David Lynch | Blue Velvet / 1986

red, white, and blue

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Lynch (screenwriter and director) Blue Velvet / 1986

 

Blue Velvet is a very dark—perhaps I should change that adjective to “horrific”—satire about small town USA in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant analysis in Shadow of a Doubt, the work which David Lynch points to as his major influence. Lynch’s work, however, has none of the lightness and goofiness of Hitchcock’s presentation of Santa Rosa, California, family life. Whereas the innocent young heroine of Shadow, Charlotte “Charlie” feels an almost clairvoyant link with her uncle Charles, the villain of Hitchcock’s masterwork, the two innocents of Lumberton, Oregon, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) have absolutely no ties to the evil forces that inhabit their logging community.

    But we sense something horrible wrong from the very beginning in Lynch’s film, as Jeffrey’s father is comically attacked by the green snake of a front-yard garden hose, which brings his son home from college. And Lynch hints early on that the lovely wooden houses of Lumberton are infested with dangerous insects, first based only on hearsay, but soon after by evidence of the blight itself.

   Walking through a wild field wherein sits an abandoned wooden shed, Jeff actually discovers a human ear filled with a swarm of black ants. He bags up the ear as if it were a kind of disgusting prize and, being the good citizen he is, takes it immediately to the local police, asking for a detective Williams (John Dickerson) who lives near his family home. He is told that he should tell on one about the ear, and that the detective in turn will not be unable to share any information he discovers about to whom the ear might have belonged.

   Almost immediately, however, he meets us with the detective’s daughter, Sandy, who has “overheard,” her room just above her father’s home office, what she knows so far about the case, that it may have something to do with a local lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who lives in a nearby apartment building.

    Just as for Charlie in the Hitchcock movie, that’s all it takes for the clever Jeff to prove, with the help of Sandy, that young men and women, particularly those of the generation having grown up with The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries can outwit any police department gumshoe. Their endless curiosity and daring lead them into a world that as Detective Williams himself proclaims, they would be better off not knowing.

   Within hours, Jeff has hatched a plan to check out Dorothy’s apartment pretending to be a pest exterminator, someone hired to wipe out those bugs who have made their way into the Lumberton abodes.

    And just as quickly he is dropped into a world, ostensibly draped in red (the color of Dorothy’s curtains and one of her dresses), white (the colors associated with Jeff himself: his house, its picket fence, his tie, and at one point his suit), and blue (Dorothy’s bathrobe and most notably her signature song, “Blue Velvet”), all colors of the US democracy, but here involved in a perverse series of events that leads him and Sandy into the dark side of the Republic: the red, white, and blues in this world are just too intense, textured, and somehow obscene in a manner that can’t quite be explained.     

    On this first visit to Dorothy’s apartment, he merely steals copies of her keys. But it doesn’t take long for him to leap even further into this allusive world by taking Sandy on a sort of date to hear Dorothy’s nightclub act, where she sings the famed Bobby Vinton song, sneaking soon after to visit her apartment and this time seriously search for any evidence that might connect her with the missing ear, the voice and the ear, obviously, being almost comically connected in this strange dream-like work.

    At this point everything changes, as Jeff and Dorothy both are sent down a rabbit hole where they discover an alternative universe.

     Dorothy returns home and undresses, Jeffrey hiding in the closet where he can see nearly everything, in some senses a straight college boy’s dream. She soon after she hears him move, as a hanger falls into place, discerning his existence, and, with knife in hand not only demands to know who he is and what he is doing in her apartment, but demands he strip: “Get undressed. I want to see you!”

    He strips to his underwear, Dorothy demanding that he now stand as she moves to the floor, again inquiring what he wants. When he has no answer, she pulls down his underwear, apparently ready to engage in fellatio with the young man, while also refusing to permit him to touch her or even look at her.

   In some teen films this might be such a young man’s sex dream, but here it is so unexpected and seemingly out of context that we can see it merely as perversity.

   She orders the naked boy to the couch, demanding he lie down, where, still with knife in hand, she smothers him in kisses.

   But the knock on the door tumbles the entire scene into even a deeper hole of madness, as she orders Jeff back into the closet (returning him to the role of voyeur and perhaps, in this twisted world, insisting he somehow return to his youthful world as an outsider innocent of sex) as Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) enters. He is the true psychopathic monster at the heart of this underground sex, drug, and kidnapping world who, before the eyes of our still somewhat innocent voyeur (and the audience’s perhaps even more surprised eyes and ears) plays out an S&M drama of such twisted Oedipal proportions that it is difficult, in not impossible, to fully explain.

