Ironic Distance and Credulity in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

Abstract

This article discusses David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), and how the film explores conventions of fictionality. Using Slavoj Zizek’s critique of ideology, we argue that the film initially encourages a hermeneutic reading, but also questions such an approach. The film tells the story of a young man, Jeffrey Beaumont, returning to the small town Lumberton, where he becomes the witness of—and active participant in—a sordid narrative of murder, kidnapping, drugs, violent gangs, treacherous police offier, and sadomasochistic sexuality. With the help of Sandy—Detective Williams’ daughter—Jeffrey eventually finds a way out of the bizarre plot, but not until he has killed the violent and psychotic gang leader, Frank. Playing with the conventions of fiction, it is as if Blue Velvet asks us, the viewers, to interpret its enigmatic signs—less to discover some underlying truth or solve a mystery, but rather to re-establish its normative frame, which allows us to maintain an ironic distance; much in the same way as ideology, according to Zizek, essentially functions. It is once we believe we hold an ironic distance to a normative order or a public narrative, i.e. that we are in possession of some free, unique inner kernel of personality elevated above the ideological—that we most immersed in the ideological.