Artikel Blue Velvet

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.

Following Eraserhead ( 1977),The Elephant Man (1980), and Dune, the split between the public social reality and its fantasmatic underside seems even more pronounced in Blue Velvet. Almost every viewer of the film notices that it depicts "two separate worlds” that we experience as "thereal world”, that which we can see and hear and touch; and a subcon­scious, dream world which must remain hidden, so potentially dark and violent are its wanderings."' Lynch foregrounds the opposition between these two distinct worlds to such an extent that detecting it doesn't even require a sophisticated interpretive act. As Laura Mulvey rightly points out, "the binary opposition between the everyday and the netherworlds is there for all to see and to grasp."' Despite the obviousness of the oppo­sition between filmic worlds—the public reality and its underside—the most visible opposition in Blue Velvet does not revolve around desire and fantasy, but between two different modes of fantasy.

The binary opposition that everyone notices while watching Blue Velvet is one between two equally fantasmatic worlds: an excessively ordinary public world of Lumberton that coexists with a similarly ex­aggerated underworld populated by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and his associates. According to Slavoj Zizek in "the Blue Velvet universe … we encounter the fantasy in its two poles, in its pacifying aspect (the idyllic family life) as well as in its destructive/obscene/excessive as­pect.” Through this opposition, Lynch develops more fully what we saw at work in the structure of The Elephant Man. But in Blue Velvet, the different aspects of fantasy emergeas fully developed worlds rather than remaining, as in The Elephant Man, opposing modes of subjective (John Merrick's) experience. As a result, we are able to see their logic in a way we could not in the earlier film.

The public world that we see when the film opens is not "the real world" but a purely fantasmatic onc that corresponds perfectly—even too perfectly—to an American ideal. The opening shots show a bright bluesky, glowing red roses next to a shiny white picket fence, and a waving firefighter riding down the street- on a red fire engine with a Dalmatian by his side. These images suggest the kind of perfectly real­ized fantasy world that one never encounters in reality. On the other hand, the horrific underside of this public fantasy is equally extreme. Frank Booth and his gang revel in their perversity and total disregard for the public law. Mere exposure to them endangers the life of Jeffrey Reaumont (Kyle Mar Lachlan) and results in a severe heating. If the public world of Blue Velvet represents an American ideal, its underside represents an American nightmare. What distinguishes Blue Velvet from the typical American fantasy is the extent to which it hold these worlds apart.

Because Blue Velvet depicts two competing fantasy worlds, it con­stantly violates narrative logic in ways that are possible only within the structure of fantasy and in ways that reflect the struggle between the two fantasy worlds. Or, as C. Kenneth Fellow puts it, "Over and over again, Lynch commits blunders (both in his script and in his direction) in the areas of sequence, causation, and consistency."5 Pellow's scathing criticisms of the film have the ironic effect of detailing precisely how Lynch's film employs fantasy. For instance, according to Pellow, the setting for the film, Lumberton, "is a small town when that's conve­nient to his theme, and it is a big city when that serves his need.”' This ability of Lumberton to be at once small town and a big city indicates not the failure of Lynch's filmmaking ability but the fact that he has sit­uated us on the terrain of two opposed fantasy structures: in the ideal fantasy, Lumberton is a small town, but in the nightmare fantasy, it’s a big city. It has the quaintness of the small town and the problems of a big city (drug dealing, murder, etc.). Each of the "vacillations in narra­tive logic" that we might detect in the film—and there are many—point us in this direction. By presenting us with these two opposed fantasy worlds, Lynch lays bare how fantasy necessarily works.

Fantasy always functions in these two modes, one comforting and the other disconcerting. As Slavoj Zizek notes,

the notion of fantasy offers an exemplary fait of the dialectical coicindentia oppositorum: on the one hand, fantasy in its beatific side,in its stabilizing dimension, the dream of a state without disturbances, out of reach of human depravity; on the other hand, fantasyin its destabilizing dimension, whose elementary form is envy—allthat "irritates" me about the Other, images that haunt me of whathe or she is doing when out of my sight, of how he or she deceivesme and plots against me, of how he or she ignores me and indulgesin an enjoyment that is intensive beyond my capacity of representation, and so on and so forth.7

These two modes of fantasy have an interconnected relationship, as we saw in the case of The Elephant Man. But Blue Velvet further shows us by we cannot simply content ourselves with the stabilizing fantasy: it fails to provide the stability that it promises, and this failure of stability gives rise to the destabilizing or nightmarishfantasy that provides anexplanation for this failure. Though the stabilizing fantasy fails inher­ently, on its own terms, the existence of the nightmare fantasy enables us to rescue the stabilizing fantasy and explain its failure with reference to an external rather than an internal cause. It is in this sense that the fantasy of the ideal depends on it underside.

