Critics reviews

It's about how America is an idea, a surface, an indistinct image. It's about the simple ways we can corrupt that image for personal gain. It's perhaps Lynch's most trenchant and political film.

In the autumn and winter of 2014-15, an exhibition of David Lynch's early pieces, The Unified Field, was on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts... The exhibit featured sculpture, painting, and short films, all of which explored the same paradigms that are at the forefront of his films, specifically the looming and inescapable darkness in moments of light. Blue Velvet is the blackest expression of that darkness; it's the raincloud over a sunny town in Middle America.

Blue Velvet has weathered the passage of time... possibly better than any Hollywood movie of its decade. The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don't.

The mastery of Lynch's probing, drifting camera and the wide range of colors and moods in Frederick Elmes's photography help elevate the film's Freudian-tinged, quasi-existential crisis, which some Eagle Scout might have on an unexpected semi-hallucinatory trip home, into something truly wonderful. Blue Velvet is a film predicated on precise details, frequently flipping the accepted understanding of what should or should not be emphasized in a narrative film.

Three decades after its initial release, David Lynch's Blue Velvet has lost none of its power to derange, terrify, and exhilarate... Blue Velvet, much like Mulholland Drive (2001), its closest cognate, exists in a bizarre present never quite untethered from the past.

In Blue Velvet, quite the opposite is true: the infamous Hopper-Rossellini "Mommy!" sequence is doubly electric because of the cold stare of Lynch's mastershot, as is the later scene at Ben's apartment (a similarly bizarre angle on Ben's ethereal, tacky version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams"). Like an approximation of the Ludovico Technique, this image is never entirely subjective and never entirely objective...

Blue Velvet plays tricks on the memory, which may be one reason time has not tamed its hallucinatory strangeness. We remember it like a dream, some details lodged forever in the mind, some fading instantly. It leaves phrases ringing in the ears, their meanings mutating with each echo: Dorothy's whiplash imperatives ("Help me!" "Hit me!" "Hold me!") and Frank's incantatory "Now it's dark."

In illustrating a complete loss of bodily control as the ultimate expression of postmodern domesticity, the film offers the alternative of embodying the disorienting postmodern condition of corporeal homelessness... Thus the hilarious, terrifying and exhilarating experience of watching Blue Velvet is to experience of the postmodern elements of one's own body that were always already there to begin with.

Propelled by a blistering Dennis Hopper performance and a memorably surreal MacGuffin, this nightmarish ode to obsession and voyeurism would have made Hitchcock blush.

Booth presides over Blue Velvet like a storm cloud, foreboding even when he isn't showering bile and blood down upon those unfortunate enough to be in his radius. He's among Lynch's most potent embodiments of evil, yet he cannot be dismissed as a mere cackling lunatic. What disturbs most about Frank is that his most twisted impulses ultimately cannot be separated from the cultural trappings so deeply imbricated within them.

Lynch ushered in a new era of movies and TV programs that attempted a similar (or identical) rot-beneath-the-small-town dichotomy, like Picket Fences, American Beauty, The Truman Show, Hot Fuzz, The Mist, South Park, Dogville... among countless examples. None approach Lynch's film in terms of tone and control, the fusion of unlike halves mastered with a kind of honest-faced plainness that was, in some ways, the one truly unprecedented part of Lynch's personality.

Dark, violent, sexual, and reeking of 1963 suburbia, the film is at times a noir mystery and at others a violent thriller. Still dangerous twenty-five years later, the film is as gorgeous as it is classic.