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"Blue Velvet is a love story... I started with the idea of front yards at night and Bobby Vinton`s song playing from a distance. Then I always had this fantasy of sneaking into a girl`s room and hiding through the night. It was a strange angle to come at a murder mystery." David Lynch (From the UK Blue Velvet DVD) For a number of reasons, to many fans - and more so to the rest of the world' - Blue Velvet' is still David Lynch´s masterpiece. Apart from the outstanding performances and wonderful visual style, the film manages to keep the balance between a tight narrative and a mere abstract world; between distance and irony; between being mysterious and being hermetical. Unlike some of his following movies, the audience are invited to identify with a protagonist, the young Jeffrey Beaumont, who is both lost in the dark world and yet capable to exist in the innocent part of the world. In retrospect, this film looks like it finally created the definitive David Lynch-image that would remain intact no matter how the following films would look like. Some posters for the video release dubbed it "the most talked about movie of the decade", which is certainly also true for film critics (feminism / intertextuality/ Wizard of Oz) - 'Blue Velvet' certainly pays homage to a couple of Alfred Hitchock`s movies like 'Psycho' and 'Rear Window' and it sounds like David Lynch has a cameo appearence in this movie as well: if you listen closely to 'that f***ing police radio' during the final showdown, it appears to be Lynch at the end of the line. - "He put his disease in me...": In 1987, the media coverage was dominated by complete hysteria: AIDS dominated the media. Facing the taboos and combination of sexuality and terror (incest, rape, fetish, homosexuality) it certainly might be a background to consider here.- Many scenes not included in the theatrical version but in the shooting script still exist: Dorothy`s attempted suicide, the "lighting / breast-scene" (to which one Italian promo poster refers), the scene with the cut ear in the toilet and many more, hopefully they`ll be released in some form someday. - Lynch`s initial choice for the female lead was the German actress Hanna Schygulla. - According to a Jack Nance interview for 'Wrapped in Plastic' the name 'Blue Velvet' was made up during the shooting of Eraserhead. |
'Blue Velvet - a parable of male development'; Screen 35:4 Winter 1994, p. 374-392 "She wore blue velvet: The Music in Blue Velvet "Bildspiegelungen in David Lynchs Blue Velvet", BV and the arts
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