Blue Velvet

Dvid Lynch's hugely influential 1986 work.
Formally, this is clearly less developed than 'Mulholland Drive', though Lynch in conventional mode remains way ahead of the crowd. Their is a strain on classism here, with restrianed quite wide framings, a willingness to create long tableaus. Their more Lynchian aesthetic is perhaps most obvious in the looming slow zooms/ tracks in an out, a slight willingness to fix the camera-position entirely. The flat looking rooms, the dull colours, are also more distinctive.
Perhaps it is the darkness of the rooms, the dirty reds and blues, that mark this out as Lynch. Combined with the nightlub scene, and some slightly in-your-face jumps in the montage is in keeping with Lynch's surrealism (different from other surrealisms to the point of disconnection).
It is surely thematically where the, to be clear, brilliance of this film lies. There is just a simple unwillingness to take us outside of the film's world, to suggest something better outside. Saying that each character is compromised would be like suggesting it was possible not to be. Kyle Maclachlan is asked if he is a detective or a pervery, and the answer see,s pretty obvious.
On the side of the deliberate pastiche, this film can be read as pretty funny. The other side of this film is surely one of the most complete horros put on screen. It is acute, achieving with a few traits a depth of detail that is remarkable. As an analysis of the current (at least) American consciousness, it is a depiction maybe unrivalled in its harshness. When similiarity is shown with the jock boyfriend, the move is complete. The underside of a certain kind of seemingly harmless behaviour is unmericfully shown. At times one almsot worries that Lynch revels in this, to an almost defeatist manner; can anything come back from this?
This is a film that is modernist in the high-art sense; unity is questioned. The dirt of the Hopper-strands are demanaded, by the rejoinder of the conventions of the feature film, to be organised. This results in the patently ridiculous attempts to do so with romance, that are hideously compromised. The inability to make films about horror is perhaps the clearest element shown here. Unity is impossible. Perhaps the end takes us too close to unity; though the last scene remains uncanny.
This is a film that is genuinely disturbing; certain scenes (overdone looming music, terrific soundtrack otherwise, amusing and challengin irony) are some of the most difficult (fasincating as they are, to the cinematic voyeur) to watch as are few others. Yet it takes on the fact that this is ultimately an aristic construct. Not as formally ambitious as maybe expected, but in its use of narrative strands and themes, a lesson in 'story' -telling. This is perhaps Lynch's forte, to reinvent how cinema can/ can't tell stories visually.