Movies I’m Afraid Of: Blue Velvet
Movies I’m Afraid Of is a weekly column in which I watch auteury or otherwise well-reviewed movies that I’ve avoided, sometimes for years, for being too creepy or depressing. To read more about the MIAO series, click here. Spoilers ahead.
Blue Velvet is a film I’ve been afraid of for ten years. I first heard about it in high school through a friend who invited me several times to watch it with her. I refused every time, mostly because I didn’t want to see the rape scene she’d told me about, nor a movie that had a rape scene in it.
Well, ha. If any of you readers out there are fellow cine-scaredy-cats, I can tell you now that there is nothing at all scary about this movie. Blue Velvet stars Kyle MacLachlan as Jeff, an Ivy League student who returns home to visit his sick dad in the hospital and to run the family hardware store. He finds a decomposing ear in the field behind his house and brings it to the police station, where a kindly but aloof cop takes it, then tells Jeff to stop thinking about it. The kindly cop’s daughter, a flirty high-school girl named Becky or Susan Sandy played by Laura Dern, tells Jeff about another case involving a singer implicated in a murder. Jeff becomes obsessed with the singer, Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini), for basically no reason, sneaking into her apartment, going to her shows, and later being seduced by her. They have kinky, non-rapey sex that Jeff regrets later. All the while, he keeps dating, or trying to date, Sandy.
Jeff discovers that Dorothy’s husband and son have been kidnapped by Frank (Dennis Hopper), a psychopath obsessed with blue velvet who blackmails Dorothy into having very uncomfortable, very short (five seconds, tops) sex with him, during which he calls her “mommy” lots and lots of times. Jeff sees them doing this squick once from inside a closet. Then he comes back to Dorothy’s apartment at a later time to have sex with her, but is caught by Frank. Frank takes Dorothy and Jeff for a scary joyride (2 Fast 2 Furious) and beats up Jeff.
By this point, Jeff’s had enough (beatings to his face). He reports Frank and his accomplice — a crooked cop, it turns out — to Sandy’s father (the kindly cop). This sets off a series of events, leading to the deaths of Dorothy’s husband and the crooked cop and to Frank coming after Jeff (to kill him this time). But Jeff outwits Frank and shoots him (whoops, Frank!) from the closet in Dorothy’s apartment where he first saw Frank do it.
The film then ends with an extremely tonally-off celebration of the triumph of white-bread suburban blandness. All the bad guys are dead, Sandy gets together with Jeff even after finding out about his sex times with Dorothy, Jeff’s dad gets out of the hospital, and Dorothy plays with her toddler son in the park under a very blue sky. The sun is out, the flowers are in bloom, and no one ever has to have kinky sex ever again, thanks to the cleverness of upper-middle class white people. The film’s opening shot of a white picket fence behind tall red flowers against a cloudless blue sky recalls the American flag; the repetition of the image near the end of the film signals the bolstering of “the natural order,” the triumph of bourgeois Americana. It’s all pretty barf-making, and nearly ruined the movie for me, and I have to imagine, for many others as well.
A final note: it must be Kyle MacLachlan’s association with David Lynch (via Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks) in the 80s and early 90s that’s led him to be typecasted for two decades now as a WASPy Jeremy Irons, a worldly, preternaturally poised pervert. The worldly pervert role is one I enjoy seeing MacLachlan occupy; he never fails to creep me out, but in a quietly seductive way. Thus it was enjoyable to see MacLachlan in an earlier iteration of this, for while Jeff ends up with the insipid Sandy, he’s also unmistakably a budding pervert, if too young to be an elegant one just yet.
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