"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 Century America have somehow been compressed into the here and now, and where time really has no meaning. Suddenly the camera dives steeply downward through the shining green blades of grass, dragging us into an unseen world where squirmy, vicious things go about their daily business right beneath the tranquil surface of the yard, an unsubtle metaphor for what's to come.

Blue Velvet is an honest-to-goodness (and then some) neo-noir thriller that originally had Roger Ebert clutching his pearls and carrying on like a hysterical pre-schooler rather than a renowned film critic. This new blu-ray comes from the esteemed Criterion Collection, an extremely high-quality video distribution company that specializes in overlooked or underseen (and occasionally popular) classic movies, featuring extensive restoration from original negatives and fascinating extras. Criterion movies cost more than most DVD/blu-ray releases, but, for collectors like me, they're worth it. This release of Blue Velvet looks stunning, and the sound (both ambient and instrumental) is incredible; watching it the other night was like seeing (and hearing) it again for the first time. Over the past 30+ years, I've probably watched Blue Velvet more than a dozen times and it has never lost its ability to shock while, at the same time, offering up a completely exhilarating movie experience.  

It is not, however, a movie I would recommend to just anybody. It's David Lynch at his David Lynchiest, only with a little more clarity than, say, Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway. Although Blue Velvet has a simple, clearly defined plot that takes you from Point A to Point B without any major detours into left-field (a common criticism of many Lynch films), there are some disorienting and highly disturbing segments of this journey into the American underbelly that many viewers find too upsetting for their tender sensibilities (hence Ebert's aforementioned rant). If you were a consistent viewer of Lynch's classic 1990's television series, Twin Peaks, you'll have some idea of what to expect: Blue Velvet took much the same route several years earlier, skipping over the woozy supernatural elements of the series to showcase a terrifyingly human(ish) psychopathology. With that in mind, Blue Velvet becomes more than a neo-noir. It's a horror show as definitive as Psycho or Silence Of the Lambs, and Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth may be the most chillingly evil boogeyman in film history, equal to, if not surpassing, Hannibal Lecter (and certainly scarier than Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees or any of their cinematic progeny).  

The story of Blue Velvet centers (sort of) around the son of the man stricken in the opening sequence. This man owns a hardware store in Lumberton and his son Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) comes home from college to help run the family business while his father recuperates in the hospital. As Jeffrey walks home from the hospital one day, he stops to throw rocks in a vacant lot, reminding me a little of Opie Taylor in the introduction of the old Andy Griffith Show. Reaching for a rock, Jeffrey comes across a severed human ear and, without so much as a grimace, plucks up the already moldy, ant-covered appendage and places it in a paper bag he finds nearby. Dissatisfied with a police detective's attention to his case, Jeffrey decides to do a little sleuthing on his own. It doesn't hurt that the police detective's daughter, Sandy, is bubbly, blonde Laura Dern, and there's an instant attraction between these two young people when Jeffrey drops by to check on the detective's progress. Sandy, naturally, already has a steady boyfriend, but that doesn't hinder the course of things to come. At first, Sandy aids and abets Jeffrey in his nocturnal snooping but then things get dicey and she has second thoughts. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, after all. Jeffrey doesn't want to hear it, and continues on, heedless of the warnings because, by this time, he's madly in lust with  Dorothy Vallens, a mystery woman he's been stalking who may be the key to the whole investigation. She may also get Jeffrey killed. Dorothy, it turns out, is a talentless lounge singer, and a woman in trouble. She lives on the seventh floor of a creepy, dark apartment building where she appears to be the lone resident. The squalor is heightened by a perpetually out-of-order elevator. Dorothy does have a regular visitor, though: psycho Frank Booth, a criminal thug who huffs something—helium? ether? amyl nitrate?--from a gas mask so he can get sexually aroused and engage Dorothy in violent S&M scenes. One night while Dorothy performs at the club, Jeffrey sneaks into her apartment hoping to find something--anything--linking her to the ear. And then she unexpectedly returns home. Quickly hiding in a closet, Jeffrey peeks through the slats and watches Dorothy undress. Moments later, Frank arrives, gas mask in hand, ready to rock and roll. The ensuing scene is brutal, lurid and an all-out assault on the senses:  Dorothy's degradation is palpable and Frank is so monstrous that the scene is hard to shake off. After Frank leaves, Dorothy catches Jeffrey hiding in the closet. Having just dealt with Frank, Dorothy is no shrinking violet. Suspecting that Jeffrey is a mere voyeur, she decides to turn the tables. Grabbing a large kitchen knife she demands that he get undressed. It's a tense scene, brilliantly done, that plays with our expectations and reveals much about both Dorothy and Jeffrey. Really, to say anymore would spoil the sheer bravado and many surprises on display for anyone who hasn't seen this movie. Why is Dorothy beholden to Frank, and what is she hiding? Who does the disembodied ear belong to, and are they still alive? What will happen when Frank catches Jeffrey? Again, this is NOT a movie for everyone.

