For Jeffrey, the road from overgrown Boy Scout to in-over-his-head amateur sleuth starts with the discovery of a severed ear in a vacant lot near his home. This is his first inkling that picture-postcard Lumberton has a dark side he\u2019s never investigated, having previously heeded his Aunt Barbara\u2019s ominous admonition to stay away \u201cfrom Lincoln.\u201d Naturally, Lincoln Street is precisely where Dorothy lives, so with the help of police lieutenant\u2019s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern as the Nancy Drew to MacLachlan\u2019s Hardy Boy), he hatches a plan to sneak into her apartment, hide, and observe what \u201cThe Blue Lady\u201d gets up to when she isn\u2019t singing at The Slow Club. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you\u2019re a detective or a pervert,\u201d Sandy says. Jeffrey\u2019s glib response: \u201cThat\u2019s for me to know and you to find out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n As Jeffrey sets his plan in motion, installing himself inside Dorothy\u2019s living room closet while she\u2019s not home, he seems destined to land in the “pervert” category since the first thing Dorothy does after taking a phone call from someone she has to call \u201csir\u201d (this we soon learn is drug kingpin Frank Booth, indelibly portrayed by Dennis Hopper) is retreat to the bathroom where Jeffrey (and the viewer) watches her disrobe in long shot. Further frustrating his\/our prurient desires, when Dorothy emerges from the bathroom she\u2019s in a modesty-preserving red towel, and to Jeffrey\u2019s alarm she heads straight for the closet to retrieve the blue velvet dressing gown she\u2019s compelled to wear when Frank visits her.<\/span><\/p>\n While he initially avoids detection, Jeffrey makes a noise when she steps back into position to continue his surveillance, alerting Dorothy to his presence. Petrified by the realization that he\u2019s given himself away, Jeffrey can only watch as Dorothy goes to the kitchen and returns with a large knife with which she threatens him, making him come out of the closet and be an active participant in what had been, up to that point, a benign if risqu\u00e9 little adventure for him. By forcing Jeffrey to strip for her so she can see him, Dorothy objectifies the voyeur at the same time Lynch strips his compromised hero bare. \u201cWhat do you want?\u201d Dorothy asks once Jeffrey is down to his underwear (which, like the towel Dorothy just had on, is red). \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he meekly replies, remaining stock still while she slips off his last remaining article of clothing and fondles and kisses him.<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout this part of the scene, Lynch frames MacLachlan so the viewer only gets a three-quarter view of his behind, but when Jeffrey and Dorothy are startled by the knock at the door heralding Frank\u2019s arrival, his manhood is exposed during his mad dash to the closet, where he watches impotently while Frank and Dorothy play out their sordid scene of depravity. When Frank orders her to open her robe to him, though, Lynch keeps Rossellini\u2019s back to the camera, keeping the focus on Frank\u2019s face \u2013 and Jeffrey\u2019s disgusted reaction to him. After Frank has had his jollies and left, Jeffrey emerges from the closet, once again in his underwear, and attempts to console Dorothy while she\u2019s at her most vulnerable. That she asks him to hold her because she\u2019s scared is quite a turnaround considering how aggressive she was with him just a few minutes earlier. When he finally gets dressed and leaves the apartment, a mere 20 minutes after his arrival, it\u2019s abundantly clear that he understands a little more how the world works, even as he questions why it has to contain people like Frank.<\/span><\/p>\n Almost in spite of how hairy Jeffrey\u2019s first encounter with Dorothy was, he tempts fate by returning to her apartment the next day (making sure he does so after<\/i> Frank has been to see her), going to The Slow Club to watch her sing, and tailing Frank and his goons back to their hideout so he can get some dirt on them for Sandy\u2019s father (and hopefully reunite Dorothy with her husband and son). On his third neighborly visit, though, Dorothy meets him at the door in a red dress (there\u2019s that color again) and invites him into her bedroom for sex, which he enjoys until she forces him to hit her. Tellingly, it is at this point and no sooner that Lynch stops being coy about Dorothy\u2019s (and, by extension, Rossellini\u2019s) body, associating its full exposure with sexual violence, which Frank backs up with the threat of regular violence when he catches Jeffrey leaving her place and takes him on a joyride designed to scare him off for good.<\/span><\/p>\n For a brief time, it appears he has been scared off, going back to high-schooler Sandy and taking her to a party that\u2019s as far from the menacing debauchery of Frank and his cronies as you can get. But then comes the mortifying scene where Dorothy shows up at his house \u2013 one of the moments Roger Ebert singled out in his scathing one-star review (reprinted in the book I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie<\/i>) in which he took Lynch to task for stranding Rossellini\u2019s \u201cconvincing and courageous\u201d performance in a story that\u2019s \u201cmarred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots.\u201d That may be how Ebert saw Blue Velvet<\/i> at the time, but in the 33 years since it was released, Lynch has demonstrated time and again the sincerity of his intentions. In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, one of the stories Lynch recounts from his childhood is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":11897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/bluevelvet2.jpg\")
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