Last night, I watched Blue Velvet (1986) for the first time and oh wow. Though it had been on my watchlist for some time and was something I’d meant to get around to eventually, it was recommended to me by my mother who had to watch it back in college for her cinema studies class, so I decided to finally give it a whirl. As I was watching it, I knew I would have to write something about this for my blog, so here I am. This movie was so fucked up, but I thought it was fantastic and I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it since.
Initially I had planned on writing about this through a psychoanalytical lens because of the whole Frank “mommy/daddy/baby” sexual dynamic (ikyk), but I decided that I don’t really want to think about Frank too much, so I decided to pivot. I had also considered writing about this film from a queer theoretical lens because I think that there is a lot to be said there as well, but, again, I did not want to think about Frank very much. So, I finally settled on looking at this movie through a feminist lens since I think there is still something to be said there, plus, some aspects of that lens tie into psychoanalytic theory, so it’s kind of a 2-in-1.
Blue Velvet has received a bit of criticism for being anti-feminist, saying that the film romanticizes the exploitation of abuse towards women, specifically domestic and sexual violence. However, I am of the belief that a mere portrayal of something in film is not the same as an endorsement, and Blue Velvet seems to make it pretty clear that the abuse that Dorothy Vallens faces is neither good nor glamorous or romantic. However, that being said, I do not think that this is a feminist film either. But, I believe that there are some aspects to Feminist Theory as described in Literary Theory: The Complete Guide by Mary Klages that provide an interesting perspective to consider Blue Velvet through.
But before I get into my theoretical analysis of the film, though, I’ll provide you with a not-so-brief synopsis. Be warned, there will be spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen it but you want to, either stop reading now and watch the film, or keep reading and don’t get mad at me for spoiling it for you.
Blue Velvet follows a college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, who returns to his suburban home town after his father has a stroke that lands him in the hospital. On his way home from the hospital one day, Jeffrey is walking in the field behind his house where he comes across a severed ear laying in the grass. He decides to pick it up and put it in a bag he found on the ground as well and he brings it to the local police station. Later on, Jeffrey decides to follow up with the officer he turned it in to, Detective Williams, who informs him that there is something to be done about this, but that he cannot divulge any of the details to Jeffrey until after the case has closed. Jeffrey, however, is too curious for his own good and cannot let it go, so with the help and encouragement of Detective Williams’ daughter Sandy, Jeffrey decides to take investigative matters into his own hands.
There’s a lounge singer, Dorothy Vallens, who lives in an apartment in the same neighborhood, who Sandy believes is linked to the whole situation, so she and Jeffrey take it upon themselves to inspect the situation a bit more closely by staging a way to get into her home to find out as much information as they can. Jeffrey poses as a fumigator and sprays Dorothy’s home as a guise to steal her keys so that he can come back and explore later when she isn’t home. When he returns to her apartment, he misses Sandy’s “get out of there” signal, so he hides in the closet when he realizes that Dorothy is about to walk in. He peers at her through the slats in her closet door as she undresses, talks on the phone, and goes to the bathroom. However, she discovers him, forces him to strip at knifepoint and starts forcing herself on him (which he doesn’t seem to mind much).
All of a sudden, there’s a pounding at the door and it is none other than Frank, a man who has kidnapped Dorothy’s husband and son and uses that as leverage to pursue sexual relations with Dorothy. Scared of what Frank will do if he sees Jeffrey, Dorothy urges Jeffrey to go back into her closet to hide. Frank is a fucked up guy. Frank inhales nitrous and thinks of himself as both Dorothy’s baby and daddy, though he only refers to her as mommy. He is extraordinarily sexually violent towards Dorothy.
During this whole encounter, Jeffrey is still in the closet watching these depraved acts of sexual violence take place through the wooden slats. He is horrified. But more importantly, he is intrigued. Jeffrey is insistent on returning to Dorothy’s apartment to see her again and find out more, despite Sandy’s hesitance.
