Blue Velvet (1986)

Director: David Lynch

Pretty riveting, dark neo-noir type film which is the most accessible film I've seen from noted surrealist David Lynch.

I recall watching this one once before, about 20 years ago, though I had zero recollection of the second half of the movie. This means that I either fell asleep, or that I left the friend's house where we were watching it before it was over. Whatever the case, I'm happy that I finally went back to it.

The movie follows Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a young man who returns to his cozy American town from college after his father is hospitalized after falling ill. While walking in a field near his neighborhood, Jeffrey makes the grisly discovery of a human ear lying on the ground. He takes the ear to the police, but can't seem to leave it at that. With the help of a police detective's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), he employs some amateur sleuthing techniques to dig deeper into the mystery. Before long, he is wrapped up with the sultry lounge singer Dorothy (Isabella Rosalini) and a maniac criminal, Frank (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey is inexorably pulled into a dark, underground criminal world filled with drugs, violence, and depravity of a level that belies the otherwise peaceful-seeming town.

Blue Velvet is still pretty hypnotic, even after nearly 35 years, and certain elements almost seem like a practice run for some of what we would see in the original Twin Peaks  TV show 4 years later. The most obvious one is the notion of dark, twisted forces lurking beneath the tranquil, All-American, white picket fence veneer of the setting. You have the attractive young couple in Jeffrey and Sandy, who seem to be falling in love, and we see more than a few nods to the idealist view of relationship from American suburbia from the 1950s and early '60s. It doesn't take long, though, before things get weird. Like, really weird. No sooner does Jeffrey sneak into the lounge singer Dorothy's house for some intel on a possible murder than he finds himself in a closet, peeping on her undressing, then seeing her brutally victimized by the unhinged, sexually warped madman, Frank. This dizzying dichotomy of light and dark has long been a part of David Lynch's works, and Blue Velvet was his earliest and probably still his most accessible example of it.

Then there are the technical merits of Blue Velvet. The movie just looks so good. And I don't mean to say that it's easy or always pleasing to watch. It's not. There are just too many disturbing and violent behaviors going on to say that you "enjoy" watching it. Still, it doesn't take an expert to see that the costumes, lighting, sets, and cinematography are masterfully designed and executed. There's such a rawness to most of the scenes involving Frank that most films won't employ. When Frank is terrorizing then raping Dorothy, there are no edits or camera maneuvers to spare the viewers of just how horrific he is. Similarly, when Jeffrey is basically abducted to the apartment where Dorothy's child is being held captive, there is such a skeevy, dangerous vibe that one can't help but feel like Jeffrey has ended up in some deceptively drab-looking circle of Hell. An easily overlooked part of these disturbing sequences is the lack of music, creating a silence that intensifies the horror. On the flip side, there are other scenes and moments that are very lush and stylized, showing off Lynch's range of techniques.

Frank, menacing over a terrified Dorothy. Frank is one of
the most frighteningly raw psychotics you'll ever see in film.
And Lynch doesn't let you off the hook by stylizing him in
any way - he's just a mad dog nutbag, on unflinching display.

I always find it hard to explain my feelings on the acting in David Lynch's movies, since there's such a range. There's almost always some campiness to be found in his works, which inherently requires some overacting and scene-chewing from the actors. And sometimes camp filmmakers just put bad actors in their movies, either because they find the amateur acting funny or because they just like the way an actor looks on film, despite a lack of acting ability. I think David Lynch has always done all of these things, and Blue Velvet is no exception. All that said, the four main performers - all rock-solid professionals - are perfect. And there's also a great, smaller turn we get from Dean Stockwell, the bizarre, perverted "ringmaster" at the aforementioned apartment scene (I must admit that this character can accurately be branded as a classic example of homophobia).

Like every David Lynch movie I've seen, I can only recommend it to people who are ready for something that's more than a little odd, twisted, and challenging in some respects. While the over-arcing story follows your typical crime thriller, the telling is much grittier, bizarre, and in your face than more popular fare in the genre. The best starting place for those who haven't seen Lynch's work is the original Twin Peaks TV show. If the darker elements of that program don't freak you out, check out Blue Velvet. From there, Lynch's work mostly gets darker and more surreal, so it's a logical next step. 

Twin Peaks (2017)

Spoilers Ahead! Fair Warning. 

Director: David Lynch

It's simple: if you enjoy David Lynch, you'll enjoy this show. If not? This one is highly unlikely to win you over.

I recently posted my reviews of the original Twin Peaks show and its prequel movie, Fire Walk with Me, as my wife and I worked through them. The original program was canceled after only two seasons and 30 episodes, then left in the ether for well over two decades. Then, lo and behold, it was resurrected by Showtime.

Sometimes referred to as Twin Peaks: The Return, this long-awaited continuation of the quirky, dark TV series does actually pick up roughly 25 years after the final episode of the original, which aired back in 1991. That final episode ended with a wild ride of surrealistic madness, capped off with buoyant, boy scout FBI Agent Dale Cooper seemingly getting trapped in another realm while an evil doppelganger had taken his place in our world. The 2017 resurrection series jumps ahead in time the same 25 years that had passed between the airing of the two series. In the strange "Red Room" limbo where Cooper was stranded in 1991, he is finally sent back out to reclaim his place in our world. The problem is that the evil version of Cooper has been there, long building and overseeing a criminal enterprise and planning how he will avoid being pulled back into the Red Room. In our world, a series of new, bizarre murders starts to bring back together many of the people in Twin Peaks and within the FBI who had previously known and worked with Cooper, especially dealing with the Laura Palmer murder.

