In the early 1970s, French, American and British movie theorists began applying psychoanalysis to film in an attempt to discuss the spectator-screen relationship. It’s important because “Look” is a term that is criticised with identification about characteristics, space and what we see on screen; and at the end it is nearly everything about effectiveness of a film on a spectator. We should draw an analogy of the screen with the mirror as a way of talking about spectator positioning and the voyeuristic aspect of film viewing whereby the spectator is identified with the gaze. Freud defines scopophilia as the deepest taste of sight. According to him, the pleasure of looking is a basic instinct, and we can also search the roots of fetishism around these subjects. For someones, voyeurism term is counted as fetishism also.
Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviours, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions usually considered to be of a private nature. Even if all we watch on the screen is fiction, we spectate someone’s life without their conscious and permission,consciously. There are many arguments about voyeurism in cinema, but one of the most important examples is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window movie. Blue Velvet is also a great example, which will be used in this report. In this film, there are some kinds of complexes that can be argued in the subject of voyeurism.
The term voyeurism describes what are in fact two phenomena, different though not always easily distinguishable, which is called covert and collusive. ‘Covert voyeurism’, ‘is a narcissistic form of penetrative aggression directly related to Primal Scene fantasies and it involves gratification through the watching of objects who are themselves unaware of being watched […]. Collusive voyeurism on the other hand involves the experience of pleasure through the activity of watching objects who are well aware that they are being watched […]. This is a more sophisticated form of perversion because it implies some recognition that others are not just extensions of one’s own self, but real persons responding to the voyeuristic activities of the subject and potentially getting themselves exhibitionistic satisfaction from being looked at’.
Sexual perversions refer to a variety of fantasies – from fetishism to necrophilia, to the two-sided coins of voyeurism/exhibitionism and sado/masochism – fantasies sometimes played out in actual activities involving relationships with other people, but mostly relegated to the dark corners of one’s unconscious mind.
Blue Velvet, written and directed by Lynch in 1986, is a masterful work providing material sufficiently intense to deeply engage the audience, spectators, both visually and emotionally, but so artfully created as to allow them to immerse themselves in this material without becoming excessively disturbed by it. He mixes classical Hollywood narrative structure with postmodernist auteur understanding in the base of the movie.
The film similarly presents the innocence of domesticity as nothing but a naïve folly, the antithesis of the world’s strangeness. It suggests that order is unattainable in the modern world. We must keep watch over one another because while our neighbours run amok, authority is unreliable at best.
Blue Velvet, as Lynch describes, is a “story of love and mystery.” In order to experience this story of love and mystery, Lynch invites the viewer to enter into a hermetic space as both detective and voyeur. Lynch creates a world that is at once familiar and strange; it is a world governed by opposites, where surface and depth, good and evil coexists simultaneously. In the film, opposites function to delimit a certain psychological space, one that is momentarily available to the viewer through identification with the male protagonist. Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of Lynch’s film-making is his ability to translate psychological and dream space into a cinematic experience. Also, one of the most compelling aspects of Lynch’s style is his ability to make that which is familiar, strange.
With Sandy’s ambivalent collusion Jeffrey intrudes into Dorothy’s private space and personal life. Hidden inside a closet in her apartment, he witnesses Dorothy being verbally and sexually abused by criminal boss and psychopathic supremo Frank Booth who, having kidnapped her son and husband, uses his perverse powers to control her. Discovered by Frank, Jeffrey has then to bravely engage in some frightening confrontations with him. To further complicate matters, Jeffrey becomes erotically involved with Dorothy and romantically with Sandy, until the narrative gets resolved into a deliberately unconvincing ‘happy ending’.
“We all have at least two sides. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile those opposing things. I’ve always liked both sides. In order to appreciate one you have to know the other. The more darkness you can gather up, the more light you can see too.”
The notion of surface and depth, order and chaos, come into play according to a Freudian logic of the unconscious. Lynch, himself, has acknowledged his aesthetic interest in extreme differences: “Everybody’s got many threads of good and evil running through them”. This contrast between light and dark, surface and depth is treated quite literally in the film. The formal contrasts between colours contribute to the film’s dream-like atmosphere. For instance, the supersaturated brightness of the red tulips and yellow daffodils, set against the white picket fence make the blackness of night seem thicker and more impervious.
Moreover, the characters articulate psychological states of love and hate through evocation of light and dark. Sandy, for instance, speaks of a dream in which thousands of robins bring forth light and love to illuminate the darkness of the world. By contrast, Frank Booth finds comfort in and feeds off of the absence of light. He remarks at several points in the film, “now it’s dark,” as if to communicate his psychological comfort and familiarity with the unconscious.
One of the most overt plays with opposites arises from Lynch’s noir-inspired use of women in the film. Respectively, Sandy and Dorothy Vallens function as opposite poles by which Jeffrey gauges his own mental states. He associates with Sandy most often during the day, communicating with her his rational plans and hypotheses about the mystery he is involved in. Dorothy, by contrast, is associated with the irrational, and exists as a site for Jeffrey to gain knowledge of his own unconscious desires and perversions. While the two women function as counterpoints in the film, Michael Chion suggests that they in fact incarnate two sides of one figure, “each side endlessly leading to the other as in a mobius strip.”
