For its 30th Anniversary, Film Forum is showing David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Shown in a new restoration, Blue Velvet is worth revisiting and definitely a must-see seeing for those to have yet experience it.  Here are five reasons why you should go back to Lumberton, North Carolina:

5. Kyle McMachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini & the spaces between

The tone switches unnoticeably based on the world around the film’s protagonist. While Jeffrey is with Sandy (Laura Dern), he is a boyish romantic home from school, as she represents what Jeffrey knows of the world thus-far. With Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), Jeffrey begins to discover more about himself and the world around him, altering his stability and stimulating his unrecognizable desires.

4. "a candy-colored clown they call the sandman..."

The music of Blue Velvet.  While Bobby Vinton’s version of the titular song inspired the film, Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” stays with you the longest. In back to back scenes the song is heard diegetically, creating the most mesmerizing moments in which Jeffrey’s mystery freezes in time. The circumstances’ absurdity soak in and Frank’s insanity is heightened all the more.  Not to mention the unsettling dreamlike score by Angelo Badalamenti, which seems to tie the narrative into one single thought.

3. The “Lynchian” Effect

A term that is not a term but transcribed and reiterated by David Lynch enthusiast, David Foster Wallace – who described Lynchian as the term that “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”  Blue Velvet opens on a white picket fence, bright red roses bursting into the bluest sky imaginable. Firemen wave in slow motion while kids are safely motioned across the street by the crossing guard. And within the same fluid motion, Jeffrey’s father suffers a near-fatal stroke while he waters his plants.  An alarming underworld is revealed to us amidst the tulips and roses.

2. The Script

“What came from the song at first were red lips at night in a car, and green lawns with some dew at night. And then the next thing that came was a severed ear in the grass.”  After the commercial fail of Dune, the director was able to put the pieces together to make (on paper) the biggest success of his career. It was a script, while maintaining severe provocativeness, that connected the independent film world to the mainstream. Lynch did so with grace and poetry, avoiding the condemnation of an X rating.  Every component of the film serves its purpose, contributing to a captivating psychological neo-noir thriller.

1. Dennis Hopper’s greatest performance

Legend has it that after reading the script, Dennis Hopper called the director and said, “I’ve got to play this part David, because I am Frank.” Hopper made a living out of playing drunks, dangerous wildcards, and distant fathers that were also drunks and dangerous wildcards. In Blue Velvet, however, Dennis Hopper plays a sadist clown so complex he feels as real as he does crazy. Frank Booth violently inhales through a mask, adding to each moment he steals.  Booth is the man you meet on the street that immediately rubs you the wrong way, while simultaneously you seem to find humor and intrigue in the energy he brings. You don’t want to be near him, but boy do you want to see what he does next.