This interdependence of the two modes of fantasy causes us to expe­rience them at the same time and in an interrelated way. In this sense, the division of the two opposed modes of fantasy in Blue Velvet sepa­rates what we experience together. Just as we normally experience de­sire and fantasy in an interrelated way, we also experience the two modes of fantasizing—the fantasy of the ideal and the nightmare—simultaneously. That is to say, when we fantasize about our ideal, we fantasize simultaneously about the threats that imperil that ideal. If, for example, we entertain a nostalgic fantasy about small-town America, we also fantasize the imminent destruction of this ideal due to the rise of the large city. In our typical experience of fantasy, the nightmare ex­ists within the same narrative structure as the ideal.

Even cinematic fantasies tend to affirm this marriage of the two modes. A romantic comedy that strives to show a fantasy of an ideal ro­mantic union always rehearses the threats to that union. And a horror film that delves into a nightmarish fantasy stages this nightmare against the background of the ideal that it threatens. This is what gives Blue Velvet its initial distinctiveness as a film. By separating the two modes of fantasy, Lynch allows us to see their similarity. Ironically, when the ideal and the nightmare function together, we cannot see the underly­ing similarity that hinds them together; their very interaction has the effect of making them seem completely different. But in the act of separating and and opposing them, Blue Velvetrenders visible this similarity be­tween the ideal and the nightmare that fantasies usually obscure.'

Despite the obviousness of the opposition between the ideal world and the nightmare world, as is also true of The Elephant Man, this op­position is not the most important one that Lynch constructs in the film. He also creates an opposition between a world of desire and a world of fantasy. Between the two competing fantasy structures, Lynch inserts a space of desire and locates this space in and surrounding the apartment of Dorothy Wiens (Isabella Rosselhini). The fundamental divide in the film is thus not, as is often thought, between the proper public world and its criminal underside: they are two side of the same coin. What isradically different is the space of desire centered around Dorothy's apartment.

The divide between fantasy and desire in Blue Velvet is at once a di­vide between masculinity and femininity. That is, the film opposes masculine fantasy to feminine desire. In this relationship, feminine de­sire is a desire that no object can satisfy, a void that threatens to over­whelm both the desiring subject herself and the men who become caught within her desire. Masculine fantasy provides respite insofar as it imagines a scenario in which this desire has an identifiable object. The film depicts the struggle between these two positions, and in the process it reveals the inability of fantasy to tame completely the disrup­tion of desire.

Most feminist criticisms of the film focus on the seemingly complete male dominance that it depicts. For instance, Jane Shattuc claims, "As opposed to Hitchcock's melodramas, which often center on a woman, Blue Velvet is a man's world; it trades on women as passive objects of male voyeuristic gazes and sadistic impulses." This interpretation ac­cepts the competing fantasies as the sole filmic reality. Though the ideal and the nightmare fantasy appear to dominate the film (and become the focus of most interpretations), Dorothy in fact occupies the central posi­tion. And she is not simply central as the object over which men fight. She desires, and the men are left in the position of reacting to this desire,never acting independently.

Unleashed Desire

The idealized fantasy world that opens the film lasts for less than two minutes. After a series of bright fantasmatic images including roses in front of a white picket fence, a fireman waving from a passing engine, and a crossing guard helping children across the street, Lynch depicts Jeffrey's father Tom Beaumont (Jack Harvey) watering the lawn. The image of the father figure watering the lawn is not simply one in the se­ries of idealized images but the key one. The father holds together and anchor the other idealized images.

The father who collapses in this scene is not a figure of prohibition, a paternal authority barring subjects access to enjoyment; creates a stable relationship to the impossible, privelee object, he acts as the support for the entire fantasy structure evinced by the bright and cheery montage that opens the film. Because he plays the crucial role in tile ideal fantasy, his collapse necessarily appears as a dev­astating event. Fredric Jameson claims that the Film treats Tom Beau­mont's stroke as "an incomprehensible catastrophe—an act of God which is peculiarly an act of scandalous violence within this perfect American small town.""' The nonsensical, traumatic status of this event stems from the idealized father's role in the fantasy. Without him, the fantasy loses its appearance of scamlessness.

Immediately after Tom Beaumont's collapse, the tone of the film un­dergoes a dramatic change. As he lies on the ground, his hand contin­ues to hold the garden hose, and we see slow-motion shots of the pet dog repeatedly snapping at the jetting stream of water. The subsequent traveling shot at the level of the grass reveals the violent and active in­sect lift: that lies beneath the surface of the lawn, as the audio track turns louder and more voracious. The sequence of shots here—as is al­most always the case in Blue Velvet - illustrates the relationship between the idealized world of Lumberton and its obscene underside rep­resented by the insects. Tom Beaumont's collapse from a stroke creates an opening between the idealized world and its underside where Frank Booth dominates. Whereas the stable father figure keeps this underside hidden, his frailty renders it accessible. But despite the focus of most spectators and critics, what is most important is not this underside but the opening to it.

