Everything about Blue Velvet totally explained
Blue Velvet is a
1986 American
mystery film, that exhibits elements of
film noir and
surreal, written and directed by
David Lynch. The film features
Kyle MacLachlan,
Isabella Rossellini,
Dennis Hopper and
Laura Dern. The title
Blue Velvet is taken from the 1963
Bobby Vinton song of the same name. The film was strongly acclaimed by critics, although initially detested by some. It earned Lynch his second
Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
Blue Velvet is also noted for re-launching Dennis Hopper's career.
After the commercial and critical failure of Lynch's
Dune (1984), he made attempts at developing a more "personal story", somewhat characteristic of his surreal style he displayed in his debut 1977 film
Eraserhead. The screenplay of
Blue Velvet had been passed around multiple times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with many major studios declining it because of its strong sexual and violent content, most of which was considered
taboo in Hollywood motion pictures prior to its release. The independent studio De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, which was owned at the time by Italian film producer
Dino De Laurentiis agreed to finance and produce the film. Production on
Blue Velvet began in January of 1985.
The film tells the story of college student Jeffrey Beaumont, who discovers a severed human ear in a grass field behind a neighbourhood in his small, all-American town of
Lumberton, North Carolina. Jeffrey decides to investigate the case himself, with the assistance of Sandy Williams, a high school student and daughter of Lieutenant John Williams, town
sheriff. Sandy provides Jeffrey with information she learnt from her father which aids them in their investigation of the ear. Jeffrey is eventually drawn into a voyeuristic, crime-fueled underworld, home to
Frank Booth, a
sociopathic criminal, and leader of a gang involved in murder,
rape, kidnapping and
drug addiction. The film has become a
cult classic.
Synopsis
Jeffrey Beaumont (
Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college after his father (Jack Harvey) suffers a near fatal stroke. While walking home from the hospital, he cuts through a vacant lot and happens upon a severed ear and puts it in a paper bag. Jeffrey takes the ear to local investigator Detective John Williams (
George Dickerson). When he returns to the Williams house later to discuss the incident further, Jeffrey meets the detective’s daughter, Sandy (
Laura Dern). She tells him details about the ear case and a suspicious woman, Dorothy Vallens (
Isabella Rossellini). Increasingly curious, Jeffrey devises a plan to sneak into Dorothy's apartment that involves posing as a maintenance man. Dorothy becomes distracted when a man dressed in a yellow suit (Fred Pickler) knocks at her door, and Jeffrey steals Dorothy's spare key.
Jeffrey and Sandy attend Dorothy's nightclub show at the Slow Club. While Dorothy performs at the
nightclub, Jeffrey sneaks into her apartment to snoop. He hurriedly hides in a closet when she returns home. However, Dorothy, wielding a knife, finds him hiding and threatens to hurt him. When she realizes he's merely a curious boy, she assumes his intentions are sexual in nature, and is turned on by his voyeurism. She makes him undress at knifepoint, then
fellates him.
Frank Booth (
Dennis Hopper) interrupts their encounter with a knock on the door. Dorothy urges Jeffrey to return to the closet and he then witnesses Frank's bizarre sexual proclivities, which include
erotic asphyxiation,
fisting,
dry humping, and
sadomasochistic tendencies. Frank is an extremely foul-mouthed, violent
sociopath whose
orgasmic climax is a fit of both pleasure and rage. When Frank leaves, a saddened and desperate Dorothy tries to seduce Jeffrey again. She demands that he hit her but when he refuses she demands to be left alone. Jeffrey again observes Dorothy's nightclub show at the Slow Club, where she performs the song
Blue Velvet. Frank is also present at the nightclub. Later, in the car park, Jeffrey watches Frank and his cohorts drive away before going to Dorothy's apartment again. Jeffrey spends the next few days spying on Frank, and at one point sees him entering a building. Shortly afterwards, two men exit the building, a well-dressed man and someone Jeffrey recognizes as the Yellow Suited Man. He concludes the two men are criminals, as is Frank. He also visits Dorothy again, and this time she successfully seduces him. However, while they're making love she asks him to strike her. He refuses and she pressures him, becoming more emotional. Finally in blind rage he knocks her backwards, and is instantly horrified, but Dorothy, as a result of Frank's constant beatings, has come to take pleasure from it.
