Date of publication: 09/19/1986
By Roger Ebert
"Blue Velvet" contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's
easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A
film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration.
And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to
what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be
in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But "Blue Velvet"
surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and
cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his
material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy
in-joke.
The movie has two levels of reality. On one level, we're in
Lumberton, a simple-minded small town where people talk in television
cliches and seem to be clones of 1950s sitcom characters. On another
level, we're told a story of sexual bondage, of how Isabella
Rossellini's husband and son have been kidnapped by Dennis Hopper, who
makes her his sexual slave. The twist is that the kidnapping taps into
the woman's deepest feelings: She finds that she is a masochist who
responds with great sexual passion to this situation.
Everyday town life is depicted with a deadpan irony; characters
use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes.
Meanwhile, the darker story of sexual bondage is told absolutely on the
level in cold-blooded realism.
The movie begins with a much praised sequence in which picket
fences and flower beds establish a small-town idyll. Then a man
collapses while watering the lawn, and a dog comes to drink from the
hose that is still held in his unconscious grip. The great imagery
continues as the camera burrows into the green lawn and finds hungry
insects beneath - a metaphor for the surface and buried lives of the
town.
The man's son, a college student (Kyle MacLachlan), comes home to
visit his dad's bedside and resumes a romance with the daughter (Laura
Dern) of the local police detective. MacLachlan finds a severed human
ear in a field, and he and Dern get involved in trying to solve the
mystery of the ear. The trail leads to a nightclub singer (Rossellini)
who lives alone in a starkly furnished flat.
In a sequence that Hitchcock would have been proud of, MacLachlan
hides himself in Rossellini's closet and watches, shocked, as she has a
sadomashochistic sexual encounter with Hopper, a drug-sniffing pervert.
Hopper leaves. Rossellini discovers MacLachlan in the closet and, to
his astonishment, pulls a knife on him and forces him to submit to her
seduction. He is appalled but fascinated; she wants him to be a "bad
boy" and hit her.
These sequences have great power. They make "9 1/2 Weeks" look
rather timid by comparison, because they do seem genuinely born from
the darkest and most despairing side of human nature. If "Blue Velvet"
had continued to develop its story in a straight line, if it had
followed more deeply into the implications of the first shocking
encounter between Rossellini
and MacLachlan, it might have made some real emotional discoveries.
Instead, director David Lynch chose to interrupt the almost
hypnotic pull of that relationship in order to pull back to his jokey,
small-town satire. Is he afraid that movie audiences might not be ready
for stark S & M unless they're assured it's all really a joke?
I was absorbed and convinced by the relationship between
Rossellini and MacLachlan, and annoyed because the director kept
placing himself between me and the material. After five or 10 minutes
in which the screen reality was overwhelming, I didn't need the
director prancing on with a top hat and cane, whistling that it was all
in fun.
Indeed, the movie is pulled so violently in opposite directions
that it pulls itself apart. If the sexual scenes are real, then why do
we need the sendup of the "Donna Reed Show"? What are we being told?
That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and
dangerous? Don't stop the presses.
The sexual material in "Blue Velvet" is so disturbing, and the
performance by Rosellini is so convincing and courageous, that it
demands a movie that deserves it. American movies have been using
satire for years to take the edge off sex and violence. Occasionally,
perhaps sex and violence should be treated with the seriousness they
deserve. Given the power of the darker scenes in this movie, we're all
the more frustrated that the director is unwilling to follow through to
the consequences of his insights.
"Blue Velvet" is like the guy who drives you nuts by hinting at
horrifying news and then saying, "Never mind."
There's another thing. Rossellini is asked to do things in this
film that require real nerve. In one scene, she's publicly embarrassed
by being dumped naked on the lawn of the police detective. In others,
she is asked to portray emotions that I imagine most actresses would
rather not touch. She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated and
undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure
those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting
her in an important film.
That's what Bernardo Bertolucci delivered when he put Marlon
Brando and Maria Schneider through the ordeal of "Last Tango in Paris."
In "Blue Velvet," Rossellini goes the whole distance, but Lynch
distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty
little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the
Hopper character.
What's worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and
finding the whole thing funny?
Blue Velvet (STAR) Jeffrey Beaumont Kyle MacLachlan Dorothy Vallens Isabella Rossellini Frank Booth Dennis Hopper Sandy Williams Laura Dern Mrs. Williams Hope Lange Ben Dean Stockwell Detective Williams George Dickerson De Laurentiis presents a film written and directed by David Lunch, and produced by Richard Roth. Photographed by Frderick Elmes. Edited by Duwayne Dunham. Music by Angelo Badalamenti. Running time: 120 minutes. Classified R. At the Fine Arts Theater.
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