Episode 45: Blue Velvet
Justin:
After one slightly fractured viewing of BLUE VELVET, I’m somehow left with no thoughts and all the thoughts. At its core, the movie tells a very simple story, combining the ideas of “wrong place, wrong time” and “curiosity kills the cat” while adding just a pinch of psychotic villainy. Ok, maybe a bit more than a pinch. But while the movie is certainly weird, I feel, well, weird labeling it as just simply that; especially coming off a month where I watched pretty much nothing but Coen Brothers movies, where weird is pretty much par for the course.
And while I neither fully grasped all that David Lynch was trying to do here, nor cared for all the gas-huffing induced raping, similar to the directing duo, I can tell that Lynch is not being weird just for weird’s sake. There’s a much deeper mission here and it just so happens to be buried beneath layers of severed ears and George’s Costanza’s favorite fabric. And while I can certainly appreciate that, I’m just not sure I care enough longterm to give it another shot in order to learn all that Lynch wants us to know about life in this seemingly idyllic town. And that’s not just because he seems to love putting incredibly terrible beers on display as the featured tastes of the town.
