Blue Velvet

***Blue Velvet*** is a 1986 film by David Lynch.

## Plot

College student Jeffrey Beaumont returns home to Lumberton, North Carolina after his father Tom suffers a near-fatal stroke. Walking home from the hospital, he cuts through a vacant lot and discovers a severed human ear. Jeffrey takes the ear to police detective John Williams and becomes reacquainted with Williams’ daughter, Sandy, who tells him that the ear somehow relates to a lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens. Intrigued, Jeffrey enters Dorothy's apartment by posing as an exterminator and steals a spare key while she is distracted by a man in a distinctive yellow sport coat, whom Jeffrey nicknames the "Yellow Man."

Jeffrey and Sandy attend Dorothy's nightclub act, in which she sings "Blue Velvet", and leave early so Jeffrey can infiltrate her apartment. When Dorothy returns home, she finds him hiding in a closet and nearly fellates him after forcing him to undress at knifepoint. Jeffrey retreats to the closet when Frank Booth, a psychopathic gangster and drug lord, arrives and interrupts their encounter. Frank then proceeds to beat and sexually assault Dorothy while huffing gas from a canister and alternating between fits of sobbing and violent rage. After Frank leaves, Jeffrey sneaks away and seeks comfort from Sandy.

After learning that Frank has abducted Dorothy's husband Don and son Donny to force her into sex slavery, Jeffrey suspects Frank cut off Don's ear to intimidate her into submission. While continuing to see Sandy simultaneously, Jeffrey also starts a sadomasochistic sexual relationship in which Dorothy encourages him to hit her. Jeffrey sees Frank attending Dorothy's show and later observes him selling drugs and meeting with the Yellow Man.

When Frank catches Jeffrey leaving Dorothy's apartment, he abducts them and brings them to the lair of Ben, a criminal associate who is holding both Don and Donnie hostage. Frank permits Dorothy to see her family and forces Jeffrey to watch Ben perform an impromptu lip-sync of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", which moves Frank to tears. Afterwards, he and his gang take Jeffrey and Dorothy on a high-speed joyride to a sawmill yard, where he attempts to sexually abuse Dorothy. When Jeffrey intervenes and punches him in the face, an enraged Frank and his gang pull him out of the car, and Frank violently kisses him all over his face with red lipstick, before savagely beating him unconscious. Jeffrey awakes the next morning, bruised and bloodied.

Visiting the police station, Jeffrey realizes that Detective Williams' partner Tom Gordon is the Yellow Man, who has been murdering Frank's rival drug dealers and stealing confiscated narcotics from the evidence room for Frank to sell. After he and Sandy attend a party during which they profess their love for one another, they are pursued by a car which they assume belongs to Frank. As they arrive at Jeffrey's home, Sandy realizes the car belongs to her by now ex-boyfriend Mike Shaw. After Mike threatens to beat Jeffrey for stealing his girlfriend, Dorothy appears on Jeffrey's porch naked, beaten and confused. Mike backs down as Jeffrey and Sandy whisk Dorothy to Sandy's house to summon medical attention.

When Dorothy calls Jeffrey "my secret lover", a distraught Sandy slaps him for cheating on her. Jeffrey asks Sandy to tell her father everything, and Detective Williams then leads a police raid on Frank's headquarters, killing his men and crippling his criminal empire. Jeffrey returns alone to Dorothy's apartment, where he discovers her husband dead and the Yellow Man mortally wounded. As Jeffrey leaves the apartment, Frank arrives, sees him in the stairs and chases him back inside. Jeffrey re-uses the Yellow Man's walkie-talkie to lie about his precise location in the apartment and hides in a closet. When Frank arrives, Jeffrey ambushes and kills him with the Yellow Man's gun, moments before Sandy and Detective Williams arrive for help.

Jeffrey and Sandy continue their relationship and Dorothy is reunited with her son.

## References

Blue Velvet (1986). Box Office Mojo
2. ↑ De Laurentiis PRODUCER'S PICTURE DARKENS: KNOEDELSEDER, WILLIAM K, Jr. Los Angeles Times August 30, 1987: 1.
3. ↑ BLUE VELVET. British Board of Film Classification