Fantasizing the Father in Blue Velvet
A Different Kind of Separation?
Chastened by the failure of Dune(1984) and his sense that he had
lost control of the film, Lynch returned to a smaller scale for his next project.
He vowed never again to give up final cut on a picture, and this necessitated
making films for less money. But one could not imagine a more resounding
response to critical and popular failure thanBlue Velvet (1986). It became Lynch's signature film: if someone knows only one Lynch
film, chances are that the film is Blue
Velvet. After it appears, David Lynch
became David Lynch - a cinematic
auteur. He even received another Academy Award nomination for Best
Director. No prior or subsequent film generated as much popular and scholarly
interest or as much criticism (among feminists for the violence toward women,
among conservatives for the perverse image of small-town America, and among
Marxists for the seeming nostalgia for the 1950s). The interest almost
inevitably focused on the conspicuous division between two opposing worlds
that Lynch creates in the film.
