Having begun his career as a pure avant gardist with
challenging yet emotionally rich films such as The Grandmother and Eraserhead,
David Lynch took an unexpected turn into the mainstream when he made the
historical melodrama The Elephant Man
and the space opera Dune. With his
next feature, Lynch found the perfect balance between his most outré ideas and
the more traditional storytelling that would make him America’s most popular surrealist.
Nevertheless, Blue Velvet still split
audiences, with some finding his S&M noir deeply compelling while others
finding its extreme scenes of sexual sadism repelling.
As is usually the case with Lynch’s films, plot is secondary
to style, world-building, and unfiltered emotion, but Blue Velvet is one of his more traditionally sensible stories
despite odd elements such as the severed ear that draws clean cut college boy
Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) into the seedy underworld in which repulsive
thug Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) kidnaps the husband and child of nightclub
singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) as leverage for forcing her into humiliating and violent sex acts.
More than 30 years later, Blue Velvet remains edgy viewing, particularly in an era in which
it’s especially hard to watch cruelty towards women, yet Lynch’s film also
remains beautifully realized, wholly original despite its genre gestures, and a
fairly profound examination of all men’s capacity for evil. As much of a
triumph as Blue Velvet is for David
Lynch the writer/director/sound designer, it is also a triumph for its cast. No
actor and actress are better at radiating effervescent wholesomeness
while still being capable of sidling up to the corrupt patches where beetles crawl as
Kyle Maclachlan and Laura Dern are… which is what makes them our best living
actor and actress as far as I’m concerned. No one is better at playing unhinged
evil than Dennis Hopper, and Isabella Rossellini is best of all as she walks the shaky line between victim and tentative abuser.
The relationship between David Lynch and the Criterion
Collection that began with the release of Eraserhead
five years ago was great news considering how so many of Lynch’s films had yet
to be released on Blu-ray. Since several of them are still in hi-def limbo
(specifically The Elephant Man, The Straight Story, and INLAND EMPIRE), a lot of fans (such as myself) were
disappointed to see that Blue Velvet
was next on Criterion’s Lynch list since there has already been a very nice
blu-ray edition of this film available via MGM since 2011. Many wondered how
much better the Criterion edition could be. Surprisingly, Criterion’s 4K,
Lynch-approved improvements are pretty dramatic, with greater clarity, depth, and
detail and more natural colors. While the MGM edition had several substantial
bonus features that seemed entirely sufficient in 2011 (most notably the hour
of deleted scenes and the feature-lengthy documentary Mysteries of Love—both ported over to the 2019 edition), Criterion still
manages to add some major new supplements. There’s “Blue Velvet” Revisited, a mesmerizingly edited compilation of production
stills and footage (and some audio) from the film’s 1985 production, a new making-of
doc with a main focus on props and Wilmington, NC, locations and cast, an excerpt
of Lynch reading about Blue Velvet from
his autobiography Room to Dream, and an
interview with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who may be Lynch’s most important
behind-the-scenes collaborator. I guess we needed a new edition of Blue Velvet after all.
