en los sueños de David

La película es del 86, o sea, de hace 27 años; David tenía 40 años; Isabella, 34; Kyle, 27; Laura, 19; Dennis, 50; Dean, 50 y Roy, qué cosas, 50 también, aunque su In dreams era del 63, es decir, de hacía 23 años, cuando él tenía 27. La letra era suya también, por cierto.

A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
"Go to sleep, everything is all right"

I close my eyes, then I drift away
Into the magic night, I softly say
A silent prayer like dreamers do
Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you

In dreams I walk with you
In dreams I talk to you
In dreams you're mine all of the time
We're together in dreams, in dreams

But just before the dawn
I awake and find you gone
I can't help it, I can't help it, if I cry
I remember that you said goodbye

It's too bad that all these things
Can only happen in my dreams
Only in dreams
In beautiful dreams

IT'S A STRANGE WORLD, ISN'T IT

Richard Corliss, Time, September 22, 1986

''Things got a little out of hand,'' nice young Jeffrey (KyleMacLachlan) tells his nice young friend Sandy (Laura Dern). Well, yes. Walking through the woods of peaceful Lumberton, Jeffrey found a severed human ear crawling with ants. The ear belonged to a man who, with his son, had been kidnaped by Frank (Dennis Hopper), a sicko on a helium high. Frank was blackmailing the man's wife Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), and hiding in Dorothy's closet, Jeffrey watched Frank work his awful sexual will on her. When Dorothy discovered Jeffrey, she took him to bed. ''Hurt me,'' she said. ''No, I want to help you'' -- but he soon enough acceded to her masochistic desires. Then Frank taught Jeffrey a lesson. He smeared lipstick on his own face, kissed Jeffrey hard on the mouth and beat him senseless. Sandy responds to such revelations like a child at the end of a nightmare fairy tale: ''It's a strange world, isn't it.''Strange and repellent and seductive -- a world of power plays in which everybody's somebody's victim. Sandy is attracted to Jeffrey's quiet intensity. Jeffrey is beguiled by Dorothy's mystery, her dangerous demands. To keep her family alive, Dorothy must surrender to Frank's depraved games. But even Frank is in the thrall of Ben (Dean Stockwell), an epicene drug dealer, who in turn is subject to the political power of a heavyset enigma in a yellow jacket. On that stroll in the woods, Jeffrey fell down the rabbit hole and found an inverted pyramid of moral monstrosity. ''I am seeing something that was always hidden,'' he says. Now he can't take his eyes off it.The plot alone would be enough to earn Blue Velvet this year's Authentic Weirdie prize. But wait, there's more. Writer-Director Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune) has stocked his movie with artifacts from every decade of postwar America; it could be taking place now, then or never. Emotionally, the picture comes from outer space. Instead of seducing the audience, the characters are picture-book flat. Only the images are deep and dense. The friendly loggers of Lumberton wave at the camera; Frank screams an obscenity and poof! disappears; a corpse is bound and bowed like a Kienholz sculpture; the climactic gun battle takes just a few shorthand strokes. The acting styles collide fiercely too. MacLachlan and Dern have an innocents-in-hell sweetness; Stockwell does a preening Percy Dovetonsils number; Rossellini is a madwoman with all stops out; Hopper tops her, with maybe the vilest sadistic creep in movie history.All of which is to say that Blue Velvet is in no sense a realistic film. It is not modernist camp either. Lynch believes every bit as much in the redemptive power of teen love -- with families miraculously restored and two kids kissing to the crooning of a wedding-chapel organ -- as he does in the force of evil. He and his film will surely be reviled, but as an experiment in expanding cinema's dramatic and technical vocabulary, Blue Velvet demands respect.

British author J. G. Ballard on David Lynch's Blue Velvet (originally published in Time Out in 1993):

Blue Velvet is, for me, the best film of the 1980s - surreal, voyeuristic, subversive and even a little corrupt in its manipulation of the audience. In short, the perfect dish for the jaded palates of the 1990s. But a thicket of puzzles remains. First, why do the sensible young couple, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, scheme to break into the apartment of the brutalized nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) and risk involving themselves with the psychopathic gangster - Dennis Hopper in his most terrifying screen performance?

[...]
The second puzzle is the role of the severed ear found by the young man after he visits his father in hospital, and which sets off the entire drama. Why an ear rather than a hand or a set of fingerprints? I take it that the ear is really his own, tuned to the inner voice that informs him of his imminent quest for his true mother and father. Like the ear, the white picket fence and the mechanical bird that heralds a return to morality, Blue Velvet is a sustained and brutal tease, The Wizard of Oz re-shot with a script by Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon.

J. G. Ballard, 'Blue Velvet' in J. G. Ballard, A User's Guide to the Millenium: Essays and Reviews