“Blue Velvet”

Movie Review

David Lynch wrote and directed the 1986 American neo-noir mystery-thriller film Blue Velvet. The movie, which stars Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and Laura Dern and is based on the 1951 song of the same name, combines psychological horror and film noir. The story revolves around a young college student who finds a severed human ear in a field while traveling home to see his sick father. The ear then leads him into a sexual involvement with a disturbed lounge singer and the discovery of a big criminal plot.

The film's plot takes place as college student Jeffrey Beaumont visits Lumberton, North Carolina, where he grew up after his father Tom suffers an almost deadly attack due to an unspecified medical issue. The fact that Jeffrey's father is strapped to a bed and wearing some kind of restraint suggests a seizure disease. When returning from the hospital, Jeffrey takes a shortcut through an empty lot where he finds a severed human ear. He brings the object to police investigator John Williams. Williams' daughter Sandy tells Jeffrey that Dorothy Vallens, a lounge singer, is somehow connected to the ear. Jeffrey, who enters her flat under the guise of a bug exterminator, is intrigued. He snatches a spare key as she is preoccupied with the "Yellow Man," a man Jeffrey refers to as while wearing a bright yellow Sport coat.

After watching Dorothy perform "Blue Velvet" in a nightclub, Jeffrey and Sandy leave early so that Jeffrey can break into Dorothy's apartment. As Dorothy hears Jeffrey coming home, she strips off and finds him hiding in a closet, where she holds him at knifepoint until he takes off his clothes. She almost kills Jeffrey, but when Frank Booth, a violently psychotic mobster and drug boss, shows up and interrupts them, he flees to the closet. Next, while consuming narcotic gas from a canister and alternating between weeping fits and intense wrath, Frank begins to beat and rape Dorothy. Following Frank's departure, Jeffrey slips away to find solace with Sandy.

Jeffrey believes Frank cut off Don's ear to terrify Dorothy into submission. Jeffrey has reason to believe Frank kidnapped Don and Donnie, Dorothy's husband and son, to compel her into sex slavery. Jeffrey engages in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with Sandy while still seeing her, and Dorothy encourages him to attack her. Later, Jeffrey witnesses Frank selling narcotics and meeting with the Yellow Man after seeing him attend Dorothy's performance. The Yellow Man is next seen by Jeffrey having a meeting with a "well-dressed man."

As Frank sees Jeffrey leaving Dorothy's apartment, he kidnaps the two and brings them to Ben's hideout, where a gang member named Ben is keeping Don and Donnie hostage. Frank lets Dorothy visit her family and makes Jeffrey watch Ben lip-synch a spontaneous version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" till it makes him cry. He then drives Jeffrey and Dorothy at a high rate of speed to a sawmill yard where he makes another attempt to sexually assault Dorothy. A furious Frank and his group drag him out of the car after Jeffrey steps in and strikes him in the face. Frank viciously kisses Jeffrey while listening to the recording of "In Dreams," coating him with red lipstick as well, and then brutally beats him until he is unconscious as Dorothy begs Frank to stop. The following morning, Jeffrey wakes up injured and beaten.

As Jeffrey visits the police station, he learns that Tom Gordon, Detective Williams' colleague, is the Yellow Man—a man who has been killing rival drug traffickers and stealing drugs from the evidence room that have been seized to give to Frank for sale. He and Sandy confess their love for one another at a party, and they are then trailed by a car they believe to be Frank's. Sandy discovers the driver is her ex-boyfriend Mike as they get closer to Jeffrey's house. Dorothy shows up on Jeffrey's porch naked, battered, and bewildered after Mike threatens to attack Jeffrey for stealing his girlfriend. Mike retreats as Sandy and Jeffrey take Dorothy to Sandy's house to call for help.

Sandy gets upset and smacks Jeffrey for cheating on her after Dorothy refers to him as "my secret boyfriend". After Detective Williams leads a police raid on Frank's headquarters, murdering his men and shattering his criminal empire, Jeffrey asks Sandy to tell her father everything. When Jeffrey arrives alone to Dorothy's apartment, he finds the Yellow Man fatally wounded and Dorothy's husband dead. The "Well-Dressed Guy" enters the apartment as Jeffrey is leaving and chases him back inside after spotting him on a staircase. In order to hide in a closet after understanding that the "Well Dressed Man" is actually Frank Booth, Jeffrey uses the Yellow Man's walkie-talkie to claim to be in the bedroom. Just before Sandy and Detective Williams show up to assist, Jeffrey ambushes Frank as he comes and shoots him dead with the Yellow Man's weapon. Dorothy is reunited with her son, and Jeffrey and Sandy resume their romance.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the screenplay for Blue Velvet was rejected by a number of big studios because of its intensely sexual and violent material. Lynch attempted to create a more "personal story" after the failure of his 1984 film Dune, which was somewhat reminiscent of the surrealist approach Lynch had used in his 1977 first film Eraserhead. Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian film producer, decided to finance and produce the movie through his independent De Laurentiis Entertainment business.

Initial reviews of Blue Velvet were mixed, with many arguing that its sexual element didn't really advance the art. Nonetheless, Lynch received a second nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director for the movie, which also won the National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Picture and Best Director for the year. It arrived to become cult-like. It was hailed for rejuvenating Hopper's career as an example of a filmmaker casting unconventionally, and for giving Rossellini a dramatic outlet beyond her prior work as a fashion model and a cosmetics spokesperson. Since then, the movie has undergone a critical evaluation and is now regarded as one of David Lynch's best works and one of the best movies of the 1980s. It has been listed as one of the best American films ever in several publications. The American Cinema Institute named it one of the best mysteries of all time in 2008.

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