<p>**REPOST** For our one year anniversary episode, The Cultists present David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986). Yet another film that was met with a mixture of confusion, repulsion, and awe upon its release into the center of the Regan era and big blockbuster productions, BV has since become something of a noted surrealist masterpiece of avant-garde cinema—one that, to some, single-handedly paved a new path for the landscape of 90s cinema. From Tarantino’s hyper cool nostalgia and rockabilly soundtracks, to the Cohen brother’s wild humor set to a backdrop of blunt, brutal violence, the ripple effects of this strange little film about a strange little world continues to shudder its way through time. </p><p><br></p><p>The premise is simple enough: Jeffery (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college to his small 1950s-tinged nostalgia town, finds a severed, moldy ear in a field, and embarks upon a self-guided odyssey into the darker parts of the town’s worn-down crevices, only to find that his thirst to drink in the dark might be stronger than he’d like. The premise is simple, but the film that unravels from beneath its surface is anything but. Relying largely on sensory instincts and “day dream logic”, Blue Velvet presents a rather loose and tangled web of threads that people love to try and straighten, only to find that the harder one pulls, the quicker the strings curl into something new. Is this film an oedipal psychodrama? A coming of age story? A heartland conspiracy? Or is it simply a mystery about mystery? </p><p><br></p><p>Let’s find out. </p><p><br></p><p>Episode Safeword(s): “red pleather” </p><p><br></p><p>(REPOSTED Episode from 2020 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).</p>
