Remembering David Lynch and Blue Velvet

A couple of weeks ago, the world lost one of its most fascinating, bold, and wonderful artists. David Lynch died at age seventy-eight. I have adored his work for a long time, and today I’d like to try and honor him and his art by talking about one of his movies, Blue Velvet.

I first saw Blue Velvet when I was maybe sixteen years old. I was enthralled by it immediately– everything from the dreamlike plot to the bizarre and colorful visuals, to the depraved and surreal violence of the work drew me in. It’s a movie, like many of Lynch’s, that plunges you headfirst into a world you’ve never seen before and never could have imagined. 

The basic storyline is this; college student Jeffrey Beaumont returns to his hometown after learning that his father has suffered a debilitating stroke which left him nearly comatose. One day, after visiting his dad in the hospital, Jeffrey finds a severed human ear lying in the middle of a vacant lot. He takes the ear to local police, hoping to find an answer as to where it came from. While the police are working to solve the crime, Jeffrey’s curiosity gets the best of him. He decides to team up with the head detective’s daughter and take the investigation into his own hands.

As strange as this description may sound, I promise it does not even begin to capture the dark, seductive, and surreal oddity of the movie. The first time I saw it, I didn’t know how to make sense of it, but I knew how it affected me. As distant and unfamiliar as the world of Blue Velvet appeared, there was something in it that nevertheless felt so real, so heartfelt and honest. I was astounded that something so blatantly absurd could come across as so true to life, even if nothing like this could ever happen. 

The second time I saw Blue Velvet, I was nineteen, just a little younger than the movie’s protagonist. In the meanwhile, I’d been through some very difficult things. I won’t go into detail, but I can say that, by that time, my outlook on a few aspects of living had been altered by pain and circumstance. When I watched the movie back, it took on a whole new emotional meaning for me. 

When you go through something traumatic and unexpected, like the death of somebody you care about, it can feel like the order of things you’ve come to take for granted just falls apart in your hands. That’s the disruptive quality of grief; it can feel like there are suddenly two worlds– one in which everything goes as planned, everything happens for a reason, and another beneath it in which everything comes loose, and awful, painful things happen that you just can’t make sense of. Blue Velvet begins with loss, the semi-death of the protagonist’s father. And, as the movie goes along, we watch Jeffrey Beaumont slip from one world into the other. In grief, he finds himself caught in a cycle of horror, a sub-life reality in which nothing makes sense, and everything has the potential to wound, to kill. 

Of course, this is only my interpretation. Somebody else might love the movie because they see something entirely different in it. That’s what makes Lynch’s work truly surreal. The characters and settings do not behave logically, but rather act as raw, materialized expressions of emotion, with all the according unpredictability and strangeness. That’s what I so love about his movies; beneath the surface-level absurdity, there is always a strong undercurrent of pure emotion that is felt before it can be interpreted.

So, on this occasion, I just want to say that I’m grateful. Thank you David Lynch, for giving me a brand new perspective on what art can be and what it is able to do. And thank you for helping me see the beauty and power in the things I’ll never be able to understand.