Blue Velvet (Special Edition)

I hated it. I really did. I was deeply offended by this film when I first saw it. It disturbed the hell out of me, in all the wrong ways.Then I saw Lost Highway - a film that, it seems, everyone hated BUT me. I thought it was a masterpiece of psychological horror; a real mind-bender with an extroardinary interior perspective on homicidal madness.So I got to thinking: maybe I should give Blue Velvet another shot. Maybe I just wasn't ready for it 17 years ago. This time I would be prepared for Dennis Hopper's demented Frank Booth. I would be ready for the ear in the field. I would be ready for the unbelievably creepy and kinky scenes in Dorothy's apartment.What I saw was a different film - not because the film had changed, but because I had changed. A lot can happen in 17 years. A guy can grow up. A guy can sense for himself the underbelly of perversion beneath the white-picket facade of middle America. A guy can come to appreciate a wickedly funny and disturbing film about the hypocrisy of genteel exteriors. A film like Blue Velvet, in other words.David Lynch's great skill as a director is his ability to aim right for the hind-brain - the unreasoning, alligator brain where the primal self lives. His work tends to hit there first, and then ricochet to the reasoning self. That's why his work is so evocative. Critics and audiences alike struggled to "explain" Mulholland Drive, and while a sensible explanation for it is possible, it sort of misses the point. These films are waking dreams - or nightmares - that, like paintings or pieces of music, try to touch something deeper than the intellect. You can't read a Beethoven symphony like a novel, you can't play Edvard Munch's "The Scream" on a musical instrument, and you can't understand Blue Velvet in terms of ordinary realism. To do so is to run screaming from it in terror or disgust, as I initially did.But taken for what it is - a kind meditation on the darkness inside - you start to see the outragousness of this film in a different light. You start to see that the characters are not so much two-dimensional freaks as they are embodiments of primal forces we all have inside of us. In Frued's moth-eaten old psychoanylitic terms (really a poor way of approximating, but it's the best I can do), Frank Booth is the hedonistic Id. Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) is the pure and virtuous Superego, and Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLaughlin) is the ego - the waking part of us torn between the two.Of course, this is a Reductionist view, and it really does disservice to the artistic acheivement of Blue Velvet. To really appreciate it, one needs to set aside preconceptions and let the experience of it percolate through that gray matter.The DVD itself is well produced, with some nice extras (rare on Lynch DVDs), and a beautiful film transfer that really showcases Frederick Elmes' cinematography.If you're a David Lynch fan, you don't need convincing. If you're where I was 17 years ago, give it another shot. You might just like it. A lot.

This is a great film, not to everyone's taste but that's ok, it's one of my favorites.

Lynch fills out the world of Blue Velvet so lovingly, and with such care and imagination, and attention to detail (and to the odd, essential quirks of life), that, surreal as it is, this world seems wholly authentic to us. Because Lynch is not afraid to "dream' his movies, he fills his world with the kind of "abritrary' touches that make up real life. And his mise en scene here, far from being merely the backdrop to his "plot," is actually central to it (and even takes precedence over it). The one grows organically out of the other, in fact, for, as in all true myths (and in dreams also), the two are inseparable. Because in life, there is no plot, obviously (save that written by God, or Chance), only an endless, infinite and unimaginably intricate unfolding of scenes, acts, events, encounters, gestures, words, sounds, smells. In a word--phenomena, endlessly spilling out and colliding and spinning off and resounding with all the crazy random beauty of pollen in the wind. There may be patterns in such chaos, but if so, they are infinite, varied, and eternally overlapping, interacting. And so the patterns we choose to isolate are simply that: their meanings is merely the meaning we have chosen to impose upon the chaos. For Lynch, the mystery of the world is inseparable from the mystery of us--the mystery of perceiving, which is the greatest mystery of them all. Something is out there, Lynch seems to be saying, because something is making us perceive. It's up to us, then, to seek it out, and even if we know we can never hope to understand it, we can at least try. What else are we here for? The alternative is simply too dull, too dispiriting, to entertain--that's there's nothing out there, nothing hidden or inexplicable, and that what we think is all there is. (The insanity of solipcism is the only thing that's unthinkable in Lynch's world.) To Lynch, the options are plain--either we know it all, and the answers are just what we choose to invent, in which case there's no sense in asking questions at all. Or--we know nothing, and no answers are possible, so all there is for us to do is ask the most exciting, enchanting, impossibly impertinent questions we can dream up. To Lynch, the world is a strange world, not because we do not understand it, but because that's the way it is--it's nothing but strangeness, that's what makes it the world (such stuff as dreams are made of). Since, for Lynch, there is nothing stranger than "normality," so, by the same token, the strange is the only "normal" thing there is. And seeing as we have made the world thus, by perceiving it, interpreting and assembling it, piece by piece, with our own thoughts and senses, then we must be mysteries, too.With Blue Velvet, Lynch succeeds in perhaps the highest single accomplishment art can aspire to (at a human level, anyway): he shows us that, if reality is a dream and dream reality, then we, as both the dreamers and the dream, are the ultimate unfathomables: we are strangers to ourselves.see [....]