[Originally published in 2011]
While it’s become a kind of Hollywood exercise for directors to re-edit and extend films for home video, David Lynch has never succumbed to the temptation. The film that arrives in theaters is, for better or worse, the film that will live on.
In terms of Blue Velvet, it is definitely for better. After the frustrations of Dune, producer Dino De Laurentiis gave Lynch a free hand and creative control over Blue Velvet and Lynch released the film that he intended.
Blue Velvet debuts on Blu-ray from MGM this week with a newly remastered edition of the film, but it also features a unique peak into the creative process of Lynch with a collection of recently rediscovered deleted scenes: 50 minutes of visions, both lovely and horrible, human and hellish.
These pieces were pared away in the editing, like a sculptor chiseling away to get to the perfect form, but they are full of visual delights and offbeat humor, narrative sidetrips and character embellishments. Some scenes simply cast a mood of unease or anxiety over the proceedings. Yet all are glimpses into the inspiration and explorations of Lynch as a filmmaker and marvelous addenda to the finished film, a look into roads not taken and details whittled away to reach the narrative focus and tonal balance of the final piece.
Lynch oversaw the editing of this collection of scenes and his simple construction gives the supplement a unity. As presented on the disc, with the scenes edited into a loose narrative of their own, it’s like a companion film focusing on the life of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) at college and at home, full of suggestions of Jeffrey’s dark side long before Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) enter his life. There is more with Sandy and her football quarterback boyfriend, many more scenes with Hope Lange as Jeffrey’s mother and a deleted storyline around the termite infestation investigated by Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay), dramatized with a slowly creeping camera and ominous chords, as if it’s more evidence of the rot of evil under the facade of the town.
While Lynch is never one to revise a finished film, he’s clearly proud of the work in these deleted scenes. “It was too much of a good thing,” is how he once explained cutting a favorite scene, but he’s happy to share those good things with us. He personally supervised the editing of these clips into a 50-minute supplement on the new Blu-ray. (For more on the search for the footage, see Cath Clark’s article in The Guardian.)
You can see one of the cut scenes below the jump.
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