4K UHD Blu-ray Review: David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ on the Criterion Collection

The most direct metaphor in David Lynch’s canon arrives early on in 1986’s Blue Velvet. After an opening credits sequence set against blue velvet curtains and accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti’s swooning score, Lynch offers up a montage of classic Americana, including gleaming white picket fences, a fire truck with a dog, and roses that gleam with a feverish red hue. Bobby Vinton’s version of the title song serves as the soundtrack to these images, and, with this song, Lynch signals both his yearning for and disbelief in this idyllic world—a conflict in emotions that would drive his subsequent film and television productions. In case this conflict is lost on viewers, Lynch ends his montage with a father collapsing from a malady as he waters his front yard, and the camera homes in on blades of grass, pressing further into the ground until we can see black insects festering underneath the surface.

It’s too simple to say that Lynch yearns for a society that could be likened to that of The Andy Griffith Show’s Mayberry, even though much of his work is a viscerally textural paean to vintage American manners and artifacts. The 1950s-era puritanism that partially drives Blue Velvet and its TV offspring, Twin Peaks, would most likely bore Lynch on its own. Lynch is attracted to duality, to the contrast of the sweet and sour textures of purity and perversity, and Blue Velvet was the filmmaker’s first pure articulation of this desire.

This landmark film is also one of the definitive explorations between the cultural links of the ’50s and ’80s. In the ’80s, American horror cinema was mining the communist paranoia of the ’50s, indulging in violence that at one point could only be implied. These films now play as a reaction to how President Ronald Reagan exploited America’s yearning for a return to a golden age, a dream version of an earlier time cleansed of various atrocities, such as internment camps and hate crimes. Reagan was selling a fantasy while committing his own atrocities, such as ignoring the ravages of AIDS on the gay community, while Lynch and other directors, such as John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, were telling a kind of truth.

Of course, Lynch voted for Reagan, which perhaps testifies to the intense pull of the sunny-side-up portion of his fantasy world. And, indeed, Lynch has always understood a primordial and insidious human quality: the satisfaction of conformation—of successfully following social rules regardless of their potential implications, and committing to a mythology of country.

In Blue Velvet, this idea is most beautifully embodied by the scenes between Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sandy (Laura Dern). Jeffrey is a college student who returns to the small, woodsy town of Lumberton following his father’s hospitalization, and Sandy is a high school senior with a father, John (George Dickerson), in law enforcement. Investigating the mystery of a severed ear that Jeffrey discovers in a field, the couple regularly meets at a diner, drinking sodas and, in Jeffrey’s case, eating what appears to be a grilled cheese and fries. The pleasure that Lynch takes in the old-fashioned-ness of all this, with Jeffrey and Sandy playing a variation of the Hardy Boys, is palpable. (These scenes are so overwhelmingly earnest that certain critics missed the point upon the film’s release, describing them as shrilly satirical.)

With his father, Tom (Jack Harvey), immobilized, Jeffrey confronts his blossoming adulthood, and so Sandy partially represents his yearning to return to the simplicity of high school, which suggests the longing for an idealized dimension that drives, at large, this production that’s so resolutely set in a timeless dimension and abounds in obsessive fairy-tale imagery that suggests an X-rated Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger production.

Yet Jeffrey’s also a man now, and most men need more than nostalgic puppy love. Drifting away from Sandy, the ear leads Jeffrey into an underworld, to Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosellini), a tormented lounge singer who’s the plutonic ideal of the male fantasy of the experienced older woman, who’s forced to sing “Blue Velvet” over and over in a club with an ardor that rivals Vinton himself. Where Sandy is gorgeous in a trim, blonde, idyllic “prom queen” way, Dorothy is a bruised brunette with ripe red lipstick (it matches the roses from the film’s first scene), a chipped tooth, and a sensual fleshiness that knocks the film off its naïve axis.

Dorothy’s apartment, which is of course on the wrong side of the tracks, is one of Blue Velvet’s many masterpieces of irrational set design. Primarily represented by the oval shape of a living room that segues into a small kitchen, the apartment abounds in deep reds, blues, and blacks that are morbid as well as titillating, explicitly suggesting a strip club’s back room while subliminally representing a womb. This set somewhat prepares us for the film’s audacious tonal U-turn. When Jeffrey wanders into this apartment, the sense of danger is intense, yet Lynch surpasses all expectations with what is still the wildest set piece of his career.

Peeping on Dorothy from behind the wall of her closet, after she’s already caught him, threatened him with a knife, and explored the possibility of going down on him, Jeffrey watches as this woman is tortured by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who beats her and calls her “mommy” before getting high on gas and stuffing a blue velvet sash in each of their mouths and savagely fucking her. Though the scene is symbolic—as Robin Wood stipulated, the sash suggests an umbilical cord, while also echoing the lost innocence of the Vinton song—it’s also unhinged, exorcising fantasies that Lynch can barely keep a handle on.

Sex in mainstream cinema has rarely felt this intimate and defiant of what we’re supposed to find erotic, which is why Blue Velvet was controversial upon its release, and would probably be even more so were it to first be seen in 2019. To an extent, Dorothy gets off on Frank’s abuse, and she subsequently attempts, in her affair with Jeffrey, to assume a Frank-like role, taking control of their sex and goading Jeffrey to tap his inner reservoir for violence. When Jeffrey eventually beats Dorothy, Lynch films the action in extreme slow motion, with what sounds like animal roars on the soundtrack. Lynch dramatizes a fissure in Jeffrey’s sense of who he is, as he plumbs his propensity for darkness. The film is, at its root, a coming-of-age tale that’s unusually connected to the dirtier and messier implications of self-knowledge.

