Blue Velvet
Could it be that Frank Booth is the most horrifying villain ever put upon the silver screen? I would say that with Dennis Hopper at the helm of this unscrupulous character, sucking on amyl nitrite, engaging in drug peddling, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder and scores of other activities of an unsavory nature, the case can indeed be made beyond a reasonable doubt. For those not up on your violent and sadistic sociopaths, Frank Booth was the antagonist who ran havoc through the seedy underbelly of North Carolina in David Lynch's 1986 Neo-Noir Thriller Blue Velvet, number 84 on the list of the '100 Greatest Scary Movies'.
David Lynch is an absolute master of showing the ugly flip side to reality. A big city may have its problems, but it will wear them on its sleeve but small towns, the keep their secrets hidden and dark, away from unbidden eyes. Could Frank survive in the big city? Possibly. His enthusiasm for his craft would certainly get him far. But why should he? He has all he needs in the small town of Lumberton. Watching Dennis Hopper in this role, the role he was born to play, is like watching a rabid animal. He twitches and shakes with agitation and hunger, literally frothing at the mouth and seemingly unable to keep his composure for more than a moment or two. He is, for all intents and purposes, humanity completely unleashed, giving into desires no matter how primitive whether he is in the throes of bizarre passion, or whether he is eliminating a foe, but then again, it might as well all be the same to this monster.
I grew up in a small town in the Northwest, just as Lynch did and I hold a tremendous appreciation for his attention to the quirks of small town life. I have seen such things with my own eyes; I have seen the blind man in the hardware store, I have seen the body parts in the field. Lynch puts them into the spotlight with great reverence, not allowing us to look away, because he truly knows, as do I, that the curiosity of the human mind is king, which is especially true in small towns.
That is partially what this film is about; giving in to curiosity and temptation, leaving your comfortable Americana life and having things spiral out of your control. Kyle MacLachlan, a staple of early Lynch cinema, plays this up so well. Here is a young man, seemingly bored out of his mind being back home from college, who takes it upon himself to do a little detective work. What he gets pulled into is way out of his league and absolutely out of his control, but he cannot stop once he gets a taste, and he gets pulled deeper and deeper into the world of Frank. Things get very frightening when you discover things within your neighbors and within yourself that you didn't think were possible.
However, for all of its oddities, Blue Velvet could also be said to be a callback to the great Noir thrillers of the 1950's. It is a whodunit in some sense of the word, though we know pretty much who did it, just not why they did it. It has a savage villain and a noble hero both of whom contain a questionable sense of morality and, as all classic Noir tends to have done, it all centers on a Femme Fatale, this time in the form of Dorothy Valens played uninhibitedly by Isabella Rossellini. I love watching the thrill overcome her when she engages in the humiliation of MacLachlan. There is both joy and fear on that face, unsure of what exactly to do now that she has the chance to inflict upon someone what has been done to her so many times.
The long and short of it: Blue Velvet is one of the most complex and psychologically disturbing pictures ever put on to celluloid and a pinnacle in the careers of everyone involved.
