In dreams… You’re mine:A meditation on Subconscious Desires in Blue Velvet
...e-like creatures that are horrific looking and terrorizing. His purpose is to make the whole garden seem unrealistic. It is too perfect from the outside but inside it is too horrific. If Lynch had shown little red ants, perhaps audiences would relate their own backyards to this garden. Yet by showing something so radical it gives the audience the reassurance that it could never be their own garden. Another example of the rule of opposites is the mood Lynch creates using light and darkness to represent dream-like atmospheres. The first and last scenes are the only ones in the movie with light which represent Sandy’s dream of perfection and love. In fact, in the next to last scene when Jeffrey is reunited with Sandy, the light is almost blinding. Conversely, the bulk of the movie is dark and saturated with color which represents Jeffrey’s dream. There is darkness everywhere around Dorothy’s apartment and all throughout the joyride Jeffrey takes with Frank. Again the audience is bombarded with unrealistic lighting and darkness. It makes both of these dreams or environments equally disturbing and alien. However, the most evident of opposites used in this movie is the characters themselves. The most prominent of these opposites is Jeffrey and Frank. Both seemingly represent the opposite of one another. Jeffrey is a young, pure boy, who goes to college and visits his father when he is sick. Frank, in contrast, is an almost middle aged man, who seems to control all the underground activity in Lumberton. “He represents masculinity to its extreme - twisted, violent, and psychotic” (Rodley 144). He is tough, listened to, overpowers and controls women, and everything he does is solely for himself. This extreme unnatural behavior reassures audiences that they are not being portrayed in Frank. They brand him as an “other,” someone unlike them. Conversely, audiences can relate themselves to Jeffrey. He is very average in looks, intelligence, and abilities. Any person can fit into Jeffrey’s shoes. The feeling of comfort from Jeffrey and uneasiness or disturbance from Frank creates a mood of disbelief because they are such an impossible pair. They seem like an odd couple of average person and out-of-this world psychotic. The two women in the novel also seem to be opposites of one another. Sandy is seen as a young blonde who is happy and lives the perfect life with her family and friends. Dorothy, in contrast, is a lonely and depressed. She is separated from her family and is constantly abused and mistreated. “Their worlds are divided according to a traditional theme: the blonde associated with the conventional life and daytime, whereas the brunette belongs to the night and a world of shady, fearful characters,” explains Chion (91). It may seem that like Jeffrey and Frank, Sandy is a believable character and Dorothy is too dramatic and unrealistic. However, both these women represent extreme lifestyles. Sandy lives in what Chion describes as a sugary-sweet idyllic paradise, whereas Dorothy lives in this dirty, bleak underground world of chilling desire and pain. Sandy seems to be unsexed while Dorothy is overtly sexual. Audiences could not completely relate to these characters. Again, Lynch masterfully creates the illusion that Sandy and Dorothy are both “others,” people that would never be found is our society. They are too extreme and one sided. Through these characters Lynch masterfully reaches into the depths of human desire without revealing to the audience that it is a mirror of themselves. The audience, feeling detached and unaware, looks into themselves in these characters. The movie is not disturbing to people for only its imagery but for what it moves inside of them. As Chris Rodley describes, “If it is hard to define not only the experience of watching a Lynch film but also to pinpoint the very nature of what one has seen, it is because the uncanny – in all its nonspecificity - lies at the very core of Lynch’s work.” By showing outrageous settings and characters, Lynch is able to go into the hearts of people in a vague and unambiguous way. Not surprisingly, the characters go far beyond just being opposites of one another. After solidifying the blanket of security that the characters are not “real,” Lynch goes far deeper and brings them as close to the audience as ever. For what seems to be opposites of one another, each of these pairs of characters cannot “be” without the other, for they are the same. This is what is truly disturbing in the movie. It is not the fact that wild and crazy things happen at night that one only “dreams of,” but that these extreme polar opposites are not extreme at all. Together