On 19 September 1986, Blue Velvet opened in 98 American cinemas. It took $789,409 in its first weekend and $8.5 million in total against a $6 million budget – modest numbers for a film that would reorder American cinema. Forty years later, almost to the day, the anniversary arrives with a weight no previous one carried: it is the first since the death of David Lynch, who died on 16 January 2025 at 78. The ear in the field is still there. The man who filmed it is not.
The comeback nobody ordered
Blue Velvet was Lynch’s fourth feature and looked, on paper, like a retreat. His previous film, Dune (1984), had been a critical and commercial humiliation; before that, the respectable The Elephant Man (1980) had earned him Oscar nominations without making him bankable. Returning with $6 million and a story about a severed ear found in a field in small-town America, Lynch premiered the film at Montreal in August 1986 and at Toronto on 12 September, then watched audiences walk out. There were refund demands in the opening week; at one Chicago screening a man reportedly fainted and had to have his pacemaker checked – then returned to see the ending.
The most famous hostile response came from Roger Ebert, who gave the film one star and accused Lynch of putting style over the suffering of Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens. Rossellini herself later said she knew exactly what she was reading when she read the script and never felt exploited on set – a statement that has complicated, without settling, forty years of argument.
Detective or pervert
The film’s thesis arrives early, in a line Sandy (Laura Dern) throws at the clean-cut Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan): she does not know if he is a detective or a pervert. Forty years of criticism have essentially been attempts to answer her. Ebert thought the question exposed the film; the film’s defenders think the question is the film. Blue Velvet films its violence plainly and its romance dreamily, and the uncomfortable suggestion – developed at length in this month’s anniversary writing – is that the viewer’s position is Jeffrey’s position: thrilled by what the screen shows, protected from it by the screen itself. Where does curiosity become complicity? The film does not answer, which is why it outlived every film that did.
It also made careers. MacLachlan, Dern and Rossellini all date their screen lives from it, and Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth – inhaling gas and screaming endearments – remains the performance against which screen menace is measured.
What remains
Blue Velvet is currently streaming on Tubi and available in a Criterion 4K UHD edition, and Elmes’s photography – the fence, the roses, the blue light – has rarely looked better. Lynch went on to Oscar nominations for The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, to make Twin Peaks, to become an adjective. But the adjective started here, in Lumberton, in the grass, with an ear.
The anniversary pieces this week keep circling the same image: roses against a fence, insects under the lawn, a woman singing in blue light. Forty years on, the mystery has not thinned with familiarity. If anything it has thickened – because now we watch a film about looking at darkness made by a man who is gone, and the looking back feels, finally, mutual.
