‘Blue Velvet,' at 30, still shines light on small-town evil

Thirty years since it first shocked and wowed audiences, David Lynch's dark masterpiece "Blue Velvet" remains a classic — and perhaps the most gripping variation of the often-told story of evil lurking under the placid surface of small-town America.

Lynch establishes his location, the small town of Lumberton, with iconic images of white picket fences and friendly firefighters driving by and waving. It's a place where a college kid like Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) comes home to run his ailing father's hardware store and sparks a nice relationship with Sandy (Laura Dern), an innocent high-school senior.

Then Jeffrey crosses a vacant lot and finds a severed human ear. Sandy's father, a police detective (George Dickerson), tells him to keep quiet and mind his own business. But Jeffrey learns from Sandy, who hears her father's whispers at home, that the ear is connected to Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a mysterious singer who lives in the seedier part of town.

Jeffrey, like a not-so-innocent Hardy Boy, is drawn to Dorothy's sexual magnetism and the allure of her shadowy world. Soon he is taking a deep dive into that world, personified by the crazy-eyed mobster Frank Booth, indelibly portrayed by Dennis Hopper.

Soon, the traditional small-town icons are replaced by Lynch's own imagery. There is the now-infamous oxygen mask through which Frank sucks in god-knows-what to fuel his mania. There's the image of Frank's cohort Ben (Dean Stockwell), lip-synching Roy Orbison with a mechanic's light as a microphone. And there's that ear, crawling with ants, through which we enter the surreal landscape of Lynchian nightmare.

All of Lynch's disturbing strangeness is in service to a perverse morality tale. Jeffrey's dilemma is a deceptively simple one: Choose between the dark and the light, with the two sides personified by, respectively, Dorothy and Sandy. But the choice becomes complicated, because not everything in the dark is bad, and not everything in the light is what it seems.

To watch "Blue Velvet" three decades later is to see Lynch mastering the macabre dream worlds that he would return to in "Twin Peaks," "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr." It's to see MacLachlan and Dern, in the full flower of their youth, ingenues thrown into an attractive sort of hell. And it's to see Hopper in the performance of his life, a distillation of madness in a sharp suit.

Most of all, watching "Blue Velvet" is to see a movie that has lost none of its power to get under our skin.