Blue Velvet is to be shown as part of the BFI Southbank in London's new David Lynch season, which begins today. I recently sat down to watch the film again on DVD, intending merely to watch the opening "picket fence" sequence – and, of course, wound up watching the whole thing.
Perhaps it's the Lynch movie in which there is most obviously a quasi-Lynch figure, a ventriloquised Lynch, in the form of the clean-cut, faintly bouffant-parted Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), apparently home for the summer after his first year in college. His capacity for obsessive rapture and scopophilia is unlocked by the bizarre discovery of a severed ear in some waste ground after walking home from the hospital where his dad is recovering from serious spinal injuries. Does the ear stand for the director's hyper-sensitive perception of those eerie, occult underground stirrings, the secret life of suburbia?
Maybe. But wait – how did his dad get these spinal injuries? We don't know. And walking home? How is it possible that Jeffrey has to ramble home through the woods, like some eight-year-old character from Huck Finn? (Later, we see him at the wheel of a gasp-inducingly cool red convertible: and this is a guy who walks home?)
Watched again over 25 years later, Blue Velvet looks even more bizarre than ever, a disorientating palimpsest of moods and eras and genres. It's an intensely 80s film in many ways: MacLachlan in his white jeans and shirt looks as 80s as Michael J Fox in Back to the Future. But perhaps only the tape-deck playing In Dreams signals this period explicitly. The rest of the time it could, of course, be a Forties noir. His small town is quaintly known as Lumberton, on account of the local logging business, and perhaps we are supposed to assume the lumber is transported via the hugely wide river that we see in one shot – it looks as huge as the Charles in Boston. This little place is nonetheless sufficiently cosmopolitan to support a smart night spot called, enigmatically, The Slow Club, where a live band and singer perform ballads. (Other small towns may have had cheesy discos where Wham was to be heard. Not this one.) The singer is, of course, Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, who croons, breathily, and always on the verge of going a quarter-tone flat, Blue Velvet – while her bullying gangster tormentor Frank, played by Dennis Hopper, scowls in the audience, caressing a horribly Freudian swatch of this same material.
Jeffrey has a crazy plan to break into Dorothy's apartment and spy on her – a plan in which he tries to involve a local wholesome girl called Sandy, perhaps in sly homage to Grease. She is played by Laura Dern, with a puzzled, indulgent, troubled look: some years later, Dern would graduate to the "woman in trouble" role for Lynch's film Inland Empire.
It is when Jeffrey is caught in the act of being a peeping tom that his twisted love affair with Dorothy begins. He sees her dysfunctional, abusive relationship with Frank, a violent, sadistic individual, who appears to intensify his sexual pleasure by huffing some nameless fumes from an inhaler.
Perhaps I should confess that, watching Blue Velvet years ago as a student in the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, I found myself intensifying the experience of Jeffrey's scenes with Dorothy with a kind of conceptual narcotic inhaler: it involved, ahem, imagining Isabella Rossellini was her mother and that Kyle MacLachlan was actually playing this love scene with Ingrid Bergman. And it is very easy to do – not merely because Rossellini looks and sounds so much like Bergman, but because of the film's intense noir atmosphere.
Perhaps I need therapy. But there is something in the infectious and mesmeric weirdness of David Lynch which makes it feel all right.
If you go and see Blue Velvet at the David Lynch season, you'll find that the Ingrid Bergman mashup thought experiment lends it an extra unwholesome thrill. Try it.
• Peter Bradshaw will be appearing at Guardian Open Weekend, held on 24 and 25 March. Festival passes are now on sale at guardian.co.uk/open-weekend. Buy your pass before 1 March to ensure the best chance of booking reservations for individual sessions.