The sequence of scenes that follow also indicate the relationship be­tween paternal insufficiency and the emergence of an opening to an­other world. After this unnerving start, we see Jeffrey walking to the hospital to visit his father. He walks through an abandoned lot and picks up a few rocks to throw. This scene is important only insofar as it sets up the next two. Jeffrey sees his father in the hospital, and we see a look of horror on his face as he observes his father's debilitated condi­tion. After the scene at the hospital, Jeffrey again walks through the same lot and again picks up a fewrocks to throw. This time, however, while searching for rocks, he finds a detached human ear.

The fact that the hospital scene intervenes between the two scenes at the abandoned lot suggests a causal relationship between Jeffrey’s expe­rience at the hospital and what he finds during the second scene ata the lot. The absence of the father within the fantasy structure allows for the introduction of desire.11 Viewing the incapacity of the father allows Jef­frey to see the ear, which marks an opening within the fantasy world of Lumberton. As Lynch himself points out, the specific body part that Jeffrey finds is not simply a contingent element in the scene. He says, "It had to be an ear because it's an opening. An ear is wide and, as it nar­rows, you can go down into it. And it goes somewhere vast."" The opening that the ear provides in the film is the opening of desire itself. It represents a gap in the fantasy structure that allows the desire of both Jeffrey and the spectator to emerge.

In addition to the opening inherent in the very form of an ear, Lynch associates this particular ear with castration and thus with the emergence of desire. Someone has used scissors to cut the ear off the head of a person, and when the medical examiner pronounces the word "scissors," Lynch cuts back to the abandoned lot where we see a close-up of scissors cutting the police tape. This filmic emphasis on the act of cutting further links the ear to the emergence of desire. The cut of castration—or the castration threat—gives birth to desire by separat­ing the subject from its privileged object. It has nothing to do with anatomy but with the subjection of the subject to the exigencies of the social law. The ear thus acts as a threat to Jeffrey, a warning about the dangers of too much enjoyment (which Detective Williams (George Dickerson] repeats to Jeffrey), but at the same time it incites his desire because of the opening that it creates.

After Jeffrey's discovery of the detached ear, the film's form under­goes transformation. Though the fantasy world of Lumberton remains, it loses its perfect coherence and pockets of desire become evident within this world. The evening of his discovery, we see Jeffrey walking in the dark to visit Detective Williams, and then Lynch cuts to a close-up of the ear in which the camera moves toward and apparently into the ear. The camera movement here indicates that Jeffrey himself is plunging into the openness of desire. When Jeffrey staves Detective Williams's house, Sandy (Laura Dern) confronts him, and it seems as if she emerges out of a void of complete blackness in the middle of the image. This is another of the openings that begins to populate the fan­tasy world of Lumberton after the collapse of the father figure at the beginning of the film. As they begin to discuss the mystery of the ear and of Dorothy Vallens, Jeffrey and Sandy walk down a street that has the appearance of a tunnel or an opening to some other place. As Janet Preston notes, tunnel imagery dominates the film, but it becomes espe­cially prevalent as the film's narrative approaches and enters Dorothy Vallens's apartment. She says, "The interior of the decaying apartment building on Lincoln Street in which the victim protagonist, Dorothy Vallens, lives is the most significant tunnel image. It ... illuminates the theme of initiation into knowledge which coheres much of the film's imagery."13 Though Preston correctly sees Dorothy’s apartment as the culmination of the film's tunnel imagery, a site where openness and gaps exist throughout the filmic space, it does, in itself, provide no knowledge for Jeffrey. In fact, Dorothy’s apartment marks a point of Jeffrey's non-knowledge, and this is what has the effect of stimulatinghis desire.

The non-knowledge, or impossibility of meaning, is epitomized by the mise-en-scene of Dorothy's apartment and the surrounding area. Whereas Lynch depicts both the Lumnberton public world and the underworld as colorful and and full, Dorothy's apartment is a world of empty spaces and dark voids, a world bereft of the fullness that fantasy adds. When Jeffrey enters Dorothy's apartment using a stolen key, Lynch shoots the scene with very little light. Initially, the screen goes com­pletely black as Jeffrey enters and then we see Jeffrey walking around in the apartment in near-total darkness. Even after Dorothy returns home and turns on the apartment lights, the lighting in the scene re­mains dim, leaving dark spares within the mise-en-scene. Just before she discovers Jeffrey hiding in her closet, Dorothy moves into one of these dark spaces: we know she is in the apartment, but she appears to be in the middle of a void." This type of lighting suggests a world of desire where nothing can be known. Even the external shots of the apartment highlight our lack of knowledge about it through the use of lighting. We learn that Dorothy lives on the seventh floor, and yet in the first external shot of the apartment, the apartment appears to have only three floors. We see the first three floors and nothing but darkness above them. The lighting produces an apartment that is present as a visible absence.