   Booth, demanding immediately to be called “Daddy,” angrily calls for his regular glass of bourbon, that she turn off the lights and never look at him as he becomes a temporary voyeur, and asks her to spread her legs, obviously to better observe her “bush.” What follows is an enactment of an almost textbook case of heterosexual childhood Oedipal lust, where Booth pretends to have sex with his woman he now perceives as his mother before his own father returns home. But it’s more complex than that, as he putts on a plastic mask which presumably gives him a kind of oxygen-deprived rush, reminding one a bit of the amyl nitrate inhalers of gay men. He proceeds to play out a game of having sex with his “Mommy,” insisting that “Baby wants to fuck.” At the same time, he is disgusted by the involvement of his mother in the act, and abuses her for her incestual fornication by beating her at the very moment he grows every more sexually excited, quickly coming in or on her in a manner that has more to do masturbation than with true sexual intercourse. It is so specific and perverted that we can only imagine that it represents perhaps regular childhood occurrences of Booth with his own mother before his father’s returns home, which also might explain his fetishization of blue velvet, clearly a memory of a nightgown his own mother may have been wearing during these episodes. It is also quite clear that he truly detests women and the need to engage in sex with them.

    Finally, he stands, comes somewhat back to his senses and tells her to “stay alive. Do it for Van Gough,” obviously a reference to the person whose ear has been brutally severed. Booth quickly exits, and Jeff comes out of the closet once again, checking on Dorothy’s condition and attempting to cover her with a white shawl which she rejects—his color, and that of innocence.

    But as he gets ready to leave, she calls out Don, asking him to hold her. She’s scared, she admits, and wonder in amazement that her Don is back. And once again she initiates a sexual relationship with the young boy, asking if he likes her, to feel her nipple, etc. It appears she is as psychologically confused as was her abuser and would somehow, like the mother of Booth’s fantasy, bring her newfound son into her own sexual confusion. Certainly, she seems to have adapted several of Booth’s S&M tropes, including the demand that she not be looked at while she engages in sex, as if anonymity would free them from any feeling of guilt. When he refuses to hit her, however, the charade is over; he will not participate for her self-punishment for having become involved in a relationship with someone like Booth.

    By the time he leaves Dorothy after this second visit, with the help of a truly heavy-handed clue hidden under her couch—a photograph of herself, her husband Don, and her child, wearing the party hat which also sits out on a table in the room, as well as their marriage certificate behind the framed photo—Jeffrey has basically figured out the entire plot, that Booth has abducted Dorothy’s husband and son to force her into sexual slavery. Perhaps he has cut off her husband’s ear to intimidate her; yet how the ear ended up in the abandoned lot is never explained.

     In fact, a great deal of the plot remains inexplicable even at film’s end.  

    What is now apparent is that Jeffrey has already developed a crush on Dorothy, and sees her yet again when he allows himself temporarily to act out her S&M demands, hitting her in the face.

    He now also observes Booth selling drugs and meeting up with a man dressed in a yellow suit coat, who the boy calls the Yellow Man (Fred Pickler). Later he sees the “Yellow Man” meet up with a different “well-dressed man.”

    In between these terrible revelations, Jeffrey seeks out the solace of comfort of Sandy, with whom—despite his boyish infatuation with Dorothy—he finds himself increasingly falling in love, despite her own commitment to the high school football player Mike (Ken Stovitz). Yet he does not tell Sandy everything and attempts to keep her away from his increasing pull into the vortex of horror with Frank Booth’s world represents.

    Finally, when caught leaving Dorothy’s place by Booth, he and Dorothy are abducted and forced to endure a high speed joyride along with Booth’s violent cohorts to Ben’s. Ben’s place, outwardly called This Is It, is a kind of strange bordello, older women lining the walls, ruled by the queenly, obviously gay Ben (brilliantly performed by Dean Stockwell), where Don and little Donnie, Dorothy’s husband and child are being held.

     Later we discover the “well-dressed man” is also Booth obviously dressed for drug pickups; yet even we now begin to realize that, as in so very many such sexually complex narratives, there is a double personality to Booth, clearly defined by his evident attraction to the utterly laid back and effeminate Ben, who Booth finds to be incredibly “suave,” and to whom he toasts: “Here’s to your fuck.”

