40 Years Ago, Blue Velvet Caught Detective Movies with Their Pants Down
“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.”
“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” The comment is directed at Kyle MacLachlan’s character in David Lynch’s first true masterpiece, 1986’s Blue Velvet. But the line — delivered by wholesome coed Sandy (Laura Dern) to the similarly clean-cut Jeffrey (MacLachlan) — serves as a thesis statement for the entire crime-movie genre.
By the time David Lynch put his stamp on tales of femme fatales and boy detectives, films like Body Heat (1981) and Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) had already taken the implied sex and violence of classic noir and made it explicit. De Palma in particular gave these movies a perverse new point of view, playing up the voyeurism also seen in works by his hero, Alfred Hitchcock. Still, no one was ready for Blue Velvet.
Lynch’s fourth feature film was intended as a return to form, reasserting the Eraserhead auteur’s independence after detours directing an Oscars contender (The Elephant Man, 1980) and a big-budget sci-fi movie (Dune, 1984). Dune in particular had been a financial and personal humiliation for Lynch, but if he arrived at the 1986 Toronto International Film Festival with the intention of upsetting the industry, he didn’t show it.
Pressed about the film’s content by the CBC’s Valerie Pringle, Lynch said that he didn’t set out to shock people with Blue Velvet: “I get ideas and I go with those ideas. It's not that I set out to disturb someone or do something to an audience — I set out to try to translate these ideas into film, and to create some sort of a world for me that I can say: 'Yes, this is what was in my mind,' " he said.
But shock people he did, as Blue Velvet became a source of controversy almost immediately following its premiere. The film’s biggest detractor was Roger Ebert, who condemned Lynch in an infamous one-star review that criticized Blue Velvet’s blend of kitsch and misogynistic violence. Many viewers were offended by the treatment of Isabella Rossellini’s character, nightclub singer Dorothy Valens, who becomes the object of Jeffrey’s obsessive affection after he breaks into her apartment in search of answers about the severed human ear he finds in a field in the opening scene. (Since then, Rossellini has come forward to say that she knew what she was getting into when she read the script, and in no way felt exploited on set.)
The sequence that follows is at the core of that critique, as the Boy Scout watches through the slats in Dorothy’s closet door as the man who’s kidnapped Dorothy’s son, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), comes into the room and subjects her to a degrading assault that leaves her curled up on the floor clutching her stomach. Jeffrey is more intrigued than horrified, and his curiosity soon curdles into violence as he begins a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with the broken and confused Dorothy. Then Frank finds out about the two of them, and this already-dark movie gets even darker.
Isabella Rossellini has come out in defense of the film’s initial controversies.
What are we to make of this? Much has been written about Blue Velvet as it relates to corruption underneath the surface of small-town American life — a recurring theme in Lynch’s work that’s also important to his TV magnum opus, Twin Peaks. And while Jeffrey’s descent into the underworld of Lumberton, North Carolina does fit this theme, its unblinking perversity also implicates the audience in ways that few filmmakers dared to 40 years ago.
Blue Velvet questions whether there is such a thing as “innocent” interest in tales of murder and mayhem, inserting shots into the infamous sequence above that allow the viewer to watch what’s happening through Jeffrey’s eyes. He wants to watch, and that desire naturally leads to the desire to participate in what he sees. But when Dorothy shows up at Sandy’s house, bruised and naked, he tries to deny their relationship to his high-school sweetheart and her police-officer father. He wants to get his kicks, but he doesn’t want to be held responsible for them.
When we watch a detective movie, we are put into a similar position. We’re thrilled and titillated by the violence that’s being acted out in front of us, but the invisible barrier of the screen protects us from accountability for it. In his dissenting review, Ebert noted that the scenes of sexual violence in Blue Velvet are filmed in a straightforward style that’s completely different than the dreamy surrealism of Jeffrey and Sandy’s puppydog romance. But what if this is not an inconsistency, but a deliberate challenge? Where does curiosity become complicity? Forty years later, Blue Velvet has gone from a controversial cult film to an undisputed classic. And we’re still trying to figure that out.
