Jeffrey:

Ah, Blue Velvet, my old friend. It’s good to see you again, buddy. After all these years of critical movie viewing, nothing quite compares to the thrill of sitting down in a darkened room and spending 2 hours with your unfailing, uncompromising genius. Oh, it’s nice to see you again, too, Segretto. And your unfailing, uncompromising genius.

As Mike stated, Blue Velvet is, in my opinion, the best film ever made. Now, I have not seen every film that’s ever been made, clearly. So I can’t say for certain that there will never be another film that will rock my world off its hinges as adeptly as Blue Velvet did. But I can say with 100% certainty that no movie will ever again play as pivotal a role as Blue Velvet did in my film-watching development.

I would guess I was 12 years old when I saw Blue Velvet for the first time. The only thing I knew about it was that Dennis Hopper played Frank Booth as a game show host in a Saturday Night Live skit (am I just making that up, or did it really happen?) and that Roger Ebert absolutely loathed it on Sneak Previews (nice job digging up that clip!). I was at the age where I was just starting to become interested in films that were a little off the beaten path, and this and A Clockwork Orange were at the top of my list of films to watch. Luckily, I come from a family that revered movies in the same way that most people in my hometown of Clio, Michigan revered that skinny, bloody dude on the cross, and so they drove me to the nearest somewhat-well-stocked video store and let me rent both of my top picks at an age in which I probably should not have been watching either of them.

Regardless of how much I understood about Blue Velvet’s deeper meanings at the time, I was immediately floored by its complete mastery of the art of film. Before I saw Blue Velvet, I had no idea that films could operate on several different levels at once. As Mike points out, Blue Velvet is, at one time, a captivating mystery, a side-splitting comedy, a pointed satire of American life, a brutal horror film, and a truly moving love story. Everything David Lynch has done since, with the exception of The Straight Story (an enjoyable movie in its own right), has been a reexamination of the themes and styles he examined to perfection in Blue Velvet. I have a strong appreciation for all but one of his films (I’m looking at you, Dune), but in my opinion, nothing he’s done since has overtaken the greatness he displayed in this, his absolute masterpiece.

From the opening sequence, which still gives me goosebumps, I was captivated. The first shot of the film—a gorgeous blue sky that pans down to blood-red roses against a white picket fence backdrop, which fades into a sequence of iconic American scenes: the fireman waving politely as he drives by, another shot of yellow tulips, school children walking through a crosswalk, all against a sonic backdrop of Bobby Vinton’s titular soft pop classic. And then we focus in on the scene at a typical American home, in which the mother watches a soap opera while her husband has a terrifying stroke in the front yard. The sound of the hose intensifies on the soundtrack, and in slow motion, a baby wanders by, while the family dog takes a drink from the garden hose that is still being held by the writhing old man on the lawn. Pan down deeper, deeper into the lawn, where a grotesque menagerie of beetles scuttle in the dirt, their sounds vividly taking over the soundtrack. Never before or since have I seen a film that so eloquently (without dialogue, no less!) and succinctly encapsulates the experience the viewer is about to enjoy in its opening sequence.

In the next scene we meet Jeffrey Beaumont, the everyman protagonist who will soon descend down into the dirt with the beetles. Jeffrey finds an ear in a field after visiting his father in the hospital (the same man who collapsed in the opening sequence.) He takes the ear to the local police station and David Lynch’s bizarre camp dialogue takes center-stage.

Jeffrey: I, uh, found an ear.
Detective Beaumont: You did. A human ear?
Jeffrey: Yeah. I thought I should bring it to you.
Detective Beaumont: Yep, that’s right. Let’s take a look at it.
Detective Beaumont looks in the bag.
Detective Beaumont Yes, that’s a human ear all right.

From there Jeffrey gets involved in an engrossing, disturbing mystery that still keeps me riveted long past my bedtime. The story of Blue Velvet is, at heart, a coming-of-age tale. But instead of the protagonist coming of age into a world that’s ultimately rewarding, Jeffrey comes into a world that’s altogether horrifying and unwelcoming. Imagine, for example, that in Say Anything, Lloyd Dobbler discovers that Diane Court is actually a masochistic murderer who delights in beating her lovers senseless, and you will come close to the sexual terror that is evoked in Blue Velvet.

If you ask most people to describe David Lynch movies in one word, the most typical response would be “weird”. To be sure, he doesn’t present the world in documentary style. But the reason his films are so consistently successful is because they are so much more than just “weird” … they are portraits of ostensibly ordinary people involved in circumstances beyond their control. Ebert, I love ya’, but you got it all wrong. Knowing how David Lynch talks, t’s really funny to listen to Ebert’s dismissal of Lynch’s dialogue as “funny, smarmy, and campy,” because that’s the way he really is.

Blue Velvet is an unconventional take on the mystery genre, but it is anything but distancing. As with Tarantino’s reputation for making violent movies, David Lynch isn’t known as the weirdest director because his films are more bizarre than anyone else’s … it’s because he does it so well. Lynch is not just a filmmaker … he is one of our most important living artists, and Blue Velvet deserves to be near the top of the list of the finest American films ever made.

And a side note: Dennis Hopper? Dennis FUCKING Hopper!

On the Awkward Press scale of pizzas, I proudly give Blue Velvet: 6 PIZZAS!!!

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