Great Character: Frank Booth (“Blue Velvet”)

One of the creepiest Nemesis characters in American film history is Frank Booth from Blue Velvet:

Played with demented intensity by the late Dennis Hopper, Booth is a psychopath of the first order. Here is the IMDB plot summary:

A man returns to his home town after being away and discovers a severed human ear in a field. Not satisfied with the police’s pace, he and the police detective’s daughter carry out their own investigation. The object of his investigation turns out to be a beautiful and mysterious woman involved with a violent and perversely evil man.

That “perversely evil man” is Booth. He says things like this:

Don’t toast to my health, toast to my fuck!

And this:

Goddamn you’re one suave fucker!

And of course this:

Baby wants to fuck! Baby wants to fuck Blue Velvet!

And then he takes young Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) for a ride:

But it’s this image by which we’ll always remember Frank Booth:

By the way, you might find this interesting: how David Lynch perhaps wrote Blue Velvet:

“For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee — with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.”

Frank Booth emerged into being from chocolate shakes, multiple cups of coffee, and lots of sugar? That make sense!

Any Blue Velvet fans out there? Still one of my favorite David Lynch movies.

[Originally posted February 18, 2011]

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