Blue Velvet is possibly the most coherent and most successful of David Lynch’s films. In the wake of the extremely odd Eraserhead (1977), and the heartbreaking The Elephant Man (1980), the film won numerous awards. Lynch was even nominated for an Oscar. On the back of its success, he went on to make Twin Peaks (1994), a T.V. show which gained both critical acclaim and high ratings.

17 years after the release of Blue Velvet, I had my first glimpse of Lynch’s peculiar cinema at an English workshop – we were asked to visualise various paragraphs from novels, like a sequence from a film. To help us, and I suspect to sustain the interest of the class, we were shown an excerpt from Blue Velvet. The first few minutes are illustrative of the entire film: cut from four hours to just under two hours, there is nothing extraneous about Blue Velvet. Every shot seems to have been lavished over.

In this world, as the local radio DJ tells us, ‘people really know how much wood a woodchuck chucks’

Unease pervades the film from the beginning, when the white picket fence, pure blue skies, and dulcet crooning of Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’ are drowned out by the clicking of beetles. The film has an uncomfortable humour in the self-conscious juxtaposition of small town America with a concoction of the macabre and the seedy. More uncomfortable than the film’s disturbing combination sexuality and violence is the goofy, almost embarrassing innocence of the lead characters.

Inside the Pleasant Valley Sunday world of Lumberton, USA, where, as the local radio DJ tells us ‘people really know how much wood a woodchuck chucks’, we find the cruelty, rage and perversion of Frank and his assortment of cohorts and victims. Alongside him sits the naïve sincerity of Sandy and Jeffrey and the world of the white picket fence. Blue Velvet leaves audiences unsure of how to respond (Mark Kermode loathed the film at first, but on a second viewing completely changed his mind and is now a Lynch devotee).

Lynch's films may well be intelligent and even difficult, but he has no scruples about using every horror movie scare tactic, or indeed the tactics of any other genre, to get a rise out of the viewer. The simplest combination of distorted images and sinister music is enough to unsettle an audience. The producer Stuart Cornfield once described Lynch as ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’. It’s a pithy, accurate assessment of his oeuvre, but especially Blue Velvet, where innocence sits alongside perversity; and intelligent filmmaking is imbued with cheap scares.

Support Varsity

Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our print newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.

We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding and we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead.

In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content and of course in print too!

Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as £1, to help with our running costs. Many thanks, we hope you can help!