Afterwards, Frank catches Dorothy and Jeffrey together, and forces them both to accompany him to the house of Ben (
Dean Stockwell), a suave dandy and partner in crime. In a bizarre scene Ben mimes the singing of
Roy Orbison's "
In Dreams", sending Frank into maudlin sadness, then rage. He takes Jeffrey to a milling yard and savagely beats him to the overture of "In Dreams." Jeffrey wakes the next day and goes home, where he's overcome with guilt and despair. He decides to go to the police. At the police station, Jeffrey notices that Sandy's father's partner is Gordon — the Yellow Suited Man. Later at Sandy's home, her father is amazed by Jeffrey's story, but warns Jeffrey of the danger of the situation. Jeffrey and Sandy go to a dance party together, profess their newfound love and embrace. When they're tailed on their way home, Jeffrey is relieved to discover that it's only Sandy’s football-playing ex-boyfriend. A confrontation is avoided when they see a naked and distressed Dorothy waiting on Jeffrey’s front lawn. Barely conscious, Dorothy accidentally reveals that she slept with Jeffrey, causing Sandy to leave in tears, although she later forgives Jeffrey over the phone. From the hospital, Jeffrey tells Sandy that he must return to Dorothy's apartment and tells Sandy to send her father there immediately. When he arrives back at Dorothy’s apartment, he finds the crudely lobotomized Yellow Man and dead body of Dorothy’s husband, who is missing an ear. When he tries to leave, he sees The Well Dressed Man coming up the steps and recognizes him as Frank. Jeffrey talks to Detective Williams over the police radio but lies about his location inside the apartment. Frank enters the apartment and brags about hearing Jeffrey's location over his own police radio. When Frank fails to find Jeffrey in the bedroom, he returns to the lounge. Jeffrey shoots Frank with the Yellow Man's gun. Detective Williams arrives with Sandy in tow. Days later, we see Jeffrey and Sandy together, with their lives back to normal, and before the credits, Dorothy and her son playing happily in the park together.
Production history
Development
Blue Velvet is frequently regarded by Lynch as being his most personal film, thus he's admitted to certain autobiographical content in the film:
"Kyle is dressed like me. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture in Washington. We were in the woods all the time. I'd sorta had enough of the woods by the time I left, but still, lumber and lumberjacks, all this kinda thing, that's America to me like the picket fences and the roses in the opening shot. It's so burned in, that image, and it makes me feel so happy."
The actual story of the film originated from three ideas that crystallized in the filmmaker's mind over a period of time starting as early as 1973. The first idea was only "a feeling" and the title
Blue Velvet, Lynch told
Cineaste in 1987. The second idea was an image of a severed, human ear lying in a field. "I don't know why it had to be an ear. Except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body, a hole into something else...The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind so it felt perfect," Lynch remarked in an interview. The third idea was
Bobby Vinton's classic rendition of the song
Blue Velvet and "the mood that came with that song a mood, a time, and things that were of that time." Lynch and Roth pitched the script to
Warner Bros. Pictures, who showed interest in the project. Lynch eventually spent two years writing two drafts, which, he stated, were not very good. The problem with them, Lynch has said, was that "there was maybe all the unpleasantness in the film but nothing else. A lot wasn't there. And so it went away for a while."
Casting
The cast of
Blue Velvet included several, at the time, relatively unknown actors.
Isabella Rossellini had experienced some recognition prior to the film for her
Lancôme ads in the early 1980s.
