Blue sky pans down to a white-picket fence and red roses while the first notes of Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” ring out. A cross-dissolve takes us to a ruby red fire engine with a waving firefighter and Dalmatian. The montage continues. Glimpses of suburban Americana build out from one another until we meet a middle-aged man watering his lawn. Tension enters as the hose kinks and then, the man has a heart attack. Clutching his neck and falling to the grass as his faithful dog bites at the still-pulsating hose. Vinton fades as caustic rumbling and chattering rise. The camera zooms in on the soil and reveals a tumbling, shining, mess of beetles churning underneath. Just when it becomes unbearable, a rapid cut. A painted, smiling, white, blonde woman stares out from a sign reading “Welcome to Lumberton.”
So begins David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet. In two minutes, Lynch provides a relative thesis statement for the film that follows. Employing imagery nearly straight out of ads from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign, Lynch lulls the audience into calmness with the fantasy of suburban bliss. Reagan used it to project a conservatism that idolized the 1950s, and Lynch starts there before rapidly deconstructing the veneer. The writhing man and beetles snap us out of a nationalistic trance. Lynch literalizes how American iconography conceals a violent and corrosive underbelly. Continuing the Reagan comp, here was a president who released those ads while espousing white supremacy and blatant, deadly homophobia around AIDS. In short, Lynch snatched conservative daydreams and used them to comment on the nightmare they stowed away.
Of course, that only covers the first two minutes and change of a two-hour movie, though the spirit remains throughout. The rest of the runtime centers on disaffected college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan). Jeffrey is home to help manage his father’s hardware store, the man who went down with the hose. While on a pleasant walk, Jeffrey finds a severed ear in the grass. The police tell him to keep it to himself, but the captain’s daughter Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) feeds Jeffrey updates. Fascinated by this dark underworld in his idyllic hometown, Jeffrey seeks out answers on his own. That choice leads him to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). It also unleashes violent psychopath and drug kingpin Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) on his life. Riffing on noir, horror, and melodrama conventions alike, Lynch propels Jeffrey and company into the bleakest corners of the American nightmare.
Jeffrey enters the story with a mix of restlessness and sudden responsibility. His father’s health means this young man has been ripped back to his hometown removed from whatever life he was building at college. Against the coded 1950s backdrop, it’s easy to pinpoint Lynch riffing on Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with the character. His first scenes give MacLachlan a chance to showcase both sides of that mood. There is fear in Jeffrey’s eyes when he visits his father in the hospital. He is faced with all the medical accouterment buzzing, beeping, and ticking. It begins with a loss of innocence that barrels forward in the following scene when he discovers the ear. What starts as a James Dean-esque tossing of stones at a shack morphs into that grisly discovery. That beat throttles us into the noir and horror territory that compounds.
What’s key with Jeffrey is that he is Lynch’s avatar for navigating both the audience and the story through his American nightmare. The Reagan-style imagery functions as shrewd costuming, heightening the disparity between what we expect and the horrors Jeffrey uncovers. That dissonance is inherent in Jeffrey’s approach to what he first gleefully labels a “mystery.” When Sandy first drops him off at Dorothy’s apartment, she says “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” Jeffrey laughs at the moment, but it’s a telling line. He’s jumped into this mystery because he wants something exciting. Or, as he puts it, “seeing something that was always hidden.” It is a comic strip view of crime that lines up with the initial nostalgia of the opening. Yet, just as the bugs took over, it’s mere minutes after that line when Jeffrey discovers Frank.
Frank storms into Dorothy’s apartment after she has discovered Jeffrey and confronted him about his insane action: hiding in her closet and watching her. Psychosexual drama enters the fray as she makes him undress while holding him at knifepoint. When Frank starts coming through the door she shoves Jeffrey back into the closet. He watches from the closet as we watch him see Frank assault Dorothy. It’s a twisted and violent role play that includes Frank yelling the unhinged line “Baby wants to fuck.” Here, the line between Jeffrey as detective and pervert is blurred by the voyeurism innate in his positioning, a filmic choice that implicates the viewer as well. It is a brutal busting of nostalgic inclinations, clarifying the savagery of what is really happening in this small American town. People may look to the firetrucks and white picket fences, but terror abounds all the same.
That kernel of truth plays out again and again throughout Blue Velvet. Each new layer of hell Jeffrey uncovers in Frank’s kidnapping plot to control Dorothy reveals fractured corruption, crime, and betrayal. Cops are dirty. Romance is ugly and lustful. Even Sandy, the herald of American innocence, must confront the extent of the darkness. It’s a theme that Lynch continued in Wild at Heart (1990) before perfecting in Twin Peaks (1990-1991, 2017). Jeffrey’s detective instincts provide both Lynch and MacLachlan a dry run for Special Agent Dale Cooper. Even without MacLachlan in Wild at Heart, all three successive works commit to the demythologizing of the American fallacies baked into the Reagan era. Lynch proudly refuses to play into the picture-perfect fairy tale of Americanness which that nostalgia purported, and continues to spout.
That fundamental fact is also why Blue Velvet remains a perfect movie for reflecting on America’s soul during your July 4th. A holiday always gilding centuries of American violence, this year it comes with the immediate context of rightly unavoidable bloodshed and treachery. It is only the most recent addition to the bloodstained narrative of American history. A history the loudest supporters of the holiday aim to drown out with chest-beating, beer drinking, and patriotic euphemizing. True patriotism is the ability to cast an honest gaze on the state of a country, and my oh my is it time more folks embraced that truth. Blue Velvet may not hold all the answers to our American crises, but it sure does make it harder to ignore them.
Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.