Lynch constructs a rigid barrier between the world of desire within Dorothy's apartment and the fantasy worlds outside. One cannot easily access this appartment since the elevator is out of order, it requires traversing seven flights of stairs. Lynch further indicates the different world the appartment by changing the sound when Jeffrey approaches it - sometimes even eliminating nondiegetic sound all together. Within the diegesis, a similar sound barrier exists: Dorothy catches Jeffrey in her closet because a flushing toilet prevents him from hearing Sandy honk the car horn four times to warn him. Though it seems as if a contingent event—the toilet flushing—blocks the passage of the sound, it follows necessarily from the barrier that Lynch establishes in the film. Dorothy's apartment is an isolated space in which fantasy breaks down and ceases to provide the explanations that give the world its coherence.

Blue Velvet reverses the trajectory, moving from a world of desire to a world of fantasy that Lynch employs in his first three films. Here, the film initially immerses the spectator in the fantasy and subsequently depicts a space of desire within the fantasy world. This reversal of trajectory—which Lynch wouldrepeat in Mulholland Drive (2001)— illustrates that the relationship between desire and fantasy is dialectical rather than temporal. Even though fantasy attempts to solve the prob­lem of desire, this solution emerges simultaneously with the problem, not afterward. Neither desire's question nor fantasy's answer has a tem­poral priority, which is why Lynch can begin Blue Velvet with a world of fantasy and later thrust the spectator into a world of desire when he introduces Dorothy's apartment.

To say that the one site in Blue Velvet where fantasy ceases to operate is Dorothy's apartment seems counterintuitive. If a critical consensus exists about any aspect of the film, it concerns the fantasmatic nature of the scene in which Jeffrey observes Frank's sexual assault on Doro­thy. Michel Chion points out that "the kind of fantasy on display" here is one that reenacts "the surrealistic sexual theories of children."'5 Echoing Chion, Betsy Berry is one of many critics who specifies this as "the primal scene," which is "both man's and child's most terrifying scenario: the vision of violent coupling between one's parents."' Sam Ishii-Gonzales goes e‘cit further, noting,

This episode not only spectacularly evokes the primal scene, it also conjures up the two other fantasy scenarios identified by Freud as the primal fantasies—namely, the fantasy of seduction and the fan­tasy of castration. These fantasies are not interchangeable, but they often become interrelated or co-existent for the inquisitive subject. This is something Blue Velvetmakes dramatically clear. Within the confines of Dorothy's living space, Jeffrey Beaumont is confronted with each of the primal fantasies in all their enigmatic force; not in strict succession, but in continuous fluctuation.¹7

The problem with this otherwise exemplary analysis of this scene—and the others that see fantasy at work here—is that it wrongly identifies the attempt to construct a fantasy scenario with the successful elaboration of one.

Within Dorothy's apartment, both Jeffrey and Frank Booth con­front her desire, and each fails, despite their efforts, to fantasize a way of making that desire meaningful. The film centers around Dorothy's desire and her status as a desiring subject; the responses to this desire remain secondary and after the fact. Throughout Blue Velvet, it is com­pletely unclear what Dorothy desires, or if she desires anything at all. As Jeffrey tells Sandy after his encounter with Dorothy's desire, she seems to desire nothing. He says, "I think she wants to die. I think Frank cut the ear I found off her husband as a warning for her to stay alive." As Lynch depicts it in the film, Dorothy's desire is a pure desire: it desires nothing, and it refuses to satisfy itself with any pathological object. The very purity of Dorothy's desire—her unwillingness to ac­cept any fantasmatic substitutes. her refusal of every satisfaction—may lead us to think that she has no desire at all. But pure desire is in some sense equivalent to the complete absence of desire. In both cases, the subject experiences every possible object as inherently unsatisfying.

As the embodiment of desire, Dorothy draws men to her. They want to discover the secret of her desire, what it is that she wants, and the fact that she wants nothing, that nothing can satisfy her, compels them all the more. At the same time, she threatens the men that pursue her becauseshe reveals the void upon which all subjectivity is based. As Jacques-Main Miller notes, because of her relationship to nothingness, "A true woman ... reveals to man the absurdity of having. To a certain extent. she is man's ruination."'

This ruination becomes evident in Jeffrey's response to Dorothy. When Dorothy discovers Jeffrey in her closet and confronts him, she finds him in a state of desire. She asks. "What are you doing in my apa t neat, Jeffrey Beaumont?" and "What do you want?" But Jeffrey is unable to answer, saying only, "I don't know." Later, after Frank's sexual assault on Dorothy, she asks him again, "What do you want?" This time Jeffrey responds, "Nothing." Each of these responses indicates that at this moment—while he is in Dorothy's apartment—Jeffrey's desire lacks a fantasy frame through which it might obtain some direction. To say "I don't know" or "Nothing" in response to the question "What do you want? " is not (necessarily) to lie or to proclaim that one does not desire at all. It is rather the way in which one asserts oneself as a desiring subject in the purest possible form. The desiring subject doesn't know what it wants because it wants nothing—the im­possible object that exists only insofar as it remains inaccessible. This is why the anorexic who literally eats the nothing is in some sense the pure subject of desire. The subject who can name what it wants has ac­cepted a fantasmatic substitute for this nothing. At this moment in the film, Jeffrey experiences desire without the surrounding narrative that would domesticate it, and he occupies this position because he encoun­ters Dorothy and her desire. And rather than experience desire in this way without the security of a fantasy frame, he asks Dorothy to allow him to leave.

