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August 22, 2007
I saw David Lynch's stylish 1986 "film noir" film Blue Velvet on DVD on the weekend. It is familiar to the terrain of Twin Peaks, as it explores the dark side of small hometown (Lumberton, North Carolina) that starts from the chance event of discovering a severed ear in a field.
Like Twin Peaks the self-conscious artiness appeals to the cinephile, as it is littered with quotations and allusions and it encourages us to identify these and interpret them.
 After we start with a death scene, we have a fragment--the ear in the field--that is the result of an act of severance, cutting, mutilation. We are presented with rotting flesh: an image that evokes feeling ie., sensation of revulsion and morbid curiosity.
The narrative is one of misogynist violence hidden beneath the veneer of idealised small town middle America: a parable about domestic violence in a patriarchal society shown through the eyes of an innocent boy/man who comes to enjoy voyeurism and rough sex.
What is presented is a tragedy about people living in a world of darkness and confusion and succumbing to violence and the desire to control others. The central male figure is an authoritarian character, a misogynist and a psychopath.
In this world of desire the law is instituted in the name-of-the-father who rules. Seduction, sadism and perversion go together and are part of a will to mastery and domination.
However, there is no coherent context or whole to the film as the text is self-consciously littered with part-objects and image fragments, within a duality of light and dark.
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