And then the young man picked up the severed ear and stared deeply into its ant-encrusted whorls.

That was the moment I fell completely for – and into – “Blue Velvet,” and I can still feel the excitement of its darkness wrapping around me, like a blanket at bedtime on a night you just know your dreams are going to take you someplace new. I had walked into the theater a naïf, and left bruised and confused and elated. And how I would love to feel that way again about a movie, and to see it in the same state of unsullied expectation.

The day was Friday, Sept. 19, 1986, the opening day in New York for “Blue Velvet,” and I went to the first show at the Bay Cinema in Kips Bay. I had seen some of the earlier work of David Lynch, its director — “Eraserhead” (at midnight, of course, in a theater thick with sweet smoke) and “The Elephant Man” – and liked what I tasted well enough. But I didn’t approach his latest film with the ardor I brought to the offerings from the godlike directors of my college days – Coppola, Altman, Bertolucci or Kubrick.

It was the trailer for “Blue Velvet” that made me feel I had to see it. And it had to be before everybody else started talking about it.