The absence of any clear direction for Dorothy's desire becomes ap­parent in her behavior toward Jeffrey. Even Dorothy herself has no idea what she wants, and as a result, she does contradictory things. She holds a knife on Jeffrey and threatens to kill him, and yet she forces him to undress and performs fellatio on him. She says to him, "Don't touch me, or I'll kill you. Do you like it when I talk like that?" Throughout this and a later sexual encounter with Jeffrey, Dorothy seems to be performing—often acting like Frank acts toward her. She performs because she doesn't know what she wants, and the performance leaves open the question of what Dorothy actually desires.

One might say, of course, that Dorothy's performance with Jeffrey occurs in response to Frank's abuse, that she plays the typical role of the victim acting out the violence that has been done to her. But such a reading tells us more about the subject who produces it than about Dorothy. It posits supreme agency in male aggression rather than in fe­male desire, which leaves it unable to explain Frank's behavior toward Dorothy. Something about Dorothy clearly disturbs Frank, which is why he goes to such elaborate lengths to perform in front of her.

From the moment Frank enters Dorothy's apartment, he appears to be staging a fantasinatic scenario, acting out a drama for which the only audience (to his knowledge) is Dorothy herself. Emphasizing the performative aspect of Frank's behavior, Michel Chion contends that'Frank behaves as if he were the actor in a show designed to move the woman sexually. His way of repeating certain sentences may be the out­pourings of a maniac, but might it not also be the mechanical repetition of a particular sentence designed to excite her?"'9 Even if Frank does not aim to excite her in a typical way, he does clearly aim to arouse her and to give a direction to her desire. By doing so, he hopes to avoid what Miller calls the ruination that she portends for him as a male sub­ject. As Chion says, Frank attempts to present Dorothy "from becom­ing depressed and slipping into the void ... by heating her, kidnapping her child and husband and then cutting off the man's ear."10 In this light, we can see all of Frank's extreme behavior in the film as an effort to domesticate the desire that Dorothy embodies_.

While he remains within Dorothy's apartment, however, Frank's at­tempt to translate Dorothy's desire into his fantasy structure comes up short. Clearly, Frank dominates Dorothy physically, but he never solves the problem of her desire or succeeds in locating her within his fantasy scenario. From her first telephone conversation with him, Dorothy continually fails to enact the fantasy impair; her desire intervenes and disrupts thenarrative that Frank attempts to establish. On the tele­phone, she calls him "Frank," and Frank corrects her, saying that she must address him as "sir." When Frank arrives at the apartment, Doro­thy makes a similar mistake. She says, "Hello, baby." Frank responds, "Shut lip. it's daddy, you shithead." These slip-ups reveal Dorothy's difficulty with the fantasy structure that Frank lays our for her. She can't perform her role correctly because Frank's fantasy can't success­fully locate her desire. She remains a disruptive force that he strives to domesticate.

The status of Dorothy's desire completely changes when she leaves her apartment and appears in the fantasmatic underworld that Frank dominates. Her desire becomes clear: she wants to care for her son, to be a proper mother. Maternity, as a symbolic role, represents a retreat from desire because it fills in this desire's fundamental absence with a discernible object. As Miller points out, "The truth in a woman, in Lacan's sense, is measured by her subjective distance from the position of motherhood. To be a mother, the mother of one's children, is to choose to exist as Woman."' That is to say, taking up the symbolic po­sition of mother represents an abandonment of one's desire. When Dorothy evinces maternal concern for her son, she indicates that shehas left the terrain of pure desire and entered the world or fantasy. As a mother, she is on male turf: the image of the maternal plenitude is a male fantasy. By kidnapping her son and prompting Dorothy into the position of the protective mother, Frank creates a fantasy scenario in which Dorothy's desire ceases to be traumatic for him."

Fantasmatic Fathers

What the idealized public world of the film and its nightmarish under­side share is a father figure that provides support for the fantasy struc­ture. The coherence ofthis structure depends on the activity of the father, which is why the collapse of Tom Beaumont at the beginning of the film has such dramatic effects. Within fantasy, the father exists in order to do­mesticate feminine desire and provide a direction for it. He names this desire and thus works to eliminate its resistance to signification.

In this sense, Frank's violence is an attempt to amuse Dorothy's desire—to motivate her to desire something rather than nothing. Like Jeffrey and like the spectator, Frank experiences the trauma of an en­counter with Dorothy's gaze and the horror of her desire, and he uses violence in order to provide a solution to this traumatic desire. This is why the spectator can find some degree of pleasure in the character of Frank, despite his disturbing violence. Frank is a fantasy figure and of­fers relief from Dorothy's desire through the fantasy scenario that he stages for her. Even his sexual assault on her—the film's most famous scene—works to mitigate the trauma of Dorothy's desire by giving it direction and forcing her to make clear what she wants.

