Blue Velvet

Jung's Shadow is the disowned material of the psyche — the sexual, aggressive, primitive, unspeakable contents that the conscious ego refuses to integrate. Disowned material does not disappear. It collects underground. The denser the surface respectability, the more energy the Shadow accumulates beneath it. A civilization that builds white picket fences with manicured roses requires, structurally, that the disowned material be processed somewhere out of sight.

Lynch's opening sequence is the cleanest visual demonstration of this principle in cinema. The camera moves through the perfect images of the postwar American dream — the friendly suburban surface — and then descends, literally, into the soil. What is under the soil is not metaphor. It is the actual content. Black beetles, writhing, eating each other. The sound design is overwhelming. This is what the suburb is built on. This is what makes the surface possible.

The severed ear that Jeffrey finds in the field is not a clue. It is an entry point. The ear is the organ of hearing. The ear in the grass is the suburb's listening apparatus, severed and abandoned, found by the young man whose curiosity has not yet been disciplined into looking away. Jeffrey picks it up. He brings it home. He puts it on a plate. The camera zooms into the ear's dark canal and we are inside the auditory channel of the suburb's unconscious. From that point forward, the film is operating inside the Shadow's territory.

The detective, the local authority, knows that Frank Booth exists and knows that processing Frank is part of what the town requires. The detective will not investigate Frank directly. Jeffrey investigates Frank directly because Jeffrey has not yet learned the adult discipline of not-looking. The investigation is Jeffrey's initiation into what every adult in the town knows and does not say.

Dennis Hopper's performance as Frank Booth is one of the most committed depictions of the unintegrated Shadow ever filmed. Frank is not a villain in the conventional sense. He is a fully energized human being whose entire personality is composed of the material the suburb has refused to acknowledge as its own. He is sexual without civilization. He is violent without rationalization. He is the suburb's id walking around in a leather jacket.

Frank uses an inhaler during his sexual encounters with Dorothy. The inhaler's contents are never specified — amyl nitrite, helium, gas of some kind. The point is the regression. Frank inhales and becomes infantile. He calls Dorothy 'Mommy.' He weeps. He rages. He occupies, simultaneously, the position of brutal aggressor and the position of needy child. This is the Shadow's actual structure. The disowned material is not only the violent. It is also the infantile. It is the pre-civilized, pre-verbal, pre-formed material that the adult ego has had to seal away in order to function in society.

Frank's relationship with Dorothy is the suburb's relationship with the maternal feminine, expressed without the usual concealments. He needs her. He hates her for being needed. He punishes her for the dependency he cannot acknowledge. He calls her Mommy because the call is honest. The viewer is supposed to be shocked. The shock is the recognition that the suburb's official sentimentalization of mothers — the apple pie, the apron, the kitchen — is the same psychic structure as Frank's, with the violence sealed off and the sentimentality made acceptable for daytime television.

Lynch is not arguing that Frank should be celebrated. Lynch is arguing that Frank is what the suburb produces by refusing to acknowledge its own contents. Frank exists because the surface requires him. The Detective knows. The town's adults know. Jeffrey — newly returned, newly curious — does not yet know. The film is Jeffrey's education in what his town actually contains.

The closet scene is the film's central transmission and the scene most viewers most actively avoid thinking about afterward. Jeffrey is hiding in Dorothy's closet when Frank arrives. He watches, through the slats, as Frank performs his ritualistic sexual violence. The camera repeatedly cuts back to Jeffrey's face. The face is not horrified. The face is not turning away. The face is fascinated. The face is aroused.

This is the moment the film stops being about Jeffrey investigating Frank and becomes about Jeffrey investigating Jeffrey. Frank is the open expression of material that Jeffrey contains in latent form. The watching is not surveillance. The watching is rehearsal. Jeffrey is studying what he might be capable of if the constraints were ever removed.

Later, when Jeffrey is with Dorothy himself, he discovers that he is capable of striking her. She has asked him to. He does. He is appalled at what he has done. He runs. The appalled-running is the suburb's standard response to discovering its own contents. The act has already been performed. The discovery is only that the capacity was there.

The closet is the viewer's position. The audience in the theater is watching what Jeffrey is watching. The audience is also being shown a portion of itself. Lynch is not entertaining the audience with depravity. Lynch is exposing the structure of cinematic spectatorship — the safe darkness from which we watch what we would never permit in our own lives — and showing that the safe darkness has its own appetite. The film's deepest cruelty is to the viewer who came expecting a thriller and is instead shown their own face in the slats.