While Jeffrey tries to help Dorothy, he turns into a man who is dragged into Dorothy’s desire to take advantage of her womanhood and approaches her with violence and instinct. This can also be explained by the fact that the disturbing elements of human beings are brought to the forefront through Lynch’s characters. Then, Jeffrey became a participant in voyeurism and eventually in sadomasochistic behaviour and in actions that appeared and he could not prevent.This also expresses the extreme desires that Jeffrey’s subconscious and social conventions suppress. Even Sandy’s suppression of himself in line with these rules leads Jeffrey to create a character like Dorothy under his consciousness. Frank and Jeffrey are also in the fight for sexual power. The dangerous man, Frank Booth, is an impotent, sadistic, terrible, cruel man with an Oedipus complex. He is trying to alleviate the disgust that he feels himself, by harming people and to enjoying it. At the same time, he has fetishistic impulse. He has a fetish in Dorothy’s blue velvet robe. When he touches it or takes it in his mouth, he has sexual satisfaction.His death was due to Dorothy and her perverted connection with him, as well as his obsession with revenge on Jeffrey and the cops who followed him. Jeffrey shot him down and the Oedipus complex process was completed.
By way of identifying with Jeffrey as protagonist, the viewer initially engages the film’s mystery in the role of detective. Gradually, the invitations to a voyeuristic gaze position the viewer more as a pervert. Sandy playfully poses the question to Jeffrey: “I don’t know if you are a detective or a pervert,” inciting the viewer to reflect, as well, on his own motivations and desires to know and to see. As Lynch readily remarks, “Film is really voyeurism…we want to see secret things, we really want to see them.” The pinnacle scene in which the film indulges this scopophilic desire occurs when Jeffrey witnesses the “primal scene” between Frank and Dorothy. As cinematographer Fred Elmes recalls, the camera’s point of view was kept in line with that of Jeffrey’s from his location in the closet.. We never shot anything that he couldn’t actually see from the closet.
As Chion notes, the performance appears contrived so as to elicit the greatest amount of pleasure for Jeffrey the voyeur. What is unusual about this scene is its theatricality. One wonders whether the characters do not enter, speak, move and behave solely to please the voyeur knowing full well they are giving him a show.
Indeed, not only do Dorothy and Frank give Jeffrey a good show, they do so for the cinematographer who, shrouded in the darkness of the theatre, sits in his own closet of sorts. I suggest that Lynch fully understands narrative cinema’s conventions of viewing, making Blue Velvet a particularly self-conscious film. He plays with these conventions not only through exaggeration, but also through an interruption of sorts. Upon Dorothy’s discovery of Jeffrey, she pulls him out of the spectator’s role and forces him “to exhibit himself, as on a stage.” This unusual turn of events no doubt makes the spectator nervous, particularly as Dorothy brandishes her knife threatening castration. Despite the intense sexual and violent energies Lynch brings up in this scene, there is a certain humour in witnessing such a literal enactment of Freudian clichés. And it is the viewer’s familiarity with these cinematic routines that gives the film a pleasure surpassing that of mere scopophilia. The mystery and beauty of the mind, for Lynch, is momentarily graspable through film as a language of the subconscious.
Jeffrey’s attempt to solve a mystery is then also a search for his own identity and masculinity. Jeffrey’s watching Dorothy being forced into a ritualised sexual encounter with Frank is an instance of collusive voyeurism. Dorothy is well aware of Jeffrey’s presence in the closet, and Jeffrey is well aware that she is well aware of it; but it is also an example of covert scopophilia insofar as Frank does not know of Jeffrey’s hidden presence in the room. Excited and horrified in equal measure, like a child exposed to the primal scene in the parental bedroom, Jeffrey watches on, and we with him as the fixed camera’s position invites us to identify with him. It could be argued that both Jeffrey and Dorothy were forced to create such a voyeuristic/exhibitionistic scenario, rather than having voluntarily constructed it for their own sexual pleasure.
It would be easy to describe Dorothy as Frank’s sex slave as we learn that he can control her by holding her husband and son hostage. We watch him violently abusing Dorothy, his face distorted in a grotesque sneer and covered by a mask through which he breathes amylnitrate, a drug inducing a state of euphoria and visual hallucinations. But his sadistic and drug fuelled sexuality is complementary to Dorothy’s masochistic association of pleasure with pain; while Frank is raping her, Lynch’s camera closes up on the almost ecstatic expression on her face. Soon after this scene we watch Dorothy seducing Jeffrey and begging him to: ‘Hit me, hit me, HIT ME!’. Presumably, she could only reach orgasm, for reasons likely to originate from some childhood traumatic experience, when feeling hurt and humiliated. Jeffrey, reluctant at first and guilty afterwards, complies with her request, realising perhaps that ‘the condition for his sexual initiation entails his acceptance of his sadistic impulses’ .
