David Lynch's brilliant 1986 film Blue Velvet is getting a two-week, 20th anniversary run in New York. Do you think any of the Toronto rep houses would follow suit? A resounding 'no' is the answer to that question. :(

Anyways, an excerpt from the NYT story by Terrence Rafferty:

... For most members of the audience, "Blue Velvet" was a completely new kind of movie experience. Its sordid matter unnerved people less, I think, than its unfamiliar — hence vaguely threatening — manner. After all, most moviegoers had seen much more graphic violence than anything in "Blue Velvet," had heard a greater quantity of foul language in prestigious pictures like "Raging Bull" and had probably gazed, with some interest and maybe even some pleasure, on a naked body or two. (Though rarely, it should be said, on one quite so rawly and unglamorously exposed as Ms. Rossellini's is here.) What's tough to handle, particularly if you aren't used to it, is the volatility of the film's tone — the abrupt, unsignaled alternations between teen-movie sweetness and splatter-movie depravity, between brazenly sophomoric humor and abject horror, between innocence and the direst kind of experience.

And it's the innocence, finally, that makes "Blue Velvet" genuinely and uniquely shocking. Mel Brooks, whose company produced "The Elephant Man," once famously described Mr. Lynch as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars"; and there is something wide-eyed and wholesome and all-American about Mr. Lynch, which is real and is, it seems to me, the ultimate, improbable source of his work's power to disturb and appall. ...

Lynch's movies, Rafferty says, have  ...

 a kind of Peter Pan quality: they're made by someone who has willed himself not to outgrow the immediacy and berserk randomness of a child's perceptions, and to take the really scary stuff along with the really neat stuff, just as it comes. 

 Mr. Lynch's Neverland, whether it's called Lumberton or Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive, is by design timeless, fundamentally impervious to the grown-up perspective that lets most of us assimilate our experiences into something like a traditional detective story: a narrative that explains the past and allows us to move (however dully) on. The world "Blue Velvet" creates is static, an imaginative city of simultaneity in which everything, good and bad, is present all at once.

Of course that's shocking. "Blue Velvet," which delighted many and repelled many others in 1986, is likely to evoke roughly the same mixture of reactions today, and 20 years from now, and on and on. There's no assimilating its dark-and-light vision, no explaining its real mysteries, and no handy term to categorize it: not "hip" (as might have been said back in the day), and certainly not "edgy" (as canny marketers have trained us to say since). Why are there movies like "Blue Velvet"? Because the world is strange, and the strangeness never goes away.

What I remember coming out of the theatre almost exactly 20 years ago is how polarized the audience was: Half the people thought it was the greatest movie they'd ever seen, and the other half thought it was the sickest piece of shit of all time.

No one just shrugged it off.

The film, if you've not seen it (rent it! rent it!) is set in Lumberton, U.S.A.

Lynch himself is from Missoula, Montana, which bears a stunning resemblance to the fictional Lumberton, based on my one drunken forestry student long weekend road trip there in the fall of 1981.

Missoula had a lost-in-time feel at that point. The University of Montana forestry students I met were nice to the point of being almost repulsively wholesome and all-American. But there is also a surreal, menacing underbelly to that place, just as there is in Lumberton. And I don't think the good burghers of Missoula were quite aware of the bad ones.

In the opening scenes, we see blindingly-white picket fences, post-card red roses, an unnaturally blue sky -- and an impassive fireman waving robotically as the fire engine passes. Pure Norman Rockwell, I'd say.

Then comes the famous sequence of a middle-aged man having a seizure and collapsing on the lawn, with the camera burrowing into the savage insect jungle beneath the blades of perfectly-mowed grass.

What ensues is college-boy Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan) coming home to visit dad and help run the family hardware business. While out walking, he finds a severed human ear.

From there, he gets drawn into the mystery, helped along by Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of the detective investigating the severed ear.

Where things move from naughty fun to seriously freaky is when Jeffrey ends up in the apartment of torch singer Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini) and gets trapped in her closet, where he watches her get brutally used by Frank (Dennis Hopper), one of the most demented, over-the-top psychopaths ever to appear in an American film. You can't see this film and think about oxygen masks in the same way ever again. :)

Rafferty talks about profanity, sex and violence of earlier '80s masterworks like Raging Bull.

However, what people probably found most disturbing about Blue Velvet was the confluence of sex and violence, and how poor, submissive, dominated Dorothy found it a turn-on -- as did voyeuristic Jeffrey, our surrogate.

There's different ways to watch this part of the movie. Hopper becomes so frenzied in parts of the scene that it becomes almost farcical. From what I've read, Lynch -- who was dating Rossellini at the time -- almost broke out laughing on set while filming the sequence.

That's part of Lynch's artistry in this film, letting you laugh at his jokes, but then testing you to see when you think the joke just isn't funny any more -- or alternatively, when you think the joke actually is on you.

Throughout the movie, Lynch strives to keep us off-balance, making us laugh at small-town squareness ("That's pretty interesting!" exclaimed Sandy after watching Jeffrey's not-so-sophisticated chicken walk) combined with (sur-) real horror, like the "joy ride" stop to listen to suave Ben's (Dean Stockwell) karaoke from hell -- he sings Roy Orbison's In Dreams:

A candy-colored clown/they call the sandman
Tiptoes/to my room/every night
Just to sprinkle stardust/and to whisper
Go to sleep/everything/is all right.

I close my eyes
Then I drift away
Into the magic night
I softly sway
Oh smile and pray
Like dreamers do
Then I fall asleep
To dream/my dreams/of you

In dreams/I walk/with you
In dreams/I talk/to you
In dreams/you're mine/All the time
We're together/In dreams/In dreams

How about in nightmares?

At one point in the joy ride sequence, Frank, his eyes alight with either realization or the fires of hell, hisses at Jeffrey: "You're just like me!"

Rafferty again:

The central question of "Blue Velvet," voiced with winning bluntness by Jeffrey, is "Why are there people like Frank?"

Now, if you haven't seen the flick, Jeffrey and Sandy are sitting in a car after dark, with Jeffrey bringing her up to date on what he's learned (this is pre-joy ride). "Why is there so much trouble in the world?" asks an anguished, overwhelmed, almost child-like Jeffrey. "And why are there people like Frank?"

We in the audience giggle because we think it's a stupid question framed in a stupid way. Why are there people like you, Jeffrey?

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Finding your own answer to the 'Frank' question -- as well as exploring how and why you react to Blue Velvet as a whole -- is what keeps it a valid and important cinematic experience.

Here's a couple of high-profile reviewers on Blue Velvet: Janet Maslin of the NYT, who liked it; and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who didn't.