Blue Velvet (film)

This article is about the David Lynch film. For the popular song of the same name, see Blue Velvet (song).

Blue Velvet
File:Bvmovieposter.jpg Film poster
Directed by	David Lynch
Written by	David Lynch
Produced by	Fred C. Caruso
Starring	Kyle MacLachlan Isabella Rossellini Dennis Hopper Laura Dern Dean Stockwell
Cinematography	Frederick Elmes
Edited by	Duwayne Dunham
Music by	Angelo Badalamenti
Distributed by	De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
Release dates	12 September, 1986 (premiere at Toronto Film Festival) 19 September, 1986 (theatrical release) February 26, 1987
Running time	120 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$6,000,000 (estimated)
Box office	$8,551,228 (North America)

Blue Velvet is a 1986 American neo-noir, mystery and thriller film written and directed by David Lynch. The film features Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern. The title is taken from the Bobby Vinton song of the same name.

Blue Velvet details Jeffrey Beamount's discovery of a human ear in a grass field, in the small and quaint city of Lumberton, North Carolina. Jeffrey becomes dissatisfied with the police's overall investigation, and begins investigating the case himself with the aid of his girlfriend Sandy. The two are eventually led into a depraved underworld home to drug addiction, rape and murder. Blue Velvet caused considerable contreversy in 1986 over its artistic merit, yet was critically acclaimed. The film was not a box office success, however, yet achieved cult classic status through video sales in the early 1990s.

Plot

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college after his father (Jack Harvey) suffers a near fatal stroke. While walking home from the hospital, he cuts through a vacant lot and happens on a paper bag containing a severed ear. Jeffrey takes the ear to local investigator Detective John Williams (George Dickerson). When he returns to the Williams house later to discuss the incident further, Jeffrey meets the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern). She tells him details about the ear case and a suspicious woman, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Increasingly curious, Jeffrey devises a plan to sneak into Dorothy’s apartment that involves posing as a maintenance man. Dorothy becomes distracted when a man dressed in a yellow suit (played by Fred Pickler) knocks at her door, and Jeffrey steals Dorothy's spare key.

Jeffrey and Sandy attend Dorothy's nightclub show at the Slow Club. While Dorothy performs at the nightclub, Jeffrey sneaks into her apartment to snoop. He hurriedly hides in a closet when she returns home. But Dorothy, wielding a knife, finds him hiding and threatens to hurt him. When she realizes he is merely a curious boy, she assumes his intentions are sexual in nature, and is turned on by his voyeurism. She makes him undress at knifepoint, then fellates him. Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) interrupts their encounter with a knock on the door. Dorothy urges Jeffrey to return to the closet and witnesses Frank's bizarre sexual proclivities, which include erotic asphyxiation, dry humping, and sadomasochistic tendencies. Frank is an extremely foul-mouthed, violent sociopath whose orgasmic climax is a fit of both pleasure and rage. When Frank leaves, a saddened and desperate Dorothy tries to seduce Jeffrey again. She demands that he hit her but when he refuses she demands to be left alone. Jeffrey again observes Dorothy's nightclub show at the Slow Club, where she performs Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton. Frank is also present at the nightclub. Later, in the car park, Jeffrey watches Frank and his cohorts drive away before going to Dorothy's apartment again.

File:Frankbooth.jpg

Frank Booth about to attack Jeffrey.

Frank catches Dorothy and Jeffrey together, and forces them both to accompany him to the typically Lynchian house of Ben (Dean Stockwell), a suave dandy and partner in crime. In a bizarre scene Ben mimes the singing of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", sending Frank into maudlin sadness, then rage. He takes Jeffrey to a milling yard and savagely beats him to the overture of "In Dreams". Jeffrey wakes the next day and goes home, where he is overcome with guilt and despair. He decides to go to the police. At the police station, Jeffrey notices that Sandy's father's partner is Gordon — the Yellow Man. Later at Sandy's home, her father is amazed by Jeffrey's story, but warns Jeffrey of the danger of the situation. Jeffrey and Sandy go to a dance party together, profess their newfound love and embrace. When they're tailed on their way home, Jeffrey is relieved to discover that it's only Sandy’s football-playing ex-boyfriend. A confrontation is avoided when they see a naked and distressed Dorothy waiting on Jeffrey’s front lawn.

