Blue Velvet Criterion 4K Review: When Lynch First Peaked By With Eraserhead, proved himself a master of the waking nightmarescape. In The Elephant Man, he brought a sense of that surrealism to a biopic. proved he wasn’t the guy to make a four-quadrant blockbuster.
But it wasn’t until — now out in a 4K edition from the — that he really became the David Lynch we know today. Twin Peaks, with its three incarnations of TV series, movie, and premium cable revival, may never be surpassed as his epic masterpiece. However, Blue Velvet was the dry run for nearly everything in there.
It was the first time on the screen that his dark subconscious met, clashed, and contrasted with his all-American Boy Scout personality. Just like Lynch himself, his movies and TV shows from then on would make you wonder what darkness lies beneath the borderline cornball surface layers. It’s hard to know at times whether he’s being ironic or just weird, and certainly, he’ll never tell.
The often deadpan tone he uses to depict characters acting bugf— insane – in both harmless and menacing ways – hasn’t always been easy to read, but by now, we know it well enough to call it Lynchian. Now that critics universally rate Blue Velvet a classic, it’s hard to believe the film had a divisive — hurtful, even — reaction at release. On the London Underground, guerilla feminists vandalized the movie posters with phrases like “Stop the exploitation of women.
” Roger Ebert, who ought to have .