The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lynch · a film · 1986 · from the director’s own screenplay · De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
Mode
Small-town mystery turned to noir and nightmare; boy-detective story, sexual initiation and surrealist dream in one structure
Mythos
The descent to the underworld and the return; the son who watches the father from hiding, is named his double and kills him
Phase
One season in Lumberton, from a father’s stroke to his recovery, framed at both ends by the same curtain, roses and fire engine
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35 mm, English dialogue; four central characters, two worlds, four old pop songs and one written for the film
Register
From picket-fence kitsch and a hardware store to an assault seen through closet slats; the daylight played stiff, the night at full pitch
Scale
One town, two households, one apartment, one boy’s initiation
Governing Proposition
A young man finds a severed ear in a vacant lot and follows it down, from the bright lawns of his town to an apartment where a man calls himself “Baby” and the woman he hurts “Mommy”. The wager of the film is that the boy’s curiosity and the horror he finds are one thing, that the town’s innocence and its rot are two faces of one surface, and that the viewer, watching in the dark, stands where the boy stands: behind the slats.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a curtain. Blue velvet moves in a wind behind the titles, to Angelo Badalamenti’s main theme. Then the town, to Bobby Vinton’s recording of “Blue Velvet” (1963), in slowed and saturated images: red roses against a white picket fence, a fire engine passing with a fireman waving, a crossing guard, yellow tulips. Tom Beaumont waters his lawn. The hose snags, and he falls with a stroke. A dog snaps at the spray, and a toddler wanders near. The camera goes down into the grass, to black beetles swarming, and the sound swells to a roar. In a few minutes the film has shown its town twice, as a picture of itself and as what lives under the picture, and it has done the second in a single movement of the camera.
Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan, comes home from college to visit his father in hospital. Walking home through a vacant lot, he finds a severed human ear in the grass. He puts it in a paper bag and carries it to Detective Williams, who tells him to say nothing. The ear is the gate. Everything after it is the descent it opens, and the paper bag, the family hardware store and the courteous detective are the daylight the descent starts from. The town is called Lumberton, and its trade is a jingle on the radio and a truck going by.
The structure is a descent and a return, framed at both ends by the same images. Four people carry it: Jeffrey; Sandy Williams, the detective’s daughter, played by Laura Dern; Dorothy Vallens, a singer, played by Isabella Rossellini; and Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper. The time is an unstated present that wears the 1950s and the 1980s at once. Frederick Elmes lights the days with a lacquered clarity and the nights in deep blacks broken by single sources, and Alan Splet lays an industrial hum under the domestic rooms. The underworld is heard before it is seen.
Movement II
At night outside the Williams house, Sandy steps out of the dark. She has overheard her father, and she gives Jeffrey a name, Dorothy Vallens, and a street, Lincoln Street. “It’s a strange world,” he says. Later she tells him, “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” It is a joke between two young people in a car, and it is the question the film will put to him and to whoever is watching. Disguised as a pest-control man, Jeffrey gets into Dorothy’s apartment, in the Deep River Apartments, and takes a spare key while she answers the door to a man in a yellow jacket.
He and Sandy watch Dorothy sing “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club, and then he lets himself into the apartment. Sandy’s warning signal fails. Dorothy comes home, and he hides in the closet. She finds him and holds a kitchen knife on him, makes him undress, and the scene turns sexual. The boy who came to look is looked at, and for these minutes the woman with the knife is in command of him.
Then Frank arrives, and Jeffrey watches him through the slats. Frank breathes a gas through a mask, calls himself “Baby” and Dorothy “Mommy”, shouts “Don’t you fucking look at me!”, stuffs a strip of blue velvet into his mouth and hers, and assaults her. After he has gone, Dorothy asks Jeffrey to stay. The closet is a cinema: a boy in the dark looking through a frame at a lit room, forbidden to be seen. The viewer stands where he stands, and the film never lets the viewer forget it.
