When Slate’s Bill Wyman reviewed the new Blu-ray of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, he suggested that it was only a matter of time before its nearly one-hour of deleted scenes—once thought lost, according to Lynch, after the death of Dino De Laurentiis—hit YouTube. Now not only are all the deleted scenes available on YouTube, but they’ve arrived together in a 50-minute video, flagged yesterday by Metafilter and today by Gawker.
The arrival online of nearly an hour of outtakes from David Lynch’s surreal 1986 masterpiece is not only exciting but also overwhelming. How did these scenes fit into the movie? If you don’t have time for them all, which should you watch? What should we make of all this material?
Thankfully, Wyman already pored over the most significant of these scenes and analyzed them at some length in his review. As he explained, some of the material is relatively inconsequential (“we hardly need more scenes of Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara”), while other scenes are as powerful and disturbing as much of the finished film—and at least one outtake significantly alters the story. Now that these scenes are available to fans who don’t have Blue Velvet on Blu-ray, and might not even have a Blu-ray player, we’re reposting some of Wyman’s analysis to help explain the video. We’ll also plug in some time codes for those that might want to skip ahead to the most notable scenes. (Note: Several of these scenes contain nudity and are NSFW.)
The first deleted scene, containing the “flaming nipple” woman, is one of the most notorious, but, as Wyman explained, not the most important:
The first one features a sort of tedious musical number of a white guy playing an acoustic guitar as a black guy does some blues vocalizing over it. Then we see the scene—it’s the prostitute-strewn bar Frank takes Jeffery to during his night of terror. As Frank and his myrmidons sweep in, Frank sees some guy he’s been looking for. He gets briefly brutalized on a pool table, as abject naked women stand around undulating. (Frank’s mad because the guy has apparently lost Frank’s favorite fetish object—a strip of Vallens’ blue velvet dress; in a later scene we see that the police had found the fabric, apparently near where Jeffrey found the ear. It’s possible that the guy Frank was terrorizing in this scene was the one who’d tossed the ear into the field.) This outtake had a certain notoriety because it was said to include a shot of a prostitute who could do some sort of trick that made it look like her nipples were on fire [2:55]. This turns out to be something less than a cinematic landmark.
The scene that would have “made Blue Velvet a different movie” begins at 3:40:
It starts at a wan school dance. Where’s Jeffrey? a student asks; there’s an emergency call for him. Turns out Jeffrey’s in a grungy basement, spying on what is apparently a date rape in progress. We see a bulky college guy pinning down a struggling co-ed—clad, significantly, in blue—on a mattress. Jeffrey watches, fascinated, as the scene unfolds. He hears someone call out to him; only then, in a fit of sudden bravado, does he tell the guy to leave the woman alone.
The inclusion of this scene would have significantly changed our understanding of the film. We think of Jeffrey as someone drawn by curiosity into a new world, in which he is freed, in some way, to experience desires or urges he didn’t previously know about. That’s part of the director Lynch’s professional mien, too; a naïf detachedly exploring, with open eyes, these unaccountably dark images that pop into his head. Instead, in this memorable shot we see something like a portrait of the artist as a young perv, comfortable, even eager, to watch not just sex but explicit sexual violence without protest. Roger Ebert, please note!
Another significant scene starts at 4:48:
The most important of the deleted scenes are a series that see the young Jeffrey at college getting informed of his father’s illness and then [at 6:55] saying goodbye to his friends, including a girlfriend he says he’s in love with. They add some substance to a figure who, when we meet him in the released film, is a tabula rasa. We learn that he was unilaterally ordered to leave college and come back and work in the family store by his mother. (This is a twist; in the released film his mother is a weak figure.)
In the goodbye scene with his girlfriend [7:15], her mannerisms are stilted even by the standards of this film, so it’s difficult to get a read on her. (The part is played by an unrecognizable Megan Mullaly, the actress who plays Karen on Will & Grace.) Later, we see their relationship disintegrate over the phone lines.
The most mordant of these scenes, heard just from Jeffrey’s side, is the final one [29:45], in which she tells Jeffrey she’s gotten married. “If things don’t work out, you have a future in comedy,” he says, and hangs up.
At 22:20, after several scenes with Aunt Barbara (portrayed by the great character actor Frances Bay), you’ll find “the most purely entertaining of the outtakes,” and also one of the longest:
It shows the opening acts of Vallens’ performance at the Slow Club. One is a terrier eating dinner contentedly from a bowl [23:05]. The other [at 25:15] is a caustic-comedian lounge act that will be worth searching for on YouTube once the Blu-ray comes out. (It’s not up yet.)
And finally, around 48:00:
Another deleted scene sees Jeffrey and Dorothy Vallens on the roof of the Deep River Apartments with Vallens balancing herself, heart-stoppingly, on the edge. This seems to be part of the understory of her being suicidal.
In between, some of the other material is less thrilling:
In the released movie, Sandy’s boyfriend, a football player named Mike, has a small role. Here there’s a long, odd scene [starting at 16:10, and continued at 31:20] in which Mike and Jeffrey are both at her house for a grim dinner and some TV watching.
Previously
The Rest Is Silencio: David Lynch’s Greatest Music Moments
Watch a Lyrical Video Essay on David Lynch
David Lynch Debuts a Frightening Music Video
