Blue Velvet: All is never well, at least not entirely.


January 20, 2025   8 mins

No doubt I was little amped up, an excitable David Lynch fan sitting down to the Pilot episode of Twin Peaks, and my slight mania may have heightened the impression, but when the opening credits started rolling my head almost exploded with how slow they were. This was prime-time, 9pm, the major America network of ABC, home of quick-beat sitcoms and frantic car-chases, and here was, by far, the slowest television I’d ever seen — a bird doing nothing on an evergreen stem, steam taking forever to exit the several chimneys of a mill, a lazy waterfall almost freezing as eerie slow-motion is imposed upon it, a glassy river barely drifting, automated sharpeners tracing the teeth of a saw-blade as if with the slow patience of an ancient craftsman, and of course the gorgeous music with its glorious slowness, every note nestled in its own little eternity. The exquisite slowness of this opening was central to it also being, and also by far, the most beautiful television I’d ever seen. Two-and-a-half minutes in and I’d already watched the slowest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on TV.

It was very daring, but it was more guileless than transgressive – like an elderly art buff, mistakenly given scheduling power at a network while knowing nothing of TV, bumping an episode of Friends to air some art history from Sister Wendy. It made for an alien gesture, in other words, but also a friendly one. When honouring David Lynch upon the depressing occasion of his death, you pretty much have to mention this friendliness, how likeable he was as a personality, the strange status he attained as both heir to the great surrealist director Luis Buñuel and a sort of favorite uncle of popular culture. And this guilelessness was essential to both. His whimsical sayings — suggesting in their content and delivery some hybrid of a seven-year-old boy and ninety-year-old man — traveled with the internet’s most wholesome memes. And his art sat at the heart of contemporary culture as its most searching examinations of human fallenness and depravity.

What followed those credits in the first Twin Peaks episode contains, again over a short few minutes, a quick intro to the moral and psychological methods he used in this examination, at that early stage of his career especially. It was a mixing of notes already familiar from his masterpiece Blue Velvet. There’s the macabre blue skin of the body of a murdered girl (“wrapped in plastic”). There’s the absurdist comic counterpoint — jarring and gentle at the same time — of a deputy weeping at the crime scene. There’s the unnerving erotic spillover of two authorities, a doctor and a cop, joined by men like me in the TV audience, regarding the young dead beauty, naked but for the clear plastic she’s wrapped in. And there’s Angelo Badalamenti’s lush chords rising to reinforce the genuine, powerfully conventional grief that the appearance of a dead teenage girl evokes in almost everyone.

And then, after a devastating, ingeniously elaborate scene in which the girl’s parents learn of her death without anyone actually mentioning it, there is that unparalleled hour of television’s greatest scene, which is set in the town’s high school, just after first bell. Here, where the students don’t yet know that their beautiful and presumably popular schoolmate is dead, a pretty brunette in Fifties fashions named Donna (presumably the murdered girl’s best friend) and a bug-eyed boy named James sit in their classroom, sharing uncanny looks about an empty desk, and Donna begins to cry even before their building worries are given official confirmation in a halting, lugubrious announcement by their portly school principal, which he punctuates by collapsing in climactic grief himself.

I love this high school scene so much and so personally because — in addition to its visual beauty and the unbelievable elegance of its construction — it places us for several minutes in the open, open heart of David Lynch, which was the key to his greatness as an artist. The school principal is a good figure to start with. He is a typical or perhaps archetypal school principal in that he is ridiculous, on the surface, and even as we watch him wade into a tragic and agonised ritual we’re tempted to laugh at his jowliness and awkwardness, the fat-guy textures of his voice. But, as he delivers his awful news, his status as a lower-order Lynchian grotesque becomes dramatically, emotionally central. Where they carried cruel comic accents a minute ago, his jowly face and gurgling voice now vibrate with a whole town’s pain. And his final breakdown, absurd in its visual details, is also crushing in its sadness. It’s like watching grief turn a somewhat baby-shaped man into an actual baby.

