Blue Velvet revisited
I remember Blue Velvet from my childhood. I remember my parents watching it, and after I inquired if I could watch it with them, my dad forbid me from seeing the film until “I’m 50.” Blue Velvet, then, entered that list of taboo-films on my “until-I’m-50-list,” joined by American Beauty and Last Tango in Paris. I find it funny, then, that at 22-years-old, these three films are now three of my favorites. But I can’t deny that watching Blue Velvet, especially, was extremely disturbing. Even though I think it’s a fabulous film, certain scenes did make me think that perhaps my dad was right.
Considering Laura Mulvey’s “gaze” helps me understand why watching particular scenes of Blue Velvet is so disturbing. Mulvey, writing in 1975 in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” says that mainstream cinema reflects male culture, has been structured around three explicitly male looks or gazes. There is the look of the camera in the situation being filmed; there is the gaze of men within a film narrative, which is structured so as to make women objects of their gaze; and finally there is the look or gaze of the spectator, which is constructed, more often than not, as male.
The scene in which Jeffrey watches Frank “do things” to the Blue Lady employs the idea of the gaze in several different ways. First, there is the gaze of Frank to the Blue Lady. She is there for his amusement, an exercise in his depravity. Then, there is the gaze of Jeffrey toward Frank and the Blue Lady, who arguably has much less degenerative intentions, but whose gaze is disturbing to witness nonetheless. And then there is the gaze of the viewer, in this case, a female, who finds herself drawn to the other female on screen who is the object of a doubly-debauched gaze.
Watching this scene, I felt sickened. Uneasy. It’s hard to watch it without subconsciously picturing yourself in the Blue Lady’s position. Even more, the scene is a perfect example of Mulvey’s famous theory, which is, in most films, hard to explicitly point out.
