Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch) (Patreon)

Three minutes in, I was already mentally composing a Scenic Routes-style essay about the opening sequence, focusing on the unexplained* presence of a toddler as Jeffrey's father writhes on the ground. (I'd previously always been too focused on the dog snapping at the hose to register the baby's disturbing incongruity on a conscious level.) 12 minutes in, when Sandy slowly emerges from the darkness of her tree-lined street as Badalamenti's score goes full Herrmann, I could no longer comprehend why most other filmmakers even bother to make films. Half an hour of non-stop nerve-shredding later, it finally dawned on me: Jeffrey Beaumont, c'est moi. I was roughly Jeffrey's age (18) when Blue Velvet was released, had not only never seen anything like it but possessed little or no awareness that such starkly psychosexual cinema could exist, or that it might be legal to show in theaters if it did. Watching it during its original run, as a fairly sheltered teenager, felt exactly like furtively spying on something horrific yet seductive and then being dragged against your will from the seduction into the horror. Three decades later, it still feels more dangerous than virtually any contemporary film would dare. A masterpiece.

...but I'm still troubled, in the wrong way, by Dorothy Vallens. Ebert's protectiveness toward Rossellini never made much sense to me, because I never perceived Blue Velvet as "insincere," even if I once found certain aspects overly corny. (I've totally come around on Sandy's speech about the robins, perhaps because I know much more about Lynch now and am confident that he's not courting laughter.) But Dorothy, as a character, doesn't quite make emotional sense. Lynch needs her to serve two separate functions—Frank's terrified victim and Jeffrey's intro to S&M—that are extremely difficult to integrate, and he solves that problem by more or less infantilizing her, even as she also becomes a twisted maternal figure for both Jeffrey and Frank. Obviously this isn't a naturalistic film, and all of its performances are heightened ("I'LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES!!!" btw holy shit that instant vanishing), but Dorothy comes across not as one trait productively exaggerated but as a convenient absence of self. That feels like a betrayal of sorts, and is pretty much the only thing keeping Blue Velvet out of my top 10 of all time.

* Hadn't watched Blue Velvet's deleted scenes until now (I didn't even know said footage had been found, despite having bought the Blu-ray years ago; what a treasure trove!), and it turns out that Lynch originally went to the trouble of showing that the baby comes from next door, having wandered away from its distracted mother. Might have simply been cut for time, but I'd prefer to believe that Lynch recognized an opportunity to unsettle.