There’s almost nowhere for Blue Velvet to go after the scene between Dorothy, Jeffrey, and Frank in Dorothy’s apartment, which also suggests nothing less than a fulfillment of the fantasies implicitly driving Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where an ambiguous male hero also peeped in on imperiled women. This sexual-violent stand-off is what Lynch has been building to throughout Blue Velvet, as he’s bringing to the fore the damage, allure, rot, exploitation, and sick hunger that exist under Lumberton’s tableaux of neat, asexual domesticity and under much of vaguely sexualized pop culture at large.

Lynch’s film subsequently follows what is a fairly straightforward mystery-thriller template, though ecstatic details and images continue to pop up, and there’s one other extraordinary scene. Frank and his goons kidnap Dorothy and Jeffrey and take them to the inner sanctum of Ben (Dean Stockwell), a terrifyingly fey and polite gangster who dances and lip synchs to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” enjoying the kind of expressive catharsis that appears to be impossible for Frank, a frustration that’s probably at the center of his insanity.

Many have commented on the inverse relationship between Sandy and Dorothy, the respective women of day and night who would initiate an ongoing Lynch obsession, but Frank also suggests an inverse of Jeffrey: a man-child who never reckoned with his desires, until they erupted out of him in a torrent of cruelty and obscenity. Even one of Ben’s prostitutes enjoys a moment of grace, dancing on top of Frank’s car outside of a factory as “In Dreams” is reprised.

Blue Velvet’s mix of pop-cultural fetishizing and extreme, occasionally ironic brutality, its swirling together of banality, kink, and tragedy, would prove to be monumentally inspirational. Quentin Tarantino’s films, namely Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, would be unimaginable without Blue Velvet, which would also serve as a roadmap for Lynch’s own career.

Lynch is still obsessed with sexual perversity, with men’s historic torment of women, with various mystic and generic totems, and with the underbelly that secretly powers pop culture. After Blue Velvet and the first season of Twin Peaks, Lynch drifted away from traditional narrative, blurring plot points and character identities. He doubled down on his own brand of American surrealism, emphasizing beauty and decay as two halves of one coin. Blue Velvet’s happy ending—in which Sandy’s dream of robins casting evil away is realized—is deliberately unconvincing. Faced with a truth about himself, Jeffrey retreats to childish illusion, though Lynch continues to wrestle with his and our madness.

Image/Sound

In 2019, the Criterion Collection issued a Blu-ray with a new transfer of Blue Velvet that, per the disc’s liner notes, was created in 16-bit 4K resolution from the 35mm A/B negative and supervised by David Lynch. This 4K release offers the same 4K transfer in its native form, improving upon the already superb 2019 disc. All of the visual textures are subtly bumped up to the next level: radiant colors are more radiant, gritty textures are grittier, and so on. The blacks in particular have a newfound materiality, which is saying something next to that 2019 disc. In general, the image in 4K has an ultra-real, looking-through-a-window aura that ironically intensifies Lynch’s very pointed sense of the uncanny. Here, Blue Velvet comes even closer than ever to resembling a motion blend of the paintings of Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon.

The same two sound mixes from the 2019 disc are included here, a 5.1 and a 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio track, and, though I didn’t discern many major differences between them this time either, they both still have extraordinary depth, balance, and dimension, with an operatic level of attention paid to diegetic sounds. For one, when Jeffrey flushes a toilet, imperiling himself, the thing gurgles so magnificently as to suggest a moaning whale.

Extras

Nothing new has been added for this new edition of the film. The most notable supplement remains a 54-minute collection of deleted scenes, which were assembled by Lynch more or less in chronological order, suggesting an entire omitted opening act of Blue Velvet. The cut footage fleshes out Jeffrey’s reasons for returning to his hometown from college, and offers many more scenes of his aunt and mother (played by Frances Bay and Priscilla Pointer, respectively). These moments are fine on their own, and anticipate the purplish tone of Twin Peaks, but a three-hour cut of Blue Velvet that conventionally explored Jeffrey’s conflict over his sick father might’ve been disastrous, killing the narcotic pull of the film as it presently exists.

There’s also an alternate introduction of Sandy that’s so tossed-off that it’s nearly banal, which is a significant contradiction of her iconic entrance in the final cut of Blue Velvet. Another deleted scene—in which Jeffrey and Dorothy ascend the roof of her apartment—is pure Lynchian poetry, though these scenes otherwise offer a primer on how a filmmaker whittled a rough cut down into something stark, mysterious, and essential.

Also essential is Blue Velvet Revisited, an 89-minute documentary by director Peter Braatz that uses free-associative editing to offer a one-of-kind portrait of the film’s production. Braatz includes stock footage, intimate still photos, such as of Lynch taping the word “Lumberton” onto an ice truck, and uses interviews as a form of narration. (Isabella Rossellini’s thoughts on making the film should serve as a definitive refutation of Roger Ebert’s absurd and condescending review, in which he essentially implied that Rossellini was Lynch’s victim.)

Elsewhere, the 70-minute Mysteries of Love is a more conventional archival documentary, with interviews with most of the film’s principal players about the making of the film, and a recording of Lynch reading from Room to Dream, the 2018 book he co-wrote with Kristine McKenna, includes stories that will probably be familiar to Lynch obsessives. An interview with composer Angelo Badalamenti, a look at the sets and props of Blue Velvet, and a booklet with an excerpt from Room to Dream round out what is still a strong supplements package.

Overall

Criterion somehow improves upon what already felt like a definitive transfer of a pivotal and still overwhelmingly intimate David Lynch film.