From the hospital, Jeffrey tells Sandy that he must return to Dorothy's apartment and tells Sandy to send her father there immediately. When he arrives back at Dorothy’s apartment, he finds the dead bodies of The Yellow Man and Dorothy’s husband, who is missing an ear. When he tries to leave, he sees The Well Dressed Man coming up the steps and recognizes him as Frank. Jeffrey talks to Det. Williams over the police radio but lies about his location inside the apartment. Frank enters the apartment and brags about hearing Jeffrey's location over his own police radio. When Frank fails to find Jeffrey in the bedroom, he returns to the lounge. Jeffrey shoots Frank with the Yellow Man's gun. Det. Williams arrives with Sandy in tow. Days later, we see Jeffrey and Sandy together, with their lives back to normal, and before the credits, Dorothy and her son playing happily in the park together.

Development and production

File:Lumbertonbv.jpg

Blue Velvet's setting of Lumberton

Blue Velvet's initial origins may lie in Lynch's childhood, spent deep in the forests of Spokane, Washington, a Northwestern setting similar to that of the film. Lynch has admitted to certain autobiographical content in the film. He has said:

"Kyle is dressed like me. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture in Washington. We were in the woods all the time. I'd sorta had enough of the woods by the time I left, but still, lumber and lumberjacks, all this kinda thing, that's America to me like the picket fences and the roses in the opening shot. It's so burned in, that image, and it makes me feel so happy."

If Lynch's childhood memories inspired the setting of Blue Velvet, the actual story of the film originated from three ideas that crystallized in the filmmaker's mind over a period of time starting as early as 1973, but at that time he "only had a feeling and a title."

The second idea was an image of a severed, human ear lying in a field that has since become one of the most striking visuals of the film. "I don't know why it had to be an ear. Except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body a hole into something else...The ear sits on the head and goes right into the mind so it felt perfect," Lynch remarked in an interview. For the filmmaker, the severed ear was the perfect way to draw Jeffrey into a secret world that lies at the heart of the film.

The third idea that came to Lynch was Bobby Vinton's classic rendition of the song Blue Velvet and "the mood that came with that song a mood, a time, and things that were of that time." Lynch was directly influenced by Kenneth Anger's use of Bobby Vinton's classic in his avant-garde experimental short Scorpio Rising (1964). The song continues the blue velvet motif that appears throughout the film from the curtain or robe of velvet in the opening credits to the piece of material that Frank carries with him. Many elements of Blue Velvet are reminiscent of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). The story of a child or naïve young man thrust into an unexpected adult world of crime, sex, and murder is common to both films, and the development of this subject as something of a journey towards the redemption of innocence also seems similar. Both films feature a helpless woman held under the power of a sometimes disarming but ultimately terrifying madman. Both madmen are tied symbolically to a primal, animal or insect world. And in both films the child character loses his father in the first scene, and later seeks the help of a surrogate father figure but is disappointed in this appeal to adult, masculine authority.

Once these three ideas came to Lynch, he and Roth pitched it to Warner Bros. Pictures who showed interest in the project. Lynch eventually spent two years writing two drafts which, he stated, were not very good. The problem with them, Lynch has said, was that "there was maybe all the unpleasantness in the film but nothing else. A lot was not there. And so it went away for a while."

After finishing The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch met producer Richard Roth over coffee. Roth had read and enjoyed Lynch's Ronnie Rocket script but did not think it was something he wanted to produce. He asked Lynch if the filmmaker had any other scripts but the director only had ideas. "I told him I had always wanted to sneak into a girl's room to watch her into the night and that, maybe, at one point or another, I would see something that would be the clue to a murder mystery. Roth loved the idea and asked me to write a treatment. I went home and thought of the ear in the field."

File:87lynch.jpg

David Lynch on the set of the film with Kyle MacLachlan.

Lynch wrote two more drafts before he was satisfied with the script of the film. Conditions at this point were ideal for Lynch's film: he had cut a deal with Dino De Laurentiis that gave him complete artistic freedom and final cut privileges with the stipulation that the filmmaker take a cut in his salary and work with a budget of only $6 million. This deal meant that Blue Velvet was the smallest film on the De Laurentiis' slate. Consequently, Lynch would be left mostly unsupervised during production. "After Dune I was down so far that anything was up! So it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment." Because the material was completely different from anything that would be considered mainstream at the time, Laurentiis had to start his own production company to distribute it.

The scene where Dorothy appears naked outside after being raped and beaten was inspired by a real-life experience Lynch had in his childhood when he and his brother saw a naked woman walking down a neighborhood street at night. The experience was so traumatic to the young Lynch at the time, it made him cry and he had never forgotten it.

Lynch's original script had Dorothy's child die before he could be saved, and Dorothy committing suicide at the end by throwing herself off the roof of the apartment building, her Blue Velvet robe dropping to cover the ground-level camera. Her suicide was to be crosscut with Jeffrey's idyllic home life. This referenced a previous scene in the film, shot but not included in the final cut, where Dorothy and Jeffrey make love on the roof of the apartment building during a thunderstorm, after which Dorothy threatens to jump from the roof.

Filming

Principal photography of Blue Velvet began on February 10 in 1986, and ended on April 26. The exterior scenes of Lumberton were filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, while indoor scenes where shot in De Laurentiis Entertainment Group Studios. Filming of particular outdoor scenes were watched by townspeople. The scene in which Dorothy Vallens is required to walk around Jeffrey's lawn; naked and badly bruised was one of them. Isabella Rossellini warned the public to stay away, and apologized for what would be shown when many decided to stay. The scene caused an outpoor of contreversy with people, and the Wilmington police notified both Lynch and the cast that they where no-longer permitted to film in North Carolina's streets. Filming was completed on April 22, 1986.

Lynch's original rough cut ran for approximately four hours. He was contractually obligated to deliver a two-hour movie by De Laurentiis and cut many small subplots and character scenes. He also made cuts at the request of the MPAA. For example, when Frank slaps Dorothy after the first rape scene, the audience was supposed to see Frank actually hitting her, instead it cuts away to Jeffrey in the closet, wincing at what he has just seen. This was removed to satisfy the MPAA concerns about violence. Lynch thought that the change only made the scene more disturbing. To this day, footage of the deleted scenes has never been found and only stills remain. David Lynch's final cut of the film ran one frame under two hours.

Music

Main article: Blue Velvet (film soundtrack)

The Blue Velvet soundtrack is by Angelo Badalamenti. The soundtrack uses vintage pop songs, such as Bobby Vinton’s "Blue Velvet" and Roy Orbison’s "In Dreams", juxtaposed with an orchestral score inspired by Shostakovich. During filming, Lynch placed megaphones on set and in streets and played Shostakovich to set the correct mood he wanted to conveyed. The score makes direct quotations from Shostakovich's 15th Symphony, which Lynch had been listening to regularly while writing the screenplay.

Entertainment Weekly ranked Blue Velvet at #100 on their list of the 100 Greatest Film Soundtracks. Critic John Alexander wrote, "the haunting soundtrack accompanies the title credits, then weaves through the narrative, accentuating the noir mood of the film." Lynch worked with music composer Angelo Badalamenti for the first time in this film and asked him to write a score that had to be “like Shostakovich, be very Russian, but make it the most beautiful thing but make it dark and a little bit scary.” Badalamenti's success with Blue Velvet would later go on to contribute to all of Lynch's future full-length films. Also included in the sound team was long time Lynch collaborator Alan Splet, sound editor and designer who had won an Academy Award for his work on The Black Stallion (1979) and been nominated for Never Cry Wolf (1983).

Cast

• Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont: Jeffrey is a college student who enjoys mystery and suspense, and after finding a human ear in a field, begins an investigation on where it came from. MacLachlan had appeared in very few mainstream roles before his work in Blue Velvet.
• Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens: Dorothy is an emotionally torn night-club chanteuse whose son and husband have been kidnapped in ransom for her to perform sexual advantages for Frank Booth.
• Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth: Frank is a repulsive, vulgar and foul-mouthed criminal rapist.
• Laura Dern as Sandy Williams: Sandy is the naive, innocent accomplice of Jeffrey, and his eventual girlfriend.
• Hope Lange as Mrs. Williams: Sandy's mother, and wife of Detective Williams.
• Dean Stockwell as Ben. Ben is the effeminate partner in crime of Frank's.
• George Dickerson as Detective John Williams: John Williams is a detective, and wife of Mrs Williams and father to Sandy.

The cast of Blue Velvet included several relatively unknown actors, including Laura Dern. Isabella Rossellini had experienced some recognition for her Lancôme ads in the early 1980s. Dennis Hopper was the biggest "name" in the film, having starred in Easy Rider (1969) and Apocalypse Now (1979), while Kyle MacLachlan had played the central role in Lynch's Dune (1984), a science fiction epic based on the novel of the same name, that become a critical and commercial failure. Blue Velvet's dark script and low budget limited the number of big names that Lynch could attract. The part of Frank Booth was originally offered to Robert Loggia, then Willem Dafoe and Richard Bright, all of whom turned it down because of the character's vulgar and intense personality. In contrast, Dennis Hopper — Lynch's third choice — accepted the role, reportedly having exclaimed, "I've got to play Frank! I am Frank!" Hopper confirmed this in the Blue Velvet "making-of" documentary The Mysteries of Love, produced in 2002 for the special edition of the film.

Three actresses were offered the role of Dorothy Vallens. Lynch tested and subsequently turned down German/Polish actress Hanna Schygulla, then considered British actress Helen Mirren, who was unavailable at the time. While in New York City, Lynch met Isabella Rossellini at a restaurant, and she accepted the role. Lynch only had one choice for the role of Jeffrey Beaumont: Val Kilmer, who turned the role down, deeming the script he read as "pornography". Kilmer later said he would have done the final version of the film; having become very fond of it. Kyle MacLachlan, who had previously starred in one film directed by Lynch, Dune (1984), was asked to play the role of Jeffrey. He instantly agreed. For MacLachlan, who appears in nearly every scene in the film, the intense shooting schedule was exhausting. In an interview, Lynch said that he initially wanted Molly Ringwald, then widely known as a "teen idol", to star as Sandy Williams; but Ringwald's mother objected to her starring in the film due to the graphic content, believing that it would tarnish her then-successful career in the film industry. Laura Dern, who had few film credits to her name at the time, took on the role.

Reception

Box office performance

Blue Velvet was released in theatres in the United States on February 26, 1986. In its opening weekend, Blue Velvet grossed a total of (USD) $789,409 and was released in a total of 98 theaters in the United States. As of August 7 2006, the film has grossed a total of $8,551,228 domestically. It was also released internationally, in Australia, most of West Germany, China, Canada, Hong Kong, Western Europe and Japan, followed by subsequent video releases. The film grossed (AU) $900,000 in Australia, which was a large and impressive amount of money for a film to gross at the box office in Australia, in that day, and (HKD) 450,139 in Hong Kong.

Critical reception

The film received an extremely positive reaction from critics in the United States. Paul Attanasio of The Washington Post said that "the film showcases a visual stylist utterly in command of his talents" and that Angelo Badalamenti "contributes an extraordinary score, slipping seamlessly from slinky jazz to violin figures to the romantic sweep of a classic Hollywood score," but claims that Lynch "isn't interested in communicating, he's interested in parading his personality. The movie doesn't progress or deepen, it just gets weirder, and to no good end."

Janet Maslin, critic from The New York Times expressed her admiration for the film, and directed much praise toward the performances of Hopper and Rossellini: "Mr. Hopper and Miss Rossellini are so far outside the bounds of ordinary acting here that their performances are best understood in terms of sheer lack of inhibition; both give themselves entirely over to the material, which seems to be exactly what's called for." She concluded by saying that the movie, "is as fascinating as it is freakish. It confirms Mr. Lynch's stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley."

Looking back in his Guardian/Observer review, critic Philip French felt that "The film is wearing well and has attained a classic status without becoming respectable or losing its sense of danger." Blue Velvet holds a 90 percent "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes and holds a consistantly high rating on the Internet Movie Database. Peter Travers, film critic for Rolling Stone magazine, named Blue Velvet the best film of the 1980s, and referred to the film as an "American masterpiece". Film critic Gene Siskel included Blue Velvet on his list of the best films of 1986, at #6.

Nevertheless, Blue Velvet was not without its detractors. A general criticism from critics in the United States was the films often vulgar approach to sexuality and violence that detracts the film from having a serious side. Roger Ebert, noted film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, supported that view, however praised Isabella Rosselini's performance as being "convincing and courageous", yet criticized how she was depicted in the film, even accusing David Lynch of misogyny: "degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film." Ebert ended up giving the movie one star out of four.

Awards and nominations

The film received an array of nominations, ranging from independent awards to mainstream. Isabella Rossellini won an Independent Spirit Award for the Best Female Lead in 1987. David Lynch and Dennis Hopper won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association award in 1987 for Blue Velvet in categories Best Director (Lynch) and Best Supporting Actor (Hopper). In 1987 National Society of Film Critics gave the film Best Film, Best Director (David Lynch), Best Cinematography (Frederick Elmes) and Best Supporting Actor (Dennis Hopper) awards. In addition, David Lynch was nominated for the 1987 Best Director Academy Award. Dennis Hopper received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the film Hoosiers. At the time, it was believed that the Academy wanted to honor Hopper's portrayal of Frank in Lynch's film, but gave him the Oscar nomination for his appearance in Hoosiers instead because Frank was just too evil a character. Many feel that Isabella Rossellini was also snubbed by the awards for her performance in the film.

It has won the following accolades:

Year	Award	Category — Recipient(s)
1986	Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival	Best Film (Grand Prize) — David Lynch
1987	Boston Society of Film Critics Awards	Best Cinematography — Frederick Elmes
		Best Director — David Lynch
		Best Film — David Lynch
		Best Actor in a Supporting Role — Dennis Hopper
1987	Independent Spirit Awards	Best Female Lead — Isabella Rossellini
1987	Montreal World Film Festival	Best Male Actor — Dennis Hopper
1987	National Society of Film Critics Awards	Best Cinematography — Frederick Elmes.

It was nominated for the following awards:

• Academy Awards (1987)
  • Academy Award for Best Director
• Golden Globes (1987)
  • Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture — Dennis Hopper
  • Best Screenplay (Motion Picture) — David Lynch

• Independent Spirit Award (1987)
  • Best Cinematography — Frederick Elmes
  • Best Director — David Lynch
  • Best Feature — Fred C. Caruso
  • Best Female Lead — Laura Dern
  • Best Male Lead — Dennis Hopper
  • Best Screenplay — David Lynch

• Writers Guild of America (1987)
  • Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Influence

Although it initially gained a small theatrical audience and was met with controversy over its artistic merit, Blue Velvet became a cult classic since its theatrical debut, had a myriad of VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases, and marked the comeback of Dennis Hopper after a significant hiatus from work and the entrance of David Lynch into the Hollywood mainstream. Its success has helped propel Hollywood mainstream toward more graphic displays of previously-censored themes, a similar case to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), for which Blue Velvet has been considered as important for the 1980s, as Psycho was for the 1960s. It is widley regarded as one of the most significant films of its era and the most defining neo-noir of the 1980s.

Blue Velvet spawned countless imitators that borrowed elements instituted by Lynch in the film. Its dark, dream-like and symbolistic production design have served as a benchmark and its inspiration can be seen in many subsequent suburban-set thriller films and cinema in general, as well as television programs including The X-Files, Lynch's own Twin Peaks, American Gothic and Desperate Housewives, as well as films such as Heathers, X, Crash, Happiness, American Beauty, Donnie Darko and Lantana. Some posters for the video release dubbed it "the most talked about movie of the decade". An increasing number of critics continue to regard it as one of recent cinema's finest achievements, Lynch’s magnum opus, and one of the most seminal crime films, and credit the film with having revolutionized the genre.

Blue Velvet now appears in several critical assessments of all-time greatest films. In December 1999, Entertainment Weekly ranked it as one of the "100 Greatest Films of All Time".The Guardian ranked it on their list of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time. The British magazine Sight and Sound’s ranked it as one of the Greatest Films in the past 25 years. It was listed on Movieline’s "100 Greatest Films Ever Made". Blue Velvet was ranked on Film Four's (UK) nationwide poll of the 2001 "100 Greatest Films". In a 2007 poll of the online film community, the film was ranked at #93. In a 2006 readers' poll by the British magazine Total Film, it ranked as the number 51st greatest film in history. The lip sync scene was ranked on Premiere's list of "The 25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History." While Dennis Hopper's performance as Frank Booth was ranked at #54 on "Premiere's" 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time. The American Film Institute has awarded the film two distinguished honors in their lists: one on 100 Years... 100 Thrills in 2001, selecting cinema’s most important horror and thriller films, and ranked the film’s villain Frank Booth, as one of the 50 greatest villains in 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains in 2003. The film was ranked #84 on Bravo Television's four hour programme 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004).

Themes and interpretation

Blue Velvet introduced several common elements of Lynch's work, including distorted characters, a polarized world, debilitating damage to the skull or brain and the dark underbelly of large cities, or in this case, small towns. Red curtains also show up in key scenes, which have since become a trademark of Lynch films. The opening title features the title cards, and a backdrop of a blue velvet robe blowing in the wind, which sets the mood for the blue velvet and how it consistently appears throughout the film. Much of the cinematography and shots bear similarities to surrealistic paintings, such as the way the streets of Lumberton are lit with very dim light.