But it’s Lynch’s crying teenagers who really, beautifully show this particular genius he possessed, of letting things be as they are, their various aspects showing themselves at the same time, coaxed out by Lynch’s naive and merciless curiosity. Twin Peaks echoes Blue Velvet in its depiction of teenagers in emotional extremis. In both works, Lynch manages to let what’s ridiculous in the emotional rigours of teenagers – the showiness, the self-regarding melodrama – sit obvious at the surface while also capturing what’s powerful and profound in them. He takes those teenage feelings at face value, in both senses — how they look from the outside and how they feel to those operatically distraught teenagers, the irony in the former somehow enhancing the pathos of the latter, and vice versa. Only David Lynch could do that.

“In every Lynch film there are shots that make you want to throw your head back and laugh at their sheer audacious beauty.”

In retrospect, that early pairing of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks looks indeed like the teenager phase of Lynch’s career, and the prominence of teenagers in them seems to explain the relative absence of the dense and challenging surrealism that would define his later works. Both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks have a surrealist feel, and they contain surrealist scenes and moments — the greatest and most amazing being the dancing dwarf scene in Episode Three of Twin Peaks. (Amazing because the dwarf did his dancing and talking backwards in primetime, on broadcast television, when families were watching!) But they’re more likely to play with psychic contradiction directly, through those funny and unnerving juxtapositions, or wild but technically possible Freudian outbreaks of doubling and mirroring, as when Blue Velvet’s clean-cut Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), in both bearing and character, basically becomes his evil nemesis Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). But almost none of this teenager stuff is fully surrealist. It’s as if, in their openly hysterical natures, teenagers make surrealist methods unnecessary. It’s when people become adults, and their outer selves congeal into stable and socially consistent personas, that the psychic matter left out of or suppressed in these personas, still coursing underneath the haphazardly fashioned mask at the surface, becomes a proper object for the surrealist’s tools.

But remember that the dancing dwarf scene was a dream in the sleeping head of Agent Cooper. So it, too, was technically possible. Indeed , you might even say it was realistic, in that Lynch made the most dreamlike dreams in the history of both movies and TV.  And I think this — the pleasing dreamlikeness of Lynchian dreams — explains the enduring reputation of his later films, where dream logic takes over reality, often with disorienting and hideous, as well as larkish and hilarious, results. How are people still watching and enjoying a film such as Lost Highway? Even for hardcore cinephiles, the story of a man in a cell on death row simply turning into a different, somewhat younger man, and then turning back into the older man, with no explanation, should be a little too recondite for repeat viewing. But one rewatches Lynch’s films, even the later ones. This is partly because of the beauty of their individual frames and scenes. His films will go from a sequence of calculated ugliness, his camera plowing rudely through space to gather harsh high-contrast images, to some lush, noirish arrangement, everything with its own halo — furniture, lamps, Patricia Arquette gorgeously emerging from a shadow with a sad grin on her face. In every Lynch film there are shots and scenes that make you want to throw your head back and laugh at their sheer audacious beauty.

But what sustains these strange films as stories is that, while making almost no literal or narrative sense, they still kind of… make sense. They might defy, if not insult, your conscious expectations of where a story is supposed to go, but they have a way of satisfying your feeling of what’s at stake in them, the hidden forces that might be fueling their twists and turns. When some overbrimming lust or jealousy or vanity turns Lynch’s characters inside out or causes them to split in two — that is, makes them into dream versions of themselves — you go along with it, because you can feel what’s psychologically unbearable in their predicament. And when things get nutty from there, you go along with that, too, because, though there’s not a “good” explanation for what just happened, there’s usually a dream explanation for it. You can’t put your finger directly on this dream causality, usually, but you sense it’s there. In Lynch films, things and events can be patently arbitrary and yet uncanny, which for the viewer is often delightful, often a cause of laughter.

