per­son­al gain. It’s per­haps Lynch’s most tren­chant and polit­i­cal film.