After witnessing Frank's assault on Dorothy, Jeffrey returns to Dor­othy's apartment on a later night and has sex with her. Lynch films this sex act in a way that indicates its traumatic status. Before they have sex, he asks her, "What do you want?” She replies, "I want you to hurt me." Though Jeffrey initially refuses, telling Dorothy, "No. I want to help you,” he ends up striking her. When he does, the screen turns white. After the white screen, we see a distorted shot of Jeffrey and Dorothy having sex in slow motion. This depiction of their sexual act registers how disturbing Dorothy's desire is for Jeffrey. It not only disturbs Jeffrey and pushes him into uncharacteristic violence, but it also disrupts the filmic representation itself. Lynch cannot film this scene in the typical way because it unhinges the field of representation itself. Dorothy’s desire for nothing resists all attempts - both Jeffrey's and the film’s - to  signify it. It produces the failure implicit in Jeffrey's violence and the failure of representation embodied by the white screen.

Seeing the trauma attached to Jeffrey’s encounter with Dorothy's de­sire in this scene allows us to understand the role that Jeffrey's subse­quent joyride with Frank plays in his psychic economy. Jeffrey runs into Frank and his gang as he is leaving Dorothy's apartment, and Frank forces Jeffrey to accompany them on a joyride that almost results in Jeffrey's death. Frank exposes Jeffrey to a violent and sadistic under­world in which Frank is the sole figure of authority. When Jeffrey de­fies this authority and punches Frank (for hitting Dorothy), Frank threatens to kill him and nearly heats him to death. During this heat­ing, a bond between Frank and Jeffrey emerges. Earlier, Frank tells Jeffrey, "You're like me," and before beating him, Frank smears lip­stick all around his lips and kisses Jeffrey. The bond between them is their shared retreat from Dorothy's desire. Even though his night with Frank nearly leads to his death, it actually provides relief for Jeffrey af­ter his encounter with Dorothy's desire. The chronology of the film al­most seems to suggest that Jeffrey fantasizes the encounter with Frank and the abuse that results in order to find respite from Dorothy. Far better to be beaten by Frank than to face the trauma ofDorothy's un­satisfiable desire. Even if Frank horrifies us as spectators, he nonethe­less provides a horror that makes sense.

The bond between Jeffrey and Frank is a homosocial one, and the film suggests that this powerful bond develops in response to the trauma of female desire. The violent nature of homosocial bonding—the fra­ternity hazing rituals, the humiliation of outsiders, and so on – does not derive simply from an excess of testosterone. This violence has a clear meaning: it assures the subjects participating in it that a power exists with the ability to contain the desire for nothing (the desire that we see in Dorothy). The abyss of this desire threatens to swallow men up, but homosocial violence implicitly premises to control it. Even the victims of homosocial violence gain this assurance, which is why they are often as artached to masculinity as the most aggressive men.

Frank also provides relief for Jeffrey insofar as he occupies the posi­tion of paternal authority. Unlike the other fathers in the film, Frank, despite his seeming commitment to unrestrained enjoyment, upholds prohibition and supports the symbolic law, This becomes evident during the joyride sequence when Frank stops at Ben's to discuss his drug dealings and allow Dorothy to see her son. Here, despite loudly pro­claiming "I'll fuck anything that moves," Frank also enforces codes of civility. When Frank toasts Ben (Dean Stockwell), Jeffrey doesn't say anything. We then see Frank walk over to Jeffrey, punch him in the midsection, and say, "Be polite!" Though this command appears wildly incongruous in the mouth of Frank given what we have just seen him do, it fits with the idea of him as a figure of paternal authority. And as the sole effective paternal figure in the film, his presence offers assur­ance to Jeffrey that Dorothy can be contained.

Frank equally reassures the spectator watching the film. Even though he is clearly an evil character (a killer, a drug dealer, a sexual predator, a kidnapper, even a drunk driver), Frank remains a thor­oughly pacifying figure on the screen. Dennis Hopper’s performance as Frank accentuates his humorous qualities even when perpetuating vio­lence. For instance, when he kidnaps Jeffrey and fences him to go to Ben's, he does so through wordplay reminiscent of Abbott and Costel­lo's "Who's on first?" routine. Lynch also uses music to diffuse rather than enhance the threat that Frank represents. Typically, films associate villains with haunting music. The song we associate with Frank—and that plays as he beats up Jeffrey the night of the joyride—is Roy Orbison’s "In Dreams," a song that defies an association with villainy. Frank attempts to distort the meaning of the song: we see him in a close-up telling Jeffrey, "in dreams, you're mine," implying that he will haunt Jeffrey like a nightmare. But the very soft and melodious nature of the Orbison song belies this threat and, along with the lipstick smeared on Frank's face, renders it less intimidating. Lynch's depiction of Frank the night of the joyride and throughout the film emphasizes that he functions as a figure of psychic relief rather than trauma.23

