BLUE VELVET (1986)—Get behind me, Oedipus.

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

For our one year anniversary episode, The Cultists present David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986). The premise is simple enough: Jeffery (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college to his small 1950s-tinged nostalgia town, finds a severed, moldy ear in a field, and embarks upon a self-guided odyssey into the darker parts of the town’s worn-down crevices, only to find that his thirst to drink in the dark might be stronger than he’d like. The premise is simple, but the film that unravels from beneath its surface is anything but. Relying largely on sensory instincts and “day dream logic”, Blue Velvet presents a rather loose and tangled web of threads that people love to try and straighten, only to find that the harder one pulls, the quicker the strings curl into something new. Is this film an oedipal psychodrama? A coming of age story? A heartland conspiracy? Or is it simply a mystery about mystery? Well, lets find out.

Episode Safeword(s): “red pleather”