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Blue Velvet

College student Jeffrey Beaumont returns to his suburban hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina, after his father, Tom, has a near-fatal stroke. Walking home from the hospital, Jeffrey cuts through a vacant lot and discovers a severed human ear, which he takes to police detective John Williams. Williams's daughter Sandy tells Jeffrey that the ear somehow relates to a lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens. Intrigued, Jeffrey enters her apartment by posing as a pest exterminator. While there, he steals a spare key while she is distracted by a man in a distinctive yellow sport coat, whom Jeffrey nicknames the "Yellow Man".

Jeffrey and Sandy attend Dorothy's nightclub act, in which she sings " Blue Velvet ", and leave early so Jeffrey can break into her apartment. Dorothy returns home and undresses; she finds Jeffrey hiding in a closet and forces him to strip at knifepoint, but he retreats to the closet when Frank Booth, a psychopathic gangster and drug lord, arrives and interrupts their encounter. Frank beats and rapes Dorothy while inhaling gas from a canister, alternating between fits of sobbing and violent rage. After Frank leaves, Jeffrey sneaks away and seeks comfort from Sandy.

Surmising that Frank has abducted Dorothy's husband Don, and son Donnie, to force her into sexual slavery, Jeffrey suspects that Frank cut off Don's ear to intimidate her into submission. While continuing to see Sandy, Jeffrey enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with Dorothy, in which she encourages him to hit her. Jeffrey sees Frank attending Dorothy's show and later observes him selling drugs and meeting with the Yellow Man. Jeffrey then sees the Yellow Man meeting with a "well-dressed man".

When Frank catches Jeffrey leaving Dorothy's apartment, he abducts them and takes them to the lair of Ben, a criminal associate holding Don and Donnie hostage. Frank permits Dorothy to see her family and forces Jeffrey to watch Ben perform an impromptu lip-sync of Roy Orbison 's " In Dreams ", which moves Frank to tears. Afterwards, he and his gang take Jeffrey and Dorothy on a high-speed joyride to a sawmill yard, where he again attempts to sexually abuse Dorothy. When Jeffrey intervenes and punches him in the face, an enraged Frank and his gang pull him out of the car. Replaying the tape of "In Dreams", Frank smears lipstick on his face and violently kisses Jeffrey. Frank then has Jeffrey restrained and beats him unconscious, while Dorothy pleads for Frank to stop. Jeffrey awakens the next morning, bruised and bloodied.

While visiting the police station, Jeffrey discovers that the Yellow Man is Detective Williams's partner Tom Gordon, who has been murdering Frank's rival drug dealers and stealing confiscated narcotics from the evidence room for Frank to sell. After Jeffrey and Sandy declare their love for each other at a party, they are pursued by a car which they assume belongs to Frank; as they arrive at Jeffrey's home, Sandy realizes the driver is her ex-boyfriend, Mike. After Mike threatens to beat Jeffrey for stealing his girlfriend, Dorothy appears on Jeffrey's porch naked, beaten, and confused. Mike backs down as Jeffrey and Sandy whisk Dorothy to Sandy's house to summon medical attention.

When Dorothy calls Jeffrey "my secret lover", a distraught Sandy slaps him for cheating on her. Jeffrey asks Sandy to tell her father everything, and Detective Williams then leads a police raid on Frank's headquarters, killing Frank's men. Jeffrey returns alone to Dorothy's apartment, where he discovers Don dead and with his ear missing, and Gordon in a lobotomised state from being shot in the head. As Jeffrey leaves the apartment, the "Well-Dressed Man" arrives, sees Jeffrey in the stairs, and chases him back inside. Jeffrey uses Gordon's walkie-talkie to say he is in the bedroom before hiding in the closet. The "Well-Dressed Man" arrives at the apartment and Jeffrey observes he is actually Frank in disguise.

Frank begins searching the apartment, and kills Gordon in the process. Jeffrey sneaks out of the closet and grabs Gordon's gun, which he uses to kill Frank when he opens the door. Moments later, Sandy and Detective Williams arrive.

Some time later, Jeffrey and Sandy have continued their relationship, Tom Beaumont has recovered, and Dorothy has been reunited with her son.