Jeffrey's flashbacks the next morning confirm that Dorothy repre­sents the real trauma for him, not Frank. Rather than dreaming about his horrific beating at Frank's hands and his near death, Jeffrey remains fixated on Dorothy, seeing her in a flashback saying "Hit me” and see­ing himself hit her in response. Dorothy is a traumatic object-cause of desire precisely because no one can fantasize away her desire and she seems to desire nothing. It is against this background of Dorothy's de­sire for nothing—or the nothingness of Dorothy’s desire – that the desire for her emerges. As an impossible object, an objet petit a, Dorothy represents a far greater threat to Jeffrey than the father figure. Frank can merely kill him, but Dorothy can force him to confront his desire.

Both the ideal father and the nightmare father are fantasy construc­tions who work to tame the impossible object-cause of desire. Even though these paternal figures do violence to the subject and represent a barrier m the subject's enjoyment, they nonetheless provide a sense of re­lief. Without the father, the fintasizing subject experiences the unbear­able weight of the impossible object intrude into its fantasy screen, caus­ing the very structure of the fantasy to disintegrate. Th is is precisely what occurs when Dorothy enters the idealized fantasy world—a world where the father has become incapacitated—near t he end of the film.

Fantasy and the Traumatic Encounter

The function of fantasy is to render the impossible object accessible for the subject. In doing so, fantasy provides a way for the subject to enjoy itself that would be unthinkable outside of fantasy. However, the act of making the impossible object accessible for the subject involves a dan­ger. This object remains pleasurable only insofar as it remains absent and impossilile. An actual encounter dislocates the entire symbolic structure in which the subject exists. Thus, most fantasies are very care­ful about the kind of access they offer to the impossible object.

Fantasies distort the object by never allowing it to appear in a pure form. We see an image masking the object, not the object itself. Or we see this object indirectly—as it disappears or moves away. The distor­tion of the object in the fantasy is the result of a failure to play out fully the logic of fantasy. When fully developed, the logic of fantasy leads to an encounter with the object in its real, traumatic dimension, but most fantasies never go this far. The separation of the worlds of desire and fantasy in Blue Velvet allows Lynch to avoid this failure that plagues most films. The film displays the fantasy in its entirety, and thus we ex­perience a direct encounter with the impossible object.²4

The ideological function of cinema depends on the limited access it provides to this object. Films provide a hint of enjoyment through the fantasy scenarios they deploy, but not too much. They remain pleasur­able rather than becoming authentically enjoyable and thus threaten­ing. The pleasure depends on an abbreviated deployment of fantasy, one that ends before it reachs its traumatic point. But the traumais thekey to the enjoyment that fantasy offers: when films avoid trauma, they avoid enjoyment. Lynch gives both by continuing the fantasy where other films stop. If it were the typical film, Blue Velvet would end when Jeffrey and Sandy proclaim their love for each other while dancing at a party. But just after this scene, Lynch unleashes a traumatic encounter with the impossible object.

Dorothy, her body naked and beaten, appears in the fantasmatic ideal world of Lumberton. This scene begins with Sandy's former boy­friend Mike chasing Jeffrey and Sandy through the Lumberton streets with his car. Lynch shoots this chase so as to create a sense of danger: we see the pursuing car only in a series of long shots that don't allow us to see who's driving. When Jeffrey assumes that Frank is in the car, the film encourages us to agree with him. After Sandy recognizes Mike driving, we experience the same relief that Jeffrey and Sandy do. Ten­sion persists as they stop in front of Jeffrey's house as Mike prepares to tight Jeffrey for stealing Sandy from him, but Mike does not represent a threat like Frank. We are thus unprepared, like the characters in the film, for what happens next.

While Mike is in the process of confronting Jeffrey, Dorothy gradu­ally enters into the back left side of the image. She seems to appear out of thin air, appearing at first as an indecipherable blot that no one—including the spectator—initially notices. When the other characters do notice, they become completely disoriented. Her intrusion into the fantasmatic realm rips apart the fantasy structure. Mike abandons any notion of lighting with Jeffrey and begins to depart. But ro lessen the trauma of Dorothy's appearance, he adds. "Who's that, huh? Is that your mother?" On the one hand, Mike's comment seems to support the reading of the film that identifies Dorothy’s with maternity, but on the other, it attests to the fantasmatic role that the image of Dorothy as mother plays. That this would be Mike's first assumption when he sees her walking through the yard naked and beaten suggests that he is re­sponding with what immediately comes to mind—i.e., with his uncon­scious fantasy. Mike's comment says more about him as a character than it does about Dorothy and her actual status in the film.

