David Lynch
Blue Velvet

"Blue Velvet", or the dirty secrets that crawl in the shadows of a hypocritical society, just like the shadow in the folds of the blue velvet dress of the beautiful club singer Dorothy Vallens.

David Lynch meticulously crafts images that pierce the viewers' eyes (who, after watching the film, will look suspiciously at their friends, neighbors, their society) to penetrate directly into their brain, ensnaring them forever within the thin threads of the psyche.

Because the story masterfully and spasmodically woven by Lynch is a dirty story, one that gets inside you to stay and contaminate you with its filthy events, with its unbearable physical and especially psychological violence. What would happen if one day, perhaps returning from work, school, a visit to a girlfriend or friends, you made a discovery destined to forever change your perception of reality? What was once thought impossible would become concrete, the same sun that lights up the place you live every day would have a different aspect, the smiles of people on the street would appear empty and false.

All this happens to Jeffrey Beaumont, a young man like many others living in a neat and sunny American suburb like many others, and who one day returning home finds a severed human ear (the shattered balance) among the yellowed grass stalks in a field at the edge of the woods.

It will be his curiosity, the quintessential human trait, that drags him into a vortex of psychological perversions at the limit of the bearable, uncovering with his investigations the rotten secrets buried beneath the tranquil routine of a calm city life. The feeling of something profoundly wrong, creeping, sick and hidden, will accompany both Jeffrey and the viewer throughout the film, and will bring with it the effect of a blinding blue neon light embedded in the mind, illuminating with cold precision unnoticed details, barriers never broken, murky mysteries never brought to light.

The same ambiguity upon which the film rests does not spare the protagonist, constantly teetering between pathological voyeurism and simple curiosity, exposing the dark side of each of us.

The story will conclude happily, with the symbolic image of a robin holding a beetle in its beak, yet, the viewer, just like the film's protagonists, will know that the return to a normal situation will be entirely apparent and that a tiny scratch would once again reveal the illness that lurks underground.

A metaphor, an apt comparison between reality and norm, unreal and abnormal, concepts capable of equating themselves when an ordinary person finds themselves catapulted into the unknown.

The film more than any other reveals the themes that touch every David Lynch film.