With perhaps the noteworthy exception of Mulholland Dr., David Lynch has never been at his surrealist best as he was in Blue Velvet, the film that saved his career following his spectacular flop, Dune.
 


David Lynch faced a crucial turning point in 1984. The 38-year-old director of one art-house hit (Eraserhead) and one Best Picture-nominated classic (The Elephant Man) had added another picture to his resume: a big-budget flop. Following the spectacular failure of the sci-fi epic Dune, the movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel, Lynch found himself at a career crossroads: should he continue to make big-budget films at the sacrifice of artistic control, perhaps sacrificing the quality of the pictures themselves in the process, or take a different route: making smaller, lower-budget films with greater creative leeway?
 
Much to our benefit (as well as his own), the former painter, used to having creative control, chose the latter. Blue Velvet (1986), his follow-up to the train wreck that was Dune, was a lower-budget picture that afforded him final cut. If it, too, was a failure, his career could have been finished as we know it; instead, he made what is arguably the greatest film of his career. (Many critics, after the consensus emerged that Mulholland Dr. was the greatest film of the 2000s, might argue otherwise.)
 


A genre-bending picture about the nightmarish reality that is not obscured by, but hidden literally inside, the suburban ideal of Americana that was sold wholesale in the Reagan 80s, Blue Velvet is the story of one young man, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who begins playing detective when a severed ear turns up in a field in his otherwise picturesque hometown. Trying to find the origin of that ear leads him to uncovering a twisted relationship between nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini) and Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), one of the purest embodiments of evil in a Lynch picture.
 
Blue Velvet absolutely resuscitated Hopper’s career, but that’s not all it did—it set Lynch on the course that he has continued to follow for the rest of his career. It was the first instance of his classic semiotic setup: begin in seemingly picturesque, small-town America, and slowly peel back the layers, until it is clear how corrupted and vile everything around us actually is. The same formula applied most obviously in Twin Peaks, as well as in Mulholland Dr., with only one minor adjustment: in place of small-town America, substitute Hollywood.



Yet it’s not only the formula of the narrative that engages here—it’s also Lynch’s utterly surreal set-pieces, which have never felt both so bizarre and so utterly, strangely true. Think of the classic sequence where Jeffrey watches Frank rape Dorothy—we sense, in some strange way, that Jeffrey is getting turned on by the experience, implicating the protagonist as well as ourselves in the hypocritical voyeuristic adventure that is cinema-going. If you’ve never caught this classic American film on the big screen, now is your chance.

Blue Velvet screens at midnight on August 20-21 at the Landmark Sunshine.

What's your favorite David Lynch classic?