Movement III
In daylight, at Arlene’s diner, Jeffrey tells Sandy what he has learned: Frank holds Dorothy’s husband and child. He watches Frank and photographs him with the man in the yellow jacket and a well-dressed man. The case runs here in plain genre terms, a drug ring and a hostage, and the film explains it barely. What it cares about is at night. Back in the apartment, Dorothy says, “Hit me.” He does.
Leaving, he is caught by Frank and taken on a joyride with Frank’s gang, Brad Dourif and Jack Nance among them, and Dorothy. At a bar Frank orders the beer: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” At Ben’s house, a brothel kept by a host in make-up, played by Dean Stockwell, Ben mimes Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” (1963) into a work-light held under his face, and Frank, mouthing the words, is undone by it. It is ridiculous and terrible at once, and the film does not choose between them.
In a field, with the song playing on the car tape and a woman dancing on the car roof, Frank smears lipstick on his own mouth, kisses Jeffrey and tells him, “You’re like me.” Then the gang beats him. Jeffrey wakes in the field and weeps. The song has changed owners in a single night, from a host’s mime to a killer’s anthem, and only a recording could make that passage. The film has said what Jeffrey is in Frank’s mouth, and it does not take the words back.
Movement IV
Against the nights the film sets Sandy. In a car outside a church, with an organ playing within, Jeffrey asks why there are people like Frank. Sandy tells him her dream: the world was dark until thousands of robins came, bringing love. Dern gives it full sincerity, and the film lets it rise and lets it tilt at the same time, into beauty and into irony, so that the scene cannot be taken simply either way. It is the light world’s answer to the closet, and it is offered as a dream.
At the police station Jeffrey sees that the man in the yellow jacket is a detective, Williams’s partner. The rot the case was about sits inside the father’s house of order. At a party Jeffrey and Sandy dance to “Mysteries of Love”, sung by Julee Cruise, with music by Badalamenti and words by Lynch, and tell each other they are in love. It is the one song written for the film.
Driving home, they are chased by Sandy’s former boyfriend, Mike. Outside the Beaumont house Dorothy stands on the lawn, naked and bruised, in the headlights. The underworld has come up onto the lawn where the father fell. She is taken inside, and then to hospital, and Sandy learns what has passed between her and Jeffrey. The sight stops the film, and for those minutes it holds no irony at all.
Movement V
Jeffrey goes back to Lincoln Street. Dorothy’s husband sits dead, with an ear cut off. The detective in the yellow jacket stands dead upright, shot in the head, a police radio crackling. Frank comes back disguised as the well-dressed man. Jeffrey hides in the closet again, and through the slats he shoots Frank in the forehead. Williams and Sandy arrive. The boy who watched from the closet kills from it, and the man he kills is the one who told him they were alike. The plot is closed by a radio and a pistol, quickly, as if the film had never much cared how.
Then morning. Tom Beaumont is well, and the families are together. A robin that looks mechanical sits on the kitchen windowsill with a beetle in its beak. Sandy says, “It’s a strange world.” Dorothy plays in a park with her son, and Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” returns over her face. The film ends on the roses, the fire engine and the curtain from the opening. Jeffrey’s words from the night they met have become hers, and the opening has become the close.
