When moviegoers walked out of theaters in September of 1986, having just watched David Lynch‘s fourth film, Blue Velvet, they felt a variety of emotions. Some were disgusted by the existence of people like Frank Booth, Dennis Hopper’s aggressive embodiment of evil. Some were angry at suburbs and small towns, the idyllic places that Lynch just laid bare in his film. And some were angry at Lynch himself, for having submitted cinematic scion Isabella Rossellini to such debasement on screen.Few, if anyone, were feeling optimistic. This despite the fact that, for all of its nastiness, Blue Velvet ends on a hopeful note. After all that’s happened, small-town boy Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) and his high school girlfriend Sandy (Laura Dern) look out the kitchen window to see a robin perched on a branch. After the couple takes a few minutes to bask in the sight, a guileless Sandy asks with a smile, “It’s a strange world, isn’t?” For many viewers, that question was the final stab of the knife for Blue Velvet, the final proof that the world was sad and dark and scary. But that reading misses the optimism present not just in Blue Velvet, but in all of Lynch’s work.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Now It’s Dark…It’s not hard to see why Blue Velvet‘s first audiences would read that final scene sarcastically. After all, Blue Velvet is a nasty film, right from the very beginning. The opening credits—displayed, naturally, on a blue velvet curtain and set to the titular Bobby Vinton song—give way to suburban iconography: a white picket fence, rose bushes, a man watering his lawn. But then the man, Jeffrey’s father, suffers a stroke and collapses, clutching his chest while his little dog yips and laps at the water streaming from the hose.From there, the camera pans down, below the perfectly-manicured lawn that Jeffrey’s dad had been maintaining and into the dirt. Within the soil, we see grubs and worms and all manner of creepy crawlies, writhing while some ungoldly noise blares in the soundtrack. The scene doesn’t just set off the plot, giving Jeffrey a reason to return from college to his hometown of Lumberton and reunite with Sandy. It also plays like a statement of intent. From that moment, Blue Velvet tells us that it will explore the evil under the facade of American life.Viewers find even more evidence for that theme throughout the film. Blue Velvet concerns Jeffrey’s investigation into a severed ear that he finds while walking in a field outside his house. That investigation leads him to the apartment of the seductive and troubled lounge singer Dorothy Vallens. Dorothy’s husband and son have been kidnapped by Frank Booth, a malevolent criminal who uses his leverage to assault her, physically and sexually. Once Frank discovers Jeffrey, he takes the boy on a journey into the underworld, a cesspit of evil that has always existed on the periphery of his peaceful town. By the time a naked and bloodied Dorothy stumbles down Jeffrey’s quiet street, into Sandy’s perfect little home, it’s clear that the darkness can no longer be ignored.But David Lynch’s work has never been about ignoring darkness.One Chants Out Between Two WorldsThe broad strokes of Blue Velvet‘s synopsis could apply to nearly any Lynch project. It obviously recalls Twin Peaks (1990-1991, 2017), the television series that Lynch made with Mark Frost. Across three seasons and the prequel film Fire Walk With Me (1992), Twin Peaks showed how the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) unveiled a cosmic struggle of good and evil playing out in a quiet lumber town in the Pacific Northwest. Wild at Heart (1990) juxtaposes the passion of lovers Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Dern) to all manner of nastiness and madness, including Willem Dafoe as perhaps the most stomach-churning character he’s ever played on screen.Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006) relocate to the decidedly less-quaint Los Angeles, but the same tension appears. Whether its the love shared between saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), the big screen dreams of ingenue Betty (Naomi Watts), or the integrity of actress Nikki Grace’s (Dern) film project, these pure pursuits all give way to corruption and darkness. Not even Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), the septuagenarian who rides his lawnmower across the Midwest to visit his ailing brother in The Straight Story (1999), Lynch’s G-rated Disney movie, can escape the madness of life, as demonstrated by a scene in which he and a fellow veteran recall their experiences in the war.Lynch has never been afraid to look at darkness, and for many, that’s been the primary appeal of his work. Nothing encapsulates that perspective better than the 1997 David Foster Wallace essay, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in which the late author identifies “Good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims’ various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread” as “thoroughgoingly Lynchian.” The Mysteries of LoveIt’s hard to disagree with Wallace’s assessment, and his invocation of Dahmer, when we see the end of Blue Velvet. The bird at which Jeffery and Sandy marvel looks unreal, patently false and mechanical. That’s because its dead, the corpse of a real bird that died during the shoot. Lynch saved the corpse and turned it into a puppet, an echo of the “Fish Kit” art piece he made in 1975, in which parts of a real vivisected fish are presented as parts of a model to assemble.And yet, Wallace’s pessimistic argument must also ignore everything else happening around the scene. To read the ending of Blue Velvet as cynical, one must believe that the movie asks us to mock Jeffrey and Sandy when the beam smiles at one another. One must think that Lynch is using the Julee Christie song “Mysteries of Love” incorrectly, somehow not recognizing that she’s singing about love and clarity through the darkness. Most implausibly, one must assume that Lynch is being ironic.David Lynch, whom Mel Brooks famously described as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” was anything but ironic. Sincerity shoots through his work, from the genuine dread of fatherhood that drives his debut feature Eraserhead (1977) to the crowd-pleasing moment he works into the otherwise audience-unfriendly Twin Peaks: The Return, in which a concert recording of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” plays as thwarted lovers Big Ed (Everett McGill) and Norma (Peggy Lipton) finally come together. Time and again, Lynch juxtaposes the nastiness of the world with unabashed hope, a combination so shocking that people like Wallace have to reject it and take it all as a joke.But Agent Cooper’s love of coffee in Twin Peaks is not a joke. The appearance of Glinda the Good Witch from Wizard of Oz at the end of Wild at Heart, urging Sailor to return to Lula, is not a joke. And the wide-eyed wonder with which Jeffery and Sandy gaze at the robin in Blue Velvet is not a joke. Rather, these are affirmations of goodness against a world that is awful, a world that has to have people like Frank. Forty years ago, too many viewers missed that affirmation and laughed off the ending as just a bit of suburban satire. Today, it’s clear that we need Blue Velvet‘s demand for goodness more than ever.The post 40 Years Later, People Still Misunderstand the End of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet appeared first on Den of Geek.