Getting Twisted with David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet'

Okay, this post is two years old. I don't care. I just finished watching Blue Velvet and I need to talk about it. I came up with my own theory as I was watching it and I'm 100 percent certain it's right, so I googled it and found a bunch of interpretations that were absolutely facile and nowhere near right. This is the only thing I've foun that corroborates my theory.

First of all, you're dead on.

I identified the Oedipal (sp?) theme early on because I know this was a major theme from Mulholland Drive, which was a film that occurred almost entirely within the mind of one of the characters who had suffered sexual abuse as a child, the dark events and characters were manifestations of the repressed memories of abuse that occasionally surfaced within a fantasy she created for herself to escape her troubled real life.

The same thing is happening in this film.

I think that the only part of Blue Velvet that really happens is when he sees his father in the hospital, from then on, everything we see is an elaborate fantasy constructed by Geoffrey to escape the crushing monotony of suburban life, and to cover up his painful secrets. His father sexually and phsyically abused him as a child, as well as his mother, he was obviously a violent and disturbed man. But when we see him in hospital at the beginning he is frail, vulnerable, weak, childlike. He breathes through a mask to survive. These two polarizing images of his father – abuser and child – merge together to make Frank: violent, perverted, twisted, he wears an oxygen mask and cries out like a helpless child "Mommy! Mommy!".

More specifically, Frank represents what Geoffrey is afraid of turning into.

There are several revealing moments ('when he tells the old lady she's "gonna get it", when he sits on his bed crying, thinking about when he hit Dorothy) that show Geoffrey becoming the abuser, the perpetrator. There's also a moment in the car where Frank turns round and says "you're the same as me!". The driving force of the film is Geoffrey trying to resist falling into the same behaviours as his father, his abuser.

Now, Dorothy. She represents his mother (she accidentally calls him 'Don', the name of her son the first time they are truly intimate; he finds The Hat in her home which gives him pause, the final scene is of Dorothy with her young son wearing that same hat). Geoffrey is struggling with Oedipal sexual feelings for his mother, this conflict is at the root of this film. Another facet of Dorothy is her sexual desire to be harmed – "Hit me!" – this symbolises Geoffreys perception of himself after his abuse, he feels used, broken, dirty, worthless, guilty. He feels unworthy of real intimacy and wants to be hurt physically so he can't be hurt emotionally.

The 'closet scene' represents something Geoffrey witnessed as a child. He hid in a closet and saw his father (Frank) violently physically and sexually abusing his mother (Dorothy), this display of raw animal sexuality was deeply confusing to him and aroused him, something which made him feel guilty and ashamed. "Baby wants to fuck." In this scene, and at several other times, characters stuff their mouth with Blue Velvet, I believe this represents their 'silence' – "putting a sock in it" – they're surpressing their fears and feelings and dark secrets. When the scene is over, Geoffrey comforts her, he becomes the protector of his broken mother.

The "investigation" is a way of stringing together the various half-repressed memories of abuse and to explain them as actions of a psychotic lunatic. "Ben" represents the people close to the family who were of the abuse, but did nothing about it, the punch to the stomach is the symbolic gesture of allowing the abuse to continue through their silence. There are many references to senses in the film, the ear, talk of 'surveillance', the blind man that 'senses' how many fingers he is holding up. This shows the tight-knit structure of small-town suburbia, where nobody has any secrets and everybody is spying on everybody else. Word travells quickly in small towns. When something is wrong, people 'sense' it. The fact that they ignore what is really happening is the true betrayal to Geoffrey.

Towards the end of the film, Geoffrey hides in the closet again as Frank comes looking for him. This is a very obvious scene that represents a memory of his father trying to find Geoffrey with the intention of abusing him – "pretty! pretty!" – when he opens the closet, Geoffrey kills him, and a light goes out. This represents his father dying in real life, the light is the life support machine being switched off. This 'sets him free' from his father's torment and allows him to finally move on. After this, we emerge from the ear (coming out of the fantasy world we entered when we travelled into the ear at the beginning) and we see the Robins that symbolise that everything is alright.

LOST HIGHWAY EXPLAINED

This is not a psycho-analysis or a review of Lost Highway's artistic merits. It is only an explanation FOR THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY SEEN IT. And since you have already seen it I will skip telling the story and only decode it for you.

The "real" backdrop of the movie is this: a man has murdered his wife on suspicion of infidelity. He is sentenced to death by electrocution. While in prison he creates a flashback and a flash-forward. The movie runs linearly through these mental compositions, beginning with the flashback and ending in the flash-forward. The flashback is the man's attempt to understand how he ended up in prison. He then creates a flash-forward to project a fantasy. The flashback informs the flash-forward and both are entirely informed by the reality that led the man to commit the murder in the first place.

FLASHBACK: The first 40 minutes or so of the movie are the flashback. In this Fred lives with his wife Renee, who he believes is cheating on him. Hints that this is unarguably a mental construct are: 1) Renee is constantly in heels, even when she is in a nightgown and fresh out of bed. 2) The video tapes. 3)The mystery man. Renee is constructed as a seductress. The videotapes are messages from the murderer's subconscious trying to tell him he murdered his wife. The mystery man is an embodiment of jealousy/rage whom the murderer himself "let into his house." Fred tells the detectives, "I like to remember things in a particular way." This flashback leads him to where he actually is; in prison.

FLASH-FORWARD: In this fantasy he is the exact opposite of Fred. He is Pete, young, reckless, wild, and cuckolding another, much stronger man (Laurent). The woman is the same person as his wife in the flashback except in this flash-forward fantasy she is won by him (Pete) and ALSO more explicitly imagined as an out-of-control prostitute/amateur pornstar/nymphomaniac who ultimately wants to be with him. The mystery man as embodiment of rage/jealousy first appears in this phase as the cuckolded Laurent's friend. When Pete kills Andy and he and Alice escape to the shed where they copulate successfully – even though at the end Alice tells Pete (who by now visually transforms into Fred) "you can never have me" because in reality she is dead. But then Alice disappears and the mystery man sends Fred back to the motel to abduct and ultimately kill Laurent. He in fact helps Fred kill Laurent after showing Laurent what Laurent is being killed for through the mystery man's video-phone. In this sense the mystery man is not specifically the murderer's jealousy/rage but jealousy/rage in general (hence appearing by Laurent when Laurent suspects he is being cuckolded).
At the end Fred returns to his apartment and lets Fred from the opening scene (flashback Fred) know that Laurent is dead. This isn't a resolution of a through-line but hints at the loop in the murderer's mind where he will probably go over different variations of these two mental compositions over and over as he awaits his electrocution.

In the "real" sequence of events the murderer probably suspected his wife of sleeping with a Laurent. After killing her in a fit of madness, his subconscious attempts to tell him what happened (in the flashback, through the videotapes) while in the flash-forward his imagination/fantasy constructs elaborate characteristics of the two objects of his jealousy/rage: Laurent as a tough gangster whom he cuckolds and kills (this is his mind saying "I banged your girl and killed you mofo – ultimate revenge), and Renee as a nymphomaniac with overly transgressive sexual inclinations (this is his mind saying "man, she loved me but boy was she a slut"). In either case the mystery man is the embodiment of jealousy/rage.