David Lynch’s entertaining Hitchockian thriller. Just forget the trite theme about “the underbelly of small towns” that some writers get stuck on here. You’d have to be defective to be surprised by the notion that people are freaky everywhere. The placid setting here largely serves as contrast to the brutality. Blue Velvet, above all else, like most Lynch films, is about mystery. Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont is the definitive Lynchian hero: a character who loves mystery for its own sake. When he finds a severed ear in the grass in his little Andy Griffith timber town, he doesn’t independently pursue the case (after turning over the ear to the police) out of any sense of justice. He’s not a wannabe cop or an avenger. His fetish is secrets. He just wants to press his nose against the glass and see, as he puts it, “something that was always hidden”. His troubles start when the people on whom he’s spying (a demonic Dennis Hopper and a sad-eyed Isabella Rossellini) see him.
This movie was a comeback for both Lynch and Dennis Hopper. Lynch’s previous film, Dune, was a mega-budget flop, the kind of disaster that ends careers. After that, he wanted to make a more personal film over which, unlike on Dune, he had complete artistic control and he took a reduced salary and a small budget to get it. As for Hopper, by the 80s, everyone wrote him off as a drug and alcoholism casualty, and his performance here as Frank Booth, the nastiest and most quotable movie villain of the decade, reminded everyone that he was still vital.