The horrible ‘Blue Velvet’ scene David Lynch called “hysterically funny”
The world of the American independent filmmaker David Lynch is an exceedingly strange one that is consistently interested in the world of nightmares and the shadows of the subconscious. As a result, many of his movies can be quite bleak, from Lost Highway, starring Bill Pullman, which delves into horror, to The Elephant Man, with John Hurt, which is an emotional-wrought character drama.
While none of his movies are outright members of the horror genre, Lynch regularly frequents terrifying themes throughout his movies. His 1977 feature debut, Eraserhead, is the film that most closely deals with horror, telling the story of a young man trapped in some sort of homely hellscape, but even in his 1986 magnum opus, Blue Velvet, evil and insidiousness lurk.
The Oscar-nominated movie tells the story of a young man who finds a severed ear in the field of a random American suburban town, only for the hunt to find its owner to take him down the rabbit hole of the country’s dark underbelly. Starring the likes of Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan, and Isabella Rossellini, one of the film’s most shocking scenes comes when the antagonist, Frank, abuses and rapes the mysterious dancer Dorothy.
Yet, shockingly, despite the disturbing nature of the scene, Lynch found the moment “hysterically funny”, telling the story to David Breskin in a 1990 interview.
“I’m sure pretty near every psychiatrist could tell me right now why I was laughing, but I don’t know. It was hysterically funny to me,” Lynch admitted, “Frank was completely obsessed. He was like a dog in a chocolate store. He could not help himself. He was completely into it. But because I was laughing and I am a human being, there must be some logical reason why”.
Hopper’s Frank is indeed a bizarre villain, being an individual who acts more on carnal instincts rather than human morals, with his character often being seen huffing a nondescript gas throughout the film. While he is played straight, there is a certain level of absurd comedy to Frank, seemingly living in the nonsensical reality of Lynch’s nightmarish dreamworld. He would, indeed, not feel out of place in the haunting ‘Red Room’ of Twin Peaks.
“It has something to do with the fact that it was so horrible and so frightening and so intense and violent,” the director continues, “that there was also this layer of humor. It has to do with the degree of obsession where people cannot help themselves”.
Take a look at a clip of Hopper’s iconic character from Blue Velvet below.
