Let’s do this one as a list:

  1. Do not confuse this movie with “Black Velvet.” That is an Alannah Myles song that you now have stuck in your head, if you pleeeeeeease. This is a David Lynch movie from 1986.

  2. If you had no idea this was a David Lynch movie, and you turned it on, within minutes, you’d be turning to the person next to you, and would be all, “this is David Lynch, right? I’m pretty sure this is David Lynch.” And not just because it’s Kyle MacLachlan, and there are scenes set in a diner, and scenes set with a surreally lit lounge singer, and logs. But because it’s super-composed and -mannered in a way that I only really associate with Kubrick and Lynch, and nobody’s at any risk of confusing those two, I hope.

  3. You get to see Kyle MacLachlan’s dong.

  4. There’s a sex scene in this movie that’s the most fucked-up sex scene in a movie that I’ve seen since Crash (the 1996 David Cronenberg movie wherein someone fucks a leg wound, not the 2004 movie wherein they cure racism forever… although I haven’t seen the 2004 one, so who knows, maybe it also has a disturbing sex scene).

  5. So the lead actress of this is Isabella Rossellini, and I’m thinking that name sounds familiar and that she acted in older Italian movies, but I go to her IMDB page and she hasn’t… but the reason I thought she had is that she is the daughter of Roberto Rossellini, who directed “Journey to Italy,” and Ingrid Bergman, who also starred in that. Well then! (Also, she apparently married Martin Scorsese for a few years.)

5a. Also, young Laura Dern (the female lead of Jurassic Park)! Also, young Al from Quantum Leap!

  1. So this movie is in shape a teen detective story(!), which makes it slightly weird, inasmuch as the main character is trying to figure out what the heck is going on, which makes him the perfect stand-in for the audience in basically every David Lynch movie/show.

  2. I don’t think there’s anything in this movie, other than some proper nouns, that would prevent it from being an unofficial prequel to Twin Peaks, so in my headcanon, it is.

  3. So I think this is a stronger movie than Mulholland Drive, because it’s if anything even more formally interesting, but it combines that with a story that actually makes sense. Like, I think there’s actually a degree to which the straightforward narrative of this one, and its use of familiar story tropes, could almost be a criticism of the movie, in that it’s too “obvious” in a way. But then, nobody would ever call this movie generic or derivative, so I think it works well. It ends up being more of a Big Lebowski thing where for all the surrealist stylings, there’s a fairly straightforward plot underneath it.