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Video by FFWD Staff Despite its reputation as a cult classic, and the fact that it is held by many to be David Lynch’s one true masterpiece, Blue Velvet (U.S.A. 1986) has nevertheless been out of circulation for years. While there have been no theatrical prints available in North America in some time, the film has also been only half available on video, as it has never, to my knowledge, been presented on tape in its full widescreen aspect ratio. Obviously, then, this new letterboxed DVD release is cause for some excitement among Lynch’s admirers, as it affords an opportunity to see this movie in its completely terrifying splendour, as close to the way Lynch intended as possible, without being in a cinema. It has probably been 12 years since Blue Velvet first scared the bejesus out of me as a naïve teenager, but even now, as a self-confessed voyeur and cinephile, I am still terrified by what the film says about cinema spectatorship and voyeurism. First, Lynch shows Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) having his innocence shattered as he hides out in Dorothy Vallens’s (Isabella Rosselini) closet, watching through the slats as she and Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) have disturbing sado-masochistic sex. Then, Lynch proceeds to emphasize the audience’s own voyeuristic complicity by time and again forcing us to strain our eyes as characters emerge from what seems to be total darkness. As we peer into Lynch’s weird dreamscape, we realize we’re not altogether any less naïve than Jeffrey, especially when confronted by Lynch’s nightmare illogic – always on edge, the viewer will never predict the next strange turn of events, and can only hope Lynch will cease this sadistic terrorism sometime soon. He doesn’t, of course, but instead winds it up until there is no choice but to feel torn between equally extreme alternatives in much the same way Jeffrey is torn. From the opening sequence, in which Norman Rockwell’s picket fence Americana is lampooned and twisted ever so slightly into something, well, Lynchian, it is clear that all is not sunny and woodsy in Lumberton today. Laura Dern, as the pure-as-driven-snow police detective’s daughter, goads Jeffrey’s curiosity about the mysterious, fatalistic Dorothy, even as his compulsive attraction to Dorothy leaves him resolute and flawed. Despite Dorothy’s assertions to the contrary, it’s hard to say just who in Blue Velvet is putting whose disease in who. In any case, the audience’s identification with Jeffrey takes precedence over the MacGuffin of a plot, concerning Frank’s kidnapping of Dorothy’s husband and son. This is all mere narrative dressing, something to tie Lynch’s creepy tableaux into one unified package. Whether it’s Isabella singing "Blue Velvet" over and over at The Slow Club, or Dean Stockwell lip-synching Roy Orbison at top volume, serenading Frank and a crowd of his slithering toadies, Lynch’s primary calculation seems to be to repel and attract at the same time. Perhaps this is why one of Lynch’s later collaborators, Barry Gifford, refers to Blue Velvet as "phlegm noir." The movie is as clever and unsettling a dissection of the voyeuristic impulse as any captured on film. Only Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom comes close to the same kind of menace or pathos that exists in Blue Velvet. Though it should be mentioned that this is also the perfect companion piece to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, another film about the morbid urge to gaze, which is currently playing in Calgary.

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