With the second part of Dune scheduled for theaters on March 1, it’s hard to believe that someone thought an avant-garde director like David Lynch could make a worthy movie that would appeal to the masses and loyal fans. Denis Villeneuve has more of the abilities to do this. The failure of the movie prompted the director to return to something more of his style. Blue Velvet opened less than two years after Dune.
Set in the fictional town of Lumberton, a typical American town, it’s about the evils that lurk beneath the service. Starting off as something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, a middle-aged man, Tom Beaumont (Jack Harvey), is watering his lawn and suffers a heart attack. Then, underneath we see the insects fighting with each other. With serious injury, Tom is in the hospital as his son, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), returns home from college.
One day, Jeffrey is out walking through a vacant area and discovers what he thinks is a severed ear. He collects it and takes it to the local police to show Det. John Williams (George Dickerson). He later spends time with Williams’ daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), who believes the severed ear is somehow connected to a mysterious lounge singer, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini).
Posing as a pest exterminator, Jeffrey gains entrance into Dorothy’s apartment where he steals a set of keys only to return later when she’s gone. However, Jeffrey soon finds himself in over his head as Dorothy discovers him in her apartment and makes him strip. But then, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) shows up. He berates her and degrades her as he sexually assaults her. Jeffrey watches all of this while hiding in the closet.
Later, he enters into a sadomasochistic sex relationship with Dorothy where he gives in to her orders to hit her while they’re having sex. But eventually, Frank discovers what’s going on as Jeffrey realizes he’s a dangerous man who is very, very violent. Frank is the leader somewhat of a group of thugs including Paul (Jack Nance) and Raymond (Brad Dourif) as well as Ben, another criminal who dresses somewhat feminine and extravagant. Ben is holding Dorothy’s husband, Don (Dick Green) and their child, Donnie, hostage so they all can use Dorothy in a sex-trafficking ring.
Originally, Jeffrey was excited when he noticed Dorothy talking to a man in a yellow suit (Fred Pickler) and stayed at a distance taking pictures of the “Yellow Man” talking with a man with a moustache outside a building. The way he and Sandy go through this initially shows you how young, innocent and foolish it is. MacLachlan was 26 when filming began and Dern was 18. You can tell they have that look on their faces of young people with their whole lives ahead of them unaware of the true dangers that lurk out in the real world.
In some ways, this is a personal story about Lynch and his career in the filmmaking business and Hollywood. His first movie, Eraserhead, notoriously too a long time to film because of funding. He then had the backing of Mel Brooks as a producer of The Elephant Man in 1980 so he was able to make the movie the way he wanted. However, he would soon learn that he wouldn’t have producers and studios going to bat for him all the time.
After the success of Elephant Man, Lynch was being tapped to direct other movies such as the third Star Wars movie with the working title Revenge of the Jedi. However, he signed on to adapt Dune, despite not having much knowledge of the book and legacy at the time. But he liked the book and worked on the script for months. It filmed in Mexico in 1983. But the production was plagued by problems followed by Universal Pictures disputes with him and producer Dino De Laurentiis over the run time of the movie. The rough cut was four hours long but Lynch had worked it down to three hours. However, Universal wanted something closer to the two hours. The theatrical version runs over two hours at 137 minutes with credits.
Dune, of course, was one of the biggest bombs of the 1980s, barely making even back its huge budget at the time of $40-42 million. The movie had also received many negative reviews from major critics. Roger Ebert called it the worst movie of the year and Gene Siskel equally didn’t like it. And other critics such as Richard Corliss of Time and New York Times critic Janet Maslin also gave the movie negative reviews.
So, there’s a lot of Jeffrey in Lynch. He even said he had MacLachlan dress in the same style as Jeffrey. The filmmaker has remained mostly private about his life and often refuses to talk a lot of his movies and their meanings. But anyone who’s ever watched him give an interview, he seems like a nice guy with a charming sense of humor who grew up in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Virginia and North Carolina. Reportedly Robert Loggia had shown up for what he thought was an audition for Frank only to wait to learn the role had already been cast. Loggia, upset over this, accosted Lynch and screamed at him enraged that he had been treated like this due to a misunderstanding. Lynch said this interaction scared him and would leave an impression that Lynch would cast Loggia in a later movie, Lost Highway, where the character has a violent temper.