What is left undecided is whether this is healing, a parody of healing or a dream ending. The robin is a machine, and the father is well. Lynch received an Academy Award nomination as director, and Roger Ebert wrote against the film’s treatment of Dorothy in the year it opened; the argument has not stopped. The film does not settle it, and does not need to. It has shown a boy finding in himself the thing he went looking for, and it has put the viewer, from the first descent into the grass, behind the slats with him.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, since the dialogue is deliberately flat and works by tone. The spine is a descent and a return, and its main parts resist subtraction. Take out the opening montage and the ending’s mirror means nothing; take out the closet and the film has no point of view; take out the joyride and “You’re like me” has no ground. The case is needed as well: the ear opens the descent, and the detective in the yellow jacket binds the father’s world of police to Frank’s. What yields to the test is particular machinery: a drug ring the film barely explains, Mike’s chase, Aunt Barbara’s comedy, and a climax solved by a radio trick and a pistol.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The obvious disclosure, rot under the lawn of the clean town, is the film’s surface, and it was not new in 1986. The deeper disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the innocent’s curiosity is continuous with what horrifies him. Jeffrey watches from the closet, is aroused, and hits Dorothy when she asks; Frank tells him “You’re like me”, and the film never answers. A second holds beside it: violence shapes the desire of its victim, and Dorothy’s “Hit me” was rare and hard in American cinema in 1986. Both are articulated, not only felt. Held a tenth above the gate: much else arrives as mood, and the robins leave it open whether a condition has been disclosed or a dream framed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is mainly dreadful, and frequent. The descent into the grass to the beetles’ roar is terror in one camera move. The closet scene sustains dread for many minutes, and Frank’s entrance turns it to something close to horror. Ben’s “In Dreams”, the work-light under his face and Frank mouthing the words, is the film’s height: absurd and terrible at once, and a kind of transport. Dorothy naked on the lawn stops the film; the last apartment, a dead man standing, is a tableau of strange stillness. Rossellini’s “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club reaches a cold beauty. Held lower by the light world: the robins and the dance rise into irony as much as beauty, and the film knows it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The film is a descent to the underworld: the vacant lot is the gate, Lincoln Street the realm, Frank its lord, and every major scene is a stage of the descent or the return. The Oedipal triangle is literal and load-bearing. From the closet a boy watches a man who calls himself “Baby” and the woman “Mommy” while he hurts her; the boy takes the man’s place, is told he is his double, and kills him from the same closet. The doubling of blonde girl and dark woman, robins and beetles, is structural, and the particular stays particular: the hose, the Pabst, the paper bag. Held below the top because the construction is diagrammatic, close to an illustration of Freud.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inherited forms are the teen mystery, the boy-detective story and film noir, all within American studio cinema. The film turns them three ways. It fuses them with surrealism and the avant-garde in a film released wide. It makes the tone undecidable, 1950s kitsch played both straight and as dread, sincerity and irony never separated. And it puts sexual violence and abjection on screen as the studio mystery had never carried them. The stake was real, by report a fee given up for control after Dune (1984), on a film many thought unreleasable. Held below the top by precedent: Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window had found the dark in the small town and the watcher, and Lynch’s own Eraserhead (1977) was the swerve that this film brought to the town.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and much of what the film knows is lost. Its knowledge is that watching is complicity, and in film the viewer stands where Jeffrey stands: behind the slats, in the dark, looking at a lit rectangle. The closet is a cinema. The songs are agents, not decoration. “In Dreams” passes from Ben’s mime to Frank’s car tape and becomes Frank’s anthem; Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” bends from the town’s theme to Frank’s fetish to Dorothy’s sorrow. Only a medium of recorded sound can make one song change owners. Splet’s drones under the domestic rooms make the underworld audible where nothing is seen. Held a step below by what prose could keep: the plot, the triangle and the descent all survive outside film.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Forty years of return are evidence. The film became the case through which a word was defined: David Foster Wallace’s essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (1996) tries to say what “Lynchian” means, largely through this film and Lost Highway. Michel Chion’s study of Lynch, Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic reading and Slavoj Žižek’s account of Frank in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) carry the readings on. They conflict and are still current: Oedipal, feminist, both for and against the treatment of Dorothy, camp, reactionary and religious. The ending can be read three ways. Held below the top because part of the yield comes from the tone itself, from not knowing whether to laugh, which can look endless without being deep.