Word: velvets
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...Blue Velvet is not the best film of the year--and it very well may be--it's certainly the most kinetic. The Harvard Square audience with which I saw the picture leaned closer to the screen as the movie unraveled, subject to some tacit gravitational pull. In this sense it's a genuine edge-of-your-seater, maybe even a beneath-the-seater, or shall we say a...crouching-in-the-aisler? Bring a pal. Bring a security blanket. Bring your goshdarn...
...film opens stunningly. A blue velvet curtain furls like a stage partition, and in the foreground credits emerge and fade. Bobbie Vinton's "Blue Velvet" wells up, and Lynch gives us a picket fence punctuated by fat red roses. We see random shots of Lumberton, the film's seemingly idyllic smalltown locale. Big-hearted firemen wave in slow-motion, houses and trees and citizens stand their ground. Then a middle-aged man has a seizure watering his lawn. The hose spurts above him with sexual abandon, and a mongrel dog lunges on the misdirected spray. Lynch follows this with...
...other. Vallens makes love to Jeffrey with carving knife in right hand, Jeffrey's genitalia in left. Booth rapes Vallens in a scene as sexually frank, brutal, and hard to bear as any contained in Bertolucci's great mid-1970s films. And murder victims' mouths are stuffed with blue velvet swatches, the chosen fetish of Booth, who covers Jeffrey's face with lipstick kisses moments before beating the absolute hell...
...disturbing stuff, to say the least. But Blue Velvet is a profoundly moral film. The audience's agony is to a greater degree Jeffrey's; he must resort to Booth's brand of sexual brutality to know not only Vallens, but himself. Lynch sees these rites of passage as horrific and scarifying, but inevitable, primal, essentially human. In a way Lynch is at war with repression; his heroes are superegos in a relentlessly allid world...
...backlash of this psychosexual tug-of-war is a devestating assault on social mores. The underside of Jeffrey and Sandy's courtship is sadomasochistic sexual initiation, and the institute of marriage is lampooned by intentionally overbearing organ music. Though Lynch seems deadset on satirizing the family, Blue Velvet exudes a romanticism for it akin to that of National Velvet. Perhaps he's saying you can regurgitate your cake and eat it too. Pardon...