Blue Velvet by David Lynch
Blue Velvet by David LynchDavid Lynch’s Blue Velvet is an exploration of things above and below the surface. This surface is really a borderline between not only idyllic suburban America and the dark, perverted corruption that lies underneath but also between good and evil, conscious and subconscious, dream and reality. Although this division seems quite rigid and clean-cut some of the most important implications of the film stem from the transgressions of these borderlines.
In the initial scenes of the film Lynch introduces Lumberton, the typical small town in Middle America where the fireman waves at you, the children are well protected, the lawns are green and there is a smile on everybody’s face. Naturally, the most important clich? is also included—we see the white picket fence with ruby red roses against a bright blue sky, making out the colors of the American flag.
There is, however, trouble in Paradise. First we witness a man—who later turns out to be Jeffrey’s father—suffer a stroke and, after showing his helpless agony, the camera burrows into the grass revealing insects “in a ferocious, predatory, and cannibalistic fight for life” (Dirks, “Blue Velvet (1984)”, http://www.filmsite.org/blue.html). These pictures, made even more terrifying by the extreme close-up and the accompanying sounds, provide the first visual clue of the dive we are about to make into the subterranean world under the pastoral life of normalcy.
Our guide through this hell below and within is Jeffrey; an all-American boy who comes home from college to help out in the family business while his father is in the hospital. His finding a severed human ear is what sends him out on a journey to solve a mystery and eventually leads him to find out more about the world, and also about himself, than what he bargained for. As the main focalizing agent of the film Jeffrey becomes the central character, the hero on a quest. He has to solve the mystery, help a lady in distress, fight villains and find love and happiness. During his adventures he also has to face and defeat the greatest evil of all—the evil within himself.
Jeffrey’s journey into the underworld of Lumberton may also be seen as a journey into the subconscious of the human mind, into the Freudian id. This may be supported by the scene in which the camera zooms in on the severed ear and, going down the rabbit hole, it leads us inside like we were traveling into someone’s mind. This is how the journey begins and when it comes to a close we leave the underworld through Jeffrey’s ear by a reversal shot of that earlier one. Accepting this interpretation we may consider the normalcy of Lumberton to be Jeffrey’s superego and the underworld, and particularly Frank, to be his id surfacing and trying to take control of his ego. The censor who struggles to keep the id suppressed is Jeffrey himself who finally succeeds...
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