Director David Lynch has an uncanny way of blending the ultra-mundane with a subtle surrealism that only gets stranger as his movies progress. His masterpiece Blue Velvet is as stripped of glamour and creepy with morbid realism as a movie can get. Underneath the surface of Blue Velvet's superficial murder-mystery plot, symbolic details reveal an important message that Lynch wanted to say: that love can only conquer evil after the outward appearances of things yield to an inner turmoil within.
Early in the film we are shown a tranquil suburban setting, where all is perfect, happy and bright. This is interrupted by a man having a stroke on his lawn while watering it. Then the camera zooms in to the underbrush of some grass, where ants are fighting each other for food in a grotesque manner, forecasting a darker atmosphere than we might have been expecting. After a young man named Jeffrey finds an ear (also crawling with ants) in the grass, he is sucked into a mystery that only gets more intriguing to him after each dark twist piques his curiosity. We are meant to think that this shiny youth has been living in a perfect suburban world (as has his girlfriend, Sandy), and that he's never faced any real conflict in his life. That is, until he finds the ear, which leads him to the lady in velvet: Dorothy Vallens.
Clues about the ear's owner cause him to stake out her apartment, where his thirst for the truth becomes so strong that he actually breaks into the place looking for evidence of murder. While he's snooping about, in comes the lady in velvet, who fixates on the youth even though he is trespassing. Her seduction lures him by some force that can only be described by a Jungian association called the Shadow, a mythological archetype that only shows itself when viewed behind closed doors and in dreams. In the movie, the Shadow is best represented by her mystique and the raging Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper: a man who is apparently holding her ex-lover and child hostage in order to make her do whatever he wants. The first of these glimpses of the Shadow come when Jeffrey was hiding in Dorothy's closet, watching her strip off the velvet. She catches him and nearly seduces him, until Frank knocks on the door and she forces him to go back in hiding. Then, once again from the closet, he watches Frank engage in an Oedipal fetish with the lady (though Frank doesn't know he can see them). She doesn't resist what Frank is doing, but we can tell she isn't enjoying herself. (During the film's climax, it was from this same place in the closet that Jeffrey put his life on the line and shot the shadowy madman who threatened to destroy all that he loved. The closet to me symbolizes the interface from which an unscathed youth first views the harshness of the real world, and conquers it by stepping through the door and confronting it.)
Things are never the same once he gets involved with Dorothy. Once Frank finds out they are seeing each other, his primitive, Freudian eccentricities go overboard and he loses his mind. He takes Jeffrey on a "joyride" meant to teach him a lesson, but it only ends up making Jeffrey stronger. During this joyride, other dark mysteries are revealed, particularly in suave Ben's apartment. Ben's a flamboyant drug dealer who sings In Dreams using a lamp as a microphone in one of the strangest and oddly captivating scenes ever made. It was here that Jeffrey learned just how sick and cruel humans could be, as the raw evilness of Frank seemed to infect everyone he interacted with. Not to mention the fact that Ben was hiding the lady's son and ex-lover behind a door in his complex. Like the song, the scene itself was like a dream- an adventure into a part of the mind that few of us have the courage to take. It was like a surreal journey into hell, too bizarre to be real yet too real to be imagined. The contrast between Ben and Frank, despite both of them being shady characters, is that Ben is dreamy and graceful: something Frank wants to be, but knows he is not. At the end of the song Frank does something peculiar. He turns off the music after becoming frustrated by Ben's karaoke dance, which indicates to me that he reminds Frank of something he can never become, something that his reptilian incapabilities and impulsive violence has been condemned by.
All this is confirmed at the end of the joyride, when Frank references hell by saying that he'll send Jeffrey there for cheating on him with Dorothy. If anyone could resemble Satan in the film, it is surely Frank. He appears at the very least to be a demonic figure attempting to ruin Jeffrey's purified soul. Before beating up Jeffrey, he asks his cronies to once again cue up In Dreams on the radio, while a stripper-junkie dances on top of the car. [Why is there a junkie dancing while Frank beats the crap out of Jeffrey? Only David Lynch knows. The dancing likely indicates another parallel between hell and the real world; that someone could be so ignorant and base as to dance while someone else is getting beaten right in front of them enhances that idea the movie is illustrating a phantasm of hell on Earth.] Then Frank tells him, "In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk to you. In dreams, you're mine, all the time. Forever." His obsession with dreams means that he knows there's a fine line between fantasy and reality, and that the line he walks is right on the edge of it. His deep curiosity in them could prove that he's a demonic figure living on the edge of reality, and longs to return to the dream-world he came from.
In between the lengthy scenes of darkness there are snippets of light, as Jeffrey's relationship with Sandy grows. Sandy represents the inner child and the flowering of love after the darkness yields to light. At one point she and Jeffery pull up beside a church and Jeffrey says, "It's a strange world; why are there people like Frank?" Instead of giving him a direct answer she tells him about a dream she had where hundreds of robins, which represented love, were released into the world to deprive it of its darkness. Here Jeffrey's disillusionment with comfortable living is sedated by Sandy's wisdom. Despite appearing to be the most naive person in the film, she turns out to be its wisest. Toward the end, after Jeffrey confronts the darkness and reconciles it with the light, we see an image of a robin eating the ants that had been fighting in the grass at the beginning of the film. In the ants we can see the consumption of Frank, Dorothy's seduction, and all the horrific things that happened, by the thing that represented love in Sandy's dream- a colorful bird. Seen in a different light, the ants can symbolize the primitiveness of creatures that haven't evolved much. Frank's strange fetish and all the violence and swearing paints him in the same light. Birds and (most) humans are highly refined creatures, just like our heroes and Ben's proverbial suaveness- all things that drove Frank mad and conquered him in the end.
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