The Villains: Frank Booth

George Lucas asked David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. He didn't end up directing Return of the Jedi; instead, he made Blue Velvet. Like Star Wars, Blue Velvet has an ominous villain, a force of unbridled tension on screen who prefaces events of bad things happening. Star Wars has a Darth Vader. Blue Velvet has a Frank Booth. Frank Booth is Darth Vader in love.

He is a psychosexual force veering to be unleashed at any moment. He'll explode into violence, laughter, tears, or erotic longing. Vvhhhhhuhhh. "Mommy, baby wants to fuck."

Instead of a respirator, he's got an oxygen mask full of amyl nitrate fueling his maddening descent into self.

He's a candy-coloured clown, dressed to be a rock star, the original hipster, listening to Roy Orbison in the eighties when you were listening to hair metal. He's your hipster hero. He even drinks your hipster beer. "Heineken?! Fuck that shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON!"

Needs More Goldblum: Jurassic Park

Here Goldblum is a rock star mathematician-- sorry, chaotician-- and he owns the part. Doffed all in black, pants and button down, and topped with a leather jacket is the rock star. And for the intellectual (and shades of nascent hipster) are a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Brought to the island as one of three subject matter experts that the InGen board of executives wants to sign off on the viability of its adventure theme park dinosaur island, Goldblum's Ian Malcolm drops the knowledge on chaos theory and unpredictability:

Life, uh, finds a way.

Ian Malcolm is too a brash young punk. When not making quips about massive piles of triceratops shit and hitting on Laura Dern's paleobotanist character, he's losing his leather jacket as he sits in an automated Ford Explorer in the rain, showing off his short sleeves and his thoughts on water ripples. Then when Sam Neill's paleontologist protagonist decides to use a flair to get the tyrannosaurus rex's attention away from the kids, Malcolm has got to do it too, to lesser, more foolish and more impulsive effect.


After the dinosaur has thrown Malcolm into a thatched hut, collapsing it in the process, he spends the remainder of the film injured. But he's still rock star enough to have tourniquetted his own leg when his injured body is first found. He also spends the remainder of the film with his shirt ripped open, his chiseled body spilling out his shirt like a pulp hero, his rugged handsomeness that of an Edgar Rice Burroughs character. Yet this clashes with his injured status, which leaves him in a prone state, his damsel in distress sitting aside like the ravished, scantily clad exotic girl of a pulp cover or like Princess Leia chained to Jabba the Hut.

If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously.