Carnal knowledge: "Blue Velvet" at 40

"There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience."

- Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan)

Blue Velvet reaches forty at a moment when we've gone almost a year on Earth without the film's presiding spirit David Lynch. (A Lynch season, The Dreamer, is running at London's BFI Southbank.) In his 2018 memoir Room to Dream, the famously enigmatic director let slip two useful pieces of information with regard to his 1986 opus. Firstly, that it was inspired by childhood memories of seeing a distressed naked woman emerge from her house one night; secondly, that his intention was never to allow us to solve the mysteries of a film, of an incident, of a life - rather to set the viewer to engage with it, to mulling any clues over in our mind's eye. (This may be why Lynch remains so beloved of critics: his works were meant to be puzzled over and invited speculation, even if their ultimate meaning fell somewhere between subjective and entirely elusive. Isn't that just like life?) It seems as good a moment as any to mull over Blue Velvet itself, and to ask how one of the darkest - and, on first release, most polarising - of American films came to be endorsed as a modern classic. 

Four decades on, we might say that the first responses were so extreme because no-one had seen anything quite like it before, not even in Lynch's own filmography. 1977's Eraserhead, a confounding and alarming escapee from an experimental laboratory, was made to be observed underground, in rooms full of men and women who'd apparently never seen the light; 1980's The Elephant Man was a play for period respectability, a cautious attempt to come in from the margins; 1984's Dune was whatever Dune was. Up until that point, Lynch had, like many artists, given the impression of casting around - but 1986 would be the year he found his true voice, and how. The new film was a studio movie - preceded by the MGM logo and shot on Technicolor, with actual stars - but one filled with surrealist intent and sexualised violence. Deploying a conjurer's trick, Lynch didn't repel us but drew us even further in: into the undergrowth, into a mystery (who's missing the ear?), and then a nightmare wrapped up in a dream. One of the revelations of revisiting Blue Velvet after some time is how well-structured it is: like Jeffrey Beaumont, we're forever left wanting to know and see more, often despite our own better instincts. The mystery (and the kink) envelops; it wraps around and embraces us like fog, quicksand or, indeed, velvet itself. No wonder some shouted warnings, and tried to resist.

If there's a moral here, it's surely conservative-leaning, a riff on how in certain circumstances curiosity really can kill the cat. But Lynch's methodology is radical and remains jolting. I genuinely believe Blue Velvet owes an artistic debt of some kind to all those peepers-slash-sex pests we were meant to identify with in early 1980s teen movies - those gurgling bros in Porky's and Screwballs and what-have-you, brought here to some form of creative justice. After hiding in the heroine's closet, Jeffrey is busted and himself stripped at knifepoint; Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy turns him into a casting-couch ingenue. And a substantial part of the film's consciousness is occupied with how easily bored young men, particularly those in small towns like Lumberton, can be misdirected in matters of the opposite sex. Jeffrey is persistently steered towards troubling carnal knowledge: that Dorothy has lovers that treat her rough and degrade her, and - what's more - that she appears to enjoy (at least some of) it, judging from the lipstick-smeared smile on her face. Some part of Blue Velvet corresponds to that fraught period in a young man's sexual development where he realises women aren't the angels he may have imagined or envisioned them as: it's there when Jeffrey asks Dorothy whether she's all right, and she replies "you know I'm not".

The vision of normal American life as dream/nightmare is so subtly insidious that when Lynch squeezes in a literal dream sequence early on - in the wake of Jeffrey witnessing Dorothy's first assault by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) - that it now comes off as somewhat hokey and goofy, as if he'd watched a Wes Craven movie the night before and taken notes. He'd soon sharpen that up, of course, but what's also interesting about revisiting Blue Velvet is spotting how close Lynch still was to the American mainstream of the mid-1980s: the "joyride" Frank takes Jeffrey on is Scorsese's After Hours, pushed to the nth degree. The mania Scorsese could only attain and sustain on coke is just there in Lynch's head, no substance stronger than caffeine required. I think there are also scenes and places that let slip a certain naivety on Lynch's part: there's surely too much preamble going into the "In Dreams" sequence, and then not enough of "In Dreams" itself, cut short just as it's flourishing into for-the-ages cinema. (Lynch's later projects allowed such musical numbers to play out in full.) It may be heresy to say this at this stage, but Blue Velvet could arguably do with less Hopper and more Dean Stockwell, less brute force and more sly finesse - but then there are a lot more tiresome Frank Booths at large nowadays, and when you're young, it's easy to be swayed by big barrelling brutes with towering reputations.

What's as clear as the night sky, though, is Lynch's understanding that depravity, or the depraved indifference that normality represents in Lumberton, is the American default; and that goodness is all but a marginal activity, something niche and rare, practiced by young dreamers whispering in diners. This really would have been a jolting proposition in Reagan's America, waving its flags and its Holy Books even as it conspired to let AIDS and crack cocaine ravage certain communities; given everything we know, it plays very differently in 2026, where the normal is normally terrible. Lynch, however, holds out his own kind of hope. In the final reels, the forbidden fruit harvested amid earlier trespasses gets Jeffrey somewhere: now this once clueless young man knows exactly where to hide in Dorothy Vallens' apartment when trouble comes calling. (Is there any greater sense of place in 1980s cinema than there is in the Vallens apartment, with its blood-red carpets that look to be inviting trouble?) Goodness triumphs over evil for now; this time round, I found the reappearance of the robin, who now invites reading as Lynch himself, overwhelmingly moving. The whole remains a potent object to study in the dark, worthy of renewed, attentive investigation; for a chastening Reagan-era double-bill, pair Blue Velvet with the same year's River's Edge: a little less Hopper, a bit more undergrowth, a similar smalltown eeriness, from a director (Tim Hunter) who was himself on the path to Twin Peaks.

Blue Velvet is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Netflix and the BBC iPlayer.