     It is hard to determine precisely what role other than perhaps serving as the keeper of Dorothy’s family Ben plays in the complex world of Booth and his thugs. But here, at Ben’s place, we perceive another very different side of Booth, a man who almost looses it over Ben’s lip-sync performance of Roy Orbison’s song “In Dreams,” which even more than the nostalgic song of lost love which “Blue Velvet” represents, tells of a dream world impermissible in the macho world in which Booth and Ben live:

A candy-colored clown they call the sandman

Tiptoes to my room every night

Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper

"Go to sleep, everything is alright"

I close my eyes, then I drift away

Into the magic night, I softly say

A silent prayer like dreamers do

Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you

 

In dreams, I walk with you

In dreams, I talk to you

In dreams, you're mine, all of the time

We're together in dreams, in dreams

But just before the dawn

I awake and find you gone

 

I can't help it, I can't help it if I cry

I remember that you said goodbye

It's too bad that all these things

Can only happen in dreams

 

Only in dreams

In beautiful dreams

 

    What becomes obvious is that in his second, double-life of Booth is a would-be gay man desperately in love with the cold-hearted, effeminate Ben, who smokes cigarettes from a holder stick, and performs the song almost as if it were a drag routine.

    That is not to say that Ben is a nice fellow; Dorothy is allowed to see her Don and Donnie, but clearly, discovering the one missing ear, the meeting does not go well; and when Ben is introduced

to the captive Jeffrey, he slugs him hard in the stomach.

    Back on the road, Booth again puts on his plastic mask in an attempt, this time in front of the others, to abuse Dorothy. When Jeffrey, from the backseat, attempts to prevent Booth from continuing, the other Booth personae puts on lipstick and violently kisses his “pretty boy” before

Raymond and Paul beat him to a near pulp, as Dorothy pleads for them to stop, leaving him near the saw-mill at which their nightly voyage has ended.

     Returning to town, bloodied and seriously bruised, Jeffrey finally determines he has to contact Detective William’s to tell him of all he has learned, while trying to keep Sandy out of the picture.

There he discovers the identity of the Man in Yellow, Williams’ partner Tom Gordon who has been busy murdering Frank’s rival drug dealers and stealing the confiscated evidence for Booth to sell.

    Again Jeff and Sandy meet up, this time their car being closely followed by auto they can only presume belongs to Booth. They attempt to escape it, finally discovering that it is Sandy’s boyfriend Mike, yet another macho male threatening to beat Jeffrey for stealing his girlfriend. But almost at the very same moment, Dorothy appears, completely naked, herself beaten, bruised, and confused on Jeffrey’s porch.

    Jeffrey and Sandy rush her into the house, met by Jeffrey’s mother (Priscilla Pointer) who calls for medical help. But now, almost in a trance, Dorothy recognizes Jeffrey has her protector, describing him in front of Sandy as her “secret lover.” Sandy predictably slaps him in the face, he calmly telling her to report everything to her father as he rushes off to Dorothy’s apartment, not even knowing what to expect.

     There he finds the Yellow Man, Detective Gordon, still standing, although near death, with Dorothy’s husband Don sitting in a chair, a strip of blue velvet stuffed in his mouth, dead. As Jeffrey attempts to back out of the apartment, and slip down the staircase, he encounters the “Well-Dressed Man,” Booth’s doppelgänger, and rushes back inside. There he grabs Gordon’s police walkie-talkie, reporting his whereabouts and telling the squad that he is hiding in the bedroom, knowing from the previous night’s car trip that Booth and his men listen to the police interchanges. Once more, he hides in the closet, a place we well knows by this time, sneaking back out at the last moment to steal Gordon’s gun.

     When Booth enters, he rushes back to the bedroom ready to shoot his prey, firing a couple of shots before realizing that there is no one there.

     He finally moves toward the closet, but when he opens it Jeffrey fires, killing him dead.

     Sandy and her father arrive a few moments later, with Jeffrey handing over his gun, now having become a murderer.

     He has ended the film almost as the young “Charlie” does in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, she escaping her uncle’s clutches at the very moment he is beheaded by another passing train. Hitchcock’s heroine closes the film quite tragically, having to keep inside all she has discovered about her uncle and the death she has, in part, caused, all in order to protect the innocence of her beloved family; but in the process she has had to abandon her belief in family and the innate goodness of mankind.

     Strangely enough the young justified murderer of Lynch’s film—despite the far deeper horrors he has undergone—ends the film back in an innocent posture, totally ensconced in a relationship with Sandy, each of the mother’s looking on. Jeffrey’s father Tom has returned home from the hospital, and Dorothy sits holding her son Donnie.

     Even the robins, which early in the film Sandy has dreamt have all left town, have returned, one of them shown about to devour a large bug. In short, Lumberton has been cleaned up; order restored. The American way can move nicely forward. In Santa Rosa, meanwhile, at least for Charlie, the myths of the American family have been inextricably lost.

     That’s why I describe Lynch’s work as a satire. Hitchcock’s black-and-white picture is a far more tragic view of the American Dream, even if it presents a world less perverse, free at least of such a conflicted gay man as Frank Booth—unless you want to make a case that the “The Merry Widow” Uncle Charlie is precisely that; fortunately Hitchcock didn’t take us there.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).