To Shuffle Hollywood

Most of what I have to contribute to this week’s conversation, on the subject of Hollywood Shuffle, is merely corroborative of Harriet Margolis’ very compelling analysis:  “Stereotypical Strategies: Black Film Aesthetics, Spectator Positioning, and Self-Directed Stereotypes in Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.” With such an encompassing title as that, and with an even more comprehensive examination within, it’s not surprising that I find it difficult to refute much of what Margolis asserts. She details the machinery of racial stereotyping, what with its cognitive foothold in our lives and that “To be successful, the least that the strategy of using stereotypes to combat negative stereotyping must do is to invoke an ironic response in the spectator, based on an ability to identify with or at least recognize the Other, as well as an inability to stand naively and comfortably in the place of the One relative to the Other” (54). She also pointedly describes the monolithic categorization and streamlining that black filmmakers, unfortunately, have to deal with when any sort of film they create is labelled, ever so broadly, as black cinema; and that “black cinema” is assumed to oblige a communal Black image, for better or for worse.

I had enjoyed Hollywood Shuffle quite a bit. I still do, even after having read Margolis’ argument. However, having been persuaded by Margolis, I now find that the film does fall short of what its self-directed stereotypes set out to do: what all self-directed stereotypes set out to do, the removal of offensive stereotyping. I had thought initially that Shuffle’s stereotypes were well wrought with a foreground of a realistic and traditional narrative being used as a springboard for the irony of the parodic scenes to land suitably in the minds of the film’s target audience.  In this respect, Shuffle succeeds with great aplomb. However, it’s not the landed awareness of the stereotypes that is the issue, it is the audience in which the stereotypes are landing (either an ironic audience that is not in need of correction when it comes to stereotyping; or a white audience, in which Shuffle does not address powerfully enough, because it adopts “a point of view that puts different classes of African Americans at odds with each other” -- being individualistic rather than communal) and it is the way in which negative stereotypes are replaced. As Margolis puts it: “Townsend attacks specific, individually expressed stereotypes more than the process of stereotyping itself” (55). She goes on to say that “Simply replacing a negative image with a positive image does not solve the original problem; it imposes one view of the world over another, leaving that view in turn equally vulnerable to changes to its authenticity” (55). In fact, it substitutes negative black stereotypes with stereotypes like the “unredeemable” white producers and the shallow gay-hairdresser.

Lastly, seeing as though I’ve hardly advanced the conversation here, I believe that Shuffle, while obviously first and foremost a racial commentary, is also a commentary on the artificial -- and frankly, tacky -- condition of Hollywood in general. This is most apparent in Shuffle’s stereotyping, the kind that Margolis’ asserts is undermining Shuffle, of the white producers/writers/filmmakers who are running the auditions and directing as they are portrayed quite negatively. But also, much of this industry ridicule emerges from the fantasy scenes, where famous films are recreated like Dirty Harry. This ridicule sets out to expose such iconic films as being formulaic -- or at least the quality of these films feels deliberately diminished. This makes the racial commentary even more biting because not only do African-Americans need to struggle to secure stereotypical roles, but even if they surpass those roles and achieve more “respectable” ones, those respectable ones are still not always of great quality -- for everyone. This forwards the movie’s cause even more: if the respectable roles can be of crappy quality, then really, there is no reason that African-Americans should struggle to obtain and then be confined to roles that are significantly inferior to that of the “respectable” ones. It’s arguable that Bobby Taylor’s satisfaction as a mailman also contributes to this sleight against Hollywood. However, personally, I don’t think that Bobby is satisfied, and that the ending is one of dissatisfaction, as he has been spurned from his dreams, and committed to contributing to the communal black identity -- a satirical jab at the notion, this audience being black, that all of a black individual’s actions must be conscientious of the appearance of the black community, for a white audience. In a way, being required to fall back on such a menial position, which can come with its own minority stereotypes, is just as confining as limited movie roles.

