ABSTRACT
In the introduction to their book on Hollywood cinema, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner focus on the relationship between film and social history. Stressing the discourses that structure both cinema and society, they emphasize the connections between the systems of filmic and social representation. The reading of Blue Velvet as an allegory is particularly interesting in light of Jochen Schulte-Sasse's definition of postmodern art as no longer overcoming the separateness of art and life. The attempt to locate an extra-narrative typological framework recuperates the functional significance of this film for this particular set of (re)viewers. In addition to exposing the fetishization of woman in cinema, Blue Velvet is itself a filmic fetish that unconsciously inscribes and parodies psychological/cinematic fetishism throughout the film. The film has been described by reviewer Pauline Kael as "David Lynch's unconscious", and, indeed, it seems quite consciously to foreground issues of memory and forgetfulness, origin and loss.
