10 / 10
Roses and Picket Fences
Blue Velvet opens on bright red roses against a white picket fence, a fire engine gliding past with a smiling fireman waving, children crossing the road and a man watering his lawn. It’s small-town America as a postcard, set to Bobby Vinton singing Blue Velvet. Then the man with the hose has a stroke and collapses, a dog drinks from the spraying water, and the camera pushes down into the grass, where beetles are swarming and devouring each other in the dark.
That’s the whole film in two minutes. Under the pretty surface of Lumberton, there’s something writhing and hungry, and the story is about a young man who goes down into the grass to look at it.
David Lynch made it in 1986, after the disaster of Dune. Blue Velvet defined him: the mix of innocence and horror, the dreamy music, the violence, the humour and the sense that ordinary life is a thin skin over something very strange.
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The opening moves from bright postcard images to a man’s collapse to insects swarming under the grass. In two minutes, it establishes the whole film’s theme without a word of dialogue.
An opening sequence can do the thematic work of an entire story if its images are chosen carefully. Show the surface, then show what’s underneath, and the reader will understand the story’s concerns before any character speaks.
Lynch’s opening works because it’s specific and physical: roses, a fireman, a hose, beetles. Abstract statements about hidden darkness would mean nothing. The swarming insects make the reader feel it. Concrete images do the work that thematic statements never can, because readers feel them in the body before they think about them. My article on opening pages that hook readers goes further.
The Ear
Jeffrey Beaumont comes home from college because his father is in hospital. Walking back through a vacant lot, he finds a human ear lying in the grass, crawling with ants. He takes it to the police, and the detective, whose daughter Sandy is a sweet high school senior, tells him to leave it alone.
He doesn’t. With Sandy’s help, he starts investigating, and the trail leads to Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer who lives in a gloomy apartment building. Jeffrey decides to sneak into her apartment to look for clues. She comes home early. He hides in the closet. What he sees through the slats changes everything.
Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey with a clean-cut, eager curiosity that’s half boy detective and half voyeur, and the film is careful never to let him off the hook for liking what he finds.
Frank
Dennis Hopper plays Frank Booth, and nobody who’s seen him has forgotten him. Frank is a psychopath, a gangster who’s kidnapped Dorothy’s husband and child and uses them to control her. He’s volcanic, obscene and unpredictable, flying into rages, sucking gas from a mask and screaming at everybody around him. He shifts from menace to childishness to rage in a heartbeat.
Film history has few villain performances this ferocious. Hopper, back from years of drug addiction and a stalled career, throws himself into it with frightening total commitment. There’s nothing cartoonish about Frank. He’s a real, terrifying man, and the film makes you believe he could turn up in any quiet American town.
His catchphrases have become infamous, and his joyride with Jeffrey, visiting a brothel and a weird suburban house full of strange people, is Lynch at his most unsettling.
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Frank shifts from menace to childishness to rage without warning. His unpredictability is what makes him terrifying.
The most frightening characters are the ones the reader can’t predict. A villain who’s always angry becomes background noise, however loud they get. One who might laugh, weep or explode at any moment keeps the reader on edge through every scene, because nothing about the next minute is safe.
Hopper’s Frank also has specific, repeated behaviors: the mask, the obsession with the song, the fixation on Dorothy’s velvet robe. Those details make him real, and they give the reader something to dread. Every time the mask comes out, the audience braces, because they’ve learned what follows.
Dorothy
Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy, and she gives one of the bravest performances of the eighties. Dorothy is a victim of terrible abuse, desperate, frightened and damaged, and the film shows what Frank does to her without softening it. The scenes are disturbing, and they’re meant to be. Rossellini holds nothing back.
Her relationship with Jeffrey is strange and troubling. She’s drawn to him and frightened of him, and she’s so damaged by Frank that she asks Jeffrey to hurt her. Jeffrey is appalled and fascinated, and the film asks uncomfortable questions about his curiosity and his desire.
There’s a scene late in the film where Dorothy appears, naked, bruised and dazed, on the front lawn of Sandy’s house in the middle of the night. Eighties cinema has few images this shocking. It’s heartbreaking, too. Rossellini makes her a person, with a symbol nowhere in sight.
Sandy
Laura Dern plays Sandy, the detective’s daughter, sweet, innocent and full of wide-eyed wonder. She’s the other side of the film, a symbol of the light Jeffrey could choose instead of Dorothy’s darkness. Her speech about a dream of robins, bringing love into a dark world, is corny, sincere and oddly moving. She delivers it in a parked car outside a church, with organ music swelling in the background, and Lynch plays it completely straight. It’s the film’s heart. It’s also a setup for the last shot.
Dern is lovely in the role, and she and MacLachlan have a sweet, awkward chemistry. The film treats their romance with the same double vision as everything else: it’s tender and a little absurd, like something from a fifties teen movie.