Dennis Hopper was the biggest "name" in the film, having starred in
Easy Rider (1969) and
Apocalypse Now (1979), while
Kyle MacLachlan had played the central role in Lynch's
Dune (1984), a
science fiction epic based on
the novel of the same name, which had been a critical and commercial failure. The material of
Blue Velvet's script and the moderately low budget limited the number of big names that Lynch could attract. The part of
Frank Booth was originally offered to
Robert Loggia, then
Willem Dafoe and
Richard Bright, all of whom turned it down because of the character's vulgar and intense personality. Hopper confirmed this in the
Blue Velvet "making-of" documentary
The Mysteries of Love, produced in 2002 for the special edition of the film. Prior to his casting in this film, Hopper had experienced little success due to a phase of rehabilitation and thus had been featured in very few films. Conversely,
Blue Velvet successfully re-launched his career.
For the role of Dorothy Vallens, Lynch met Isabella Rossellini at a restaurant, and she accepted the role. Lynch only had one choice for the role of Jeffrey Beaumont:
Val Kilmer, who turned the role down, deeming the script he read as "pornography". Kilmer later said he'd have done the final version of the film; having become very fond of it. In an interview, Lynch said that he initially wanted
Molly Ringwald, then widely known as a "teen idol", to star as Sandy Williams; but Ringwald's mother objected to her starring in the film due to the graphic content, believing that it would tarnish her then-successful career in the film industry.
Screenplay and filming
After finishing
The Elephant Man in 1979, Lynch met producer
Richard Roth over coffee. Roth had read and enjoyed Lynch's
Ronnie Rocket script but didn't think it was something he wanted to produce. He asked Lynch if the filmmaker had any other scripts but the director only had ideas. "I told him I'd always wanted to sneak into a girl's room to watch her into the night and that, maybe, at one point or another, I'd see something that would be the clue to a murder mystery. Roth loved the idea and asked me to write a treatment. I went home and thought of the ear in the field." "After
Dune I was down so far that anything was up! So it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment."
The scene where Dorothy appears naked outside after being raped and beaten was inspired by a real-life experience Lynch had in his childhood when he and his brother saw a naked woman walking down a neighborhood street at night. The experience was so traumatic to the young Lynch at the time, it made him cry and he'd never forgotten it.
Principal photography of
Blue Velvet began on
February 10,
1986. The exterior scenes of Lumberton were filmed in
Wilmington,
North Carolina. He was contractually obligated to deliver a two-hour movie by De Laurentiis and cut many small subplots and character scenes. He also made cuts at the request of the
MPAA. For example, when Frank slaps Dorothy after the first rape scene, the audience was supposed to see Frank actually hitting her, instead it cuts away to Jeffrey in the closet, wincing at what he's just seen. This was removed to satisfy the MPAA concerns about violence. Lynch thought that the change only made the scene more disturbing. The filmmaking style of David Lynch has been written about extensively using descriptions like "ultraweird"," "dark", and "oddball". An author of a book on Lynch wrote, "One can't watch a Lynch film the way one watches a standard Hollywood film noir nor in the way that one watches most radical films."
Blue Velvet represents and establishes somewhat Lynch's famous "askew vision", and introduced several common elements of Lynch's work, some of which would later become trademarks of his films, including distorted characters, a polarized world, debilitating damage to the skull or brain and the dark underbelly of large cities, or in this case, small
towns. Red curtains also show up in key scenes, specifically in Dorothy's apartment, which have since become a trademark of Lynch films.
Blue Velvet has been compared to
Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho (1960), because of its stark treatment of psychotic evil, as well as having an established link with
Rear Window (1954), especially considering that Lynch has called
Rear Window one of his favorite films. The premise of both films is curiosity, an investigation that draws the lead characters into hidden, voyeuristic underworld of crime. The films thematic framework hearkens back to Poe, James and early
gothic fiction, as well as films such as
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and
The Night of the Hunter (1954) and to a lesser extent, the entire notion of film noir. Lynch has called
Blue Velvet a "film about things that are hidden - within a small city and within people". The resulting violence, she claims, can be read as symbolic of domestic violence within 'real' families. For instance, Frank's violent acts can be seen to reflect the different types of abuse within families, and the control he's over Dorothy might represent the hold an abusive husband has over his wife. Michael Atkinson reads Jeffrey as an innocent youth who is both horrified by the violence inflicted by Frank, but also tempted by it as the means of possessing Dorothy for himself. Michael Atkinson takes a
Freudian approach to the film, he claims that "Dorothy represents the sexual force of the mother [figure] because she's forbidden and because she becomes the object of the unhealthy, infantile impulses at work in Jeffrey's subconscious". The score makes direct quotations from Shostakovich's
15th Symphony, which Lynch had been listening to regularly while writing the screenplay.
