Ear to the Ground, Eye to the Saturated Sky-Blue Velvet

Before watching David Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet, I had the assumption based on one of those shows where B-List celebrities get all nostalgic and say "remember when?", in this case for scary movies, that this movie was going to be primarily about Dennis Hopper terrorizing people. While he does do this in the film, my assumption was mistaken. I was also told that the film seems to be edgy yet masks an 80's 

conservative yearning for the 50's. Again, I watched the film with the assumption that this would be the case, and again, I found myself mistaken and relying too heavily on hearsay. Blue Velvet, seems to shift in its view consistently throughout the film, starting with a 1950's-like suburban setting called Lumberton, where the colors of everyday objects give one the sense that "everything is beautiful" yet something is off, because color on films of the 1950's era would not have lasted through their replay, they would have faded over time. This gives me the sense of David Lynch not trying to make a film that recaptures the 50's, but rather a film that reedits the 1950's into a stylized form digestible to a late 20th century audience, trimmed of its drabness into something as visually rich as blue velvet fabric. The film visually then, put into the context of the mid-1980's, seems to mirror President Reagan's nostalgic ideal of the 1950's as a Technicolor utopia, skimming over the gritty, "less pleasant" parts of the era. When we do get to the "gritty parts", in the form of main character Jeffery Beaumont's ascent into the dark crime underworld of Lumberton, these areas seem to be stylized into a form trying to recapture past film genres such as film noir and other entertainment, whether it be through the setting which is also richly colored but dark to the extent where one really doesn't know what's occurring, or the characters, which come in the forms of femme fatale (Dorothy), ultimate bad guy (Frank) and his sleazy minions. Jeffery also turns into one of these character forms; the good citizen-man, seduced into the underworld by the femme fatale. According to Po-Mo Puritan, several of these characters such as Jeffery and Frank, are products of early American Literature such as Melville and Hawthorne, a time in which, the worlds of good and evil were separate, and life was consistently a trial of trying to prevent one's soul from easily slipping into evil and becoming the next Frank Booth. I think this film is also reminiscent of the seedy crime pulp novels, where there is usually a seductive woman in trouble and violent, purely evil villain, intent on harming her. I also think however that these black and white character types are defied in the film. In several scenes both Jeffery and Frank promote specific name brands of beer, not only showing the prevalence of materialism of 80's culture, which designates this decade from others, as well as the similarities between Frank and him. He becomes a womanizer, lusting after two women who both seem to seduce him into the crime underworld, although with Dorothy this seems to be lust, while with teenage Sandy, this is romance. I feel that this shows how the longing for past times seems to be drawn both to the grit and romance of times past. By the end of the movie, and after Frank's demise, things return to normal as in Jeffery goes back to the world of Lumberton, pursuing his relationship with Sandy and both seem to act like nothing really happened. I believes this echoes the denial that is part of post-modernism and the nostalgic idealization by Reagan of what in reality has happened in the past and a longing to return to the idea of the 50's. I also think that because this ending was unnatural and unbelievable (at least to me) that Lynch's intent may have been to show viewers, that yes, 1950's mainstream/pop culture is "neat" but is it replicable? Not really. Did anyone view the ending similarly? Furthermore, since the end of the Cold War , we have been romanticizing the 50's through the 80's as times defined primarily by music and fashion, is this already happening for the 90's?  

Remind you of anything?

Dorothy in a stylized embrace with Jeffery