In Lynch's `Velvet,' the real is unreal

When "Blue Velvet" was first released 20 years ago, the reviews were split and heated. Sides were taken over the question of authorial intent. Did David Lynch mean for audiences to laugh at his square-jawed, perky teenagers Jeffrey and Sandy, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern? Or were the scales supposed to fall from our eyes along with theirs as they unearthed the unspeakable horrors lurking beneath the surface of their placid, all-American town? Considering that its horrors were so utterly horrifying, why should the Arcadian innocence of Lumberton seem so corny and funny and out of touch? And what did it mean that Dennis Hopper's sadistic, drug-addled Frank was funny too? Did Lynch have a point, or was he just trying to pass off a fancy visual style as substance?

Alighting on screens somewhere between "Back to the Future" and "Peggy Sue Got Married," "Blue Velvet" reflected -- or, rather, refracted -- the cloying, claustrophobic nostalgia for the 1950s that had overtaken the popular culture at the time, a nostalgia that would seem to stand for an impossible desire to go home again. But since his beginnings as a painter, Lynch has fixated on the idea of home as a dangerously fraught and vulnerable place. "The home," he has said, "is a place where things can go wrong." Thanks to the release of a 35-millimeter print that will be shown at Landmark's Nuart Theater for one week beginning today, we can take another good look at how, exactly.

In hindsight, since "Blue Velvet," Lynch has consistently returned to the same theme: In the postmodern era, reality and normality and truth have been supplanted by the pastiche of pop images and ideas that have come to stand for them. No wonder the kitschy picket fences, the technicolor lawns, the eugenically perfect roses, the impossibly corny fireman waving to the impossibly corny kids that kick off "Blue Velvet" ring so disturbingly false. They're anachronistic idealizations (the movie is set in the '80s, after all, despite its allusions to movie representations of the '50s). But the same thing goes for the flip side. The gleefully sadistic (and psychologically mysterious) gangsters and corrupt cops that swarm Lumberton's underbelly are no easier to peg than the benevolent aunts and mechanical robins that populate the town's surface. They do, however, raise a good question: The movies have entertained us with violence and degradation since their inception. Are we supposed to keep pretending that we only watch for the moral lessons?