Blue Velvet -- 1986 -- R

Ah, David Lynch. A writer/director you try to sink your teeth into and so many times you comes back without any teeth (or teeth looking like they were painted by Picasso). Well, Lynch has become kind of the Picasso of the movie world where he makes a film that has all the elements, but you have to look at it "just so" in order to understand it. However, Blue Velvet is not one of those Lynchian efforts.

For the most part, Blue Velvet is a straight forward narrative with some weirdness attached. A guy comes into town from school in order to help care for his father who is in the hospital. While in town, he finds a disembodied ear on the ground and turns it into the police who apparently, have some ideas as to what it might have to do with, but they don't tell our hero anything about it (of course). So, he's naturally curious and runs across the detective's daughter who lets him know a thing or two. He pursues the clues she gives him and decides to launch his own (somewhat illegal) investigation.

This line naturally gets him into an adventure that he both pursues and falls into. We get a solid sense of some very warped individuals, and see the darker side of the world for a little while -- the darker side that embraces vengeance and crime as a way of life, and finds the torment of others entertaining. to say that quite a few elements here were disturbing is an understatement, but after a whle, we lose sight of what we came for. We learn whose ear it is, but what we never really learn is why the ear was taken. Granted, we lose sight of this very easily within the world we're given, but in retrospect, I still wanna know.

The characters are drawn not for huge development, but for their personalities as they are now. No one really has a past or future, but their personalities are so bizarre that we are more interested in what they'll do next than who their favorite high school teacher was. It is this strangeness of character that will continue to characterize Lynch as his films as he slowly goes more and more Picasso on us.

Lynch had been in the industry for twenty years at this point, so this can hardly be called an early film, but knowing where he goes from here, we see the seeds of madness blossuming to where he passes from the writer/director of Dune to the creator of Twin Peaks and beyond. This one is all about a dark underbelly of happy little suburbia and it accomplishes that task very well.