David Thomson's Top Ten Films: Blue Velvet

The bogeyman we hate to love

In an age when, increasingly, American films are made for children, or for those who decline to grow up, is it any wonder that the great American movie resorts to that alarmed, paranoid vision on the tender side of immaturity? Blue Velvet is a parable about coming of age in a society that has no place for adulthood. All the grown people defy or mock the attempt by Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) to pass beyond infancy or primitive states. The old American dream of taming the frontier (and its wild men) to make a decent place to live receives its grisly comeuppance in Lumberton, that naive, flag-bright strip of Americana. This sham culture cannot stop heeding the roar of its outlaw genius, Frank Booth, the beast who urges "fuck-fuck" upon Jeffrey and everyone else.

David Lynch is not an artist filled with recrimination for lesser talents. Still, it's hard in hindsight not to see his assemblage of terrors (and these have mounted in Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr) as a rebuke to the addled fondness for tidiness and small town small mindedness that besets Spielberg and Lucas – the gigantic exponents of modern movie marketing.

By contrast, Lynch – so unhip and inarticulate as to seem out of touch – but hugely stubborn and determined, too, is an exponent not just of independent film, but of art school solitude. As American as a hot dog, Lynch is also raised in European, avant garde traditions. He is so comfortable in the surrealist tradition, that the "Dr" in Mulholland Dr plainly stood for "dream" and not just "drive". Yet Lynch, somehow, got that dragon of the old industry, Dino de Laurentiis, to let him make Blue Velvet. And at the art-house level, their picture did business. Even in the zombie Eighties, Lynch's film found an audience and left it tingling with a mixture of dread and delight. And though this trick happens far less often now, once again America demonstrated its rare capacity to make a film that was hauntingly artistic and sensational at the same time. Yet Lynch knows that the world outside the cinema is a version of Lumberton, and that's why, while he wants to like Jeffrey and his chances, still he will not give up on Frank Booth, and Frank's insistence that Jeffrey is like him.

Jeffrey is a good little boy – Kyle MacLachlan has an air of Bobby Harron or Richard Barthlemess, handsome heroic youths from the silent era. He lives in a picket fence prison, and his father has been put to sleep by a stroke. Then Jeffrey finds the severed ear, the gold that always lurks in American undergrowth. That ripped tissue is a promise of the potent white flesh of Dorothy Valance, her blood lips, the suffocating pink-brown vaginal warmth of her apartment, and that siren song, "Blue Velvet".

Jeffrey has a nice girl in view (Laura Dern), but Dorothy is outrageously alluring, not least in the way the unformed Jeffrey is allowed to be her voyeur, then offered the chance of possessing her and beating her.

In an instant, nearly, he runs the gamut of sexual experience – and coincidentally, it is still the best way to interpret Buñuel's Un chien Andalou as a similar rite of passage. But what is unique to Lynch's vision is the night-town ordeal of Frank (Dennis Hopper), Raymond (the hideously suave Dean Stockwell) and the dreamy murder mystery that Jeffrey is drawn into.

Of course, Blue Velvet, for all its attempt at fairy-story, is also a horror film determined to maintain the humdrum texture of gruesome Americana – it's in the tradition of Psycho and Jeffrey Dahmer. Things seem to end well for our Jeffrey, if that's how you care to feel about it. The bogey-men have been dispelled, Dorothy may be on her way to recovery. And maybe Jeffrey will marry his sweetheart and be a pillar of the community in Lumberton.

But after 100 years of film, we all walk with our fantasies now. So how can Jeffrey forget Dorothy – that pale bush sprouting up in the suburban garden – not just a guilty nightmare, but the personification of Edenic shame? How are we to forget Frank or his taste for that inflaming gas and all his language? How can we let go of Dean Stockwell's languorous rendering of "In Dreams"? How can this arsenal of progress called America stay awake – instead of lapsing into the eternal trance of horror? What have we done to ourselves in letting movie in? After all, a moment ago historically, no one knew what it was or had dreamed of it. We were literate.

Fuck literate – you can hear Frank's tirade building. The dark ages are back. Why else do so many of us resolve to sit still in the dark – when there is daylight left?

d.thomson@independent.co.uk