Often going unnoticed to others, the power of such persecutory fantasies can dramatically create for those affected by them the terrifying experience of living in hell. This may even apply to the world inhabited by Frank himself, a paranoid, psychotic inner universe which he can only survive by forcibly projecting it onto others. One aspect of it is his incapacity to think in other than concrete terms; for instance, he can only understand in such terms the metaphorical meaning of the ‘blue velvet’ in Dorothy’s signature song. We see him fetishistically caressing a piece of blue velvet material when listening to her singing in the Slow Club, placing the blue velvet belt of her dressing gown in her and his own mouth while raping her, and having pushed yet another blue velvet cloth in the mouth of her murdered husband, we then discover, whose left ear had been cut off. Shot by Jeffrey, Frank dies holding Dorothy’s dressing gown across his arm.
In this film, Dorothy is a factor in Frank’s Oedipus complex and is described as mum, at the same time being mum of a son, in the movie. There is sadomasochistic sexuality between Frank and Dorothy. Frank, who has mental disorders, is aware of his own illness and reflects his anger about himself and his diversity outwardly, and especially to Dorothy as violence. She must have had this violence for a long time. Thus, the violence she sees has now become an element that satisfies her in a masochistically sexual way. Dorothy then notices that she is being watched by a voyeurs man. After seeing Jeffrey, she picks up the knife and tells him to take off his clothes. She reflects the violence to Jeffrey that she learned from Frank, and sadistic sexual events come to the forefront. Even if she is in a hard condition like beaten and tortured, then left as naked, she was trying to charm Jeffrey at Sandy’s home in front of her.Furthermore, in the ending part, we see that she comes to Jeffrey’s house as naked and tortured. And she does not care being watched by Mike and his friends and also other neighbours. When we come to Frank, he gives lots of examples in the movie about how much he hates being spectated.
The Oedipus Complex, according to psychoanalytic theory, consists of a boy’s ownership of his mother, the elimination of a parent in his same sexuality, feelings, thoughts and nudibranchs. According to Freud, a child’s first love is the parent who has the opposite gender of her/him. The boy hesitates from the father, a power authority at home, and sees him as a competitor. In this movie, Frank represents the oedipal-father. He could not get out of the Oedipus complex. At the end of the movie, Jeffrey killed Frank and the Oedipus tragedy becomes real. Also regulation is settled to normal one with Dorothy embracing her real son. Primary Scene is the moment when a child sees his/her mother and father through sexual intercourse. It can not be remembered but it is suppressed. If the child remembers seeing this moment, this is called a secondary scene. From here we can figure out what Jeffrey witnessed in a primary scene. According to that Jeffrey becomes the baby in the Oedipal complex triangle here.
Some psychoanalytic authors who have written about this film focus on Jeffrey’s attempts to deal with his as-yet unresolved Oedipal issues. When Sandy asks Jeffrey, “Are you a pervert or a detective?”, it is a rhetorical question, for we can see that the detective’s search will embody a perverse solution’. Jeffrey is both a detective and a pervert, insofar as all detectives are, so to speak, also perverts. Here, then, Sandy’s question would relate not just to Jeffrey, but also to her own father who had chosen the detection of crimes as his professional activity. And it would relate to us, curious viewers of Blue Velvet …
As both Jeffrey and Sandy state more than once: ‘It’s a strange world, isn’t it?’
Finally, the movie has a happy ending like almost all Hollywood films. In comparison to other waves of cinema that the world has been seen before, its low budget is the same with nearly every cinematic wave in order to try something new, speaking something unspoken and directed by an alien-head to this world.
Lynch got involved in the story of Blue Velvet, and so taken by his need to tell it in the visual language so distinctively his own, that he was not too bothered about its reception. Sekoff critically suggests that ‘Blue Velvet enters popular culture as another fetish, a commodity fetish that allows the purchase of an experience of the “dark side” of life’. Lynch is a visionary, intuitive rather than intellectual filmmaker. As a result, his story-telling style is often free associative and requires from us viewers a complementary attitude of free-floating attention, or suspended disbelief, analogous to that familiar to those of us sitting behind an analytic couch.
Bibliography:
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- Anne Dunn, Rosemary Huisman, Helen Fulton, Julian Murphet. (2005). Scopophilia. In: Anne Dunn, Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet, Helen Fulton Narrative and Media. Google Books: Cambridge University Press. 88-89.
- Kübra Nisanoğlu. PSYCHOANALYSIS, VOYEURISM, FETISHISM AND FEMINIST THEORY: BLUEVELVET CASE BY DAVID LYNCH. Available: https://www.academia.edu/41386266/PSYCHOANALYSIS_VOYEURISM_FETISHISM_AND_FEMINIST_THEORY_BLUE_VELVET_CASE. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- Stephanie Lam. (2009). David Lynch’s Blue Velvet The Use of Binary Oppositions and Space. Available: https://offscreen.com/view/lynch_blue_velvet. Last accessed 01/04/20.
- TOM WATCHORN. (2016). How Blue Velvet reflects the voyeuristic gaze of Rear Window. Available: https://lwlies.com/articles/blue-velvet-rear-window-voyeurism/. Last accessed 01/04/20.
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