Blue Velvet: The dark underbelly of the American Dream

For the second day running, a birthday present from my niece gave me the opportunity to catch up on an iconic film that I’ve never quite got around to watching. In this case, David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet – an “adult fairytale”, according to the BFI.

Why have I not seen it before? Largely, I think, because I’d wondered if I’d find it ‘too much’, such is its reputation and also, because inevitably, I’d seen fleeting clips of Dennis Hopper inhaling something that turns his character more psychotic and dangerous than ever.

Writer and director Lynch opens the film with surreal scenes of a sugar-sweet, small-town America; an immaculate white picket fence, red roses and a blue sky – redolent of the Stars and Stripes – and a fire truck moving down a street in slo-mo, with a fireman on the back waving directly toward the camera, a dalmatian sitting alongside him. Then a middle-aged man watering his lawn, while his wife inside the house watches a crime mystery on the TV.

So far, so good. But then the gardener has an accident with his hose (the implement seems almost to turn on him) and everything is spun on its head, as the film dives beneath the carefully manicured grass to find a churning mass of insects in the dark below.

The gardener is Tom Beaumont. Hospitalised, he’s visited by his son, Jeffrey, who has returned from college because of the accident. But on the way home after his visit, Jeffrey discovers a human ear in a field, which he takes to the police station, to a Detective John Williams, who’s also a family neighbour.

Later, after he’s called on Williams at home to see if there is any news, Sandy, the policeman’s daughter, stops him in the street to say she’s overheard that the ear somehow relates to a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens. Fascinated by the idea of a mystery, Jeffrey decides to investigate – and is drawn into the word of psychopathic gangster and drug dealer Frank Booth.

So the film moves from surrealism into noir. But this is no conventional noir. The hero, for instance, in no hard-boiled, cynical character – à la Bogart in The Big Sleep – but a boyish ingenu.

Likewise, neither the ‘good girl’ (Sandy; blonde) nor the ‘femme fatale’ (Dorothy; dark haired) fit simply into those cinematic cliches. Both are more complex.

And that’s before we get to Frank (left, with Dorothy), with all the suggestions that at least an element of his ultra-violence is down to self-loathing: is he straight, gay or bi?

It’s never a bigger question than in an extraordinary scene when Frank and his thugs have dragged Jeffrey and Dorothy to the den of fellow drug dealer Ben. There, the camp, made-up ‘Suave’ Ben lip-synchs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, right at Frank, as though in an act of seduction, moving him to tears of rage or something else.

Right after, before beating Jeffrey, Frank smears the young man’s lips with lipstick and savagely kisses him.

Is this about toxic masculinity and the pressures to conform to heteronormative stereotypes? It’s certainly about power relationships; Frank’s exercise of power over everyone in his orbit – except Ben, who seems to have the upper hand there – and Dorothy’s over Jeffery are both crucial, but there is also the question of who exercises the power in the relationship between Sandy and Jeffrey.

There are so many things to take in here. Sandy, in her blonde innocence, nods back to 1978’s Grease and the leading character of the same name. The naming of the ‘femme fatale’ begs the question: is Frank (who is obsessed with her) really a ‘friend of Dorothy’?

Then there’s the contrast between the darkness and violence of the film and the two big musical themes – Bobby Vinton’s cover of 1950 song Blue Velvet by Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris, and Orbison’s 1963 In Dreams – as if they hark back nostalgically to a gentler time and their use by Lynch is a subversion of that ‘gentler time’ – a time that was suggested by the opening shots.

It was far from universally acclaimed when it came out, but Lynch’s film has more than stood the test of time and well deserves its status as a classic.

The central cast is excellent. Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy is strong and vulnerable at the same time. Kyle MacLachlan is suitably innocent as Jeffrey, finding himself out of his depth when drawn toward a stranger world than he had previously imagined possible. Laura Dern makes Sandy both plausibly girlish, yet also with a tough core.

But it’s Hopper who dominates the film as Frank, in a performance that is absolutely riveting; even when you want to flinch and look away, you cannot.

The supporting cast are largely sketches – with one exception. Dean Stockwell’s Ben (left) – albeit a one-scene turn – is simply exceptional.

Lynch wraps it up with a ‘happily ever after’ finale, which returns us to the surreal openings, but with the addition of an animatronic robin, which reiterates the message that all this is really just artifice and wishful thinking. Indeed, the film it culminates with a repeat of those very first sequences.

But by now, we are well aware of the dark underbelly of such an American Dream. Brilliant.

• Femme is a 2023 film takes a deeper dive into the theme of sexuality-driven self loathing.