Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): society is a social construct, it’s all made of dreams, and we can’t stop the robin’s dancing

At the end of Blue Velvet, there’s a scene of suburban bliss with an obviously fake robin standing on the windowsill. I love that scene. There’s a great special feature (or maybe an easter egg) on the DVD, in which the cinematographer describes shooting it. He says they originally tried to get a real bird, but when they ended up using a fake one, he kept saying to Lynch, “We can’t shoot this; it looks ridiculous”, and Lynch responded, “Yeah, it’s perfect!”

The scene is played for irony, but its artificiality does not suggest that the characters’ happiness is a fleeting illusion. I think the whole point of the movie, which is emphasized by the hokey characters, the artificiality of the suburban setting, and the obvious fakeness of the bird, is that the happy everyday life that the characters briefly leave and then return to is an artificial construct. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less meaningful; the happiness that they find at the end is real, even if it is based on artifice. It’s like an extension of Rousseau’s description of the social contract: society is an expression of the general will. Blue Velvet extends that idea to the next level, in which the very reality of the everyday social world is a social construct. The robin is a fabrication, but it is a fabricated representation of social ideals; it is built from the ideals of the everyday people such as Dern. And as long as people live in terms of those ideals, they are real. They exist even if they are constructs.

Consider how that ties in with the role of blue velvet in the film. The blue velvet is vividly colored, but more importantly, it is textured, and Hopper pointedly feels it in the rape scene. It is a representative of the raw, visceral, tactile existence underlying the social construct. The robin, though a realization of Dern’s dreams, is artificial; the velvet you can feel between your fingers. Also consider the fact that the town is a logging town: it removes the wildness of the forest, uncovers the darkness hidden there (a theme returned to in Twin Peaks), and turns the trees into tools for human construction. The movie does a great job of setting up and showing the interactions and attractions of both worlds: the artificial world built of common ideals and phony robins, and the mysterious, raw world built of primal and personal deviance and populated by Frank Booths.

Also, the “In Dreams” scene is the greatest thing ever: a profound mixture of absurdity and melancholy, ideality and kitsch, propelling the film past the foundations of social reality and into the quagmires of the Self and the swooning horrors of obsessive love.

Tags: favorites, Lynch, movies, real and ideal, simulacrum, society