It holds up.
I don't want to spoil too much with this one. If you haven't seen Blue Velvet go watch it. It is a tightly assembled mystery that is surreal without totally departing reality for parts unknown.
If you have seen Blue Velvet, I'll try not to bore you with what has already been said many times over about this film. So let me see if I can say something that hasn't been said about it before . . . I might not be up to the task . . .
I'm a big fan of point-and-click mystery adventure games: Shadowgate, Deja Vu, Uninvited, King's Quest, Nightshade Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh, Snatcher, Grim Fandango, the Gabriel Knight series, the Tex Murphy series, the Phoenix Wright series, and pretty much everything put out by Wadjet Eye Games. These are games where you drag a cursor around the screen, looking for some kind of response from the program, looking for any kind of a clue. You might need to interrogate people by choosing dialogue prompts, being careful not to say the wrong thing which could potentially shut down a conversation prematurely. Usually these games take place in a series of rooms and passages, where each section must be thoroughly investigated and solved before you unlock more rooms, and more passages, that are, ultimately, all connected in some unexpected, labyrinthine fashion by game's end.
Point-and-click games are sometimes notorious for the difficulty of their "moon logic" puzzles-conundrums whose solutions are so arbitrary and obscure that they could only possibly make sense in the hermetically sealed, hyper-postmodern reality of a video game. Sometimes, though, these moon logic puzzles transcend to a level of surreal brilliance which delights, but just as often they make you want to throw your monitor through a window. The best point-and-click adventures create an internal logic that subtly challenges you to engage with the mystery on its own terms, giving you enough clues and worldbuilding contextualization so that you have a fighting chance to reach the end state of the game with a sense of earned achievement.
Blue Velvet creates a near-perfect point-and-click adventure scenario with its own internally consistent reality that seems rooted in our world, but departs from it in key moments to give us a bit of a jolt at just the right moments. We even have a video game cypher of a protagonist (perfectly played by Kyle MacLachlan as a twin-souled square and voyeuristic freak all in one) who allows us to enter into the world with just enough perception to suss out a mystery worth diving into, but lacking that extra bit of common sense which would send a normal person running the fuck home. Visually, we are presented with a series of images and objects that lead us further into the heart of mystery: a severed human ear; a propeller hat; a blue velvet robe; angry and agonized and ecstatic faces distorted in dreams; human forms moving from the background of shadows into the foreground of light; an apartment and a living room presented as though each were a proscenium stage; a work light used as a microphone . . . we are encouraged to think in terms of a show presented before our eyes and how exactly that show has been put together.
The video game cypher takes time out of the adventure to assemble his thoughts and experiences in montage, drawing conclusions that advance the program closer to the end state.
Meanwhile, Angelo Badalamenti's lush score seems to emanate from a dimension of refined film noir that blurs the lines between cinema and reality. After my latest viewing, I am now convinced that the world of Blue Velvet was born from Badalamenti's mysterious score, as opposed to being a film created by a cast and crew of hundreds of people as you would expect from most movies.
Much like in a point-and-click mystery adventure, our protagonist doesn't notice all there is to notice until he is deep into things. When he first goes to a nightspot called the Slow Club, he is mesmerized by a sad and beautiful torch singer. Later, after he's been through some shit, he goes back to the Slow Club, is once again mesmerized by the sad and beautiful torch singer . . . but now he sees someone else in the audience. Someone who was probably there the first time, but our protagonist had no reason to notice this person as distinct from the other anonymous customers in the crowd. I imagine a New Game+ version of these sequences where you can play through it, again, and have a different outcome.
But Blue Velvet isn't a video game. It's a movie. It flows in one direction, coming to one conclusion every single time, and it will never change.
Unless, of course, David Lynch decides to go back into it with computer graphics technology and add in copious amounts of bantha poodoo, digitally enhanced explosions, and maybe an extra rock for Kyle MacLachlan to hide behind inside that closet . . . this would be so fucked-up and absurd I kind of want to see it happen.
But I get drawn into this one every time I watch it. Maybe it's a great movie. Maybe I'm just a great sucker.
NEXT: 2/23/18: Twin Peaks Pilot Episode (1990)