Every character in Blue Velvet is a little off-kilter; they may look perfectly human, but, even the sanest of them (Sandy and her folks) seem to have wandered in from a parallel universe that looks like ours, but is fundamentally different. Kyle MacLachlan makes a terrific Hardy Boy-type hero: he's adventurous, brave and surprisingly tough, given the punishment he takes. That he discovers a few things about himself while indulging in his unofficial and unsanctioned investigation is a big part of what makes the movie so successful. MacLachlan went on to play Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks a few years later, and I can see how Jeffrey might have grown up to be Cooper. It's an open, aware performance that, in any other movie, might have garnered more praise. However, Blue Velvet is no ordinary movie. Aside from director Lynch, it really belongs to Dennis Hopper. As the idiosyncratic Frank Booth, he delivers a performance so powerful that it should have netted him an Oscar, or at least, a nomination (he did receive a nomination that same year for a role in the movie Hoosiers). 

Hopper's Booth is a violent, frightening sadist, leader of a criminal gang, a psychopath who gets his kicks from inflicting pain and humiliation. His current target may be Dorothy Vallens but it's obvious that anyone is fair game. In one scene, he angrily bellows: “I'll fuck anything that moves!" and what he means is he'll rape anything that moves. You worry for Jeffrey because, at that very moment, Jeffrey is Frank Booth's hostage. Frank and his gang have caught Jeffrey leaving Dorothy's apartment and are taking them for "a little ride". Hopper is so perfect that it's hard to look at the screen and believe that this is someone acting out a role. He virtually becomes this walking embodiment of evil in every scene he's in (and there are many). Frank Booth may lack the cultured panache of Hannibal Lector, and he's certainly not a shy mama's boy like Norman Bates, but he belongs in that same rarefied pantheon of cinematic villainy. All the more chilling is the fact that, while most of us have probably never known anyone like Norman Bates or Hannibal Lector, we've probably come across a Frank Booth at some point in our lives. I know I have. His kind, unfortunately, are not all that uncommon and they can't simply disappear into the masquerade of anonymous everymen. Like these people, Frank is explosively, monumentally insane and he's incapable of hiding it.  It's no wonder that we hardly see him during the daytime, or in places frequented by regular townspeople: he's such an obvious mad dog that the jig would immediately be up if he were spotted out and about by ordinary people. Dennis Hopper gives life and a frightening authenticity to this most unlikable of characters, and elevates the psychosis of Frank Booth to a seedy cinematic grandeur.

For her part, Isabella Rossellini, as Dorothy Vallens, almost matches Hopper's intensity with a scary, moving performance that's completely off the rails in its own right. I was surprised to hear that Dorothy was an early role for Rossellini given how good she is. As a victimized femme fatale, Rossellini is nude, or nearly so, throughout most of the film, and yet this never feels exploitative. Whether being beaten down by Frank, or playing exotic temptress with Jeffrey, she does an outstanding job and walks a fine line between pathetic and dangerous. It's impossible not to compare Rossellini with her mother, Ingrid Bergman, never more so than in Blue Velvet, where she's like a latter-day version of the Alicia Huberman character in Notorious.

If all my gushing doesn't make you want to run out and buy a copy of Blue Velvet it's probably for the best. I said it before and I'll say it again: this is not a movie for everyone.

Blue Velvet was filmed in 1986 in Wilmington, NC, which is where C's nephew lives. We visited there a few years back when his nephew got married, and it was interesting to see some of the locations where Blue Velvet was filmed. When we booked our hotel for the wedding, we waited too long to get a room with the rest of the wedding party and wound up at some chain hotel out on the outskirts of town. Backing up to the hotel was an old, abandoned factory populated by dozens of feral cats. That factory was plenty creepy, creepy enough that I could imagine Frank Booth wandering around out back, looking up at our hotel room, smoking and bellowing and aiming futile kicks at those "fucking cats".

