‘She wore blue velvet, bluer than velvet was the night, softer than satin was the light, from the stars.’ That is a strange world where director David Lynch puts viewers in the exciting story of Blue Velvet from the year 1986. This movie is a surrealistic escape from reality followed by various painful emotions and beautiful visuals. Blue coloured Velvet here symbolises the lost American dream and a memory of the old days’ protagonists still used to remember but only can get close to them when they close their eyes. Extravagant velvet coloured with sadness, freedom and dreams tells a story of the twisted fairytale.
It is a motion picture about a college kid who, while visiting the home to see his ill father, discovers a human ear in a field and that shocks and inspires him to uncover a criminal conspiracy that was going on and fall in love throughout his investigation. That sends him on the path to find beauty and love in this dystrophy of the modern world and help a nightclub singer bring back home her stolen child. Heineken green beer bottles, neon blue lights and red satin with dreamy songs fill the unsettling atmosphere. Blue eyeshadow and red lips, nights full of stars, scary car rides, raw emotions and fictitious reality are buried inside this artistic void. Bad people, odd situations, unexpected destinies, exposed desires and famous fights between good and evil keep film viewers excited and anxious until the credits roll. Uncovering disturbing behind white fences and red garden roses and then going even deeper to find beauty in the sadness and violence this society regularly provides is a classic statement by David Lynch. Under the same roof, is visible in the art of play, the innocence of songs and desirable perversions that are followed by haunting, evil screams of noir cinema. But, the pure truth of reality, in the end, is going to win. The battle between light and the dark uses day and night camera shots to describe the innocence that is hiding in all that madness. Well-known images from real life are twisted into something much darker, so this movie at some moments looks like a horror genre motion picture with aesthetically pleasing filming techniques.
Well-known Lynch actors such as Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper are worth mentioning for making this movie a masterpiece with their yet opposite from each other but on the other side very compatible characters. Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris are authors of the infamous song of ‘ Blue Velvet’ performed by Isabella Rossellini that seductively pushes viewers into a fever-like world. Also, Roy Orbisons musical romance, for this movie, appears with the song ‘In Dreams’ and provokes the perfect illusion of a messy and sinful utopia.
I would recommend this motion picture because it feels like a dream. Fantastic from start to finish, but yet in Lynchian style amazingly unnerving. Just like it is said in the film: ‘It is too bad that all these things can only happen in my dreams.’ And that was, is and will be “Blue Velvet.”