these characters represent the duality of man, the good and bad, conscious and subconscious, etcetera, which is in everyone. For instance, Frank is not just a common low life, but represents Jeffrey’s subconscious. They are in fact, the same man. Frank appears only after Jeffrey finds the ear; the ear that Jeffrey takes the journey into, both physically as he unravels the mystery and mentally as he finds his subconscious self. As Lynch insists, “It had to be an ear because it’s an opening. An ear is wide and, as it narrows, you can go down into it. And it goes somewhere vast…” (Rodley 136). It is the doorway into the subconscious. Between the ears the vast subconscious world beats with life. It has its own way of looking and understanding ideas and situations. It moves with its own desires and whims. Frank is the incarnation of these desires that Jeffrey, like any other young man, has repressed. Frank’s first appearance in the movie is at Dorothy’s apartment. Jeffrey, the audience’s eyes, is hiding in the closet watching as the scene unfolds. Jeffrey, a closet voyeur, watches the sexual and abusive plays between Dorothy and Frank. Instead of being shocked or turned away, he gets increasingly more interested in Dorothy. He finds her more attractive and gets more protective of her. He looks at Dorothy with the same desire, albeit a more sincere one, as Frank does. Through his subconscious, in this case Frank, he is able to experience new things that otherwise he would have never known or seen. Jeffrey does not have to act out every desire himself, for he would have to deal with the consequences. But through Frank he can enjoy the delicious secret desires that are deep within him. As the movie progresses, Jeffrey becomes more and more like Frank. After watching Frank physically abuse Dorothy, he himself hits her. Before Jeffrey and Dorothy have sex, Jeffrey hits Dorothy several times. This gives a glimpse of what sort of relationship Jeffrey and Dorothy would have had, which is not that dissimilar from Frank’s relationship with her. On another occasion, Frank sings Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” to Jeffrey: “In dreams...I walk with you/In dreams...I talk to you/In dreams...Your mine/All of the time/We're together/In dreams...In dreams.” The word “dream” in this song has numerous meanings, one of them being the state in which the subconscious controls the mind. This mental state, just like dreams, does not happen often nor are people aware of its presence or control. In these “dreams” Frank seemingly controls Jeffrey. In the fearsome joyride, according to Chion, Frank declares his love for Jeffrey and threatens his life, “if you get involved in my affairs, I’ll send you a love letter, which is to say, a bullet between your eyes” (93). Interestingly, Jeffrey is the one to “put a bullet” through Frank’s head in the end of the movie. Therefore, both Jeffrey and Frank control one another, just like Frank says they “dream together”. Nonetheless, Frank doesn’t represent only Jeffrey’s subconscious. If Jeffrey represents the average young man, then Frank represents the average man’s subconscious. Frank lives inside every person, deep in their minds. Therefore, just like Jeffrey, the audience does not need to act out their desires or fantasies, as Lynch himself explains, “You sit there in the safety of the theatre, and seeing is such a powerful thing. And we want to see secret things, we really wanna see them… the more new and secret they are, the more we wanna see them” (Rodley 145). The mind is just as satisfied watching as it is doing. For Jeffrey, as for the audience, just watching Frank is enough to satisfy their desires for “perversions.” Similar to Jeffrey and Frank, Sandy and Dorothy also seem to represent the same person, but in an entirely different way. They do not correspond to just one person, but represent women in general. Given that they are polar opposites in physical appearance and in lifestyle, these two women are very similar in other aspects. One of these is their source of pleasure. Amazingly, Sandy and Dorothy are both masochists. This can be seen easily in Dorothy’s character. She gets pleasure from being beaten. She is being blackmailed into doing things that might hurt her, but she refuses to do anything about it. She does not go to the police and prevents Jeffrey from doing so as well. The reason for this is not that she is protecting her child and husband, but that she herself is locked in a role that she enjoys taking part in. If she indeed wants to help her family she would have asked for Jeffrey’s help, whether it risks her life or not. Instead she uses Jeffrey for her own masochistic sexual pleasures. Many scholars attribute her characte...