In Dreams
The most famous scene in the film takes place in the strange house Frank drags Jeffrey to, where a sinister, powdered, effeminate man named Ben, played by Dean Stockwell, lip-syncs Roy Orbison’s In Dreams into a work light while Frank watches, entranced and then enraged.
Bizarre, creepy and mesmerising: pure Lynch. Stockwell’s performance is odd and unsettling, and the song, about a dream that ends in loneliness and loss, turns into something terrifying in this context. Orbison was reportedly upset by the use of his song at first, and came to appreciate it.
Badalamenti and Old Pop Songs
Angelo Badalamenti’s score began his long partnership with Lynch. It’s lush, romantic and eerie, like a fifties melodrama heard through a nightmare. Badalamenti and Lynch also wrote Mysteries of Love, sung by Julee Cruise, playing over Jeffrey and Sandy’s first slow dance.
The film’s use of old pop songs, Blue Velvet, In Dreams, Love Letters, is one of its signatures. Lynch takes sweet, innocent music and makes it menacing by setting it against violence and perversion, and it’s a technique countless filmmakers have borrowed since.
Lynch’s Company
Blue Velvet assembled the family Lynch would work with for the rest of his career. Kyle MacLachlan, who’d been Paul in Dune, went on to play Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, another clean-cut investigator poking into a small town’s rot. Laura Dern became a Lynch regular, starring in Wild at Heart and Inland Empire. Badalamenti scored almost everything Lynch made after this.
Watching Blue Velvet now, you can see Twin Peaks being born: the sawmill town, the diner, the teenage romance, the evil hiding behind neighborly smiles. Lynch spent the next forty years exploring the same territory, and he never mapped it more sharply than he did here, in a story about a boy, an ear and a closet.
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The final robin is visibly fake, turning the happy ending into an ironic comment on the whole film.
A single deliberate false note in an ending can change its meaning entirely. The reader sees the happy resolution and senses that something’s still wrong underneath, and the unease lingers after the book is closed.
If your ending restores order on the surface, consider giving the reader one small detail, an odd sound, a wrong color, a fake bird, that hints the danger isn’t gone. It’ll stay with them far longer than a clean resolution would. Lynch’s fake robin is funny, and it’s also a warning: the peace is a performance, and everyone in the kitchen is playing along.
The Robin
The film ends back in the sunshine. Jeffrey’s father is recovering, the family is gathered in the kitchen, and a robin, just like the one in Sandy’s dream, sits on a windowsill with a beetle in its beak. Everybody smiles. Dorothy is reunited with her son in a park.
The robin is visibly fake, a stiff mechanical bird, and that’s the final joke. The happy ending is as artificial as the postcard opening. Order has been restored, and the darkness is still there, under the grass, waiting.
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The final robin is visibly fake, turning the happy ending into an ironic comment on the whole film.
A single deliberate false note in an ending can change its meaning entirely. The reader sees the happy resolution and senses that something’s still wrong underneath, and the unease lingers after the book is closed.
If your ending restores order on the surface, consider giving the reader one small detail, an odd sound, a wrong color, a fake bird, that hints the danger isn’t gone. It’ll stay with them far longer than a clean resolution would. Lynch’s fake robin is funny, and it’s also a warning: the peace is a performance, and everyone in the kitchen is playing along.
The Ebert Fight
Blue Velvet was hugely controversial when it came out. Some critics called it a masterpiece. Others, notably Roger Ebert, attacked it for the way it treated Isabella Rossellini’s character, arguing that the film exploited her suffering while mocking the small-town world around her. Audiences walked out. It became a cult phenomenon anyway, and Lynch was nominated for an Academy Award for best director.
The debate over whether it’s a profound study of violence and innocence or a sadistic joke has never quite ended. I think it’s the former, and I think the discomfort is exactly the reaction Lynch was after.
Hard to Watch
The violence, especially the sexual violence against Dorothy, is disturbing and graphic, and some viewers will find it unbearable. The tone, lurching from horror to comedy to romance, confuses people, and the film’s strangeness puts others off.
None of that dents it for me. It’s Lynch’s best film, about the darkness under every lawn, and nothing else looks or feels quite like it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Blue Velvet sets innocence against depravity and refuses to let either win. The hero is drawn to the darkness he’s investigating, and the film asks the audience to recognize the same curiosity in themselves.
A protagonist who is fascinated by the evil they’re fighting is more complex and more unsettling than one who simply opposes it.
Give your hero a secret attraction to the thing they’re fighting, and let the reader feel it too.
The Darkness Under the Lawn
Blue Velvet is a 10: David Lynch at his peak, funny, horrifying, romantic and deeply strange, with Dennis Hopper’s unforgettable Frank Booth, Isabella Rossellini’s fearless Dorothy and a picket-fence America that turns out to be crawling with beetles. Hard to watch, impossible to forget.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists
