By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
David Lynch passed away on January 15, 2025, leaving behind a legacy of work in film and television that helped redefine what entertainment could be and pushed the envelope to the very edge of acceptance in mainstream Hollywood. Fans have been debating for years which of his films is the best, but two tend to be at the top of everyone’s lists: Mulholland Drive and one of his earlier films, which ended up setting the tone for the rest of his landmark career. Released in 1986, Blue Velvet is considered by the American Film Institute to be one of the greatest mystery movies of all time; it’s confusing and strange, includes a sudden jump to a musical interlude, and laid the groundwork for Twin Peaks.
A Suburban Nightmare
Blue Velvet starts off on a strange note from the opening minutes, with MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student back home to help take care of his sick dad, discovering a severed human ear. Jeffrey discovers the ear is loosely tied to Dorothy Vallens, a local jazz singer, so he ends up awkwardly talking his way into her place after a performance, leading to an exchange between MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy that is one of the most awkward conversations ever caught on camera.
That’s before Blue Velvet takes a wild turn when the local crime boss, Frank (played by Dennis Hopper in a career-changing performance), turns up for a wild night with Dorothy that involves a gas mask and calling her “Mommy,” which Jeffrey watches from the closet.
All of that is within the first thirty minutes of Blue Velvet, and the film gets even stranger from there, uncovering a criminal conspiracy lurking just beneath the surface of the small town of Lumberton. Granted, to get there, Jeffrey has to spend time with Frank, which includes visits to a drug den and a sawmill, that includes not one, but two oldies, “In Dreams” and “Mr. Sandman,” with characters dancing as only David Lynch would have them do. It’s a fairly conventional story, but with the Lynchian touches on top, he’s able to take a tale of suburban plight and turn it into a dreamlike narrative that is constantly knocking viewers off balance by subverting every expectation they had going in.
Blue Velvet Changed Cinema
Following the catastrophic failure of Dune, a sci-fi epic, David Lynch went back to how he started with Eraserhead, a bizarre low-budget film that, again, stripped away the strange moments of a disembodied head floating through space or a radiator singing golden oldies and it’s about relationships. Blue Velvet includes what would later be considered Lynch’s trademarks (one-scene characters that steal the show, dreamlike narratives, lingering shots that don’t cut away, among many others) and by going through an independent studio run by the legendary B-movie producer Dino De Laurentiis, he didn’t have to compromise his vision. Critics responded at the time by being divided, with those who would die on the hill that it was a subversive, groundbreaking film and those who thought it was pretentious, dull, and made no sense.
Today, Blue Velvet is rightly recognized as a landmark of American cinema. Not only does it have an 81 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes from today’s critics, but it’s even been studied in writing and film classes as an example of the power of storytelling. It’s a difficult film to watch that will linger and stay with you for years, but it’s also one of the single greatest achievements in moviemaking and helped reignite the career of David Lynch, a man whose name has become synonymous with challenging, thought-provoking media and one of Hollywood’s greatest creative minds of all time.
Blue Velvet is streaming on Max.