Film Studies: A nightmare that keeps coming back

David Lynch's Blue Velvet is coming back – and why not? It's 15 years old now, just as wondrous, mysterious and alarming as ever, and here comes the present-day Lynch with Mulholland Dr., the only other film he's made that's as good as Blue Velvet. Not coincidentally, the two films work in much the same way, and that's what I want to talk about. Because Lynch, I think, is most difficult for those people trying extra hard. You see, it isn't exactly that his films are "challenging"; it's more that they work less by any rules of narrative, than by the imperatives of dreaming. It's being wide awake that can make Lynch seem baffling. On the other hand, if you're ready to slip away ...

Take the way the Dean Stockwell character sings "In Dreams". I know, this occurs beyond the halfway point in the movie, so to talk about it is hardly showing a dotted-line path. But sometimes, with film, if you can fix on one scene and realise how it works, that can be suggestive.

To be brief with the plot – but to describe the story in what I think are its proper terms: once upon a time in a little town called Lumberton (not quite Slumbertown), there was this very nice, good boy Jeffrey. But one day he found an ear. And he couldn't resist its appeal: not just to whom the ear might have been attached, but what it had heard. So he found a sickly, pale older woman, Dorothy, who lived in an apartment the colours of flesh and blood. And he spied on her and saw her naked – because he had heard she was involved, and because he yearned to see such a woman.

He learnt that she had lost her child, and perhaps he wanted to be that child and her lover both, but was old enough to be her lover. And it was secret and magic between them until the terrible Frank came by – Frank was Dorothy's master, her owner, her beast, her devil. And Frank breathed so deep, he needed extra gases, like drugs. And he was angry with Jeffrey (for the nice boy had by now had the fallen woman) and he took him off to a bad place in the night. To Ben's place.

And it was clear that Ben might destroy Jeffrey. He punched him in the stomach, without a word of warning. And Ben was cruel, frilled, perverse.

But instead of stripping off every inch of Jeffrey's young flesh – especially the parts that had been in Dorothy – he picked up a heavy work-light and used it as a microphone (the bright light making his pancake face glow) and sang Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" to him.

Remember that? Well, Lynch and his lead actor, Kyle MacLachlan (Jeffrey) were travelling from New York to Wilmington, North Carolina (where the film was shot) when the radio in the cab they were riding in played Roy Orbison doing "Crying". And Lynch was thrilled – by the mood and the coincidence – and he decided to use that song in the film. But in Wilmington, he got the record and he found he preferred "In Dreams".

In Lynch's script it was Frank (Dennis Hopper), who was to sing the song. So Lynch told him to start learning the lines. And Hopper asked his friend Dean Stockwell (Ben) to help him practise it. So Dean learned the words, too. And when they came to shoot it, Dean was still mouthing along with Dennis and Dennis stopped – he was so struck by the sight – and said, "Dean has to do it". And then the scene became these two devils – the one all roaring, the other effete – with Hopper gazing at Stockwell as if he's God, doing such a suave and sinister job of miming to Orbison. And great as the sequence is, I'm not sure if the most moving things in it aren't the close-ups of Dennis Hopper, filled with reverence and then anguish as he realises he can't utter the song – so he shuts it off.

Now, you may decide this is a hokey way to try film criticism, as well as a risky way of making films. But Lynch makes movies that carry their stories as disguise. The structure and epiphany of dream are more valuable at directing us in to the emotional power of what we're seeing or hearing. Blue Velvet is about the passage from infantile to adult sexual experience. It is a fable in which the plot is secondary to the inner force. And what's most telling is that it was only when Lynch had the action rehearsing before his eyes, that he recognised his own picture. That's the best advice I know for watching Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. – twin masterpieces.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'Blue Velvet' (18) is re-released on 14 December