Platoon: The Dissolution of Good and Evil

There is a large part of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) that is concerned with moral ambiguity and I don’t think that I’m sensing the presence of such a concern as a mere residual effect of similarly examining Blue Velvet a couple of weeks ago. The two films share quite a bit in common: their thematic material, their technical construction, and the values that they seek to subvert. In an overly simplified manner of comparison, the two pursue the dissolution of dichotomies like good and evil through both murky narrative content and cinematography that is dream-like or literally obscured; and this assertion of ambiguity functions to interrogate Americans’ impetuous complaisance with national ideals like the American Dream and patriotic, ideological wars.

In fact, I believe that Irena Makarushka’s analysis, “Subverting Eden: Ambiguity of Evil and the American Dream in Blue Velvet,” is nearly as relevant to Platoon as it is to David Lynch’s film. Lawrence W. Lichty and Raymond L. Carroll’s “Fragments of War: Oliver Stone’s Platoon,” on the other hand, is an article with which I have a few discrepancies. While Lichty and Carroll offer a number of dependable assertions regarding Platoon as they note that, compared to most previous war films, it was not propagandized and it was a marked improvement in authenticity; I do think that some of their observations are limited to the surface-level: they are preoccupied with the degree of the film’s validity and the relationship between the production of war films and their final product. Lichty and Carroll mistake Platoon as being a film that is obligated to adhere to reality when, in fact, the film is still an artist's depiction (albeit an artist with first-hand experience) -- complete with creative decisions like the design of the film’s aesthetic and the license to establish symbolism.

As a point of negative criticism, Lichty and Carroll remark: “Unfortunately, this scene [in which a wounded Elias flees in front of enemy soldiers as they fire upon him] looks as though it is staged, rather than a natural part of the film’s action, and it tends to reduce the credibility of the rest of the film” (398). Of course it feels staged: this is a realistic depiction but not reality. This particular scene purposefully details a symbolic image -- an image, that I will comment on shortly, that I find relevant to the film’s moral ambiguity. Even if the symbolism weren’t applicable to one of the film’s large intentions (which I believe it to be), Lichty and Carroll address, and thus undermine, their own criticism when they acknowledge: “War here is depicted from the perspective of the individual, not from the group or from a national perspective. The film effectively reveals Taylor’s confusion and disorientation from beginning to end” (398). It is the duality of comments like these two contradictory quotes that make me apprehensive about the article as a whole because it acknowledges that the film is supposed to have a disorienting quality, that it is an artist’s creation (“All artists manipulate history, and Platoon, as art, can be freely interpreted” (400).), and that these features are representative of the hell that was Vietnam War; but the two critics still penalize the film with an “Unfortunately” for it not having reached the degree of realism that they desired -- a threshold that they never really make clear. A film can be held accountable for botching the consistency of its symbolism or for it having shallow symbols, but admonishing a film’s technical use of symbolism is not a fair assessment when examining cinema.

Platoon is a film about moral ambiguity -- not just in Vietnam but in all of human nature. The film portrays the actuality of moral ambiguity by depicting exaggerated representations of good and evil (Sgt. Elias and Sgt. Barnes, respectively), and then it subsequently dissolves this dichotomy with its treatment of these two characters. Blue Velvet might have ridiculed black-and-white binaries from its very artificial beginning -- setting out to determine that they don’t even exist -- but Platoon takes another route to demonstrate the more realistic presence of ambiguity: good and evil do exist in the film -- they’re merely inferior to more ambiguous characters like Charlie Sheen’s Chris Taylor, or at least just as mortal as the next guy.

