BLUE VELVET: Innocent Love and Carnal Lust
De Laurentiis Entertainment GroupWarning: the following article contains heavy spoilers for Blue Velvet.
The cinema of David Lynch is one that has always been characterised by the duality of humanity. Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway feature two tormented people who hide inside fantasy realms to come to terms with their own mistakes, The Elephant Man exemplifies the age-old motto of “do not judge someone by the way they look” in a genuine and tender way, the character of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me embodies the struggle between her angelic purity and the personal trauma that leads her to do bad. These elements are present in virtually his entire filmography, but it is in Blue Velvet, one of his most deceptively simple films, that captures the light/darkness dichotomy on a romantic level as well.
On the surface, Blue Velvet is nothing more than a neo-noir made in 1986: a young man slowly uncovers a mystery bigger than himself, falls for an older femme fatale, ends up killing the evil criminal behind it all, and goes on to live happily ever after with a pretty young blonde. Looking at the plain text of the narrative, the film seemingly lacks many of the surreal, nightmarish qualities that have defined the term “Lynchian”, but that would be over-simplifying the importance of the whole film. After all, Blue Velvet has been subject to many studies over the decades, becoming a go-to for young academics and critics to explore critical thinking and digging deeper into what the film has to say.
Rather than focusing on what everyone always ends up discussing about the movie (the opening scene is the thesis statement on the violence hidden underneath the façade of American suburbia, the camera entering the severed ear begins the nightmare while the camera exiting Jeffrey’s ear at the end ends it, and so on), the focus of this feature is primarily on the relationships between Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), and Sandy Williams (Laura Dern).
At first glance, all four of these characters seem rather clear-cut: Jeffrey is the investigative hero, Sandy is the naïve young girl, Dorothy is the broken woman who needs saving, and Frank is the ultimate embodiment of evil. However, in pure Lynch fashion, all of these characters have light and darkness, good and bad brimming inside of them. As a protagonist, it takes a while for the audience to fully embrace him: after all, he spends the first act of the movie trying to sneak into Dorothy Vallens’ apartment, where he ends up spying over her as a voyeur (an element present in a deleted scene that was meant to introduce the character), and later he steals away Sandy from her boyfriend Mike.
He is a questionable character to the point that Sandy herself does not know whether she likes him or not: “I can't figure out if you're a detective or a pervert” she says, to which he replies, “Well, that's for me to know and you to find out.” Jeffrey’s journey is one of self-discovery, his voyeuristic tendencies revealing someone who would rather spy than get involved directly, compromising himself and showing a darker side that is not accepted by society. He is the perfect embodiment of a person split between chasing a love that is pure and innocent (Sandy’s) or the lustful, sensual, and purely physical carnal pleasures (Dorothy’s).
The scene that changes all the dynamics in Blue Velvet, giving a bit of clarity to who three characters really are, is the aforementioned sequence where Jeffrey is inside the closet of Dorothy’s apartment. He watches her from afar, talking on the phone and changing her dress, in a way that makes it clear he has done this before, thus lowering his likability and making Dorothy’s discovery of him satisfying. However, while Dorothy might seem like the victim at first, wielding a knife and fearfully threatening Jeffrey, she ends up seducing him and pleasing him orally in a thoroughly disturbing turn of events, once again shifting the relationship and putting Jeffrey into danger at the hands of this woman. But it is Frank Booth’s arrival, where he violently abuses Dorothy (both physically and verbally), that makes everything clear, making all three characters fall into their specific roles as protagonist, antagonist, and damsel in distress.
Even then, calling Dorothy Vallens a “damsel in distress” is a disservice to how complex her character is. She is neither just an alluring femme fatale nor someone who needs saving, rather the victim of countless days (Weeks? Months?) of being assaulted by Frank in order to keep her kidnapped husband and young child alive. All the violence and trauma she has suffered broke her psyche in unfathomable ways that can never be fixed, going beyond the Stockholm syndrome, to the point that the only way for her to feel pleasure during sexual encounters with Jeffrey is to be verbally abused and slapped. In a way, pain is the only thing she is capable of feeling after all the agony, rationalising the internal suffering into something that can be recognised. She is an incredibly tragic character, and her relationship with Jeffrey manages to keep her from saying farewell to the world.
