Blue Velvet (film)
Blue Velvet is a 1986 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written and directed by David Lynch. Blending psychological horror[4][5] with film noir, the film stars Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern, and is named after the 1951 song of the same name. The film concerns a young college student who, returning home to visit his ill father, discovers a severed human ear in a field. The ear then leads him to uncover a vast criminal conspiracy, and enter into a romantic relationship with a troubled lounge singer.
The screenplay of Blue Velvet had been passed around multiple times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with several major studios declining it due to its strong sexual and violent content.[6]: 126 After the failure of his 1984 film Dune, Lynch made attempts at developing a more "personal story", somewhat characteristic of the surrealist style displayed in his first film Eraserhead (1977). The independent studio De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, owned at the time by Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, agreed to finance and produce the film.
Blue Velvet initially received a divided critical response,[7] with many stating that its explicit content served little artistic purpose. Nevertheless, the film earned Lynch his second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director, and received the year's Best Film and Best Director prizes from the National Society of Film Critics. It came to achieve cult status. As an example of a director casting against the norm, it was credited for revitalizing Hopper's career and for providing Rossellini with a dramatic outlet beyond her previous work as a fashion model and a cosmetics spokeswoman. In the years since, the film has been re-evaluated, and it is now widely regarded as one of Lynch's major works[8] and one of the greatest films of the 1980s.[9][10] Publications including Sight & Sound, Time, Entertainment Weekly and BBC Magazine have ranked it among the greatest American films ever.[11] In 2008, it was chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the ten greatest American mystery films.
Plot[edit]
College student Jeffrey Beaumont returns to his hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina, after his father, Tom, has a near-fatal attack from a medical condition. Walking home from the hospital, Jeffrey cuts through a vacant lot and discovers a severed human ear, which he takes to police detective John Williams. Williams' daughter Sandy tells Jeffrey that the ear somehow relates to a lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens. Intrigued, Jeffrey enters her apartment by posing as an exterminator. While there, he steals a spare key while she is distracted by a man in a distinctive yellow sport coat, whom Jeffrey nicknames the "Yellow Man".
Jeffrey and Sandy attend Dorothy's nightclub act, in which she sings "Blue Velvet", and leave early so Jeffrey can infiltrate her apartment. Dorothy returns home and undresses; she finds Jeffrey hiding in a closet and forces him to strip at knifepoint, but he retreats to the closet when Frank Booth, a psychopathic gangster and drug lord, arrives and interrupts their encounter. Frank beats and rapes Dorothy while inhaling gas from a canister, alternating between fits of sobbing and violent rage. After Frank leaves, Jeffrey sneaks away and seeks comfort from Sandy.
Surmising that Frank has abducted Dorothy's husband Don, and son Donnie, to force her into sex slavery, Jeffrey suspects that Frank cut off Don's ear to intimidate her into submission. While continuing to see Sandy, Jeffrey enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with Dorothy, in which she encourages him to hit her. Jeffrey sees Frank attending Dorothy's show and later observes him selling drugs and meeting with the Yellow Man. Jeffrey then sees the Yellow Man meeting with a "well-dressed man".
When Frank catches Jeffrey leaving Dorothy's apartment, he abducts them and takes them to the lair of Ben, a criminal associate holding Don and Donnie hostage. Frank permits Dorothy to see her family and forces Jeffrey to watch Ben perform an impromptu lip-sync of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", which moves Frank to tears. Afterwards, he and his gang take Jeffrey and Dorothy on a high-speed joyride to a sawmill yard, where he again attempts to sexually abuse Dorothy. When Jeffrey intervenes and punches him in the face, an enraged Frank and his gang pull him out of the car. Replaying the tape of "In Dreams", Frank smears lipstick on his face and violently kisses Jeffrey. Frank then has Jeffrey restrained and beats him unconscious, while Dorothy pleads for Frank to stop. Jeffrey awakens the next morning, bruised and bloodied.
While visiting the police station, Jeffrey discovers that the Yellow Man is Detective Williams's partner Tom Gordon, who has been murdering Frank's rival drug dealers and stealing confiscated narcotics from the evidence room for Frank to sell. After Jeffrey and Sandy declare their love for each other at a party, they are pursued by a car which they assume belongs to Frank; as they arrive at Jeffrey's home, Sandy realizes the driver is her ex-boyfriend, Mike. After Mike threatens to beat Jeffrey for stealing his girlfriend, Dorothy appears on Jeffrey's porch naked, beaten, and confused. Mike backs down as Jeffrey and Sandy whisk Dorothy to Sandy's house to summon medical attention.