On one of Jeffrey’s next visits (there are multiple), he and Dorothy are having sex when she asks him to hit her. He does not want to do this. She begs him to and eventually he gives in. He does not hate this. He wants to have hated this.
Frank eventually catches Jeffrey at Dorothy’s apartment and kidnaps him to take him on a joyride. Eventually, after sexually and physically assaulting Jeffrey, Frank and friends leave him on a dirt road somewhere. Jeffrey decides he has to give it up at this point, so after giving as much evidence against Frank as he can to Detective Williams, he devotes himself fully to Sandy and accompanies her to a high school party where the two confess their love for one another.
On the way home, they’re being chased by a speeding car, which they assume is Frank, but it is only Mike, Sandy’s ex-boyfriend, who is mad at Jeffrey for stealing his girl. However, as this altercation is taking place in front of Jeffrey’s house, we discover that Dorothy has been left there by Frank, naked and beaten. Jeffrey and Sandy rush over to her house to call an ambulance and the police to help her out. Jeffrey takes matters into his own hands and he goes back to that apartment one last time. When he arrives, people have been tied up and murdered. He tries to leave, only to see Frank showing up in disguise, so he rushes back into the apartment. He’s trying to contact Detective Williams on the police radio, but he forgets that Frank also has a police radio. Quickly thinking, Jeffrey uses this to advantage to misdirect Frank into the bedroom, while he goes back to hide in that closet one final time. He peers at Frank through the slats before finally shooting and killing him.
The film ends with Jeffrey and Sandy happier than ever, Jeffrey’s dad is fully recovered, and we find out that Dorothy and her son have been reunited as well, all in a dreamlike sequence of shots.
Now, this is obviously not a complete 1:1 of how exactly the movie goes down, however, I think this pretty accurately sums up the gist of the general plot points.
Back to theory. What is Feminist Theory? There are a lot of components to feminist theory, but the aspects of it that I want to touch on are in relation to the following quotes from Klages:
Thus “adulthood,” or becoming a linguistic subject, for Cixous, means having only one kind of sexuality: passive, vaginal, heterosexual, reproductive. And that sexuality, if one follows Freud to his logical extreme, is not about female sexuality per se, but about male sexuality: the woman’s pleasure is to come from being passively filled by a penis (remember, Freud defines activity as masculine, and passivity as feminine).
She aligns writing with masturbation, something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful, or silly, something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order to achieve adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in favor of vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality.
Cixous explains that men’s sexuality, like women’s, has been defined and circumscribed by binary oppositions (active/passive, masculine/feminine), and that heterosexual relations have been structured by a sense of otherness and fear created by these absolute binaries. As long as male sexuality is defined in these limited and limiting terms, Cixous says, men will be prisoners of a Symbolic order that alienates them from their bodies in ways similar to (though not identical with) how women are alienated from their bodies and their sexualities.
What I have surmised from these three quotes is that male sexuality is something that is active, it involves doing something to someone else. When women engage in auto-indulging their sexual pleasure it is something that is frivolous and childish, and they must instead opt for passivity; it is a man’s job to be actively sexual, and when a woman brings it upon herself to be actively sexual, she is assuming the role of the male, which is childish and bad (despite reigning supreme, systemically). Finally, the fact that sexuality is firmly confined to these structural binaries is limiting and alienating, even to males, despite them being the ones who set up that system in the first place. Men are taught to fear their sexuality in a different way than women; if men deviate from the norm of being actively sexual versus passively sexual, they are “not man” at all (making them women, which is “bad”).
Jeffery is shown throughout the film grappling with the ways in which he wants to enact his sexuality. It is clear that Jeffrey enjoys being a voyeur to the dark underbelly to his suburban town, but once he becomes an active participant in the mystery, he is grappling with the need to accept his actions.