Entertainment Weekly ranked
Blue Velvet's soundtrack on their list of the
100 Greatest Film Soundtracks, at the 100th position. Critic John Alexander wrote, "the haunting soundtrack accompanies the title credits, then weaves through the narrative, accentuating the noir mood of the film." Lynch worked with music composer
Angelo Badalamenti for the first time in this film and asked him to write a score that had to be “like Shostakovich, be very Russian, but make it the most beautiful thing but make it dark and a little bit scary.” Badalamenti's success with
Blue Velvet would later go on to contribute to all of Lynch's future full-length films.
Release and reaction
Performance
Blue Velvet premiered at the
Montréal World Film Festival in August 1986, and at the
Toronto Film Festival on
September 12,
1986, and a few days later in the
United States. It debuted commercially in both countries on
February 26,
1986 in 98 theatres across the United States.
Isabella Rossellini won an
Independent Spirit Award for the Best Female Lead in 1987.
Critical reception
The film received an extremely positive reaction from critics in the United States.
Janet Maslin, critic from
The New York Times, expressed her admiration for the film, and 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 concluded by saying that the movie, "is as fascinating as it's freakish. It confirms Mr. Lynch's stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley."
Looking back in his
Guardian/Observer review, critic Philip French felt that "The film is wearing well and has attained a classic status without becoming respectable or losing its sense of danger."
Blue Velvet holds a 90 percent "fresh" rating at
Rotten Tomatoes and holds a consistently high rating on the
Internet Movie Database.
Peter Travers, film critic for
Rolling Stone magazine, named
Blue Velvet the best film of the 1980s, and referred to the film as an "American masterpiece". Film critic
Gene Siskel included
Blue Velvet on his list of the best films of 1986, at #6.
Nevertheless,
Blue Velvet wasn't without its detractors. A general criticism from critics in the United States was the film's often vulgar approach to sexuality and violence that detracts the film from having a serious side. One of the film's most notable detractors,
Roger Ebert, noted film critic of the
Chicago Sun-Times, supported that view, although he praised Isabella Rossellini's performance as being "convincing and courageous." Ebert criticized how she was depicted in the film, even accusing David Lynch of
misogyny: "degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film." It has become one of the most significant, well-recognized films of its era, spawning countless imitations and parodies in media.
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 films themes and motifs.
Blue Velvet now appears in various critical assessments of all-time great films, as well as rankings as one of the greatest films of the 1980s. In a poll of two American critics ranking the "most outstanding films of the decade", Blue Velvet was placed third and fourth, behind Raging Bull (1980), E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) and the German film Wings of Desire (1987). In a 2002 survey of fifty UK film critics regarding the top ten films of the last twenty years, Blue Velvet came fifth. In a 1999 Entertainment Weekly magazine special ranking the greatest films of all time, Blue Velvet came in at thirty-seven. The film was ranked by the The Guardian in there list of the 100 Greatest Films. The film came fifth in Sight and Sound's Greatest Films in the past 25 years.
Total Film ranked the film one of the greatest of all time, in both a critics list and a public poll, in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
The
American Film Institute has awarded the film two distinguished honors in their lists: one on
100 Years... 100 Thrills in 2001, selecting cinema's most thrilling moments and ranked the film's villain Frank Booth, as one of the 50 greatest villains in
100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains in 2003.
Premiere magazine listed Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, as #54 on its list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time, calling him "the most monstrously funny creations in cinema history". The film was ranked #84 on
Bravo Television's four hour programme
100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004). It is frequently sampled musically.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Blue Velvet'.
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