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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Blue Velvet

All Acting Regiment

18:17 / 04.12.05

There's already a thread on this, but it's more of a "how to watch it" thread, so I thought we could have a thread for people who have seen it and want to talk about it to do so.

To start off- and feel free to take this anywhere within the remit- do you feel that the other characters are dwarfed in any way by Hopper, and that this makes the film less successful? This is a view I've heard expressed, and though I don't really agree with it (except in that I think he's supposded to dwarf them, in a way), it's quite an interesting question.

Over to you.

18:25 / 04.12.05

Hopper is certainly overwhelming in the film. I think he's very entertaining and disturbing, completely owning every scene he's in, but that's what a really good performer in a really good role should do. The parts without Hopper are still successful, I love the stuff with Jeffery and Sandy, most notably the dance in the basement before he goes off to get Frank.

One of the things I'd really like to see discussed about the film is how much of it is supposed to be an ironic pastiche. Like, is the 50s style dialogue making fun of these people or a genuine expression of emotion. Considering Lynch's other work, I think it's genuine, but I was at a screening a couple of years ago and people were hysterically laughing at most of the stuff with Sandy.

19:54 / 04.12.05

I think its one of the most disturbing films I have seen.

Frank/Dennis Hopper is overwhelming and unsettling, but everything else is incredibly ambiguous. I particularly like the way Jeffry is the closest thing the film has to a hero who the viewer can identify with, but then as you watch the film, it becomes harder to distinguish his character from the worst parts of Frank.

There's a point halfway through the film, when Frank has taken Jeffry for a ride to see Dean Stockwell, he turns round to Jeffry and says 'You're like me'. That just about sums it up for me. By the end of the film you're not really sure how to feel about any of the characters.

I think this is part of the whole fifties pastiche too. The whole film probes these images and tropes of small town America, from the opening sequence where the camera pans down below the lawns and white picket fences to all the insects crawling around over each other, to the closing shot of an incredibly fake looking robin (as a point of comparison, have a look at the very real looking robin at the start of the music for Twin Peaks - Lynch could have shot a realistic looking bird if he'd wanted one).

I particularly like that last shot actually, and I think it shows exactly how the film is supposed to be 'ironic', although perhaps that's the wrong word. The happy ending is totally artificial, like the bird. You can't look at Jeffry in the same way as you did at the beginning. And this goes back across the whole film, all the cheesy dialogue between Jeffry and Sandy, when the whole time he's becoming more and more obsessed with Isabella Rosselini. I think David Lynch is trying to show how fake the whole appearance of innocence and naivety is, trying to really focus us on what's beneath it.

04:05 / 05.12.05

I rememeber having read somewhere - probably in the WRAPPED IN PLASTIC Lynch fan magazine - that there are 2 slightly different versions to the final scene. in one it fades to black with Dorothy smiling while she hugs her son. the other fades a little bit later and we see her happy expression turning into worried.

the fact that we never get to see the kid's face makes it even more disturbing [and wasn't there something about Frank doing some damage do the kid? or was she talking about her husband?].

uncle Lynch once said the movie was "THE HARDY BOYS go to Hell" and I love that aspect of it; not only the curruption sandwich with fake bread of the structure in terms of light/darkness, but how Kyle's character "enters" a darker version of the apparently peaceful town. everybody hides a secret and all that.

this journey is almost otherworldly and it was always there, it just took an ear dumped on a yard to kickstart that bizarre, almost TWILIGHT ZONE-like, dive. Laura Dern hitting the car horn to warn him about someone arriving at Dorothy's apartment... she was always his anchor to the "day/good" version of the town and her reality away from all the madness, violence, decadence.

Hopper's Frank was so powerful and owned most of the movie but BV woudn't be what it was without all the other animals in that bizarre small jungle. take Stockwell and Nance's characters for instance, the fat ladies in the gang etc. and the movie would never work without Maclachlan "goodie-2-shoes amazed, but curious, boy" aura to serve as a faint sparkle in the darkness Frank inhabitted...

06:08 / 05.12.05

McClachlan's character was kinda just an envoy for Sandy's speculation/curiosity, though, innit?
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure nothing is overtly detailed about anything being done to the kid, just his dad getting his ear off (as we see, ear first and then the head it used to be attached to, later), and then the symbolic but still totally invasive dress mutilation. That's, I'm pretty sure, all the cutting in the movie, at least. There's enough rape and assault to go 'round, otherwise.
And the evilest fucker in the picture just walks away. Clean away, right out of the movie. Lovely.
Is it true that, when Frank's getting shot at the end, there's a frame or three of our protagonist's face replacing Dennis Hopper's? I heard that a few times, but I've not bothered to freeze-frame it myself. It's Lynch, who digitally neutered an actress and did the flare-to-obscure-gore thing in 'Wild at Heart', so it's plausible if not true. Wouldn't tack on any new layers of subtext, but does strengthen some inferences.