Jeffrey enjoys being a spectator to sexuality. The women he lusts after, Sandy and Dorothy, are both in relationships with other men. He watches as Dorothy has her violent sexual encounters with Frank and he watches Sandy with Mike, though it is not the same.
Against his better judgement, his curiosity gets the best of him and he cannot control himself and he feels like he has to get involved in both of these situations, thus becoming an active participant. While he finds himself drawn to the spectatorship aspects, he is forced into a participating role. From here, Jeffrey begins to engage in a violent sexual relationship with Dorothy and a more surface-level romantic relationship with Sandy.
You would think that since Jeffrey is a male, he would be rewarded from breaking free of his desire for sexual passivity. The film goes about addressing this in two ways, which I find to be unique.
The first way highlights how Jeffrey is punished for his femininity, aka for his passive sexuality. Jeffrey is forced out of the closet (hmm) and is thrust into the middle of Dorothy’s world of sexual violence and criminal torture. Jeffery is suddenly shoved into Frank’s grasp and becomes a victim in his own right. Frank kidnaps him, molests him, and beats him up and threatens his livelihood in more ways than one. None of this would have happened, if not for Jeffery’s voyeuristic desires (though, it must be said that Jeffery is not totally passive in this instance, as he did make the choice to pick up the ear, bring it to the police, converse with Sandy, and then go to Dorothy’s house in the first place).
The second way does reward Jeffrey for becoming an active participant in his sexuality, by allowing him the sexual company of two women which does bring him sexual pleasure. He gets to tap into a dark side of his sexuality deeply embedded in him that gets coaxed out by Dorothy’s repeated begging for him to hit her. While the thought visibly distresses him, he doesn’t shy away from having violent sex with her. It makes him feel uncomfortable that he was able to go through with these actions, but he was able to see them through, nonetheless. Additionally, he gets to pursue a relationship with Sandy, and although it is less sexual and more innocent in nature, Jeffrey still gets his desire for romantic love fulfilled.
In the end, Jeffrey does end up living the ultimate American dream. He has his family and his white picket fence home and his girl-next-door girlfriend to make him lunch. He gets to sunbathe in the suburbs and disconnect the violence that lies right underneath the surface. There will always be the dark elements to peak suburbia and to his own sexuality that he’ll never be able to forget, however with enough repression, he will be able to ignore these aspects to himself and his town and ultimately still live his regular life.
I do think that the ending of this film speaks heavily on sexual repression, but that would be something to touch on more if I was reading this through a psychoanalytical lens.
David Lynch has taken a unique approach to feminism in this film. To the uncritical viewer, this film can easily get mistaken as misogynistic in its portrayal of female sexuality. However, I think that if we give this film an ounce of critical thought, we can understand that there is a subversive feminist commentary at hand here. Typically, we would be seeing a woman exploring her sexuality then ultimately being punished for it, before being given her “happy ending” that just involves living a traditional cookie-cutter suburban fantasy life. But Blue Velvet puts a man in the role of being forced to confront his sexuality. While it is being done in a way that makes more sense for a male character (exploring his desire to be sexually violent, which is a desire that most men probably have), it doesn’t negate the fact that this is a trope usually assigned to women. If a male character is depicted as exploring his darker sexual desires, he does not end up being punished and repressing himself, he usually is allowed space to see through the full limits of his sexuality—he is allowed to become a depraved, sexually deviant monster. The male is not typically granted the white-picket-fence, unless it is attained through coercive violence against the woman. Unlike most sexually deviant males, Jeffrey is able to fully repress that side of himself, he patches it up and moves on to better things—at least for as long as the ending scene of the film runs.
What becomes of Jeffrey after the credits roll? Will he allow himself to indulge his hidden desires for sexual aggression? Will he go back to displaying his voyeuristic tendencies? Will he repress his deviant sexual behaviors altogether?
I do not have the answers to any of those questions, but I will leave you with a quote from an exchange between Sandy and Jeffrey.
“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
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