If Dorothy is broken and incredibly seductive, Sandy Williams is the total opposite. Her introduction perfectly represents her character: a blonde, bright, shining young girl coming out of the darkness in a truly effective way, with Angelo Badalamenti’s score in the background evoking sweeping character introductions from the 1950s. Sandy is innocent, pure, sincere, but also wide-eyed and naïve. She keeps reminding Jeffrey that she is very much in love with Mike (a character with more screen time in the deleted scenes), yet she keeps following the wannabe detective around, both clearly falling for each other. As good as she may be, she is still cheating on her boyfriend and hiding things from her police officer father, but she is also deeply charming and endearing. When she recounts a dream she had, with the world enveloped in darkness and thousands of robins bringing back the light, it is like watching a child who earnestly believes in magic and fantasy (further emphasised by her excessively girly pink room).
Jeffrey clearly loves both women, but for very different reasons. On one hand, Sandy is what could be defined as “marriage material”: young, pretty, and trusting. Jeffrey is attracted to this side of her, and she is attracted to him because of his confidence and for opening up to her about how much the violence that Frank commits is hurting him inside. On the other hand, Dorothy can give things to Jeffrey that Sandy never could: she is older, deeply erotic, and provocative, the opposite of the virginal innocence of the other girl. The difference between the two is also a purely aesthetic one, with Sandy being blonde and Dorothy dark-haired. Plus, Vallens is a woman who needs saving, giving rise to Jeffrey’s masculine side of righting wrongs and giving her the happiness she deserves, only to end up doing even more damage.
Finally, everything leads back to the villain of the picture, the terrifying Frank Booth: he is violent, deranged, constantly swearing and sniffing an unspecified substance. His chaotic energy shows someone who takes what he wants without asking, killing other criminals or sexually violating Dorothy without even a hint of remorse. There is a tiny, imperceptible glimmer of humanity still in him, as he softly cries while listening to Dorothy Vallens sing “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club. But Frank is off any point of salvation, and what scares Jeffrey is that he could easily become him in the future if he gives in to his urges without any control or restraint. “You’re like me” says Frank to Jeffrey Beaumont, something the young man is perfectly aware of.
Thankfully, Jeffrey does not end up becoming like Frank Booth, and during the climax of the film he manages to trick him and shoot him point-blank in the head. A literal blinding light engulfs both Jeffrey and Sandy as they kiss: evil has been defeated and the world is alright again. The sappy images from the beginning are shown again, and everything seems to be going great for the Beaumont and Williams family. Jeffrey, who throughout the film wore mostly black or dark clothing, now has a white shirt with black dots: the darkness is still inside of him, but he is fully in control and able to lead an honest life. A robin shows up to the house with a bug in its mouth, reinforcing the “happy ending” vibe of the whole ending, with Julee Cruise’s “Mysteries of Love” playing in the background.
While Jeffrey, Sandy, and their families might go on to lead a happy life, there is someone that has forever been changed for the worse by the trauma and violence she suffered: Dorothy Vallens. Her husband may have been killed after painful torture, but in the final image of the film she is shown finally reunited with her kid. As she embraces him, the lovely strings of Badalamenti morph into her rendition of Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”: “And I still can see blue velvet through my tears”. There might be healing in the future for her, but the scars and wounds deep inside her are unlikely to ever vanish.
Blue Velvet is an incredible piece of cinema, portraying a different outlook on love and sexuality that forces audiences to confront their deepest desires and the constant struggle between wanting an innocent love and needing carnal lust. The beauty of the works of David Lynch is that, no matter how straightforward some of his films may be, every audience member will connect to something different and probably leave forever changed, his exploration of duality being one of the most thought-provoking themes that can be tackled in cinema.