The definition of a must-see movie

fizz_28

Although I was once inclined to agree with Roger Ebert's dismissal of "Blue Velvet" as a shocking albeit skillful and artistically stylish montage of pointless images, symbolism and effects, I've had to do a 360 turnaround after seeing it on DVD after all this years and reconsidering it in relation to some similar texts. The film certainly makes sense in comparison with a quest narrative such as Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and in light of Freud's ideas about love as well as Nietzsche's thoughts on the Dionysian self. It's also a film that pays constant homage to Hitchcock's best work, notably "Vertigo", "Rear Window" and "Psycho," in its preoccupation with spectator psychology and voyeurism.

Basically, Blue Velvet is about the rites of passage of a young man after a descent into the underworld of his home-town. However, the man emerges from his experience neither sadder nor wiser. Instead, Lynch cynically reprises the film's innocent opening with its hopelessly artificial, Pollyannish, post-card pastoral idyl that is most likely the preferred reality of the American mainstream movie consumer. At the same time, he preserves the tenuousness of such a naive vision with the shot of a deliberately artificial insect impaled on a robin's beak and with a soundtrack that subjects the theme song to a disturbing treatment out of some internal, subterranean sound studio.

This film has so many meanings, it would be exhausting to write even half. People, especially the detractors of the film, should give up on saying that there is nothing at the center of the film, and that it is merely pretentious art. Like I said, it has so many meanings that it would take me forever to write even a few with the limited amount of paragraph space I have. Jeffrey, our hero, confronts at first, mortality (his father stricken by a life-threatening stroke), then a severed, decaying human ear in a field. The ear, the organ of hearing, is also the sense that fully awakens only in the dark, granting access to the Dionysian, deep intuitive wellsprings of the self. But the ear we see on screen has become a diseased, useless instrument in a "sunny" culture whose idea of music is Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet." The ear is Jeffrey's passage into the underworld. Thus, as he sees the ear, before he enters the underworld, the camera zooms into the ear. At the end of the film, when Jeffrey has confronted his demons and been through the ordeal within the underworld, the camera zooms out of the ear to represent what has happened.

Blue Velvet is David Lynch's magnum-opus. Dennis Hopper once said that it was America's first surrealist film, however I'd give his earlier, more unknown work "Eraserhead" this title. Blue Velvet is probably, however, the most famous example. I highly recommend this film, whether or not your going to enjoy it is completely out of the question, as long as you see this. It's a life changing experience and a masterpiece.

score 10/10

fizz_28 23 January 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1806095/