And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
"Love it or hate it, see it you must. Nothing remotely as unhealthy has come out of Hollywood for years but also nothing that so upends our usual expectations of the commercial cinema. And its more than a little acrid fumes, blow away the memory of much fake perfume. Calculated it is, and ultimately perhaps just a little bit hollow. But it’s a major effort to convince us that a popular film need not always indulge us when it indulges itself. It can draw a bit of real blood, too."
Now and again Hollywood breaks a barrier or two, generally by mistake. But I’ve no idea what persuaded a major company to finance David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (Lumiere, Chelsea, Screen on the Hill, Gate, 18). It is as resolutely radical in both style and content as Eraserhead and light years ahead of the stodgy botch-up of Dune.
We’re in Lumberton, USA, where an old man collapses watering his garden. The flowers are artificially pretty along the fence but the hose-pipe seems to have a murderous mind of its own, practically strangling him to death. Returning from the hospital, his son discovers a severed ear along the way. Something’s funny somewhere, and we’re not quite certain yet whether it’s funny peculiar or funny ha-ha.
The young man, enamoured of the local detective’s partly pretty daughter, also becomes enamoured of the mystery, tricking his way into the apartment of a night-club singer who is connected with the police investigation. He hides in the closet and watches her undress. When she discovers him, he’s forced to make love to her. Then her real lover arrives, so he hops back into the closet and squints at a sado-masochistic battle royal developing in front of his startled but fascinated eyes. Before long, he’s embroiled up to the hilt in a murderous psychodrama.
The film is smart-looking, incredibly knowing and exists both on a level of absolute reality and out-and-out nightmare. If it is a commentary on the worm-in-the-bud of “ordinary” American society, it has an astonishing capacity to hit below the belt and enjoy it. But I think its real significance lies not in any general comment but in a series of particular observations, concerning our fears about what we might become if our familiar constraints were blown away.
Just as in Lynch’s Eraserhead, where the beastie quite literally gets out of control, so in Blue Velvet curiosity almost kills the cat, showing our hero what he really is. The happy ending to the present tale looks thoroughly unconvincing, and I think it is meant to. The flowers in the garden where the young man wakes are just too pretty to be true. And the final image of an artificial robin with a live bug in its beak confirms our unease.
The opening montage is famous for its bright red roses, yellow tulips, and a waving fireman, all set to Bobby Vinton’s "Blue Velvet." However, the camera pans down beneath the lush green grass to reveal a churning mass of black insects fighting and devouring each other. This is the film's thesis: beneath the polite surface of society lies a violent, primal reality.
Voyeurism and the Closet
Jeffrey spends much of the film’s first act hiding in Dorothy’s closet. This makes the audience complicit in his voyeurism. We watch through the slats of the closet door as Frank abuses Dorothy, forcing us to confront our own fascination with onscreen violence and depravity.
Birds vs. Bugs
The film uses nature as a moral compass. The "bugs" represent the filth and corruption Jeffrey discovers, while the robins (introduced in Sandy’s dream) represent love and the return of light. The film's conclusion, featuring a robin with a bug in its beak, suggests a fragile victory of order over chaos.
Key Cinematic Sequences
The "In Dreams" Lip-Sync
One of the most surreal moments in cinema occurs when Frank takes Jeffrey to visit "Ben" (Dean Stockwell). Ben performs a flamboyant, high-camp lip-sync of Roy Orbison’s "In Dreams" using a work light as a microphone. The scene shifts instantly from absurdist comedy to horrific violence, demonstrating Lynch’s ability to manipulate tone and use pop nostalgia to create a sense of profound unease.
The Night Ride
The "joyride" sequence where Frank pummels Jeffrey while quoting song lyrics is a masterclass in psychological horror. It strips away Jeffrey's illusions of safety and forces him to confront the "Frank Booth" within himself—the capacity for violence and the thrill of the forbidden.
Production and Legacy
Casting: The film revitalized Dennis Hopper's career and established Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern as Lynch's primary muses.
The "Lynchian" Definition: This film solidified the term "Lynchian"—the juxtaposition of the mundane and the macabre, the sentimental and the surreal.
Influence:Blue Velvet effectively birthed the "Suburban Gothic" subgenre, influencing everything from American Beauty to Stranger Things. It proved that independent films could be both avant-garde and commercially viable.
Psychoanalytic Interpretation
The Oedipal Triangle
Many critics view Blue Velvet through a Freudian lens. Jeffrey’s father is incapacitated by a stroke at the start of the film, leaving a "paternal vacuum." Jeffrey then enters a dark world where Frank Booth acts as a perverted, monstrous father figure, and Dorothy Vallens becomes a sexualized mother figure. Jeffrey’s journey can be seen as a twisted "coming of age" where he must "kill" the dark father (Frank) to achieve maturity.
The Severed Ear as a Portal
The camera’s slow zoom into the severed ear at the beginning—and out of Jeffrey’s own ear at the end—suggests that the entire film might be an internal psychological journey. The ear is a portal into the "auditory subconscious," where the repressed fears and desires of the protagonist are given physical form.
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