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Wednesday Movie - Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet is not unlike an old episode of Scooby-Doo: Kyle McLachlan makes a passable Fred, Laura Dern embraces parts of both Velma and Daphne, and Dennis Hopper could conceivably be Old Man Withers—the crusty amusement park owner disguised as the monster—assuming Old Man Withers was a psychopath who liked to huff nitrous oxide and dry-hump people.

In a nutshell, Blue Velvet is about Jeffrey, a young, all-American type boy who returns home from College after his father falls ill. On a walk home from the hospital, Jeffrey makes the grisly discovery of a human ear, which he brings immediately to the authorities. The police are interested but they shut him out from the details of the case, so Jeffrey begins some boy detective work. He is led to Dorothy, an alluring though seemingly unbalanced lounge singer who he believes may be a murderer. But he soon learns that Dorothy is being sexually blackmailed by a lunatic named Frank, a man who needs all kinds of crazy shit to get his rocks off (like a nitrous oxide mask, frequent utterance of the word “Mommy,” and the assurance that you are not fucking looking at him). Tracking Frank leads John to further horrors, including brothels, murder, police corruption, lip-synched Roy Orbison songs by a supergay Dean Stockwell, and all sorts of other things you wouldn’t care to know of occurring in small town America.

Jeffrey forms two relationships in the film. The first attachment is to the sheriff’s daughter, Sandy, which is the apple pie, two kids in love kind of story. They take long walks, they kiss, they dance, and they reveal their reluctant love to one another. Then there’s his affair with Isabella. After witnessing one of her sessions with Frank, Jeffrey rushes to comfort her. His comfort is taken as seduction, which Jeffrey is all for, until Isabella says the last thing anyone would suspect: “Hit me. I want you to hit me.” She doesn’t just play masochist to Frank sadist, that’s who she is. Jeffrey is appalled, at least at first, but he's eventually driven to do what she asks.

There is a stark and well-designed contrast between Jeffrey’s two worlds. At the start, Jeffrey, his relationship with Sandy, and the appearance of the entire town is absurdly wholesome. But then we get Frank, with his mask and his f-bombs, who is all id and is a horrifying comparator. The movie is grounded in normalcy so that abnormality seems that much more repugnant. It’s the kind of thing that Todd Solondz loves—the idea that your quaint little suburb is home to more horrors and perversions then you could ever imagine.

The film does peter out in the last half hour—there’s a drug deal, and corruption, and bad disguises—and it turns into more of a crime story then anything. Overall, the movie turned out to be far more linear than I expected. This is David Lynch, and while I haven’t got around to Mulholland Dr. or Twin Peaks, I have seen Lost Highway which was a big pile of crazy (not to say that I didn’t like it). But again, Blue Velvet: not at all surreal; repugnant or not, these people could exist and this story could happen.

Comments

Jay said…
You sure have a strange way of "reviewing" films.
Anonymous said…
Whaddaya mean could. You just copied a page out of the average Georgetown Kid's Diary.

You cheap bastard...

In a nutshell, this post about Blue Velvet is about Jorge, a young, all-Canadian jackass who makes the grizzly discovery of a formatting error in the second paragraph....

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