Tagline: It’s a strange world.
Blue Velvet movie storyline. College student Jeffrey Beaumont returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton to manage his father’s hardware store while his father is hospitalized. Walking though a grassy meadow near the family home, Jeffrey finds a severed human ear. After an initial investigation, lead police Detective John Williams advises Jeffrey not to speak to anyone about the case as they investigate further. Detective Williams also tells Jeffrey that he cannot divulge any information about what the police know.
Detective Williams’ high school aged daughter, Sandy Williams, tells Jeffrey what she knows about the case from overhearing her father’s private conversations on the matter: that it has to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens, who lives in an older apartment building near the Beaumont home. His curiosity getting the better of him, Jeffrey, with Sandy’s help, decides to find out more about the woman at the center of the case by breaking into Dorothy’s apartment while he knows she’s at work.
What Jeffrey finds is a world unfamiliar to him, one that he doesn’t truly understand but one that he is unable to deny the lure of despite the inherent dangers of being associated with a possible murder. Still, he is torn between this world and the prospect of a relationship with Sandy, the two who are falling for each other, despite Sandy already being in a relationship with Mike, the school’s star football player.
Blue Velvet is a 1986 American neo-noir mystery film, written and directed by David Lynch. Blending psychological horror[3][4] with film noir, the film stars Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern. The title is taken from Bobby Vinton’s 1963 song of the same name.
The screenplay of Blue Velvet had been passed around multiple times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with many major studios declining it because of its strong sexual and violent content. After the commercial and critical failure of Lynch’s Dune (1984), the director made attempts at developing a more “personal story”, somewhat characteristic of the surrealist style displayed in his debut Eraserhead (1977). The independent studio De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, owned at the time by Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, agreed to finance and produce the film.
Symbolism is used heavily in Blue Velvet. The most consistent symbolism in the film is an insect motif introduced at the end of the first scene, when the camera zooms in on a well-kept suburban lawn until it unearths a swarming underground nest of disgusting bugs. This is generally recognized as a metaphor for the seedy underworld that Jeffrey will soon discover under the surface of his own suburban, Reaganesque paradise.
The severed ear he finds is being overrun by black ants. The bug motif is recurrent throughout the film, most notably in the bug-like gas mask that Frank wears, but also the excuse that Jeffrey uses to gain access to Dorothy’s apartment: he claims to be an insect exterminator.[17] One of Frank’s sinister accomplices is also consistently identified through the yellow jacket he wears, possibly reminiscent of the name of a type of wasp. Finally, a robin eating a bug on a fence becomes a topic of discussion in the last scene of the film. The robin, mentioned earlier by Sandy when she recounted her dream, represents love conquering evil.
The severed ear that Jeffrey discovers is also a key symbolic element, leading 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 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.
Blue Velvet (1986)
Directed by: David Lynch
Starring: Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell, Priscilla Pointer, Frances Bay, Jack Harvey, Ken Stovitz, J. Michael Hunter
Screenplay by: David Lynch
Production Design by: Patricia Norris
Cinematography by: Frederick Elmes
Film Editing by: Duwayne Dunham
Set Decoration by: Edward ‘Tantar’ LeViseur
Music by: Angelo Badalamenti
Distributed by: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
Release Date: September 19, 1986
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