Anybody who has seen the 1982 movie ‘Blue Velvet’ will undoubtedly remember the severed human ear found in a field. For those who haven’t seen the movie, Jefferey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns to his hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina after his father suffers a stroke. While cutting through a vacant lot during a walk home from the hospital, he discovers a severed left ear in the grass.
The ear wasn’t just your average prop, it took a lot of time and effort to create.
According to Blue Velvet makeup supervisor Jeff Goodwin, creating the perfect ear took careful attention. “David (the director) and I approached it like a character in the film,” Goodwin explains. “We actually called it Mr. Ear.”
Blue Velvet was Goodwin’s first major release and getting the severed ear just right was of the utmost importance for Lynch. “My first ears I made, I actually made casts of my own ears. I made them out of material which was kind of the norm back in the day then, which was liquid latex”.
“I took them into David’s office. He was actually on the phone. I put them on the desk. He’s playing with them, looking at them. He gets off the phone and goes, ‘These are great, these are great, but let’s make them adult ears.’ I said, ‘David, those are my ears!’ He looks at my ears and says, ‘You have the smallest ears in the world.’”
Goodwin would go on to use producer Fred Carus’s ear to make the cast used in the film. He also used David Lynch’s real hair to give the ear some realistic fuzz. Goodwin spotted Lynch getting a haircut from stylist Barbara Page in his trailer and he swept up some of the hair that had fallen onto the floor and punched some of it onto the prosthetic ear.
Makeup artist Jeff Goodwin on set.
“I wanted the ears to have a little wiggle and movement, which I was not getting with the latex,” Goodwin explains of the process. “So I started experimenting with a new material that I was using for mold-making, for the prosthetics and stuff, but I’d never used this material for screen use. That material was silicone. As far as I can tell – and in all my research with friends and people in the business – we can’t come up with an earlier use of silicone in cinema history than that.”
So Where Is The Ear From Blue Velvet Today?
In most movies, numerous variations of the same prop are made. The same can be said of the ear, of which three were made. One left ear, and reportedly two right ears. Only the right ear was seen on screen during the movie.
As the ear(s) were made from silicone, it wouldn’t biodegrade or decompose. Therefore the ears would be in the same shape today as they were in 1982. Assuming the ears were looked after and not simply discarded.
Thankfully, it appears that at least two of the ears from Blue Velvet has indeed been looked after. Between 2016 and 2017 a right ear was exhibited at Cape Fear Museum in North Carolina.
The right ear on show at the Cape Fear Museum 2016/2017.
While the left ear, which was never actually on screen, can be found at Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon. The video store opened in 1991, and is now home to more than 80,000 movie titles. It also included numerous movie props from Scream, Pscyho and more.
Left ear on display at Movie Madness.