Dean Stockwell in 'Blue Velvet': The Movie That Made Him Timeless - Variety

So Ben, who looks like a candy-colored clown, stands up in front of the room in his huge-collared frilly open shirt and smoking jacket, brandishing a cigarette holder, using an industrial work light as his pretend microphone (it lights up his face), and proceeds to do an act of lip-syncing that is so hypnotic you’re tempted to call it bad-dream karaoke. He’s not actually singing. The sound is all Roy Orbison warbling “In Dreams” (“A candy-colored clown they call the sandman/Tiptoes to my room every night…”). But as the great Roy sings, and as Ben, standing in his self-styled industrial spotlight, mimics that song, you’d swear that you could almost hear him, and time seems to stop. The movie seems to stop. We’re no longer just watching “Blue Velvet.” The film has sliced through all our rational defense mechanisms, pulling us in like the TV set in “Poltergeist.”

Why is Ben standing there, miming that song? Because he wants to; because Frank, whose response to the song is so intense it looks like he’s going to either cry or explode (or both), wants him to. But really, Ben is doing this because David Lynch simply had to stage that scene, because it poured out of him, because he needed to see it and needed us to see it, and knew that Dean Stockwell, performing it with a private smirk that comes off as bizarrely innocent, even as it marks him as a figure out of a horror movie designed to scare children to death, would be the only actor who could make that scene cut across time itself.