The threat of the fight suddenly seems absurdly insignificant in com­parison with the trauma of Dorothy's body. Her body has no place within within the fantasmatic public world, and the fantasy screen breaks down. The fform in which Dorothy appears – publicly naked and begging for Jeffrey’shelp—reveals the spectator's investment in the fantasy and demands that the spectator confront her qua impossible object. She doesn't fit in the picture, which is why we become so uncomfortable watching her naked body in the middle of the suburban neighborhood. When Jef­frey and Sandy take Dorothy into Sandy's house, Dorothy clings to Jef­frey and repeats, "He put his disease in me." Dorothy 's presence is un­bearable both for characters in the film—Sandy begins to cry, and her mother retrieves a coat to cover Dorothy—and for the spectator.

Here the realm of desire intersects with that of fantasy, forcing an encounter with the real dimension of the impossible object without its imaginary guise. The fantasy, structure of Lumberton's idealized world can only maintain its consistency as long as it excludes desire. Hence, when Dorothy's desire intrudes into this structure, she shatters it and at the same time shatters the spectator's distance from what's happening. As a foreign body in this mise-en-scene, Dorothy embodies the gaze, and our anxiety in seeing her indicates our encounter with it, revealing that we are in the picture at its nonspecular point, the point of the gaze. For Lacan, "The object a in the field of the visibleis the gaze ."²⁵ That is, the gaze is the impossible object—not a subjective look but the point at which the object marks the subject's desire. Hie gaze includes the sub­ject's desire within the visual field as an impossible point irreducible to that field. As this scene illustrates, in the form of the gaze the object looks back at us. Our desire becomes embodied in the traumatic point of Dorothy's body on the screen. Blue Velvetuses a strict separation of desire and fantasy in order to depict the traumatic point of their inter­section. The film shows that by immersing ourselves in fantasy without the security of the father, we can encounter the impossible object. And it is through this encounter that we enjoy.

A Utopia Without Disavowal

The film concludes with what seems like the restoration of the ideal­ized fantasy, now cleansed of both its nightmare underside and of Dor­othy's desire. At Jeffrey's house, we see Jeffrey’s and Sandy's family in­teracting with each other on a sunny summer afternoon, Jeffrey's father stands with Detective Williams in the backyard, his health now re­stored. Jeffrey and Sandy are together, with her boyfriend Mike no lon­ger a barrier to their romance. What's more, a robin appears on thewindow ledge, seeming to confirm Sandy's fantasmatic prediction that there will lie trouble only until the robins come. There are, however, noticeable stains within this idealized image.

The robin itself, the representative of the ideal, also hints at the con­tinued existence of the underside as we see it eating a hug. This bug serves to remind us of the opening sequence, where Tom Beaumont's collapse opened up the underworld of bug life beneath the surface of the grass. The idealized fantasy thus reveals its failure again, even at the point of its apparent success. The limitation of this fantasy becomes even more evident as the film ends.

The film ends with a final image of Dorothy that suggests that the restoration of the father has secured her desire. She now exists as a mother, with only maternal desires, in the idealized fantasy world of Lumberton. The last image of the film depicts Donnie, freed from Frank's threat, playing with his smiling mother on a bright sunny day. The idyllic scene offers visual confirmation of the clarity of Dorothy's desire, but, as so often happens in a Lynch film, the audio track belies the visual image. The last words of the film are Dorothy singing the song she has sung throughout the film. We hear, "And I still can see blue velvet through my tears." This line suggests that despite the image of Dorothy playing peacefully with her son, her desire cannot fit com­pletely into the maternal role. Here the visual and the audio tracks are completely at odds with each other, as the audio track recalls Dorothy’s involvement with Frank. This continued division within Dorothy's de­sire indicates that neither alternative is entirely satisfying to her. She re­mains a subject desiring nothing and thereby staining the denouement of the film.

In this way, the film shows us the limit that fantasy cannot eclipse. As Blue Velvet makes clear, fantasy works in two different ways to nar­rate the disturbance that desire brings to the symbolic order, but neither of these ways is fully successful. The ultimate contention of the film is not that we should abandon our fantasies--if this were even possible—because they always fail. What we most do, instead, is pay attention to those moments at which fantasy fails, not to guard against these mo­ments, in order to see that the enjoyment we derive from fantasy depends dirertly on the moments of failure. It is onlyat which they fail that fantasies allow us access to an otherwiie inaccessible
object.

We most often think of the turn to fantasy as a betrayal of desire, as a way of compromising on the purity of desire. On one level, Blue Vel­vet confirms this idea through its depiction of fantasy as a retreat from Dorothy's implacable desire. But on another level, the conclusion of the film indicates how a certain mode of fantasizing can take desire into account and remain true to it. By taking fantasy to its limit, by fantasiz­ing absolutely, one sees desire reemerge in the fantasy. The bug that the robin eats and the sound of "Blue Velvet" on the film's audio track in the final scene bear witness to desire's reemergence. Fantasy allows us to rediscover the desire that it leaves behind so long as we persist in it seriously enough. It is only the halfhearted fantasy that forsakes desire. The absolute commitment to fantasy produces the impossible moment at which betrayed desire returns.