Blue Velvet is difficult to watch. The film, like its teenage protagonist, is representative of that adolescent age where popularity becomes important. Adolescence is melodramatic and dangerous. It is a period of transition via experience of the world. It is disorientating to follow, and can be far more uncomfortable to watch than it is entertaining.

In my personal experience, I can initially dislike a film if it doesn't entertain me, then I hear the theory behind it, and suddenly, when I hear what the filmmaker was trying to say, I love it. But when a filmmaker takes all these fabulous ideas, and condenses them to a signifier or metaphoric reference, only to be translated by a film student, and pieced back together again to form the same information, it becomes tiresome. If the film wasn't even entertaining, then what was the point in making it? I'd rather they wrote a book and be done with it;

"If you could put into words the symbolic equivalent to most of my visual concepts, no-one would probably want to produce my films." 1. - David Lynch in an interview in 1990.

There are different types of cinema for different purposes. Modern Hollywood cinema has the main objective of entertaining. Moral messages can be entwined if they suit the storyline, but they aren't the first objective. Cinema is a powerful medium in the world today because we are of a generation that carries most of our belief systems about the world around us from TV and cinema. The way it differs from our knowledge of literature and non-filmic art is because popular cinema allows us a certain escapism from reality, and offers this invisible filmmaking and storytelling as reality. In our minds, we often carry these references and hold them against our own real experiences. Literature cannot create the same false reality, as the evidence of the written words is a storyteller that we can see. If a filmmaker is interested in challenging what we perceive as reality, then there will be an obvious discrimination from audiences that are aware of the fact that they are being given information. Such cinema can be tiring to watch.

In Blue Velvet, as we become introduced to our protagonist Jeffrey, a virginal teenage boy, it seems appropriate. The film follows his initiation into the dark world of the antagonist, Frank. David Lynch has described Blue Velvet as a "Story of love and mystery. It's about a guy who lives in two worlds at the same time, one of which is pleasant, the other dark and terrifying." 2. Blue Velvet, as a film, also lives in two worlds. Even when Jeffrey becomes afraid and tries to escape the dark culture he has seen, he is pursued by it. He must co-exist between worlds. As must the film; it stays mainstream by its hilarious version of closed filmic storytelling. There are various scenes of terrible melodrama, with dialogue from the blonde 'good girl', that "there's trouble 'til the robins come."

"You get the sense... that Lynch in his heart would like to save the sweet, blonde homecoming queen from having to grow up... In this rather politically unpopular way, he is an intensely conservative storyteller, a consort of J.M. Barrie," 3. says Michael Atkinson of Lynch's habit of creating counter, difficult cinema. Blue Velvet is however a little darker than Peter Pan, and had Peter reached adolescence, maybe this is what we could have seen. "I'm seeing something that was always hidden," Jeffrey concludes early on in the Blue Velvet. Has closed filmic storytelling hidden something that should be easy to see?

The safe closed forms of filmic storytelling can be represented metaphorically by the geek in high school who must keep his head down, or be bullied down by the ignorant masses. Blue Velvet is the geek that doesn't know its place, and that hits on the blonde cheerleader. And yes, later it will lead to it being chased by the angry football player, who is a figurehead of the action trumps words mentality that the adolescent masses will adopt. This film is counter cinema because it opens the conventional storytelling form at the risk of mass disapproval.

Mass disapproval is seen because Blue Velvet displays ontological behaviours, threatening traditional values. The danger of this in relation to the masses lies in the way that cinema has altered our perceptions of the world and shaped our own references. In difficulty in our lives, we may look to a fictional protagonist that has overcome an obstacle, and measure our own courage against them. Blue Velvet brings forward protagonists that mimetically alter our references. We hope we are not like Frank, and we may sympathise and identify with Jeffrey's socially taboo voyeurism.

What if we are sympathising with a perverse protagonist? Are we perverse? Or can we blame the filmmaker? An accepted rule of script writing is to create a bond between the audience and the protagonist. The audience does not have to agree with the protagonist's methods; perhaps through theft or murder; but they must care for the protagonist reaching his/her goal. But a cinema can be walked out of, and a DVD can be stopped. Eyes can be closed. (In a crowded cinema in Long Island, on Blue Velvet's opening night; a large amount of people rioted, threw things at the screen and walked out.) 4.

Now we can eliminate the type of people that would stop watching, and focus on the people metaphorically left in their cinema seats. Are they perverse for continuing to watch? They didn't walk out, they have one less excuse. Is it still questionably the filmmaker's fault? Lynch admits he centred his own pathologies in Blue Velvet. Jeffrey's love of Voyeurism is in fact reflective of Lynch's own.

"Voyeurism that is not too sadistic (there is none which is not so at all) rests on a kind of fiction more or less justified in the order of the real... a fiction that stipulates that the object 'agrees', that is therefore exhibitionist." 5.

Examples of this fiction could be theatre or a strip tease. The lack of this fiction is when elements of sadism become involved. In the way of film, there is no individual consent between each Voyeur watching and the actors within the film. There is a certain, if only small, amount of perversion in this.

In the rape scene, Dorothy is placed in a position that makes her part of Frank's exhibitionistic, almost theatrical act. This scene is thoroughly disturbing, and like Jeffrey, we are forced to watch from a hidden place. In terms of mise-en-scene, we only see from the direction Jeffery can see. Dorothy's consent to the Voyeurism is similar to her agreement with Frank to let him molest her in exchange for her family's safety. Jeffrey's life would be at stake if Frank knew that he was in the closet.

The Voyeurism of this film is interesting. The inside looking out, rather than the outside looking in. This language suggests internal conflict, and being trapped within. Jeffery tells Dorothy when she pulls him from the closet that "I didn't mean to do anything but see you." To this Dorothy commands "Don't look at me!", whilst initiating a sexual encounter at knifepoint. We later realise that this is an echo of Dorothy's abuse by the antagonist, Frank. Frank often represents the film's sub textual message of repressed sexuality. He seems to be impotent. Yet the majority of his behaviour act as a substitute; a frustration of his inability to climax. In Dorothy's rape scene, Frank stuffs her mouth and between her legs with the blue velvet from her rope. An expression of violence is shown in his cutting of her robe with scissors, yelling; "Don't you fucking look at me!"

Christian Metz explored Freudian theory, theorising that the obtaining of a desire cannot easily satisfy the sexual drive, as food can cure hunger. In this way, a sexual drive must sustain itself, as no real object can. So the drive "pursues an imaginary object (a 'lost object') which is its truest object. An object that has always been lost and is always desired as such." 6

Frank seems like the sexual drive that cannot be satisfied. He's searching for any outlet he can find for his frustrations. He can do anything but have sex; so he does everything but. There is a lot of internal torture apparent in Frank's character, and by his behaviour there is most likely a traumatic event in his own past that he is echoing. He reacts to his own unseen demons during his rape of Dorothy. A scene where he is crying into a piece of blue velvet cut from Dorothy;s robe while watching her perform a song on stage, suggests the material itself, or the song, is a signifier. It reappears throughout the film, diegeticly through Dorothy's song at the beginning; her mournful acknowledgment of its importance.

Frank and Jeffrey have a dichotomy. "You're like me," Frank tells him. There is a degree of fetishism in the relationship between the two men. Fetishism; back again to Freudian theory; represents a 'just before'. Objects or items that were present just before the change or reordering of a belief structure. 7. It is possible that had Jeffrey continued on the path he was on during the film, he may have ended up like Frank. Jeffrey may be the 'just before'. Frank talks of love letters to Jeffrey, then kisses him with lipstick on all over his face and stuffing a scrap of blue velvet in his mouth. Jeffrey is then beaten, showing Frank's natural link in his own mind between sex and violence. This beating and declaration of love to Jeffrey shows that Frank sees him as a kind of fetish object, the evidence of a 'before';

"'If I desire myself, it must, following elementary logic, be because I am not it." 8.

Frank, representative of a harsh truth of the world, appears in a pound-store disguise. We can argue that until we see the film through, the disguises aren't so easy to see through. Then the disguise is as detectably fake as the robin on the windowsill in the happy ending.

Lynch himself said that psycho-analysis in relation to his films, "destroys the mystery, this kind of magical quality... it's lost it''s mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience." 9.

Blue Velvet becomes difficult to watch when we worry that we are perverse for not walking out. Even more so when we don't take responsibility for our Voyeurism. In our inaction, that echoes Jeffrey's reluctance to stop both rape scenes, (Dorothy's, and another that was cut from the film) questions whether we are at the 'just before'. If Voyeurism becomes acceptable, then a further step becomes more real. For this, we are glad that Blue Velvet is only a film, and that we were mere spectators with Jeffrey inside the closet. But cinema is powerful, and such information is now there to be referenced. Counter cinema makes further cinema of any kind more difficult to watch;

"The meanings of signifiers are determined by their relation to other signifiers rather than by their reference to any linguistic reality. Films are texts to be 'read' and reading them requires our initiation into the specific ideological biases of cinematic discourse." 10.

The prominent signifier, the blue velvet material shares its name with the film itself. The film therefore seems not solely entertainment, but a point of reference. Like Jeffrey, we end up back in a melodramatic world where the robins come back, and we get a happy ending. He has changed, and so have we. In the last remnants of identification with our protagonist, we can see the happy ending for what it is in relation to his new experiences during the film. Hollywood cinema won't be quite the same again.

If we once again metaphorically see Blue Velvet as adolescent, we see that its unpopularity may be the result of the traumatic distortion of a belief system during transition.



@->-- Notes



1. David Breskin's 'The Rolling Stone Interview with David Lynch', 'Rolling Stone', 6th September 1990.

2. David Breskin's 'The Rolling Stone Interview with David Lynch', 'Rolling Stone', 6th September 1990.

3. Michael Atkinson, 'Blue Velvet.' British Film Institute 1997

4. Michael Atkinson, 'Blue Velvet.' British Film Institute 1997

5. Christian Metz, from 'The Imaginary Signifier.' Film Theory and Criticism sixth edition - Braudy Cohen - Oxford University Press 2004

6. Christian Metz exploring Freudian theory - from 'The Imaginary Signifier.' Film Theory and Criticism sixth edition - Braudy Cohen - Oxford University Press 2004

7. Christian Metz exploring Freudian theory - from 'The Imaginary Signifier.' Film Theory and Criticism sixth edition - Braudy Cohen - Oxford University Press 2004

8. Quote from M. Borch-Jacobsen, 'The Freudian Subject.' 1991

9. David Breskin's 'The Rolling Stone Interview with David Lynch', 'Rolling Stone', 6th September 1990.

10. Christian Metz, 'The Passion for Perceiving' from 'The Imaginary Signifier.' Film Theory and Criticism sixth edition - Braudy Cohen - Oxford University Press 2004



Bibliography;

Alexander, John - 'The Films of David Lynch' - Letts of London, an imprint of New Holland (publishers) ltd 1993.

Atkinson, Michael - 'Blue Velvet' - The British Film Institute 1997

Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristen - 'Film Art' third edition - McGraw Hill New York 1989

Bouzerau, Laurent - Interview with David Lynch - 'Cineaste' - Volume 15, number 3, 1987

Borch- Jacobsen, M - 'The Freudian Subject' - C. Porter London McMillan 1991

Chion, Michael - 'David Lynch'- British Film Institute, London 1995

Jarvie, Ian - 'Philosophy of the Film' - York University, Toronto - Routledge 1987

Lebeau, Vicky - 'Lost Angels - Psychoanalysis and the cinema,' - Routledge 1995

Metz, Christian, 'The Imaginary Signifier.' Film Theory and Criticism sixth edition - Braudy Cohen - Oxford University Press 2004

Mitry, Jean - 'Semiotics and the Analysis of film' - Translated by Christopher King - The Athlone Press, London 2000

Monaco, James - 'How to read a Film' third edition - Oxford University Press 2000

Rodowick, D.N - 'The Crisis of Political Modernism'- University of California press 1988.