Barbara Creed A JOURNEY THROUGH BLUE VELVET

David Lynch's film Blue Velvet threatens to make interpretation redundant, so openly does it flaunt its Freudian themes and narrative. Its protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), is an Oedipal hero. His real father is struck down (by a heart attack); he sets out on a journey, encounters woman as enigma, woman as symbolic mother figure, and makes love to her; finally, he kills the murderous father-substitute at which point some fonm of normality is restored and the hero is free to take a young woman of his own. The narrative is liberally dotted with Freudian signposts, often humorously treated: a severed ear, the symbolic use of 'keys' (to unlock the unconscious), the Oedipal drama which Jeffrey witnesses from a wardrobe, repressed homosexual desire when Frank (Dennis Hopper) kisses Jeffrey, the multiplication of father figures, the separation of a mother from her (male) child, woman as masochist, and so on. This surface knowingness and playfulness, the ironic tone and insistent parody of family values, mark Blue Velvet as a post-modern text. It also displays the expected generic pastiches of film noir, melodrama, and pornography. The sendup of Freudian themes as when Frank snaps his scissors over the Blue Lady's pubic area suggests a deliberate trap for the earnest or unwary theorist. But to argue that this puts the film somehow 'beyond' analysis not only falls into the intentionalist fallacy, it also misses the more interesting and disturbing questions about fantasy and spectatorship which Blue Velvet opens up. Certainly the film is parodic, but it can still be read in terms of what happens to its own surfaces, even in terms of its refusal to take itself seriously. From this point of view, Blue Velvet emerges especially in its representation of Freud's primal fantasies as an hysterical text. The concept of fantasy has recently been taken up by film theorists, particularly feminist writers, because it seems to offer a way out of a couple of related problems: too narrow an account of the film-spectator relationsbip, and the denial of a position for the female spectator.' The turn to fantasy has enabled them to counter the tendency to ascribe a fixed, masochistic place for both