As L&C note, “Stone’s film has succumbed to the temptation of a Coppola-like treatment of a universal madness personified in an individual” as “Staff Sergeant Barnes is the manifestation of man’s most ignoble instincts unchecked” (401). It isn’t difficult to see this allusion to evil in Barnes -- his sinister scar alone could give it away. It’s a little more difficult to extract benevolence from Sgt. Elias, but I believe him to be representative of good. He isn’t afraid to report Barnes for his atrocious execution in the village, his appreciation for drugs seems inherently hedonistic, and even his smiles (like the one he gives Barnes before he is shot) seem knowing like they are given from a person looking downward -- especially when paired with his almost angelic death as he sends his arms skyward and the viewer is to think benevolence from this signifier of crucifixion. Unlike L&C’s assertion that the “flaw in the direction of literary allusion and symbolism is all the more regrettable because the totality of the war’s madness, and what it does to the human beings who populate the platoon, is so finely drawn and credibly conveyed,” (401) I don’t think that these symbolic characters are demeaning to the film for the reasons I’ve already given (that, in addition to its increased authenticity, this is a symbolic film -- symbolism and authenticity are not mutually exclusive). Because concrete morality like good and evil is present, their removal makes the reality of ambiguity all the more adamant. “Chris Taylor… seems to be characterized by both perceptiveness and indecisiveness. He is neither good nor bad. He is neither held up for admiration nor reviled for his conduct” (L&C 401). Chris Taylor removes the complete evil by killing Barnes, and substitutes his gray morality within the vacancy. One might argue that the film is still advocating the superiority of evil over good since Barnes removes Elias, but this isn’t the film’s agenda as Elias endures to be killed by a more ambiguous enemy and Barnes doesn’t escape with his life. These representations are even made clear in the last few moments of the movie as Taylor wraps up his narration and says “I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for … ‘possession of my soul.’ There are times since then I’ve felt like a child born of those two fathers” (L&C 398).

Lastly, the film endorses ambiguity even through its technical aspects. The opening shot of the film is a cloudy view of the landing zone as a plane, carrying fresh troops, blows dust and dirt into the frame. The entire film obscures the camera’s view like this: the jungle thicket is always covering one corner or edge of the frame, the frequent pans are dizzying, the cuts are rapid and endanger continuity, the camera always seems to face characters so that we only see their reactions and not their focus (meaning: we see them get hit by bullets and spray at the enemy, but it is unusual for us to get a good view of their targeted enemy or even their comrades). The platoon’s operation is in an ambiguous area as the location given by the film reads “Somewhere near the Cambodian border.” And there even seems to be inconsistency in Taylor’s letters (and narration) to his grandmother, or at least a certain sparsity. He expresses to his fellow soldiers that he has stopped writing to his grandmother, and his final narration seems directed to a wider audience than the ones at the beginning of the film. All of these elements work together to elucidate the disorientation, the ambiguity, and the disillusionment that these soldiers experience. Chris Taylor starts off as a patriotic volunteer, fighting for his country in a supposedly ideological war. The film quickly dismantles this attitude and this ideology, and exposes polarized morals like good and evil for the artificiality inherent in such a dichotomy.

Disclaimer: If some of my comparisons between Blue Velvet and Platoon are seemingly cut short or my analysis of subverted American values seems like a dropped thread, it’s only because I’m establishing some points to commence my final paper’s synthesis.

"Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?"

“Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” asks Private Hudson in the film Aliens.

“No, Have you?” replies Private Vasquez.

Her retort seems like it would fit perfectly well into some sort of discussion disassembling gender definitions. Instead, the line is merely used to highlight Vasquez’s endangered femininity so that she becomes a scapegoat to liberate Ripley of homophobic scrutiny and to assure the film viewer -- with the additional narrative threads of romance between Hicks and Ripley, and Ripley’s motherly protection over Newt -- that the action heroine subscribes to heteronormativity.

In his essay “Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return,” Jeffrey A. Brown makes the limitations of Sigourney Weaver’s action hero very clear when it comes to crossing the divide of conventional gender roles.  He says that “the development of the hardbody… heroine … indicates a growing acceptance of nontraditional roles for women and an awareness of the arbitrariness of gender traits” but that it does not go far enough to create a “legitimate role for women” because an action heroine like Ripley does not remove women from the “strict binary code” in which women can only be evaluated by the degree of their masculine traits. Brown continues to imply that roles like Ripley are not liberating as they are considered more like a “gender transvestite,” “cinematic cross-dressing,” and that “the action heroine is just a sheep in wolf’s clothing”; especially when compared to roles like Maggie in Point of No Return, which presents a true parody of conventional gender standards. As a biological woman, Maggie illustrates the plasticity of gender definitions through her exploitation of gender stereotypes depending on which suits her objective -- her stereotypical femininity with a mini-skirt appearance and her diminutive demeanor place an enemy off guard so that when she switches to stereotypically masculine aggression and gunplay, she decimates her enemy. I very much agree with Brown that the role of Maggie takes greater strides to expose the artificiality of gender definitions than action heroines like Ripley and Sarah Connor (of Terminator 2), who merely demonstrate that gender boundaries can be crossed. However, I do think that Aliens (and the franchise in general) has a few other objectives in mind when it seeks to "harden" the body of a woman because it is determined to show the capability, and often unstoppability, of maternal instinct.