Unless I wanted that summary to stretch into a 20-page exposition, I had to keep it laughably short and simple. Twin Peaks: The Return consisted of 18 episodes, all between 50 minutes and an hour, and it takes no end of strange, surreal twists, and is told in typically David Lynch, non-linear style. This makes any concise, clear summary all but impossible. At least, not one that conveys the show's distinguishing characteristics. This is a long, all-David Lynch production, and it contains pretty much all of the "Lynchian" elements that one might expect.

In short, my wife and I enjoyed watching it.

Andy and Lucy are among the many original characters 
to return. They're also part of several of the stranger,
stilted, and seemingly disconnected scenes and sequences
that we get over the course of the 18 episodes.

If you ever saw the original show, or a few of Lynch's more surreal films like Eraserhead, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, among others, then you have a sense of what to expect. So many scenes and moments will leave you questioning what, exactly, is going on, especially in terms of the plot. Thanks to shifting perspectives, unclear identities, multiple identities, non-linear narrative, and outright surreality, Twin Peaks is far from a traditional narrative. Sure, it contains more than a few familiar mainstream elements of crime dramas - mysteries surrounding murders, some tense confrontations between hardened criminals, narrow escapes from death - but the precise combination and presentation of them in all uniquely David Lynch. Characters act and speak in strange, often stilted ways. The pacing of many sequences is bafflingly drawn out at times. Many of the odder elements are never clearly explained. Such non-traditional spinning of a story can be enjoyed, tolerated, or rejected. I actually enjoyed much of it, and was able to tolerate the rest. But I also understand why some people would reject the show.

Probably the most obviously bizarre elements are the supernatural/surreal ones. In Twin Peaks, David Lynch has created his own cosmology - one which we viewers are not meant to completely understand, in my view. It involves industrial machinery, electricity, deep space, atomic science, and several immortal beings that are able to move between alternate dimensions and planes of existence. I won't pretend to understand it all, but I greatly enjoyed the mental exercise of stitching together the images and implications presented in the show. While there are plenty of these supernatural elements to be found through the entire 18-episode series, the most mind-blowing and dazzling episode was Part 8, which is almost completely done in black and white, with sparing dialogue, and is a parade of images and settings which can only be understood as "not of this world." That is, except for some scenes at the beginning of the atomic bomb detonation in 1945, and some bizarre, ash-covered demon-like figures who appear later, in 1956. The rest is a hypnotic, dreamlike tour through alien landscapes and perception-altering imagery. Honestly, watching it was not unlike taking hallucinogenics, and I was transfixed.

One of the many striking and puzzling images from the
markedly surreal eighth episode. Some viewers would be
turned off by the strangeness of it, but I was dazzled by the
imagery and dreamlike nature of this chapter.

But what about the more grounded elements? What about Dale Cooper and the crime stories? This is where, I suspect, some viewers lost their patience with the show, which I can understand. During many of the periods on "our world," David Lynch often chose to draw scenes out to frustrating lengths. A ten-minute sequence of a few people trying to find a key to an apartment. Two full minutes of a guy sweeping up a bar floor. An interminable argument between Audrey and her husband that stretches out, piecemeal, over four or five episodes and ends up going seemingly nowhere. And there are plenty of other examples. For me, these were things that I tolerated, but I totally understand how some people found them infuriating. In my case, I found that they did somewhat fit into the overall off-beat vibe of the entire series. Or at least, they fit just enough that they didn't get on my nerves too much.

A significant part of the fun here is seeing which characters and actors return from the original show, and what their characters are up to. Amazingly, the overwhelming majority of the original actors were around and signed on for it. Some of them don't show up until much later in the season, and very few of them have any great roles. In fact, almost none of them have any more than maybe 30 minutes of total screen time, across all 18 episodes. I have to think that this was much more about David Lynch just wanting to show faithful fans of the original show that these characters are still around, even if most of them no longer have any real connection to the greater events swirling around Agent Cooper. Whatever the case, my wife and I certainly perked up when seeing an original cast member turn up, however inconsequential their presence may have been.

The alienness of the Red Room serves as a microcosm for how
a viewer might feel while watching this show. Familiar elements
mixed in jarring, inexplicable ways can both attract and baffle.

I do have to point out something which my wife initially noticed about the entire show, and which is hard to ignore once perceived, and that is the role of women. David Lynch is clearly an artist who has a deep passion for the styles and character archetypes of popular Americana from the 1950s and 1960s. This has long been a huge part of his style: blending those classic, romanticized elements of U.S. culture with the twisted, pitch-dark demons lurking beneath their surface. Unfortunately, he also seems to keep his female characters almost always restricted to the old, limited roles of popular stories from those bygone decades. With very few exceptions, the women in Twin Peaks are either victims, objects of lust, mentally unstable, or various combinations of those three. A few others may only be attractive window dressing, such as Agent Tammy Preston in The Return, who does little more than pose like a model for David Lynch's Gordon Cole character to gaze at from time to time. As our culture changes in its attitudes towards representation here in the 21st century, it becomes harder and harder not to notice such a clear imbalance in gender roles in TV and films like this.

As implied, this show is a tough one to recommend. I certainly can't suggest that anyone start with this revival of the show, before watching the original. The original program will give you a beginning sense of whether you care for David Lynch's general style or not. More than that, though, I would recommend also seeing one or two of Lynch's relatively more accessible films, like his neo-noir thriller Blue Velvet or even the aforementioned Lost Highway. Those two contain some of the challenging, surreal elements that the director uses more in Twin Peaks: The Return. If you dig those earlier movies, then you'll probably like the resurrection of Twin Peaks.