After Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Dune, we knew David Lynch could bring on the weirdness like few others in the business. It wasn’t until Blue Velvet that we learned he was also one kinky son of a gun. With this film, he peeled back the veneer of smalltown Americana and apple pie and discovered it was rotten to the core. Sure, this isn’t exactly a shocking revelation, but it’s the distinctly Lynchian way he pulls it off that makes it a classic.
Small town boy Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home and discovers a severed ear in a field. Before you can say Vincent Van Gogh, he’s playing junior detective with the pretty Sandy (Laura Dern) who also happens to be the daughter of the local police lieutenant (George Dickerson). Jeffrey eventually uncovers a sinister plot involving a battered night club singer named Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) who is held in sadomasochistic torment by the maniacal Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper in a performance for the ages). Jeffrey tries to play the white knight but soon gets sucked into Frank’s bizarro world of crime, malice, and suffering.
Lynch deals with such adult themes as voyeurism and sadomasochism with a childlike innocence, which is what gives the movie its power. The way he contrasts the smalltown exterior with its seedy underbelly (a theme he’d later expand upon with Twin Peaks) is sometimes shocking, as is the way he dekes and dives into various subgenres. It goes from a Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery to neo-noir to straight-up Playboy Channel on a dime. Lynch keeps you in the palm of his hand for every twist and turn along the way.
The performances are all great. MacLachlan and Dern have a lot of chemistry together and his scenes with Rossellini are rife with tension too. Hopper (the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2!) is a real force of nature in this as his foul-mouthed soliloquies are equal parts frightening and hilarious. (“Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”) It’s Dean Stockwell who threatens to steal the movie as Frank’s buddy Ben, who in the film’s dreamiest scene, lip synchs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”.
