Blue Velvet

(1986)

Postmodern art that can carry sincerity is a rare commodity in cinema. David Lynch is one of the few directors whose films are as earnest as they are oblique. BLUE VELVET uses popular culture representations of the American smalltown as a mode of expression, a figurative shorthand to key directly into the milieu without wasting expository real estate. That Lynch’s images – both here and in his TWIN PEAKS series – have themselves become touchstones of these representations testifies to the clarity and integrity of his re-visioning. Inside this hyper-reality, we are asked to share the heightened emotions of the characters as they experience them without editing or stylization. The episodes of mania and delirium we find Sandy, Frank, and Dorothy in for long stretches of continuous screen time compel us as an audience to abandon ironic detachment and revert to basic human empathy. In this and other ways, the film is among the most probing studies of voyeurism in what has to be the medium that most invites it. Lynch sets up a cinematic projection booth within the world of the film in the closet of Dorothy’s apartment, which alternates with our cinematic viewpoint, and confuses it. But in this depiction of the American heartland, purity and perversity can co-exist without contradiction, a metaphor for the elision of social boundaries of taste – along with the argument about domestic and imported beer – and culture which defines postmodernism and of which Lynch is a chief proponent in both his life and his art.