When Dorothy calls Jeffrey "my secret lover", a distraught Sandy slaps him for cheating on her. Jeffrey asks Sandy to tell her father everything, and Detective Williams then leads a police raid on Frank's headquarters, killing Frank's men. Jeffrey returns alone to Dorothy's apartment, where he discovers Don dead and Gordon mortally wounded. As Jeffrey leaves the apartment, the "Well-Dressed Man" arrives, sees Jeffrey in the stairs, and chases him back inside. Realizing that the "Well-Dressed Man" is Frank in disguise, Jeffrey uses Gordon's walkie-talkie to say he is in the bedroom (to distract Frank, who has a police radio) before hiding in the closet. When Frank arrives, he starts shooting around the apartment, in the process killing Gordon. Frank deduces where Jeffrey is hiding, and Jeffrey kills Frank with Gordon's gun upon Frank opening the door. Moments later, Sandy and Detective Williams arrive.
Some time later, Jeffrey and Sandy have continued their relationship, Tom Beaumont has recovered, and Dorothy has been reunited with her son.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Blue Velvet premiered in competition at the Montréal World Film Festival in August 1986, and at the Toronto Festival of Festivals on September 12, 1986, and a few days later in the United States. It debuted commercially in both countries on September 19, 1986, in 98 theatres across the United States. In its opening weekend, the film grossed a total of $789,409. It eventually expanded to another 15 theatres, and in the US and Canada grossed a total of $8,551,228.[56] Blue Velvet was met with uproar during its audience reception, with lines formed around city blocks in New York City and Los Angeles. There were reports of mass walkouts and refund demands during its opening week. At a Chicago screening, a man fainted and had to have his pacemaker checked. Upon completion, he returned to the cinema to see the ending. At a Los Angeles cinema, two strangers became engaged in a heated disagreement, but decided to resolve the disagreement to return to the theatre.[21]
Critical reception[edit]
Blue Velvet was released to a very polarized reception in the United States. The critics who did praise the film were often vociferous.[21] The New York Times critic Janet Maslin directed much praise toward the performances of Hopper and Rossellini: "Mr. Hopper and Miss Rossellini are so far outside the bounds of ordinary acting here that their performances are best understood in terms of sheer lack of inhibition; both give themselves entirely over to the material, which seems to be exactly what's called for." She called it "an instant cult classic", concluding that Blue Velvet "is as fascinating as it is freakish" and "confirms Mr. Lynch's stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley."[57]
Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times called the film "the most brilliantly disturbing film ever to have its roots in small-town American life," describing it as "shocking, visionary, rapturously controlled".[58] Film critic Gene Siskel included Blue Velvet on his list of the best films of 1986, at the fifth spot. Peter Travers, film critic for Rolling Stone, named it the best film of the 1980s and referred to it as an "American masterpiece".[9] Upon its initial release, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese called Blue Velvet the best film of the year.[59]
Home media[edit]
Blue Velvet was released on VHS by Karl-Lorimar Home Video in 1987 and re-issued by Warner Home Video in 1992. After that, it was DVD in 1999 and 2002 by MGM Home Entertainment. The film made its Blu-ray debut on November 8, 2011, with a special 25th-anniversary edition featuring never-before-seen deleted scenes.[71] On May 28, 2019, the film was re-released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, featuring a 4K digital restoration, the original stereo soundtrack and other special features, including a behind-the-scenes documentary titled Blue Velvet Revisited.[72]
Although it initially gained a relatively small theatrical audience in North America and was met with controversy over its artistic merit, Blue Velvet soon became the center of a "national firestorm" in 1986, and over time became regarded as an American classic. In the late 1980s, and early 1990s, after its release on videotape, the film became a widely recognized cult film, for its dark depiction of a suburban America.[73][74] With its many VHS, LaserDisc and DVD releases, the film reached broader American audiences. It marked David Lynch's entry into the Hollywood mainstream and Dennis Hopper's comeback. Hopper's performance as Frank Booth has itself left an imprint on popular culture, with countless tributes, cultural references and parodies.[75] The film's success also helped Hollywood address previously censored issues, as Psycho (1960) had. Blue Velvet has been frequently compared to that ground-breaking film.[41] It has become one of the most significant, well-recognized films of its era, spawning countless imitations and parodies in media. The film's dark, stylish and erotic production design has served as a benchmark for a number of films, parodies and even Lynch's own later work, notably Twin Peaks (1990–91), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine cited it as one of the most "influential American films", as did Michael Atkinson, who dedicated a book to the film's themes and motifs.[9][18]
