FILM

Rip It Up, Issue 121, 1 August 1987, Page 36

FILM

BLUE VELVET Director: David Lynch "At the sound of the falling tree, it's 9.30, purrs the DJ on the local radio, as David Lynch's film proceeds to take us through a glass darkly into the heart of Middle America. The idyllic images of Lumberton in the opening

scenes of Blue Velvet are descriptive: soon we're plunged into the fetishistic and S&M rituals of Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper. The connecting link between these two extremes of smalltown life is provided by Jeffrey Beaumonth (Kyle MacLauchlan) when he discovers a severed ear at the local rubbish tip and decides to investigate further. After the constraints of ‘Elephant Man and Dune, Lynch is freer to create a more elusive film with Blue Velvet, a film in which so much lies beneath the surface. It’s no accident

that the director seems to be at pains to make the thriller trappings of. the plot structure like something out of a trashy television movie: deliberately corny dialogue (the exchanges between MacLauchlan and George Bickerson's detective, for example); melodramatic musical punctuations, and even the brief appearances of Hope Lange, one of television’s achetypal mothers. Lynch deals instead with the crossover between dreams and reality. There’s a dreamlike quality to the Bobby Vinton song which gives

the movie its title, a song which serves as both the centrepiece of Rossellini’s nightclub act and the object of Hopper's fetishism. Sandy (Laura Dern) the co-ed virgin and a Shelley Fabares for the 80s, worries about Jeffrey’s curiosity (“it sounds like a good daydream, but actually doing it’s too weird") and yet confesses her idea of happiness in the form of a dream of fulsome sentimentality Other songs extend Lynch’s central theme. The young lovers eventually dance to Julee, Cruise’s ‘Mys-

teries of Love’ with its references to "mysteries... in the dark.” Later in the film, Dean Stockwell’s garishly made-up pimp mimes to a recording of Roy Orbison's‘ln Dreams,' a song :which, in this new context, is particularly eerie.. The director even offers the faint-hearted a release at the end of the film: when MacLachlan wakes up after dozing in the yard, perhaps the whole' thing was a dream ... an extended nightmare. Despite the determination . of Frederick Elmes’s camera to probe ruthlessly into everything from an underground ants nest to an ear, Blue' Velvet doesn’t give up all its secrets on one viewing. Like Dern who blurts out to MacLachlan at one point, "I. don't know whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” the audience's grasp on any reality is never more than equivocal. Yet, not so equivocal that the film runs into any danger of becoming a thinking man’s 9 1/2 Weeks: Hopper attacks MacLachlan with the accusation “You're like me, you. fucker,” and the wider implications of Blue Velvet are suddenly apparent. Like, the image of the wind-blown candle which occurs during the film’s more heated moments, it is a vision of the permeation of evil into the fabric of American society. Beautifully played by its cast, from Dem’s touching gauche teen queen to Hopper's blistering inferno of hate and violence, Blue Velvet is one of the most provocative and disturbing films to come out of America in this decade — an American Dream for thpßOc?

William Dart