So what was this asshole’s deal?

So what was this asshole’s deal?

I CLOSE MY EYES

THEN I DRIFT AWAY

2surreal4me

No seriously Lynch way overdid the surrealism in this movie to the point that it said nothing and was about nothing

INTO THE MAGIC NIGHT

>i'm an expert on surrealism and art

He was a hologram that only Dr. Samuel Beckett could see and hear.

I SOFTLY SAY

Hopefully his next leap... will be the leap home

are you fucking stupid

this movie is simple. it isn't even really surreal. Fuck you retard

he was suave

Wow, they really got lazy with that Ziggy prop in the later seasons.

YOU GET A LOVE LETTER FROM ME FUCKER

I CAN HEAR YOUR FUCKIN' RADIO YOU STUPID SHIT!

...

How does Lynch do music scenes so well?

BABY WANTS TO FUCK

look at his hair. he's creative and a genius.

The Candy-coloured Clown.

A SILENT PRAYER
LIKE DREAMERS DO

Is there a meaning to that edit where they all disappear or is it just a little stylistic flare?

He was just a suave fucker.

we love Ben

here's to Ben!

my girlfriend and I reenact the "Daddy wants to fuck" scene during sex sometimes. it cracks the both of us up.

Sounds amazing.

He was the spiritual center of the movie.
He appears pretty much dead center in the run length. There's some anticipation of the visit to him, and his interaction with Frank sort of cements Frank's character and the sleazy, violent, twisted world that he lives in.

Go back to bed ebert

He was clearly a sleazeball middleman of some kind.

I always thought he looked like Kenneth Anger; the Anger resonance is made more explicit by the fact that Anger also prominently used the song Blue Velvet in one of his most famous shorts, which also has a 50s tough-guy vibe going on, as does Blue Velvet.

I'm picturing this user awkward, jerkily-smashing dry-humping the GF during these sessions.

I think it's just a little stylistic flare (flair?). It suggests that the gang split instantly out of that place to go for a ride, like you don't even see them, bang they're gone. Also it could be taken as being "intentionally clumsy" (Lynch does this a lot) to suggest old pulp 50s movies or such.

A very similar little beat is the freeze frame at the end of the opening scene of Pulp Fiction.

Fun fact:
Dean Stockwell was at FanExpo in Toronto a few years ago for a Q&A. (I guess because of his work on Quantum Leap and Battlestar Galactica.) I went to the Q&A because Blue Velvet is one of my favorite movies, and I think his role, in his brief screen time, is absolutely brilliant.
The time came for audience questions, and I asked him how long it took for him to film his scenes in Blue Velvet.
If I remember correctly, he said just a couple of days: about a day for the long shots, and then closeups the next morning.
Then he did what I actually wanted him to do, which is to just talk about his reminiscences of making Blue Velvet. It was great.
He and Dennis Hopper had known each other for a long time. They were filming in some house that was under renovation. Hopper had gone into another part of the building and found the mechanic's light. He brought it back excitedly and Stockwell agreed it was a great prop to use, and Lynch agreed to include it. That's the light that Ben uses as his "microphone" during the lip syncing.
Of course Stockwell had had a small role as Yueh in Lynch's Dune, and that's how he got to know Lynch.
Wish I could find a video of Stockwell's answer at FanExpo. I'm sure there is one, it's just not on YouTube yet. He said some other interesting stuff about it that I can't remember right now.