Lynch said he was also traumatized by a childhood experience when he saw saw a naked woman walking down the street at night. He said he cried so hard when seeing this. And he never forgot it. This memory comes in the final act of Blue Velvet where Dorothy appears nude, apparently raped and assaulted, seeking the help of Jeffrey while he’s on a date with Sandy. Filming of this scene caused problems with Wilmington, N.C. authorities as Lynch and Rossellini had told the locals they were going to be shooting a very difficult scene and probably wouldn’t want to watch. Instead, they reported people had turned the filming into a picnic. However, the scene is so difficult to watch, it had to be difficult to shoot and probably even more difficult to watch being film. So, it’s no surprise that many people had left the area by the time the scene was wrapped. Police later denied permission of filming in public areas of Wilmington.
The city had become the headquarters of De Laurentiis’ film company DeLaurentiss Entertainment Group which temporarily operated in the state in the mid to late 1980s as an independent movie studio. However, low box office returns of its movies caused the studio to fold in a few years.
This next part I must say includes a lot of spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen this movie, don’t read any further. The second half of the movie takes a different turn as Jeffrey learns that he’s gotten too much involved in a dangerous situation. After being discovered by Frank and his thugs, Jeffrey is beaten up by them at the end of a tense night when he defends Dorothy from Frank’s abuse. Beaten and left out in the middle of nowhere, Jeffrey walks home and recovers.
He then spends more time with Sandy. Jeffrey also discovers that the Yellow Man is actually a police detective who works with Sandy’s father. His name is Tom Gordon and after showing some photos to John, the older detective becomes careful around the corrupt cop, even intentionally going on a watch with him as he knows Gordon may be dangerous. Jeffrey attends a dance with Sandy in which it seems they’re going to get closer together. Sandy even tells of Jeffrey a dream of world of darkness without robins as she considers them a representative of love.
In the movie’s climax, Jeffrey discovers the Moustache Man is actually Frank and he outwits Frank to get the better of him where he is able to use a revolver to kill Frank. The movie ends with Tom recovered from his health issues and the Beaumonts and Williams meeting on an afternoon for a luncheon Jeffrey and Sandy and his Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay) see a robin perched outside the kitchen window with a bug in its beak. This goes back to the beginning with the bugs underneath the ground are fighting. Love has conquered the darkness in the world.
It’s a beautifully shot ending with Angelo Badalementi’s ethereal music that he would later bring to Twin Peaks and other Lynch productions. We then see a dream-like scene of a passing fire truck as a fireman waves happily. And then we see Dorothy happy and playing with Donnie in the sunlight, free of the darkness she was once in. She’s only portrayed in settings as in claustrophobic apartments and buildings or out at night.
On the surface, Lynch is just showing us a straight forward ending of goodness conquering evil. However, it might seem too good to be really true. Since Lynch is often focused on dreams and visions, which play a huge role in many of his movies and Twin Peaks. I’ve often thought that Jeffrey is actually in a coma from the beating he suffered. Or even he might have died and the final climax is a way for him to have a happy ending in his mind. It’s possible he thought the Yellow Man was a cop and the Mustache Man is Frank because it makes sense like someone you’ve met will pop up in a dream. And hearing Sandy’s dream of the robins evokes something in Jeffrey’s subconscious to see the robin as he observes Tom and John talking outside like they’re friends and his and Sandy’s mother talking in the living room like they’re friends. Everything now seems perfect.
Of course, it’s not a perfect world. And Lynch knows that as he leaves a lot of his movies open to interpretations at the end on what really happened. During the Reaganeighties, there was this push by the powers that be to overly romanticize the 1950s. And Lumberton seems like it can be one of those blue-collar towns where youth hung out at the malt shop and dances and mostly white people lived in nice neighborhoods where everyone could basically walk down the streets without any worry in the world. But there is crime and it’s happening behind closed doors. And there are corrupt people of authority who are abusing their powers. Frank uses of inhaling narcotics gas and his perversions seem to be what Americans at the time were told criminals were.
Produced on a budget of $6 million, the movie made about $8.6 million in North America. However, it polarized critics. Siskel called it one of the best movies of 1986 but Ebert dismissed it with a one-star review saying it has a misogynistic view of women, saying he felt bad for Rossellini in this movie. While Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised it, Paul Attansio of the Washington Post didn’t like it.
In 1987, Lynch would be nominated for Best Director for the movie, the movie’s only Oscar nomination. He had received a nomination for The Elephant Man in 1981 and would get his third nomination for Mulholland Drive in 2002. In 2019, the Academy gave him an honorary award.
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Zane Says 