Blue Velvet by Atkinson Michael

Author:Atkinson, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

All the same, Dorothy’s manipulative attempts to seduce Jeffrey only work until she asks, then insists, that he hit her. Lynch shoots Rossellini in a monstrous upside-down close-up, her lips glistening as she purrs, ‘Hit me!’ Jeffrey, only ready to go so far along in his pursuit, begs off. ‘I’m leaving now,’ he says to her after he’s gotten dressed. ‘Don’t,’ she whispers into the bathroom sink. ‘Help me.’

The reverberations from his evening spent in oedipal horror/ lust never truly leave Jeffrey, just as a primal scene, witnessed so acutely, can linger over one’s subconscious life for decades. After a fierce dream sequence (in which Jeffrey sees himself for a moment as Dorothy, pummelled by Frank), Jeffrey wakes up with a start, and Lynch slowly pans up the bedroom wall to an unspecified object hanging on a nail: an amorphous brown rubber shape, seemingly a deflated balloon or toy, whose distinguishing characteristic is a yawning mouth lined with teeth. Though the significance of this little totem is truly up for grabs, we can read the ambiguous strangeness of it as echoing Jeffrey’s feelings of guilt and unease.

In any case, Jeffrey’s lighthearted, adventure-seeking demeanour is no more – compare his transformation to the embarrassed giggles of the sexually inactive teenager giving way to the impassioned gravity of the newly initiated – and Sandy notices immediately. Parking in Jeffrey’s car the next evening outside a warmly lit church, Jeffrey gives Sandy the facts of the matter, leaving out the sordid and incriminating details:

Dorothy Vallens is married to a man named Don. They have a son. I think that the son and husband have been kidnapped by a man named Frank. Frank has done this to force Dorothy to do things for him. I think she wants to die. I think Frank cut the ear I found off her husband as a warning to her to stay alive.

Jeffrey’s conclusions are based almost wholly on one moment, Frank’s departing declaration to Dorothy: ‘You’re still alive, baby. Do it for Van Gogh.’ If the Dorothy–Frank dynamic makes sense outside of its collision of deviant needs and psychological battery, it may pivot on this one reading. Chion thinks so, maintaining that ‘Dorothy is prey to a sense of terminal depression’, and that Frank’s scheme (whatever its untold literal aspects) revolves around keeping Dorothy alive by threatening her with the lives of her family. Frank’s thesis here is far from clear, but Dorothy’s becomes lucid. As Chion points out, not only does Dorothy fit the paradigm of Lynch heroines from Mary in Eraserhead to Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, her behaviour throughout is that of a forestalled suicide. The help she requests from Jeffrey has apparently nothing to do with her kidnapped family; she needs to be saved from slipping into a void and never coming out. Jeffrey realises this immediately, although he understands as little as we do as to why she is as she is. (Lynch had shot and then cut a scene on the

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