Blue Velvet (1986)

I’ve heard people rave about David Lynch’s body of work before and I knew his films were something I needed to experience. Blue Velvet was my first taste of Lynch and I was in no way prepared for the weirdness that was to follow.

The DVD case champions the film as “David Lynch’s Erotic Masterpiece” so I went in expecting something vastly different than what the film actually was. To me, there seemed to be two different worlds occurring in the film, one being the sugar coated glamour of 1950s small town America and the other being a world of darkness, crime, and sexual perversion.

I’ve read around a little bit and Roger Ebert’s opinion of Blue Velvet criticizes the film for not letting the sexual portion of the storyline unfold. Blue Velvet keeps going back to the kitschy, small town America storyline and the dark world of sexual perversion never really develops past the initial fake rape scene in Dorothy’s apartment. It seemed to me that David Lynch was trying to flesh out two vastly different ideas in this film and the result left me a bit uncomfortable.

 

Color

Moving past that though, I would like to bring up one aspect of the film which really stood out to me and that was Lynch’s use of color. The over-saturated picket fences and perfectly manicured lawns that we are introduced to as the film opens has an interesting, Tim Burton-like effect for me. The overly colorful suburbs read as something being just a little off, as if the town is trying so hard to be something that it is not; the result is an eerie quality which the film quickly develops as Jeffrey finds the severed ear and the mystery plot picks up.

Saturated picket fences

I found myself looking out for the color blue from the very start of the film given the name of the film. I found it interesting that the first time the color blue really shows up in the film is when Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment and the walls in the hallway are dark blue, giving the hallway a cold, eerie feeling. Then Jeffrey walks inside her apartment, only to be greeted by warm red tones all over the walls and furniture.

Shade of red

From that point on, I started to notice a juxtaposition of blue and red tones associated with Isabella Rossellini’s character throughout the film. The juxtaposition is seen, quite literally, on her face in most of the film as she sports that horrific blue eye shadow with the vibrant red lipstick.

 

Every good make-up artist knows you either do bold lips or bold eyes, never both…

Sound

David Lynch was recommended to me as someone to look out for in terms of film sound and I was not disappointed. One aspect of the sound design that stood out to me was Lynch’s (and the sound designer, Alan Splet’s) use of horror sound throughout the film. One such moment occurs when the camera cuts to a close up of a street sign (Lincoln Street) and there is a corresponding screeching sound typical of horror movies. Juxtaposed against the sounds of small town suburbia, these horror sounds stand out and provide two vastly different sonic universes, just as there are two different types of stories occurring.

The sound design continues to implement juxtaposition and contradiction through is use of anempathetic music. As some of you might remember from my lecture on film sound, anempathetic music does not participate in the action or emotion onscreen; the music expresses indifference to what is going on and this apathy further accentuates the emotion onscreen. David Lynch takes full advantage of this effect. One example is in the scene where Frank pulls Jeffrey out of the car on the side of the road and beats him senseless while the cheery song “Candy Colored Clown” blares from the car stereo. The absurd collision of the upbeat song with the violent action accentuates the brutality in an almost comical way. There are also homoerotic undertones in Frank’s treatment of Jeffrey here and the anempathetic music serves to highlight those undertones and give the violence a perversely sexual feeling that harkens back to the violent rape scene earlier.

One last point I will make about sound pertains to the party scene at the whorehouse. Music begins as Ben begins to sing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a lightbulb that he uses as a microphone. His voice is beautiful and although you might momentarily question if he’s really singing, you don’t fully realize that he’s lip synching until Frank begins to sing along and breaks the spell of Ben’s performance, exposing the artificiality of it all. By doing this, Lynch is playing with out conception of what is real and what is staged by first fooling us and then revealing the trick. I find this particularly interesting and it is something that I will discuss further in my response to Mulholland Drive where Lynch plays again with ‘authentic’ versus pre-recorded sound.