A friend of mine was first exposed to David Lynch in college during a film class, where the professor screened the first fifteen or twenty minutes of his 1986 masterpiece, Blue Velvet. In true Lynch fashion, the opening moments alone cast a spell of oddness, and my friend sat mesmerized. What he saw sets up the film’s plot, although the plot is often the least important thing in this film. Jeffrey, despite his earring and cool-cat ‘80s ties, is a typical small-town guy, and he’s home from college to visit his sick father in the hospital, who in the opening scene we see suffering a violent stroke. On the walk back from the hospital, he discovers a rotting human ear beneath a canopy of tall grass, and, captivated by the frightening implications of his find, he picks it up, puts it in a brown paper bag, and hurries to the local police station to get to the bottom of the mystery. From the first ten minutes, he positions himself as a makeshift Hardy Boy, down to his boyish looks and overeager attitude. He eventually becomes trapped by his own curiosity, and he propels himself deeper and deeper into the mystery, and as danger continues to mount, he still can’t help himself with the mystery.

This opening segment, like the rest of the film but especially here, has an unbelievable specificity in what’s shown and how. It doesn’t take the first few scenes for the attentive viewer to notice Lynch’s dense cinematic language, just the first few frames. The opening shot is of a curtain dissolving into a bright, blue sky that sets up the heightened and theatrical nature of the film. It also sets up one of the film’s most prevailing questions: is any of this real? The shot pans down into a low-angle close-up of red flowers sitting in the lawn in front of a glossy white picket fence. The high key lighting makes the flowers simply glow with oversaturation, and the artificiality of the image gives the shot a dreamlike quality, almost as though the flowers are trying to make their beauty seem genuine but can’t. This is a good metaphor for Blue Velvet’s setting as a whole—including the town and the mise-en-scenes inside different buildings. The film’s second shot continues to exaggerate its setting, as a bright red fire truck drives past the camera with one abnormal twist: a man, ostensibly a fireman, stands on the side of the fire truck, and, two shots into the film, David Lynch already breaks the fourth wall. He stares right into the camera, waving with enthusiasm, and, to add to the strangeness of the scene, a Dalmatian is sitting on the fire truck’s sidestep right next to the man. A few stylistically strange shots follow until one is not like the others. So far, Blue Velvet has been an ostentatious display of small town Americana perfection, but shot seven is a medium shot of a TV showing, of all things, a revolver. Alongside the shiny, smiley little town, there is danger.

The opening scene’s most cathartic moment is suggestive of these same ideas, albeit much more obviously. As Jeffrey’s father uses the hose to water the lawn, the camera cuts to the leaking hose faucet, it suddenly has the terrible ambience of a gargling storm drain from Gehenna. The hose instantly contorts itself like a suicidal snake, and as the pressure continues to rise and rise, Jeffrey’s dad suffers a stroke. The camera moves downward and into a thicket of grass, and as it gets closer the sound becomes increasingly diluted and perverse, eventually becoming an abstraction of a beast’s roar crossed with a misfiring furnace. The biting sound of disgusting insects clamoring atop one another digging in the dirt fills the sound mix, and ants are shown as great giants dominating the frame—a not so subtle metaphor for the seedy underbelly that rests just beneath the thin veneer of this small town. Insects are one of the film’s recurring motifs, and they’re given a second close-up when buzzing around the cut off ear.

And, as if he hasn’t thrown enough at viewers in the opening two minutes, the shot immediately following the malevolent ants (I love this can be a sentence) is of a huge wooden billboard saying “Welcome to Lumberton”, just as the cheery jingle of a radio program exclaims “Logs, Logs, Logs!” Lynch begins his film with spectacular bravado, moving in seconds from establishing a distinct and palpable otherworldly tone into depicting the gruesome fall of a patriarch, then into pure surrealism, and, finally, into campy comedy.