"It's a strange world, isn't it?" Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) in Blue Velvet . David Lynch's 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet begins innocuously enough: it is a beautiful summer day and two firemen are perched aboard a 50's-style firetruck as it does a slo-mo glide past richly blooming rose bushes and white picket fences. Nearby, a robin bounces jauntily while a middle-aged man hoses down his lawn. And, after the firetruck has passed, we see the middle-aged man grab his neck and collapse to the ground, the water shooting from the hose in arcs as he writhes in the grass. A toddler strolls into the frame as Angelo Badalamenti's lush score wells up, and this intrigue suggests that all will not be well from this moment on. Until now, the beatific street looks like Anytown USA: the peace and serenity are idyllic. But it's a town called Lumberton, located somewhere in the same twilight zone as Twin Peaks, towns where most of the decades of 20 th Cent
