College kid returns to his hometown after his dad is injured in a freak accident. Kid finds severed ear on the ground. Kid plays Scooby-Doo detective. Kid hides in a closet. Kid gets caught in the middle of a crazy kidnapping scheme. Kid falls in love. Kid has final boss battle with loco Dennis Hopper. Just another day in the sleepy town of Lumberton, right?

Imagine if you could show Blue Velvet to someone unfamiliar with any of the actors. Now, ask them two questions. When was the movie made, and what year does the story of Blue Velvet take place? To me, Blue Velvet looks ageless and timeless. The cinematography and the look of the actual film are flawless.…

White picket fences, suburban subversion, sexual repression and violence - David Lynch’s recurring themes and obsessions emerge fully formed in this hyperreal nightmare of wholesome Americana and sadomasochism. The term ‘Lynchian’ immediately conjures up dreamy images of small town America distorted by dark forces and although Blue Velvet marked Lynch’s fourth directorial effort it is a film that best encapsulates his entire career as he continues to recycle and reexamine these nightmare fantasies.

Causing a stir upon its release in 1986, Blue Velvet captures a world of contradictions as Lynch contrasts the neat gardens and painted smile facade of suburban life with its dark underbelly of crime and sexual perversion. By the director’s later standards the film is far more…

I basically crawled up from my "cinema cave" to write this. My body, mind, and soul is like half-cooled jello. I feel like I was assaulted and beaten in a nightmare, only to wake up into another nightmare that's even worse. Blue Velvet just gave me a cinegasm, an experience so thoroughly sensational, terrifying, ingenious, and astoundingly perfect that all I could do at the end was cry and collapse onto the floor.

David Lynch's film is both his finest masterpiece as well as the greatest film of the 1980s. It's that brilliant, mind-boggling, devastating, goofy, disturbing, hilarious, and saddening. Let's say that there was a giant semi-truck carrying every emotion in the world, and it just hit me. All…

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MKE Film Fest #5

"Are you the one that found the ear.....?

And then she emerges. Out of a simmering, endless night, one of mystery and strange occurances, Sandy is a figure of innocence; pink and bold, radiant and curious. She's another version of Jeffrey in many ways ("You're a neat girl." "So are you...I mean you're a neat guy."), but still tied to small-town perspective, unraveling clues and revelations long past their due date (particularly when Dorothy is taken back to her parents' household) and unconsciously clinging to the façade. It makes the basement house party scene fascinating in that Jeffrey yearns to regain the shining purity which Sandy beckons, yet he cannot turn back from what he's…

So now next in My David Lynch's marathon is 'Blue Velvet'. And after going in a quite linear direction with a film like 'The Elephant Man'. Now I am back again to 'Lynchian Cinema'.

Blue Velvet might be the perfect film to introduce someone to David Lynch's Cinema. As it is a film that perfectly blends nightmarish nature of his later work with a more conventional setting of his films like 'The Elephant Man' and 'The Straight Story'.

Here he re-examines which is a recurring theme throughout his filmography i.e 'Duality in human Nature'.I read in one interview that he believes "everyone human being has at least two sides to themselves. And the world we live in is a world…

Blue Velvet is by all means a cultural landmark of sorts. At its best moments, it manages to bring to the screen that flickering inner space we call sub-conscience, filled with the fermentation of life’s two engines, sex and death. It is the genesis, the trial grounds for David Lynch’s later works. It is blatantly silly in some other aspects, as its caricatural portray of small American town and the characters inhabiting it. But boy, the moments where it plunges are breathtaking - that is all the scenes involving Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper.

American writer David Foster Wallace spoke numerous times about Lynch and his art. Here’s a quote:

You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense…