Subject: Re: Blue Velvet ending (possible SPOILER) From: barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Barb Miller) Date: 1991-08-20, 16:47 Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks Reply-to: barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu In article <1991Aug19.151415.1@wombat.newcastle.edu.au> ecwdb@wombat.newcastle.edu.au writes: > > I might be a sick individual, but I don't think that the final scene of > > Blue Velvet is meant to be such a happy ending. It has been posited in this > > group that the robin devouring the bug indicates that the evil which has > > touched the lives of the Beaumonts has been expunged. > > However, in the shot, the robin is totally and obviously bogus. I took > > this to be a shot at the kind of world-view held by Laura Dern's character ( > > remember her dream about the world with no robins, and the scene where she is > > crying and saying "where is my dream"?). Lumberton seemed like a such an idyllic > > place and yet there is an undercurrent of pure evil. The "good" characters in > > the film are, to my mind, portrayed as almost contemptuously naive and so at > > the end when the robin dream has come "true", the robin is obviously fake. Thus > > only a naive fool would believe that faith in dreams where love conquers all etc > > will overcome the Franks of the world. Hiding behind dreams and pretend games > > will not make evil go away. Blue Velvet is my favourite film, but I really don't > > think that the "nice" characters are meant to be sympathetically received. > > > > Wylie Bradford I don't think that the implication is that faith in dreams has overcome Frank; clearly, a gun has. It seems to me that the movie is more about moving from innocence to knowledge than about good overcoming evil. I usually take the ending image of the robin devouring the bug to be symbolic of the fact that, just as our green lawns harbor bugs, our symbols of hope and goodness, like the robin, FEED on bugs. