Recent viewings

Blue Velvet (1985) David Lynch's Oscar-nominated 1985 festival of the bizarre can only be seen, in hindsight, as a precursor to Twin Peaks, where he further explored his love of baroque complexity, shockingly surreal imagery in hypersaturated color, and the seedy underside of the human psyche.

The movie stars Kyle McLachlan as a stereotypically clean-cut college boy, Jeffrey, who becomes involved in a tangled web of crime and pathology after discovering a severed human ear laying in a field near his improbably-idyllic hometown. The plot thickens as he encounters a lovely cocktail singer, played by Isabella Rossellini, who has very troubling secrets, both sexual and otherwise. Dennis Hopper chews the scenery frantically, almost comically, as "Crazy Frank", a maniacal sadist who is victimizing her, but toward whom she also seems to feel a kind of perverse desire. (Lynch's villains are always weirdly over-the-top, apparently.)

Laura Dern, looking both angelically blonde and oddly masculine, lurks in the background as the somewhat reluctant female sidekick who shares secrets and provides a wholesome alternative to the yawning psychic abysses that confront Our Hero. "You're just like me," Frank snarls at Jeffrey at one point, and a tense sexual encounter with Rossellini's character suggests that there's some truth to that, just as the repeated motif of hideous bugs lurking under the illusory perfection of glowing green lawns suggests the way that depravity can lurk under the appearance of idyllic bliss.

Sadly, I am probably the last person who will get a chance to view this influential, Oscar-nominated film through Suburban Public Library. A local busybody took it upon herself to complain that it was "pornography". The film subsequently was discarded. The official story is that the DVD was damaged.