As with much of the psychological thriller genre, Blue Velvet owes a large debt to 1950s film noir, filtered through a uniquely individualistic vision, containing and exploring such conventions as the femme fatale, a seemingly unstoppable villain, and the questionable moral outlook of the Hero — extended here to include even the humanity of the hero, as well as the usual shadowy cinematography and important symbolism. The film also pays tribute to many 1950s and 1960s soap operas and B-films, showcasing nostalgic visuals; the setting is also very indistinguishable, as there are references to the both the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1980s.

Feminist psychoanalytic film theorist Laura Mulvey argues that the film establishes a metaphorical family — Jeffrey Beaumont (the 'child') and his 'parents' Frank Booth and Dorothy Vallens — through deliberate references to film noir and its underlying Oedipal theme. The resulting violence, she claims, can be read as symbolic of domestic violence within 'real' families. For instance, Frank's violent acts can be seen to reflect the different types of abuse within families, and the control he has over Dorothy might represent the hold an abusive husband has over his wife. Michael Atkinson reads Jeffrey as an innocent youth who is both horrified by the violence inflicted by Frank, but also tempted by it as the means of possessing Dorothy for himself. The film is also a journey into the heartland of a seemingly perfect small town America, and its underlying surface, which is presented throughout the film with the visual manifestation of roses, white-picket fenced homes, happy suburban families, and then the discovery of what lies beneath, visually represented with crawling insects, pain (such as the seizure of Jeffrey's father) and destruction.

Critics also argue and link the film was widley interpretated as "a provocation to the "retro culture" of Reaganism, but under close examination is the embodiment not only of the bankruptcy but the extreme reaction underneath the cinema’s postmodern social criticism."

In an interview, Lynch mentioned that he deliberately placed recurring symbols into the film. The most obvious symbol is that of insects, introduced at the end of the first scene, when the camera zooms in on a well-kept suburban lawn until it discovers, underground, a swarming nest of bugs, a metaphor for the seedy underworld that Jeffrey will soon discover in his suburban town. The bug motif recurs throughout the film, most notably in the bug-like oxygen mask that Frank wears, but also in the excuse that Jeffrey offers when he first gains access to Dorothy's apartment: he claims he is an insect exterminator, and finally in the last scene where a robin, which is meant to symbolize love, flies onto a windowsill with a beetle in its mouth.

The severed ear that Jeffrey discovers is also a key symbolic element; the ear is what leads Jeffrey into danger. Indeed, just as Jeffrey's troubles begin, the audience is treated to a nightmarish sequence in which the camera zooms into the ear canal of the severed, decomposing ear. Notably, the camera does not reemerge from the ear canal until the end of the film. When Jeffrey finally comes through his hellish ordeal unscathed, the ear canal shot is replayed, only in reverse, zooming out through Jeffrey's own ear as he relaxes in his yard on a summer day.

Frank's drug

Throughout the film, Frank Booth uses a mask to breathe a gas from a tank. Lynch's script specified helium, to raise Frank's voice and have it resemble that of an infant. However, during filming, Hopper, an experienced drug user, claimed to have insight into Frank's choice of drug and that helium was inappropriate:

"...I'm thankful to Dennis," Lynch said, "because up until the last minute it was gonna be helium — to make the difference between 'Daddy' and the baby that much more. But I didn't want it to be funny. So helium went out the window and became just a gas. Then, in the first rehearsal, Dennis said, 'David, I know what's in these different canisters.' And I said, 'Thank God, Dennis, that you know that!' And he named all the gases."

In The Mysteries of Love documentary on the DVD version of the film, Hopper claims that the drug was amyl nitrite an angina medication.

Further reading

• Atkinson, Michael (1997). Blue Velvet. Long Island, New York.: British Film Institute. ISBN 0-851-70559-6.
• Drazin, Charles (2001). Blue Velvet: Bloomsbury Pocket Movie Guide 3. Britain. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 0-747-55176-6.

External links

• LynchNet - Blue Velvet
• Blue Velvet at All Movie Guide
• Blue Velvet Mysteries: two part search for the film's deleted scenes
• Blue Velvet at IMDb
• Blue Velvet at the TCM Movie Database

Reviews:

• Template:Filmsite
• Blue Velvet at Rotten Tomatoes