Before I consider the material of maternal instinct, I want to point out the film’s treatment of women in general. While not as encompassing as Brown would have it, I do find Aliens to be more empowering for women than not. Vasquez may be a scapegoat, but she is also more than just a narrative tool, she is a positive representation of the “butch” or the “ballsy” military woman. The movie isn’t looking to demean her traits -- frankly, she is one of the more heroic characters. In fact, James Cameron is very much looking to emancipate women regardless of those who may think that his intentions don’t extend far beyond the surface level. He takes the damsel of The Terminator and makes her the stoic soldier in the sequel. He takes the “final girl” of Alien, and makes her the dominant matriarch in Aliens who can handle any matter of hardware. Hell, he’s got two women in the marines of Aliens and they’re treated with nonchalance given that the film was released in 1986. I know that women have been allowed volunteer opportunities within the military since the 70s, but it wasn’t until five years after the film, 1991, that 41,000 women were deployed in combat zones of the Persian Gulf war. The movie is well aware of changing times and it is impractical not to acknowledge the fact that, even though the action heroine does not shake gender definitions to their core, she has placated a very sexist industry that is usually only concerned with the objective use of women.

Of course, it is difficult to disband the heteronormativity of the film. The time of its production was rife with homophobia, and contrary to any of the creator’s intentions, there were and will continue to be box office numbers to meet. Let’s, for a moment, consider that the film is wary of a heteronormative agenda because it is preoccupied with its display of motherhood; that display is grounded through a heterosexual female because, while a contemporary argument might assert that caretakers can be of any sex or gender, the general 1987 audience is more familiar with the heteronormative choice. As an aside, and adopting the particular contemporary argument that I just mentioned, I tend to disagree with Brown’s assertion that T2 adheres to the same limitations as Aliens when it comes to removing gender boundaries. This opinion is definitely based on a postmodern perspective, but I think that since Arnold Schwarzenegger is such a cultural icon for stereotypical masculinity, the very notion of him playing the stereotypical feminine caretaker is evidence enough that gender definitions are illusory and made arbitrarily -- whereas Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton didn’t have the benefit of a famous background to dismantle gender boundaries and so they were compared by default to the discourse of previous action heroes.

Returning from my tangent, Aliens is continuing the franchise’s main theme, the examination of motherhood. An argument could almost be made that there are elements of the film’s universe that seek to dismantle gender definitions, particularly the main novelty of the film: facehuggers impregnating humans without any discrimination towards their sex; but because these hosts, usually on the screen as male, give birth by way of their violent death the potential for blurring the role of gender is discredited -- the only motherly role that comes out unscathed is the biologically female Ripley. So again, we have to pursue the role of motherhood in Aliens under the assumption that it is only for heterosexual females.

I’m not going to go into great detail on the exhibition of motherhood in this movie as the symbolism is quite overt (the many affectionate gestures from Ripley to Newt, the battle between Newt-protecting Ripley and the egg-laying xenomorph Queen). If you’re looking for even more evidence, just look at what the theatrical version cut out:

0:08:29: Ripley is sitting on a bench and looking at a clearing. The camera slowly makes a curve and we see that it is only a projection on a video wall. Ripley powers it off with a remote control. Then Dr. Burke enters the room and the following dialogue takes place:

Burke: "Hi, sorry I'm late. I've been running behind all morning."

Ripley: "Is there any word about my daughter?"

Burke: "I do think we should worry about the hearing now, cos we don't have a lot of time now, okay? I read your deposition, and it's great. If you just stick to that, I think we'll be fine. A thing to remember is there are gonna be a lot of heavyweights in there. You got feds, Interstellar Commerce Commission, Colonial Administration, insurance company guys -"

Ripley: "Do you have any news about my daughter?"

Burke: "Well, we did come up with some information. Why don't we sit down? I was hoping to wait until after the inquest. Amanda Ripley-McClaren – married name, I guess – aged 66. And that was at the time of her death. Which was two years ago. I'm real sorry."

Burke gives her the picture of her daughter, an old woman can be seen. Ripley touches the photo.

Ripley: "Amy..."

Burke: "Um... she was cremated and interred at Westlake Repository, Little Chute, Wisconsin. No children. I checked."

Ripley: "I promised her... that I'd be home for her birthday. Her 11th birthday."

Ripley's voice gets weak and she starts crying pressing the picture of her dead daughter against her face.

Or:

1:28:54: Newt and Ripley talk a little longer.

Newt: "Did one of those things grow inside her?"

Ripley: "I don't know, Newt. That's the truth."

Newt: "Isn't that how babies come? I mean, people babies? They grow inside you."

Ripley: "No, that's very different."

Newt: "Did you ever have a baby?"

Ripley: "Yes, I did. I had a little girl."

Newt: "Where is she?"

Ripley: "She's gone."

Newt: "You mean dead."

The film goes to great lengths to describe Ripley’s need for the maternal role and her efficiency once she has obtained it -- the maternal instinct: the take-no-prisoners, leave-no-quarter resolve that Ripley dares the Queen not to cross, and makes good on her threat when she is defied. That is what I am more interested in. The nature of the display of maternal protection in the film and its overall importance. Its nature is akin to the berserker status that we discussed with Rambo. She has entered a state of “nothing left to lose” where her only concern is the well-being of Newt, whom she figuratively adopts as her own child.

Another scene from the Director’s Cut might be relevant:

1:31:24: The DC contains a dialogue extension about the alien-queen. While Hudson and Vasquez are talking in the DC the Theatrical version only shows them looking in silence.

Hudson: "Hey, maybe it's like an ant hive."

Vasquez: "Bees, man. Bees have hives."

Hudson: "You know what I mean. There's, like, one female that runs the whole show."

Bishop: "Yes, the queen."

Hudson: "Yes, the mama. She's badass, man. I mean, big."

Vasquez: "These things ain't ants, estúpido."

Hudson: "I know that."

Is the berserker status needed to illustrate that a mother has respectable opinions that demand attention, or that a matriarchal authority is just as effective as patriarchal leadership? I’d like to think that Ripley’s authority, and the efficiency of that control, is adequately explicit by the time she goes berserk; and that the berserk is merely the final declarative touch cementing the film’s expression of female equality, a touch that is considerate of its predominantly young, male demographic in that it uses the action-hero berserk as a signifier of the hero’s cause being one of nobility. This is an oversimplified and reductive view in which I’d welcome more thorough opinions, but maybe Aliens only does play the role of the intermediary. It is an early, though long past due, wake-up call for the audience to the existence of gender definitions so that subsequent movies like Point of No Return might eventually break those definitions. I’d say the film is still monumental to even the furthest causes of gender theorists who seek to elucidate people of gender’s imaginary substance. It may not have reached the finish line, but it provided something radical in a solidly patriarchal, eighties, American society.

Blue Velvet: What Goes in One Ear, Decomposes the Other

Watching Blue Velvet was my first exposure to a David Lynch product though it was bound to happen sooner or later as he’s been lurking around my watchlist for a long while. Now that I finally have seen one, it’s needless to say that I’ve since bumped Twin Peaks closer to the front of the line on my Netflix queue.

Blue Velvet is just so deliciously postmodern. It carries the same referential and aesthetic tendencies as other postmodern works that challenge the reverence given to the master narratives of modernism, but unlike many of the other works that wave their postmodernity like a banner (which is still a perfectly viable decision -- think Repo Man), Blue Velvet chooses to wear the guise of authority and legitimacy (like its modernist predecessor) so that when the guise is all but transparent the film’s exploitation of the American Dream and its complication of the binary dichotomy of good and evil make an effect that is one of disconcert and sobriety.

This isn’t to say that the film’s commentary is overly hidden, and that only the wariest of watchers can discern the film’s true intentions because from the very beginning there is a clear sense of Blue Velvet’s artificiality. The scenes of a white-picket fenced suburb are too perfect to be true, and if they aren’t obvious enough, it isn’t long before these familiar touchstones of idealized comfort are distorted by Lynch’s use of texture through tactile sounds and visuals. The reason that the film can be misinterpreted as having genuine meaning, in a modernist sense, is that the film wants the viewer to have difficulty acknowledging the transparency and vulnerability of the American Dream. Only through strain in the act of relinquishment can the confusion of ambiguity, and the reality that there is no such thing as concrete morals, be made comprehendible -- or at least made existent to the viewer. This is why the film hangs on to its archetypes and its genres and its set designs -- distorted though they may be. It does not want to discredit the ideal values of the American Dream, the film just wants to make it apparent that it is misleading to pursue such unattainable values; and that even if they are acquired, there will be insufficient satisfaction as the human condition desires more complex features than ones that can be corralled into the categories of good and evil. Disclaimer: There is a chance, given the content of this film, that with that rationality I just euphemized the film’s kinky sex. So be it: it’s illustrative of inexplicable human desire.

Irena Makarushka’s “Subverting Eden: Ambiguity of Evil and the American Dream in Blue Velvet” details many of the functions of ambiguity within the film. She asserts that “Lynch presents an allegory whose images reflect a nostalgia for absolute values that is subverted by the ambiguity implicit in the experience of evil” (32), and I tend to agree. Even the title of the essay merits a reconsideration of the story of Adam and Eve, especially when one considers that America’s identity, and by extension the American Dream, was founded upon values that uphold the ones laid out by Christian belief. If American Exceptionalism maintains that America has the ideal virtuosity and that the country can be a sort of return to Paradise, then Blue Velvet, as the postmodernity that preys upon historical narratives like American Exceptionalism (or the American Dream as Makarushka asserts), is obligated to point out that there are many complexities to ascertain before one confines their self to traditions that project genuine and safe touchstones -- and, accordingly, the movie doesn’t hesitate for a moment to tackle these reliances on denominators of morality. It promotes an awareness of ambiguity that, given the chance, might suggest to a person who believes in American Exceptionalism that even their idealized identity can still have the trappings of the serpent’s deceit. If  a person’s opinion is “We had paradise once, why can’t we have it again?”  then it is worth noting that other similar questions can be raised: “Why would paradise, under reclamation, not have the ambiguity of evil in its gardens yet again? Was not the existence of dangerous fruit and a beguiling serpent evidence enough that “evil” had infiltrated -- no, had already existed within -- Eden’s borders?” In a certain manner, these are the type of questions that Blue Velvet inquires to disable obligatory comfort.

Returning to the hollowness of nostalgia, Makarushka goes on to say that the film “can be described as a visual narrative allegory told in the language of familiar icons that no longer effectively evoke the meanings traditionally associated with them.” I believe that Lynch accomplishes this appropriation of nostalgic touchstones through the seemingly textured elements of his film’s construction -- namely, through sound and vision. An idyllic watering of the garden is perturbed by repressed water pressure in the faucet and further stifled in the neck of the hose as if to parallel the neck-grabbing that the man does when he has a stroke. There is a lingering atmosphere of cheer, especially in the sound, that contradicts the visuals on the screen to make one uncomfortable with something that may have been initially peaceful. And the film doesn’t let up, it decides to corner those who might think that the rare stroke while gardening is just a forgettable fluke in a truthfully perfect society; the film does this by turning to the dog, who seems to consider the taste of the water spout more frugal than the friendship American Dreamers were promised from man’s best friend. Truly, there is more constancy to be found beneath the perfect lawn, the unsettling clicks of beetles that lurk as a mystery never all that far from, perhaps even coexisting with, tranquil life.

There are so many other examples of confluence between tradition and illusion that Lynch depicts in this film that it would be impossible to include them all. A few of these examples that I found noteworthy included the uses of diegetic sound, the perversion of the film noir genre, and the heavily book-ended style of the narrative frame.

