On his first day back in Lumberton to visit his injured father, college student Jeffrey Beaumont discovers a human ear in a field. He turns it into Detective Williams but is burning with curiosity, wanting to know about the case. He learns from Sandy, the detective’s daughter, that a local lounge singer is somehow involved. Jeffrey concocts a plan to investigate her apartment. Jeffrey learns the lounge singer is a traumatized, sexually abused woman trapped under the control of Frank Booth, a deranged, gas-huffing psychopath. Jeffrey just can’t quit the case and sinks deeper into it, discovering the criminal underbelly of Lumberton and confronting how weird the world truly is.
I chose to watch “Blue Velvet” after watching, and hating, David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”. Lynch is such an esteemed creator but I thought “Mulholland Drive” was a steaming pile of turd, so I wanted to give him another shot. I liked “Blue Velvet” much better—it’s an actual beginning-middle-and-end story, after all, and it means something. For me, the film explores a young man’s maturity: the questions he asks, the mistakes he makes, and his ultimate shedding of naivety in the face of how dark and tragic the world ultimately is. But I still didn’t care for the brooding tone and wooden performances. I’m not a noir fan, in general. This film was full of insufferable characters making bad choices. I think the one interesting note in the whole picture was Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth, who was eccentric, erratic, and terrifying. But by the time we get to the third act, I sort of didn’t care what happened to our protagonists. I totally see how this film is influential and a jump in the depiction of gore, sex, and crime. But...meh. Maybe David Lynch just isn’t for me. Everyone sings the praises of “Twin Peaks”, but I suspect it will be a while before I get to that show.