Blue Velvet now frequently appears in various critical assessments of all-time great films, also ranked as one of the greatest films of the 1980s, one of the best examples of American surrealism and one of the finest examples of David Lynch's work.[18] In a poll of 54 American critics ranking the "most outstanding films of the decade", Blue Velvet was placed fourth, behind Raging Bull (1980), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the German film Wings of Desire (1987).[76] An Entertainment Weekly book special released in 1999 ranked Blue Velvet 37th of the greatest films of all time.[77] The film was ranked by The Guardian in its list of the 100 Greatest Films.[78] Film Four ranked it on their list of 100 Greatest Films.[78] In a 2007 poll of the online film community held by Variety, Blue Velvet came in at the 95th-greatest film of all time.[79] Total Film ranked Blue Velvet as one of the all-time best films in both a critics' list and a public poll, in 2006 and 2007, respectively. In December 2002, a UK film critics' poll in Sight & Sound ranked the film fifth on their list of the 10 Best Films of the Last 25 Years.[80] In a special Entertainment Weekly issue, 100 new film classics were chosen from 1983 to 2008: Blue Velvet was ranked at fourth.[81]
In addition to Blue Velvet's various "all-time greatest films" rankings, the American Film Institute has awarded the film three honors in its lists: 96th on 100 Years ... 100 Thrills in 2001, selecting cinema's most thrilling moments and ranked Frank Booth 36th of the 50 greatest villains in 100 Years ... 100 Heroes and Villains in 2003. In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "ten Top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Blue Velvet was acknowledged as the eighth best film in the mystery genre.[82] Premiere magazine listed Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, as the 54th on its list of 'The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time', calling him one of "the most monstrously funny creations in cinema history".[83] The film was ranked 84th on Bravo Television's four-hour program 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004).[84] It is frequently sampled musically and an array of bands and solo artists have taken their names and inspiration from the film.[85] In August 2012, Sight & Sound unveiled their latest list of the 250 greatest films of all time, with Blue Velvet ranking at 69th.[86]
Blue Velvet was also nominated for the following AFI lists:
Inspired by the film, pop singer Lana Del Rey recorded a cover version of "Blue Velvet" in 2012.[87] Used to endorse clothing line H&M, a music video accompanied the track and aired as a television commercial. Set in post-war America, the video drew influence from Lynch and Blue Velvet.[87][88][89] In the video, Del Rey plays the role of Dorothy Vallens, performing a private concert similar to the scene where Ben (Dean Stockwell) pantomimes "In Dreams" for Frank Booth. Del Rey's version, however, has her lip-syncing "Blue Velvet" when a little person dressed as Frank Sinatra approaches and unplugs a hidden Victrola, revealing Del Rey as a fraud.[88] When Lynch heard of the music video, he praised it, telling Artinfo: "Lana Del Rey, she's got some fantastic charisma and—this is a very interesting thing—it's like she's born out of another time. She's got something that's very appealing to people. And I didn't know she was influenced by me!"[90][91]
"Now It's Dark", a song by American heavy metal band Anthrax on their 1988 album State of Euphoria, was directly inspired by the film, and specifically the character of Frank Booth. The same phrase appeared in the liner notes of Rush's album Roll the Bones, and drummer Neil Peart later explained: "The phrase occurs in David Lynch's comedy classic Blue Velvet."[92]
The sludge metal band Acid Bath sampled several of Frank Booth's lines on the song "Cassie Eats Cockroaches" from their 1994 debut album When the Kite String Pops, and industrial metal band Ministry sampled the movie in their song "Jesus Built My Hotrod". The experimental rock band Mr. Bungle also sampled lines from Blue Velvet on the songs "Squeeze Me Macaroni", "Stubb (A Dub)", and "My Ass Is On Fire" from their debut self-titled album.