An almost unrelieved carnival of perversion, corruption, mayhem, and spectacle.

The disc also includes the documentary "Mysteries of Love," which owners of the original DVD already have. It's a thorough exposition of the film's making and themes, done with extraordinary taste, intelligence, and lack of squeamishness. Among other things, it has a lot of footage of the cerebral Rossellini (the daughter, you'll recall, of director Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman) offering her take on the movie. It was her first American film (Lynch happened upon her in a restaurant, also the beginning of the pair's extended personal relationship), so we had no context for her at the time. We can see how her intelligence informed her performance. The grueling, notorious scene Roger Ebert found so provocative—that's the one in which an abject, nude Vallens appears on a street at night—remains an iconic moment in transgressive cinema. In this film and elsewhere, Rossellini has said she drew on several images to help her do it. Among them: The famous picture of the Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack; a slab of beef hanging from a meat hook—and her personal experiences with the haunted visages of privileged European friends who'd been kidnapped and tortured by the Red Brigades.