Since the really disturbing stuff in Blue Velvet isn't about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey discovers about Lumberton, but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey gets off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feet a/f/w Jeffrey and so that we find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it's little wonder that we (I?) find Blue Velvet "sick"-nothing sickens me like seeing onscreen some of the very parts of myself I've gone to the good old movies to try to forget about.

Written and directed by David Lynch, this is possibly the only coming-of-age movie in which sex has the danger and heightened excitement of a horror picture. The charged erotic atmosphere makes the film something of a trance-out, but Lynch’s humor keeps breaking through, too. His fantasies may come from his unconscious, but he recognizes them for what they are, and he’s tickled by them. The film is consciously purplish and consciously funny, and the two work together in an original, down-home way. The setting is an archetypal small, sleepy city in an indefinite mythic present that feels like the past, and Kyle MacLachlan is Jeffrey, the clean-cut young man who’s scared of his dirty thoughts (but wants to have them anyway). He commutes between the blue lady of the night (Isabella Rossellini, who’s a dream of a freak) and the sunshine girl he loves (Laura Dern). The movie has so much aural-visual humor and poetry that it’s sustained despite the wobbly plot and other weaknesses.