At some point while watching a Lynch work, I’m typically struck with the marvellous fact that he wrote all this down. For us in the audience, simply intuiting his uncanny linkages feels vaguely miraculous: “I don’t know how, and yet I do know how.” We couldn’t reproduce this stuff in conscious terms if we tried, much less scheme it out in the first place. And yet Lynch made whole screenplays of it. His difficult, magnificent update of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return, has 18 episodes of it: 18 hours of it. How does one sit down and, under the full inhibitive burdens of conscious awareness, conceive and write 18 hours of fragmentary, dream-associative television narrative. (That he wrote it in collaboration with Mark Frost makes it more marvelous. How might you collaborate on these narrative turns?) This power that Lynch had to stenograph the ineffable is what I’m trying to get at when I refer to his “open, open heart”.

David Foster Wallace makes a stab at explaining this characteristic in his essay about Lynch that’s included in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. “A kind way to put it,” Wallace writes, “is that Lynch seems to be one of these people with unusual access to their own unconscious. A less kind way to put it would be that Lynch’s movies seem to be expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested, borderlinish parts of the director’s psyche.” And this was Wallace defending Lynch from ad hominem critiques, for which, as a writer of psychologically adventurous fiction, Wallace had a reflexive distaste. Of course, Wallace is also hedging here, giving the ad hominem readings of Lynch more than a little credit. What’s odd is that Wallace’s essay — with its queasy, anxious, self-defensive reservations about David Lynch — was written in the supposedly more freewheeling Nineties. Here in the much more censorious 21st Century, when Wallace himself has been posthumously roughed up by a much more aggressive and philistine generation of cultural commissars, the once-problematic David Lynch is widely beloved.

One reason for this is surely just Lynch being such a cool cat, such a lovely person on social media, which they didn’t have back when Wallace wrote his essay. But a lovely person is precisely what Lynch’s violent and sexually creepy and difficult films supposedly revealed him not to be. How to make sense of this? Maybe Lynch’s works were “expressions of” this loveliness after all, or maybe, at least, these works are fully consistent with the kindly fellow we came to know on the internet. I’m the last person to praise social media, but maybe in this case, through the personal exposure to David Lynch it gave people, they were able to see more clearly what was always evident in his art. He was not a wrecker or a cynic. He was not a nihilist. He was not — to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche — “anti-life”. As Wallace says, he had a “child’s” psychological and sentimental openness, but in no way was this openness — as Wallace muses it might be — “sociopathic”. Lynch said “yes” to the contradictory stuff of human life because, it seemed, he simply lacked the capacity to say “no”. His “creepiness” wasn’t just his creepiness. It was ours.

When, at the beginning of Blue Velvet, the camera moves from a stricken man lying in front of his well-tended house, inside his white picket fence, downward through the grass and into the dirt where all the hidden bugs live, it’s tempting to read this in the (over-)familiar terms of anti-bourgeois critique, and many viewers have fallen for the temptation. Blue Velvet exposes the hollowness and hypocrisy of suburban propriety! Look at the ugly reality covered over by the cheap facade! But this reading fits uneasily with the film’s resolution — the demon Frank Booth banished to Hell, the wholesome hero Jeffrey Beaumont triumphant, suburban order reassembled, with smiling families lunching together on a sunny Sunday. This is not to say that all is well — a writhing bug larva makes a heavily suggestive appearance — but that’s not because bourgeois falseness has triumphed despite its oppressive hypocrisy. It’s because all is never well, at least not entirely. There’s always a bug in there somewhere. We’ve just seen wholesome Jeffrey too easily let the evil spirit of Frank Booth enter him. We hope for the best for his future, but we’ve now seen what wholesome Jeffrey has inside him.

Jeffrey Beaumont has Frank Booth inside him, or the potential to become Frank Booth once again, not because he’s a hypocritical bourgeois but because he’s a person. David Lynch’s beautiful genius was his ability to portray these two things sharing the same space and time in one person’s soul, showing us that wholesome Jeffrey has the bug of sexual creepiness and evil inside him, and yet he’s still wholesome, and yet he still has that bug.


Matt Feeney is a writer based in California and the author of Little Platoons: A defense of family in a competitive age