Part 1 of Essay
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet is an exploration of things above and below the surface. This surface is really a borderline between not only idyllic suburban America and the dark, perverted corruption that lies underneath but also between good and evil, conscious and subconscious, dream and reality. Although this division ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... a stroke and, after showing his helpless agony, the camera burrows into the grass revealing insects “in a ferocious, predatory, and cannibalistic fight for life” (Dirks, “Blue Velvet (1984)”, http://www.filmsite.org/blue.html). These pictures, made even more terrifying by the extreme close-up and the accompanying sounds, provide the first visual clue of the dive we are about to make into the subterranean world under the pastoral life of normalcy. Our guide through this hell below an ....