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 1986, so force and reach are scored together. The force made a grammar of the suburban uncanny and carried the surreal into the American mainstream. It did this by joining parts already present, Hitchcock, Buñuel, noir and Lynch’s own earlier film, and the force reassembled more than it invented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Twin Peaks (1990) carried the film’s world into television and changed what television drama could carry; “Lynchian” entered the language; the suburban gothic that followed bears it plainly, in Happiness (1998), American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001); the old pop song laid over violence, sincere and ironic at once, became an idiom of the 1990s; and Hopper’s Frank became a template for the villain whose evil is regressive and comic.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over forty years: continuous exhibition, issue on every home format, restoration, and a settled place in teaching and in criticism. The surface was out of time on release. A pastiche of a 1950s that never existed, worn over the 1980s, has little period surface to lose, and the 1980s show only in a few cars and clothes. Two things could wear. The irony is a mode, and modes date. And the treatment of Dorothy has been contested from the start: Roger Ebert’s review of 1986 objected to it. If that judgment hardens, the film will be shown with a caveat. The contest is charged as a risk to survival, not as a verdict. The bar is cleared with a tenth of room.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Frederick Elmes’s light gives the days a lacquered clarity and the nights deep blacks broken by single sources. Alan Splet’s sound design, the roar in the grass and the hum under the apartment, works as a second score. Badalamenti’s score is lush and slightly too much, as the film needs. The songs are placed, above all “In Dreams” at Ben’s. Hopper pitches Frank between infant and killer; Rossellini holds abjection and dignity at once. The slowed, saturated framing of the opening and the close makes the town a picture of itself. The costs: the stiff playing of the light world is chosen but sometimes merely stiff, in Mike and in some of the Williams scenes, and the climax’s mechanics are perfunctory.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Sandy’s dream of robins, told outside a church with an organ playing, and Frank’s assault seen through the closet slats. One law covers them. The film is a boy’s dream of a town, in which innocence and horror are two faces of one surface, rendered at the same pitch of excess. The descent into the grass, the robin with a beetle in its beak and the curtain at both ends frame everything in it. The range is wide, comedy, kitsch, horror, romance and noir, and the genre plot obeys the law too: the teen mystery is one more surface the dream wears, played straight and as dread like the rest. The strain is at the end. The robin is mechanical and the father is well, and the film leaves both standing.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A two-hour film holds four orders in one structure, each built in rather than merely present. Consciousness and sexuality, the adolescent’s discovery of desire and violence, at the centre. The family: two households, a father struck down and restored, a mother and child held hostage. The town and its order: the police, who are the plot’s hinge and the seat of its corruption. The natural order, insects under the lawn and robins above it, as the frame. The father’s stroke opens the descent. What holds the axis lowest is what is only touched: the lumber trade is a radio jingle and a truck, the sacred an organ and a dream, and history is not lived in, the time deliberately unstated.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.0, then The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.9. A command of light, sound, song and performance that carries what the film knows; one law of the dreamed town covering kitsch and horror alike; the teen mystery and noir turned into surrealism in a film released wide; and a form in which the viewer stands where the boy stands, behind the slats.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7 — consciousness, the family, the town and the natural order are held in one structure; labour, the sacred and history are touched, not held. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.3: the drug ring, Mike’s chase, the hardware-store comedy and the radio trick of the climax are permitted rather than compelled.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Blue Velvet as released in the United States in September 1986, from the opening titles to the closing curtain: written and directed by David Lynch, produced by Fred Caruso for the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, photographed by Frederick Elmes, with music by Angelo Badalamenti, sound design by Alan Splet, editing by Duwayne Dunham and production design and costumes by Patricia Norris; shot in and around Wilmington, North Carolina. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The deleted footage later issued on home video, Twin Peaks and Lynch’s other films are not part of the work judged. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain; no lyric is quoted, and the songs are named by title. The order of three middle passages, the dream of robins, the recognition at the police station and the joyride, is not relied on. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, the scene and shot counts, the budget and the share of the dialogue, are not given.