A P.I. walks down a dark, smoky alley, taking a shortcut on the way to a seedy speakeasy. As he walks down, raindrops from this morning’s monsoon fall to the black cobblestone path. The only light coming from the P.I.’s $10 cigarette which he sparks under his ruffled fedora. He takes one inhale, releases it from his scarred and crusted lips and for one brief second we see his face, he’s not some older gentleman veteran of WW2, he’s not some dismissed police officer who lost his career for assaulting a suspect. He’s just a kid who walked through a field one day and found a severed ear.
I’m a massive fan of David Lynch, when he posted a video a few days ago teasing a new project, that easily brightened my whole day. So, on a David-Lynch-Fever, I scoured the streaming services for a film I haven’t seen, and voila! With just 33 hours remaining on Amazon Prime, I pressed play on ‘Blue Velvet’, Lynch’s response to the Noir film genre. This film isn’t an experimental piece like ‘Mulholland Drive’ or ‘Inland Empire’, it’s one of the more linear of the director’s filmography, and like his other films, ‘Velvet’ is a masterpiece.
Jeffrey Beaumont is walking back home from the hospital one day when he sees a severed ear in the grass. After reporting it to the police, an officer’s daughter lets slip whose ear it is: a lounge singer by the name of Dorothy Vallens. Through morbid curiosity, Jeffrey begins his own investigation, blurring his own lines of morality, becoming neither good nor evil, not hero nor villain, but thrusting himself into the deep grey spot with no relief. As he finds more and more, he gets involved with a criminal gang and its eccentric leader and becomes an obsession to Ms Vallens.
Kyle McLaughlan plays Jeffrey, he stays quiet and anxious in most tense scenes which helps blur his role as the protagonist. In one scene, he hides in Vallen’s wardrobe as the villain abuses her, and to me, this was the definitive scene for Jeffrey. If anyone else played Jeffrey afraid, he’d still qualify as a hero, any calmer, a villain, but McLaughlan perfectly distorts Jeffrey into both and neither at the same time. McLaughlan makes Jeffrey’s balance between solving the case so the criminals are arrested and taking advantage of the situation so inconsistent, he feels more “noirish” than Humphrey Bogart. Laura Dern plays Sandy Williams, the detective’s daughter who tells Jeffrey about Vallens and helps him with the investigation. Dern’s best scene in the film is easily towards the end where she hears Vallen’s insane ramblings. Dern’s look of sheer terror and disgust was incredible, she’s spent most of the film as such a sweetheart but to see her hurt like that was heartbreaking (but then, that is what Lynch is best at). Isabella Rosselini plays Dorothy Vallens in such a frightening manner, Rosselini easily portrays a life of mistreatment and sexual abuse without having barely any backstory. You feel terrible, want to help her, but you get the sinking feeling that she’s beyond help. Rosselini makes Vallens the perfect victim.
Lastly, Dennis Hopper plays Frank Booth, a criminal leader with a past with Vallens. Every scene with Hopper is his best scene, he’s completely ridiculous! His constant obscenities, his acting as a child, it’s hilarious but everyone else in the film is so deranged, you can hardly correct it. Correcting Booth as a character means you’d have to correct Vallens, which is definitively impossible.
Mason’s Top 3 Reasons To Watch ‘Blue Velvet’
- A mystery film where you see neither the beginning nor end to the investigation. We just get the middle, we get no climax, no resolution, just like in real life.
- A direction which makes the film a better contraceptive than condoms. It can be darkly sexual and seductive sometimes, but it nicely portrays a message along the lines of “sex is evil”
- Character behaviour so bizarre, there are endless interpretations of how the real story went. A mole in the police department? An overly-elaborate sexual fantasy? Maybe Jeffrey and Vallens have met before?
Mason Horsley is a graduate of UOW with a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts, majoring in Creative Writing and minoring in Theatre. He hopes to write and direct a feature film and has been working on screenplays since he was 17. He writes film reviews for the Tertangala and works on his latest project ‘The Last Film’ while working a full-time job at a fish market. Mason despises reviewing films he dislikes and because of this, every review he writes acts as a recommendation.
Image Credit: IMDb