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THE NINETY SECONDS THAT BUILT A CINEMA, LYNCH
On Blue Velvet, 1986, and the opening sequence in which an American director established the structural method of his next forty years.
David Lynch at his studio, March 15, 2002, Hollywood, California. Photo: Chris Weeks
Lynch opened a film, in 1986, with a sequence of about ninety seconds: white picket fences, red roses, a suburban lawn, a man having a stroke, and a camera moving down into the grass to show insects feeding on each other in the soil. The rest of his career was a development of what those ninety seconds had already proposed.
David Lynch made Blue Velvet in 1986. It opened on the 19th of September that year, in American theatres, and earned him his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He had already made Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Dune (1984), and Blue Velvet came out of a deliberate retreat to a smaller film, made on his own terms. He was forty years old. He had ten years of feature filmmaking behind him. He had not yet made the work for which he would be most widely recognised. Blue Velvet was that work.
The film opens with a sequence that has entered cinema history as a single thing. White picket fences in front of a quiet American suburban street. Saturated red roses pressing against the white pickets. A fire truck passing slowly down the road, with a uniformed fireman waving. Children crossing a street guarded by a uniformed crossing guard. A man in his front yard, watering the lawn. A water hose tangling on something underground. The man clutching at his neck, dropping the hose, falling slowly to the grass, twitching. A small dog standing over him, drinking from the still-spraying hose. And then the camera moving down, very slowly, through the green of the grass, past the surface, into the soil, until the screen is filled with the close-up writhing of black insects feeding on each other in the dirt under the lawn.
Blue Velvet (1986), dir. David Lynch
The sequence runs about ninety seconds. It is the structural argument of the film stated as image. Lynch would spend the rest of his career examining it.
The argument is exact. The American daily life of the visible surface and the violence of the underside are not separate worlds. They are the same world seen from two distances. A perfect lawn from above is a system of feeding insects from below. A small American town from its main street is a town with a severed ear in a vacant lot, a woman being held captive in an apartment, and a man performing acts of violence in a basement. The camera, in the opening sequence, simply moves the distance from one to the other. The surface and the underside are both there. The cinema of Blue Velvet, and of what came after, is the cinema of moving between them.
This was not a metaphor. It was a structural claim about how American life was organised, delivered as a method of looking. Most American cinema before Lynch had treated the violence beneath the suburban surface as either a moral exposé (the surface is a lie, the underside is the truth) or as a thriller premise (the underside is a problem the protagonist must solve). Lynch refused both readings. The surface and the underside were equally real. Neither was the truth of the other. The film was about the relationship between them, not about the resolution of the relationship.
Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens, Blue Velvet (1986), dir. David Lynch
The plot of Blue Velvet is, in summary, simple. A young man named Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan, returns to his hometown, finds a severed human ear in a field, and follows the ear into a hidden world of violence, sex, and a damaged nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, who is being controlled by a violent figure named Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper. The plot is a thriller plot. The film is not a thriller. The plot is the surface; the film is what the camera does with the surface.
What the camera does, throughout, is move the way it moves in the opening sequence. From the visible to what is underneath the visible, and back, and back again. A young man's college-town homecoming and a woman's confinement in an apartment a few blocks away exist in the same town. A police investigator's family dinner and the same investigator's involvement in a corruption ring sit in adjacent scenes. A Sunday-school singer's voice and a voyeuristic crime occur in the same character's life within the same evening. The film does not resolve these oppositions. It frames them. It is a film about the frame.
This is what Lynch had not done in Eraserhead or The Elephant Man or Dune. Eraserhead had established the atmospheric vocabulary. The Elephant Man had demonstrated his control of historical material. Dune had been a misalignment of his sensibility with a studio franchise. Blue Velvet was the first film in which Lynch had a fully operational method: a way of looking at American life that produced new images by moving between surface and underside on equal terms.
Everything that followed used the method.
the Red Room from Twin Peaks (1990), dir. David Lynch
Wild at Heart (1990) ran the same opposition through the road movie. Twin Peaks (1990 to 1991) brought it into a small town and a network television series, using a high-school homecoming queen's murder as the entry point into a hidden county-wide system of violence and abuse. Lost Highway (1997) applied it to marriage and identity. Mulholland Drive (2001) ran it through Hollywood. Inland Empire (2006) extended it into the production of cinema itself. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) ran it through a quarter-century of accumulated American time. Each film was a different application of the method that had become fully visible in the opening ninety seconds of Blue Velvet.
Lost Highway (1997), dir. David Lynch
The other thing that became visible in those ninety seconds was what Lynch was prepared to do with the camera. The slow movement from the lawn into the soil is a camera move that almost no major American director was making in 1986. The movement is unhurried. It is uncommented. It is willing to take its own time to deliver the image it is producing. American cinema of the period was largely organised around fast cutting and action sequences, with editing built to manage audience attention. Lynch was making a film in which the camera moved slowly, lingered, and trusted the image to land without help. The opening sequence demanded the audience watch insects feed on each other for several seconds, in close-up, with no narrative explanation. Most American films of 1986 would have cut away. Lynch did not cut away. He made the image hold long enough for the surface-and-underside structure to be felt rather than understood.
This was a directorial position. The camera, in Lynch's hands, was a slow instrument that paid full attention to whatever it was looking at, surface or underside, and that asked the audience to pay the same attention. Almost every major Lynch image afterward was made with the same instrument working in the same way. The atmospheric long takes of Twin Peaks, the dreamlike highway sequences of Lost Highway, the camera lingering on Naomi Watts's face in Mulholland Drive, the eighteen-hour patience of The Return. The instrument was the same instrument that had moved into the grass in 1986.
Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (2001), dir. David Lynch
Lynch died in January 2025, at seventy-eight, at his home in Los Angeles. The body of work was closed. The structural method that the opening of Blue Velvet had established in 1986 had been operational across thirty-nine years and across feature films, television, painting, music, furniture, and a daily YouTube weather report he produced during the COVID pandemic. The method was not specific to cinema. It was a way of looking at American life that produced images other directors did not produce, because they were not looking the same way.
Blue Velvet is now thirty-nine years old. It is taught in film schools and is still in continuous circulation. The opening sequence is among the most analysed in American cinema. What Lynch made visible in those ninety seconds in 1986 was a structural relationship he then spent the rest of his life examining. The lawn is still beautiful from above. The insects are still feeding in the soil. Both images, the film argued, are equally true. The cinema worth making is the one that moves between them.
Bibliography
Lynch, David. Blue Velvet. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. Director, screenwriter.
Lynch, David; McKenna, Kristine. Room to Dream. New York, Random House, 2018.
Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish, Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York, Tarcher / Penguin, 2006.
Rodley, Chris, editor. Lynch on Lynch. London, Faber and Faber, 1997, revised 2005.
Atkinson, Michael. Blue Velvet. BFI Modern Classics, London, British Film Institute, 1997.
Nochimson, Martha P. The Passion of David Lynch, Wild at Heart in Hollywood. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1997.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Best Director nomination, 1987.
David Lynch Foundation, Iowa City. Founded 2005.