Blue Velvet (1986)

While this frame is meant to stand as a Frame of Reference for just one David Lynch film, it could just as easily be a Frame of Reference for Lynch’s entire body of work. No frame articulates Lynch’s style better than this one.

Lynch’s vision of America as a Norman Rockwell nightmare distinguishes him from similar filmmakers, because although his world seems strange, perhaps alien, he continually foregrounds the strange in the real and the familiar. What frightens us about Lynch’s world is not that he’s managed to concoct some fantastic nightmare landscape out of the darkness of his mind, but because he reveals to us the darkness of the world we already live in and shows us the horrors of the world that exist but which we are not willing to see.

At first glance, this frame could almost make the viewer say “Awww …” because it superficially represents a scene of idyllic suburban Americana that we’ve been raised to desire; it’s almost as if part of our brain blocks out the dread and terror of the image in an attempt to preserve the myth of American domestic bliss. But there’s no avoiding the truth: as cute as the dog and the kid with the lollipop are, the white-haired patriarch still writhes on the ground, crippled by a malfunction in his brain.

And once we recognize that, everything about the image becomes menacing. The child remains on the concrete, hesitant to venture onto the lawn, frozen by ignorance and confusion as he clutches to his treat for comfort; or perhaps he watches with interest, deriving some pleasure from what he sees -- something that foreshadows the later behavior of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan). The dog’s attempts to drink from the hose no longer read as cute but as violent; he lunges and snaps viciously, his fangs bared, no glee in his expression, only anger. And the white picket fence cannot contain any of the terror.

But it's funny too. We have to stifle a bit of laughter at the irony of the image; we have a hard time processing cute and horrible existing simultaneously, and the best reaction to fight that off is a WTF kind of laugh. And it is amusing, but provoking that laugh is just Lynch's way of getting us to repress our fear for just a little while longer. He doesn't need to scare us yet; he knows he's got plenty coming up that will make us wet our pants.

Looking at the fence calls attention to the dizzying grouping of lines in the shot. There are the lines from the picket fence, of course. There are the bricks separating the garden from the lawn, and they also form pickets like the fence. There is also the strong, deep diagonal formed by the right side of the fence, leading our eyes off toward the jungle of the hedge, which is important because, a few moments from now, the camera will descend into the grass to reveal the violence lurking underneath the nature's superficial beauty. The beginning of the line created by the fence on the right is extended by the father’s body, which lies perfectly in line with the fence. Then there’s the line of the water from the hose, both going with the fence and away from it, as though it’s not part of the pattern or it’s not supposed to be there. And finally, there are these strange yard stakes that perfectly enclose the grandfather and the dog, perhaps to allow grass to grow back into the patch of mud, but is it any accident that the father falls into the mud?

All of these lines are orderly and meant to keep things tidy, and yet their arrangement in this frame serves to make the image appear chaotic and distorted. And that’s what Blue Velvet is all about—taking the totems of order and turning them into the instruments of disorder. Lynch understands that this is where true terror comes from: the discovery that behind what we revere as normal lurks true perversion. Up becomes down, dark becomes light, safety becomes danger, and sane becomes insane. Whether we’re talking about Blue Velvet or Eraserhead or Mulholland Dr., this is Lynch’s project, to seduce us with the comfortable images of American life and then deconstruct them until we see them for what they are: smokescreens for deep neurosis and fear.