Blue Velvet – Introduction

Back in June 2025 I introduced a screening of Blue Velvet at The Little Theatre in Bath as part of Picturehouse’s ‘Lynchspirations’ season. The film was paired with Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which is said to have inspired Blue Velvet. I look at those possible inspirations, alongside those of Lynch’s favourite Kubrick film, Lolita, and his cold feelings towards the city of Philadelphia.

The audio in the below video was specially recorded for it based on the rough introduction that I had written before the screening. Looking back on this intro I can see how I fell into the trap of treating every Lynch film like Mulholland Drive, when largely Blue Velvet can be seen as fairly direct (and there’s a chance that all of his films may be seen as such by some people, Lynch certainly insisted that they each told a direct story, but openly liked to leave things down to interpretation and what viewer’s got from his films). And, as with all of his films, there’s of course a good deal of interpretation that can be brought to this particular one. Hopefully there’s still something here in this introduction, the first that I had done for a good while at the time the screening happened.