IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched on Amazon Video
The cinema has an iconography of the suburbs that every cineast is now more than familiar with from various films: rich, clean-washed colours greet you there. Freshly painted fences, red roses, meticulously tended front gardens, white front doors. People smile incessantly at each other, squirrels cavort in the trees and the flock of birds in the blue sky, completely free of clouds, sings a lovely song. David Lynch also gives these canonical impressions their place in "Blue Velvet". There are the radiant roses, there is the fireman waving joyfully in slow motion from the ladder truck - and on the soundtrack Bobby Vinton's titular classic makes itself at home. Inevitably, the question arises as to whether the cinematic repertoire of images is really so limited when we return to American suburbia?
Of course not, as David Lynch impressively proves here. Instead, he uses these quasi-prescribed impressions of that sheltered microcosm to gradually subordinate them to reflection on content. In "Blue Velvet", the correlation of the familiar and the strange is at the centre, which Lynch takes as an opportunity to first reproduce the illustrations of suburbia that have been depicted enough in the past before subjecting them to a lasting dismantling. There is Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), who returns to his hometown, Lumberton, as a result of his father's accident. "Blue Velvet", however, doesn't give its main character a chance to settle into bourgeois puritanism, as Jeffrey also quickly discovers with the discovery of a cut-off ear. What follows is a look into the orcus of social psychology: where individual needs and primal urges flourish.
The familiar and the strange are not only conflated in the external haze of the small town when Jeffrey embarks on a "little adventure" and enters the flat of the singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini). Inside Jeffrey, too, this dichotomy is defined more and more strongly, as the young student penetrates diffused worlds of feelings and moods that he was never able to savour or even experience before, in the hermetically sealed suburb. The evil, the strange, the unknown, however, has always been here. And at the same time: it has always been in Jeffrey. "Blue Velvet" formulates itself as a lift ride into the subconscious; as a curious look into a dimension saturated with red and blue tones, which resembles our reality, but still distorts, twists and shifts it to some extent - which only makes it all the more intense to mirror our social and human centre.
In any case, David Lynch's handling of the symbolic character of individual colours within his genuine visual worlds is striking: the red of lips, the red of flowers, the red of the brain that will spread across the carpet and, of course, blue, like the velvet that lines a curtain behind which we explore secrets that are of abysmal power and intimate beauty. These signals, impulses and stimuli flank Jeffrey's inner-soul journey of exploration. The strange, strange world, as he is wont to say repeatedly, we not only live in it, it lives in us. The evil and the unreal, it does not split off, it is beneath and within us, hidden in the depth of the image, the vastness of space, the longing of body and mind. And at the end? There remains the wink, the robin, the insect, the darkness, the light and above all: consciousness.