I once had a friend who lived in Wilmington. You might call him a lost boy but you might have called me that, too, at one point in my life. A beautiful, friendly, vivacious kid, he worked for me back in the early 90's in Oklahoma City when he was barely out of high school and still trying to find out who he was. That's not easy for anybody, but it seemed especially difficult for him. He came from a family of achievers and he'd assumed the role of the problem child. There were drugs--a lot, apparently--and he thought he might be gay, so there was a lot of stress within his family. We were close friends for awhile and then he couldn't show up for work on time and things went south. He finally left but it wasn't an acrimonious parting of the ways, at least not between us. Still, I didn't see him again for many years. At some point, his mother and I managed to reconnect online--she and I had once been good friends, too--and she mentioned that he lived in Wilmington and suggested that I get in touch with him if I was ever up that way. Coincidentally, C and I were planning a weekend trip to look at property in the Chapel Hill area and I emailed him at the address his mother had given me. So, he made the three hour drive from Wilmington to Chapel Hill and met us for a long lunch. By then, he was 40, or thereabouts, a little heavier but still beautiful, still vivacious, still the charming, sweet and funny boy I remembered from Oklahoma City. Of course, we reminisced and talked about his family, other old friends we had in common, what he was up to, who he loved. He was doing well and, despite a recent breakup, seemed optimistic that he and his young man could patch things up and resume their relationship. When we finally left him that day, he seemed happy and full of hope, bubbly and smiling, just as I always picture him. Not long afterward I sent him an email to say we might be back up that way soon, not knowing that he was already dead, had died by his own hand there in his house in Wilmington. His mother contacted me with the news and I could only speculate what led to this desperate final act. The demons were at bay on that day we met up with him in Chapel Hill. But, I think they were always there, had always been there, and in the end, he simply couldn't live with them anymore. When answers aren't forthcoming, we make of it what we can.

Back in the early days of air travel--I was 16, to be precise--I happened to meet a girl I'll call Jane. In those days, I often stayed with my mother's parents at their house in small-town Texas, especially on holidays and for the entire duration of each summer. Since this town had a total population of a little over 800 people, we--my friends and I--prowled other towns in the vicinity that offered a change of scenery and maybe even a remote chance of action. The seat of the next county over (and the town where I was born)--a bustling metropolis of almost 8,000 people--was always a promising and exotic destination. It was on one of these late-night sojourns that I came to meet Jane, a lanky, good-looking blonde who, at 5'10", towered over me by a good 3 inches. Jane was also 16 but looked 27 and we fully expected her to become a top model someday. She dated rich, older guys who drove fancy cars and seemed like the world-weariest 16-year old I'd ever met. Jane lived in a nice house with a mother who smoked, had afternoon cocktails and lounged around on a chaise in pedal-pushers, affecting a seen-it-all attitude of her own. Jane's father was a rancher with money--maybe he had oil wells, I wasn't sure--and older than her mother. I rarely saw him and when I did, he was like most ranchers I've known, not exactly loquacious or outgoing. There was an older brother who was never at home, although he purportedly lived there. I only saw him once, and that was at an ill-fated party at Jane's house one New Year's Eve that should have clued us in on what the upcoming year had in store. I liked Jane, although not in a romantic kind of way. Once in awhile we made out, but that was whenever she was bored and not out on a date with one of her flashy beaus. To be honest, even I knew that Jane was way out of my league. Mostly we hung out, played foosball and air hockey at the "Grease Pit", went to the drive-in movies and drank wine coolers, and talked about how bored she was with her parents and that small town (which seemed like a city to me). She didn't seem to like many of her classmates and they didn't seem to like her, either (I'd become acquainted with a number of them and they dished plenty about Jane). I wasn't sure why she wanted to hang out with me but she was always nice (to me) and I enjoyed her company. As it turned out, Jane had secrets. And it is Jane's secrets that came to mind when I started writing about Blue Velvet (although Twin Peaks might be more apropos). The big tip-off should have come when I never actually met any of her rich boy toys in their snazzy cars (and by the way, I was driving a Mustang Mach 1 with a black hood-scoop at the time, so mine was no dog). I did meet some of her good-looking male friends who were all older than we were but still under 21. However, Jane scowled if I asked if this or that one was a boyfriend. "No," she'd laugh, "are you kidding? He's way too immature."

