Breathed also took many pop culture figures and
events to task. Prince Charles and Princess Diana,
Madonna and Sean Penn, Michael Jackson, and a
host of other popular celebrities were lampooned in
Go-Go’s, The
In 1987, Breathed received a Pulitzer Prize for ed-
itorial cartooning for the strip. In 1989, Breathed de-
cided to end the strip. He stopped producing the
dailyBloom Countyand began a Sunday-only strip ti-
tledOutland.
Impact Bloom Countyprovided a mixture of politi-
cal satire, cultural commentary, slice-of-life humor,
and surrealism at a time when those four elements
were rarely combined in a single mainstream comic
strip. In addition to entertaining and edifying his
readers, then, Breathed was one of a few cartoonists
to demonstrate that a strip could eschew predictabil-
ity and adherence to a few set themes and still be suc-
cessful. He thereby helped expand the possibilities
of the syndicated daily comic.
Further Reading
Breathed, Berke.Classics of Western Literature: Bloom
County 1986-1989. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.
___.One Last Little Peek, 1980-1995: The Final
Strips, the Special Hits, the Inside Tips. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1995.
Jarnow, Jesse. “The Penguin Is Mightier than the
Sword.” Salon.com. Nov. 20, 2003. http://dir .salon
.com/story/ent/feature/2003/11/20/breathed
/index.html.
P. Andrew Miller
See also Comic strips; Kirkpatrick, Jeane.
Blue Velvet
Identification American art-house crime film
Director David Lynch (1946- )
Date Released September 19, 1986
Blue Velvetshocked audiences with its violence and sexu-
ality, establishing David Lynch as one of the most contro-
versial directors of his generation.
Lynch was known to several different audiences for
his early works, including the unsettling experimen-
tal filmEraserhead(1976). However, few filmgoers
were prepared forBlue Velvet, which simultaneously
employs and subverts a host of familiar settings,
images, and characters. The film is set in an imagi-
nary American lumber town, and while it apparently
takes place in the present, its opening scenes create
a bucolic atmosphere evocative of the faraway 1950’s.
Lynch’s main character is the seemingly innocent
Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan), who
finds himself drawn all too willingly into a frighten-
ing situation that might have been lifted from one of
the film noir mysteries of the same period.
The film’s audience learns by degrees that the
husband and son of sultry nightclub singer Dorothy
Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) are being held captive
by drug-crazed thug Frank Booth (played with manic
intensity by Dennis Hopper). Dorothy submits sexu-
ally to Frank but also lures Jeffrey, who has discov-
ered the situation, into a sadomasochistic affair.
At the same time, Jeffrey is falling in love with girl-
next-door Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), who is the
daughter of a police detective and is surreptitiously
helping the young man investigate the mystery.
The film includes a number of disquieting and in-
congruous episodes. In an early scene that sets the
tone for the film, Jeffrey discovers a severed human
ear lying in a field and crawling with ants. Sometime
later, Frank, who has been presented as a foul-
mouthed monster, sits enraptured as Dorothy sings
the 1963 Bobby Vinton hit “Blue Velvet” (written by
Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris) at her club. Later
still, the kidnapped Jeffrey watches brothel owner
Ben (former child actor Dean Stockwell) lip-synch
another famous 1963 song, Roy Orbison’s “In
Dreams,” into a trouble light that grotesquely dis-
torts his features. The inclusion of Orbison on the
film’s soundtrack proved significant, because it
helped the singer regain a popularity he had lost in
the 1970’s. Before he died in 1988, Orbison enjoyed
a few years of regained success.
Whether they were alive in the 1950’s or not,
Americans of the 1980’s tended to think nostalgi-
cally of the earlier decade as a period of innocence
and tranquillity. Lynch contrasts this perception with
a dark and menacing vision of human relationships,
but nothing in the film suggests that either version is
more “correct” than the other. Thus, the film’s nom-
inally happy ending merely reinforces the mood of
unease that has prevailed since its opening scenes.Impact The violence, frank sexuality, and dark vi-
sion ofBlue Velvetdrove many filmgoers from the the-
ater during early showings, but critics recognized120 Blue Velvet The Eighties in America