It's a Disturbing Life

Blue Velvet

Directed by David Lynch

At the Harvard Square Theater

DAVID LYNCH'S FILMS leave you dishrag limp and beyond commentary. Blue Velvet, his new movie, a "mystery thriller" analogous to Alfred Hitchcock's "family drama" Psycho, should come with seatbelts, or restraining harnesses, whatever it takes to keep the overwhelmed viewer from being sucked into all the utter energy on the screen.

If 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 mom.

The 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 a close-up of insects teeming in the rich grass. He sticks your nose down into the nest, and the theater fills with brittle bug noises.

Switch to the hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who has just found a human ear in a field. He takes it to the Lumberton police and carries out a personal investigation that leads him to Sandy Williams, the chief's daughter (Laura Dern), Dorothy Vallens, a masochistic torch singer (Isabella Rossellini) and Frank Booth, a perverted drug dealer (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey discovers that Vallens' son and husband have been kidnapped by Booth, and his effort to intervene opens realms of violence and sexuality he never knew possible.

LYNCH SEES sex and violence as necessarily linked; to know one is to know the 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 out of him.

It's 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.

The 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.

Kyle MacLachlan is outstanding as Jeffrey. With his paperboy face and barely noticeable earring, he meets and hurdles each awful rite of passage with marked confidence. Laura Dern makes for terrific chemistry with MacLachlan; she slow dances and sips Heineken like a runner-up Homecoming Queen and proclaims with detached conviction, "It's a strange world." Isabella Rossellini is all lips and eyes as the tortured chanteuse. "Hit me, hit me," that S&M cliche, has resonance and poignancy in the context of her performance. Dennis Hopper is to-the-core nasty as the vile drug-killer; he was better in Apocalypse, Now, but it's hard to imagine any actor carrying this role off as well, or with more energy. Brad Dourif, babbling Billy Bibbit of Cuckoo's Nest fame, has a cameo, looking like John Cougar on acid. And Dean Stockwell lipsyncs his way to moviedom history as the super-suave Ben.

EROTIC, BRUTAL, horrifying, and singularly comic, Blue Velvet marks an awesome return to form for director Lynch. In the course of his relatively brief career he has given us Eraserhead, an unsung underground classic, The Elephant Man, a bittersweet beauty-and-the-beast parable, and Dune, a $40 million dollar turtlewaxed Edsel. In Blue Velvet Lynch demonstrates with grace and the sheer momentum of genius that he is our most valuable, audacious and unabashed cinematic exorcist. He takes fear, his and ours, and smears it on the big screen. His canvas is dazzling, replete with hyperorganic imagery and an almost primal compulsion to confront man's inner self. And at 40 years young, as of last January, he promises lots of strange and wonderful Lynch landscapes to come.