The New Years Eve Party at Jane's house was, I guess, the beginning of the end. My best friend, his date, and I had driven over to find a packed house of teenage revelers--really, like something out of a John Hughes movie. Except Jane's mother was there with her cigarette and a drink in her hand, and Jane's brother was hauling in more party supplies from the back of the house. Jane's dad was conspicuously absent, all the better since I strongly suspected that his capacity for being amused by the antics of drunken teens was non-existent. Jane, herself, was apparently in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Who knew what was going on? My friends and I made some new acquaintances at the party, had a few beers and decided to leave. Unfortunately, my friend with the car had one beer too many so I was put in charge of driving us home. After he slumped over against the passenger window, his girlfriend (who was sitting on the center console) leaned over and slid her tongue in my ear just as I passed a cop. Failure to dim headlights was the offense I was eventually ticketed for. As the police car did a U and turned on the red and blue lights, my buddy puked in the floorboard of his car. Nice. After that, it was going to be hard to lie our way out of this one. So, the three of us got hauled down to the hoosegow along with all the other New Year's Eve drunks who had driven with too many beers in their belly and someone's tongue in their ear. My one phone call was to the party and within ten minutes, Jane, along with a surprising number of partiers had piled in cars to come and bail us out of jail. In the meantime, when my best friend went to make his phone call, he proceeded, instead, to vomit on some police sergeant's desk where the phone happened to be positioned. No need for him to take a breathalyzer after that. They kept him in for public intoxication. They let me and his girlfriend leave with the partiers, two of whom eventually got us to our respective homes. But, oh, after that, how the shit hit the fan! For one thing, my friend's arrest for public intoxication came out in two local newspapers, the one in Jane's town and the one in ours. My friend's mother blamed me (I was always the instigator, the bad boy leading her son astray) and my grandparents blamed Jane's mother: my best friend was forbidden to hang out with me anymore and I was forbidden to see Jane. Of course, these forbiddings came to naught after about a week.

Regardless of our intentions, Jane was on her way out of my life. The following summer, I was dating someone and the occasions that Jane and I met up were few and far between. Never forthcoming, she seemed unhappier than ever and eager to get away from home. Before I knew it, it was September, and school had already started when I got the news that Jane's mother had taken a shotgun and murdered the father in the front yard of their house. Jane had been inside the house getting ready for school. That weekend, I drove over to see how Jane was coping. I am not certain what I expected, but I can say that I did not expect Jane to be as cool-headed as she was. She could, after all, be herself with me. She didn't have to pretend. "Well, he's dead, and I don't know what is going to happen now." Words to that effect. Very matter-of-fact. Maybe she was shell shocked. The last time I saw Jane she was sitting on the hood of a car in the supermarket parking lot (where all the cool kids hung out in those days), smoking a cigarette, brushing aside a lock of long blonde hair as she accepted another condolence from some fellow high schooler who might be her friend (but probably wasn't).

I don't know how long after the murder and the arrest of Jane's mother that the whole story came out, but come out it did. Or, rather, it erupted.  Le scandale!  Jane's mother had, apparently, been engaged in a long-term enterprise with a local attorney. It was more than just an affair although, presumably, that's how it started. At some point, someone came up with the bright idea that Jane, being preternaturally gorgeous and well-developed, might be a good moneymaking venture for the pair. I don't know how old she was when they first started pimping her out to wealthy, older men, but that certainly explained her reticence to disclose details about her "boyfriends", much less introduce us to any of them. Actually, it explained a lot of things about Jane, maybe everything that I'd come to accept as Jane just being Jane. I don't know if any other girls were involved in this scheme or not, and I don't know how Jane's father fit into the picture. He must have known what was going on. How could he not?  For some reason, I didn't follow the trial. I let it slide out of my memory and I still don't know why. I was never able to get back in touch with Jane after I saw her that night on the supermarket parking lot. Certainly, she got her wish to leave town--probably in the care of family members, if not with her older brother (doubtful, since I believe he was in college by then). Over the years, I've wondered what became of Jane, if she's even still alive. She must have been terribly damaged by what happened to her. Eventually, it would have caught up with her, the particularly terrible betrayal, the rage, the tragedy, all that meshugas. She has no online presence at all. None. It's as if she has vanished off the face of the earth. Maybe she's living quietly in the suburb of a large city or in some small desert town. At the end of the day, maybe all she wanted was to live an ordinary life.

Stevie Smith was an English poet who is probably best known for her poem "Not Waving But Drowning". She was inspired to write this poem after reading an account of a man who swam out too far and was thrashing about in the water, waving his arms in a desperate attempt to get the attention of his friends on shore. When his friends did finally notice, they waved back and went on about their business. The man drowned before anyone realized that he was in trouble. Of course, the poem has much deeper implications, and these last two lines came to mind as I recounted the above memories of both my Wilmington friend and Jane:

I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.