ABSTRACT
A classic trope in American film noir is an opening in which a voice warns us of the darkness and danger of the city (over shots of skyscrapers at night with lighted windows) and then promises to show us that darkness. Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) similarly sets up an opposition between light and darkness, surface and depth, between the bright and cheery suburban streets of daytime Lumberton and another night-time Lumberton, hidden beneath (or inside) the first. Yet the film establishes the opposition only to breach it. Sinister details from the other Lumberton constantly intrude into the innocent suburban spaces (as Jeffrey walks to visit the police detective along leafy streets, the trees suddenly darken to become full of menace), while the good, upright people of Lumberton are shown to be subject to desire for what the other side of the town has to offer. Unlike the classic gangster movie, Blue Velvet stops us discriminating firmly between the apparent and the real, surface and depth, light and dark. Rather, we are encouraged to think of the two moral dimensions of the city as present simultaneously in the same physical space. A lecture delivered by Michel Foucault in 1967 anticipates something of the effect envisaged by Blue Velvet. In his talk Foucault speculated that Western culture was undergoing a change in experience of the structuring of time and space, and their relation:
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world… The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-byside, of the dispersed.1
