For Leigh Singer, the critic at the British Film Institute, the border between the real and the surreal dissolves in Lynch's best work, and logic gives way to intuition and feeling. It is a cinema in which ordinary things, the white picket fences of the suburbs, the quiet American houses, the pop songs of the fifties and sixties, turn into a territory of violence, sexual threat, unconventional humor, and unsettling sounds.

Lynch described the idea himself, in a 1986 conversation with David Chute: he wanted to go beneath the surface of a small American town, a place that is innocent and simple and at the same time full of dread and sickness, and he wanted a film that could carry the forces of goodness and darkness at once.

Blue Velvet is that film. It begins with Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student who has come home to the small town of Lumberton and finds a severed human ear in the grass of an empty lot. What starts as curiosity about who the ear belongs to draws him into the life of Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer, and into the violent world of Frank Booth. Chute described the result as a nightmarish coming-of-age story in which innocence and terror are not two separate worlds. That combination divided major critics almost immediately, and the argument it started is still alive four decades later.

The Split Among the Critics

Roger Ebert, the celebrated critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film one star out of four. His main objection was aimed at the film's shift in tone. In his view, Lynch placed Dorothy's suffering and sexual desperation alongside jokes, irony, and a humor that weakens the power of those very scenes. Scenes that strong, Ebert argued, deserved to be in a film that was sincere, honest and true; instead the film is pulled in two opposite directions until it finally comes apart.

Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, saw almost the same elements and reached an entirely different conclusion. She described Lynch as an artist who does not censor his sexual fantasies or the material drawn from the unconscious, and suggested he might turn out to be the first populist surrealist. Kael does not even take the film's apparently happy ending at face value. Sandy has dreamed of the robins returning and of love coming back, and at last the bird does appear at the window, with an insect in its beak.

J. Hoberman, in The Village Voice, called the film a mixture of an adolescent coming-of-age story and film noir, and wrote that Lynch is strangest precisely when he is trying to be normal. His assessment of the film's construction was direct: no American film since Raging Bull had been made with such richness, such command of form, such imaginative casting, and such psychological and sexual force. What Ebert saw as a break in tone, Hoberman weighed within the frame of Lynch's command of form.

Dorothy Vallens and the Question of an Actor's Agency

Ebert did not deny the force of the scenes involving Dorothy Vallens; he found in them a raw and painful emotional energy. What angered him was the way Isabella Rossellini was presented. When you ask an actress to endure those experiences, he wrote, you owe her your side of the bargain, which is to put her in an important film. Hoberman, by contrast, counted Lynch's casting and his command of form among the film's strengths.

Rossellini herself, who considers Dorothy the most complex performance of her career, has not accepted Ebert's reading of an actor victimized by a director. She says the notion that directors take young women and make them do what they do not want to do diminishes women's agency and the actor's own work.

Willow Maclay returned to the argument in March 2026 on RogerEbert.com, showing that it remains open on the very site that published Ebert's review.

Four decades on, the disagreement is still alive: Ebert asks what a filmmaker owes the performer, Kael speaks of the power of the unconscious, Hoberman insists on the command of form, and Rossellini defends her own choice and her role as an artist.

Three Reviews, Three Perspectives

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, September 1986
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Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, September 22, 1986
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Willow Maclay, RogerEbert.com, March 3, 2026
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