Lynch’s use of diegetic sound (sound whose source is identifiable within the storyspace of the frame) shares a similar function to that of the aforementioned camerawork that had established discomfort because, in Blue Velvet, the diegetic sound is seemingly commandeered as non-diegetic sound (mood music, voice-over narration, added sound effects -- sounds without the frame or storyspace). This is paradoxical because once non-diegetic is revealed within the storyspace then it immediately becomes diegetic, but I’m comparing it in this way to illustrate how palpable the sound and visuals feel. The tones of scenes are set by the film’s varied sound design. Sometimes the proximity of recording seems rather intimate, like the sound is zoomed in on the cottonmouth in the actors’ voices, or there is ruffling of clothes and textures that are not usually heard on screen. Sometimes the sound of the next scene, like a car passing by, begins while the frame is still within the current scene, say in a living room; and similarly, the current scenes sound might linger into the next scenes frame. More frequently, we get purely aesthetic clips to preface the consecutive scene, like the candle flame blowing in the wind to make us rather unstable. And my favorite, the ironic uses of sound which can be observed in the scene where Jeffrey and Sandy are sharing a heartfelt moment while hymnal music plays, a church in the background. The hymnal music might be comforting non-diegetic sound to set the mood, or it might just be diegetic sound emanating from the nearby church and merely giving the scene ironic levity. The answer is certainly the latter, but regardless it exemplifies the immense degree in which Lynch layers the ambiguity within this film, even in its technical construction.

Regarding the perversion of the film noir genre with Blue Velvet, it may be more appropriate to say that the movie merely reveals an element of perversion that has always been inherent to the hugely American genre. On the very surface, all signs point to the classic film noir setup. You’ve got good-guy detective (good-guy emphasized to indicate that this highly debatable) pulled into a seedy world during his investigation of a jazzy femme fatale. You’ve got low key lighting ratios, and German Expressionist shadows, and suspect currents that blow in the wind, and an alluring but unknown beauty -- the formula is all there. So why are viewers still left unsettled even though they’re watching a tried-and-true American genre. Maybe because the film calls the inadequate comparison of good and evil like it is as it is quintessentially summarized by one of Sandy’s lines to Jeffrey: “I don’t know if you're a detective or a pervert.” There is no difference between detective and pervert when they share the same muddled ground of voyeurism. Makarushka makes a few great points about this obscurity. On one hand, she fleshes out the notion that being good and doing good aren’t always congruent. She says, undermining the American Dream yet again, “American religious self-understanding is continually challenged by the tension between spirituality and materialism, status quo and change, intolerance and liberalism.” Similarly, Jeffrey’s intentions to examine Dorothy more thoroughly might be “good” by his own definition, but his experience is more ambivalent and to the viewer it is self-indulgent. Additionally, Makarushka asserts that “Participation in the process of narrative construction provides the viewer with a sense of complicity in Lynch’s decomposition of the ideals of the American Dream.” The viewer is just as complicit in Jeffrey’s voyeurism.

Lastly, one more thing I wanted to touch on was the framing of the entire film within and without the decomposing ear and the healthy pink one. Concerning the decomposing ear and relating to the connection between values of religion and values of the American Dream, Makarushka asserts, “Insofar as Lynch focuses the unfolding narrative in Blue Velvet on the decomposing ear, the viewer is invited to consider whether God can still be heard” (34). While this is valid evidence for supporting the vulnerability of the American Dream as the authority of God is a critical component to such values and a decomposing ear goes a long way in subverting such values, I found the ears to also have had a less religious function, though one that is equally murky. I think that the narrative frames itself within these ears for two reasons. One, the more simple of the two: it provides such a neat bookendedness (you like that word?) to the film, especially with the palindromic recycling of opening and closing scenes. This is a reassertion of the film’s postmodernity because its adherence to such rigid narrative structure and traditional circularity is so obvious and deliberate that it just becomes ridiculously satirical of such structure. Two: the ears provide an illustration. Before the camera zooms in on the decomposing ear, the scenes are idyllic and fantastical, and after the camera zooms out of Jeffrey’s healthy ear, the scenes resume this sense of fantasy. But the bulk of the movie is figuratively contained within the two ears, perhaps in the mind. While the viewers are between the ears, the camera is now taking us into the unbridled depths of the human mind -- here, the ambiguity runs rampant. On the surface, the ears hear the delineations of moral codes and defined values, but deep inside a mind fights against the rules that are heard. Inside, there are repressions like the water in the faucet and in the knotted hose, there is disillusionment of the kind when spurned by not-so-faithful dogs, and there is curiosity that lurks beneath perfectly trimmed lawns or behind the blinds of a closet -- a kind of curiosity that is nebulous, and often disquieting like the clicks of a beetle.