All Acting Regiment

07:00 / 05.12.05

I think one of the strongest moments in the film is when the boy walks into the police station- and sees mustard jacket man right there. We've seen light, we've seen darkness- now suddenly darkness in what is kind of the stronghold of light.

The Return Of Rothkoid

02:11 / 06.12.05

Personally, I like the way that Jeffrey starts taking on parts of Frank's life. It ultimately leads him to the satisfaction (well...) of the end of the film, but sometimes it's like it's a taint he can't remove: I'm thinking of being in bed with Dorothy, say.

I think it's entirely intentional that we're meant to alternate between thinking the romantic actions between McLachlan & Dern are sweet, and thinking they're funny or lame - it's set somewhere where nothing's certain, after all.

11:10 / 06.12.05

I love this film, I can't really add any more to what has been said, but yeah I think it is mostly about perceptions of society and innocence conflicting with human nature.

For me, Frank Booth, while pivotal doesn't overshadow the film, I think the focus is always firmly set with Jeffrey in his journey.

Something which came up in an interview (can't remember which DVD maybe "Out of the Blue" or "Easy Rider"?) was where Hopper said he thought he may have damaged (paraphrasing here) Lynch's vision of the film a bit by suggesting that Frank inhale amyl nitrate (poppers) instead of Helium, as Lynch had originally intended.

Indeed, how much more of an *interesting* character would that have made him?

All Acting Regiment

14:40 / 06.12.05

If it'd been helium, he would have a had a high voice- prseumably linking him to a) the son of Rosselini and b) the boyish parts of Jeffrey's character.

18:07 / 06.12.05

I was thinking more along the lines, that Booth was an even more psychotic character because he wasn't breathing amyl nitrates to get high, he was just breathing helium, then acting all crazy with a Donald Duck voice.
Perhaps even more creepy.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:23 / 07.12.05

The thing I find funny about Blue Velvet (which I absolutely adore as a movie) is that when it came out, remember everyone was saying this was Lynch doing something more "normal", as if he was saying goodbye to his "weirdness" and making "proper films". Aside from the fact that it's an incredibly disturbing piece of film in itself, career-wise it also marks the stepping-off point from which came Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive- hardly the most "normal" things I've ever seen.

I love the fact that this nasty, fucked-up world is right there beneath the surface- as someone said upthread, it always was, and all it takes is that ear for Jeffrey's wide-eyed inocence and enthusiasm to lead him to a very bad place. A place that's always existed, and, as proved by the mustard-jacket guy in the cop-shop, is more entwined with the world everyone thinks they know than is comfortable... It's not even that hard a place to find... all Jeffrey (or anyone) has to do is stop ignoring it, or stop pretending it doesn't exist.

I get that feeling most in the "a ride? Hell, that's a good idea!" sequence. Jeffrey's not actually all that far from home, but for all that matters, he could be on another planet. All the rules have changed, and NOTHING is safe anymore.

God, I love Lynch.

19:51 / 07.12.05

That "[a] ride? That's a..." quote/paraphrase pretty much sums up my intuitions as to what Lynch's films are all about. Let's go for a ride. Yay. And they are.
I think 'Blue Velvet' is where Lynch begins to add a layer of parodic normality to (a) appease the people who wanted/needed a normality and (b) completely mock the notion of that normality as, honestly, which seems more real, Sandy-verse or Frank World? Or, is real reality the ontic burn of the experiential friction as the two spheres interact?
From this comes the perspective drives or 'Lost Highway' and 'Mulholland Drive' as well as the variations presented in 'Twin Peaks' as series and as film. That method of telling the story - again - with a different set of, possibly contradictory, elements, metaphors, and allusions... that's a very Lynchian thing, isn't it? Other than 'Shoujo Kakumei Utena' and it's 'Adolescence Apocalypse' are there that many works handled in that way from one one primary person/entity? I'd almost included the 'Naked Lunch' film adaptation, but one is Burroughs' and one Cronenberg's. Who does the same, twice, differently, in this manner? Or, is it simply a Lynchian trait?
Screening 'Mulholland Drive' for a group of friends in Beverly Hills once, I was kinda struck when someone asserted that it was "a perfectly literal film" and people started agreeing with him.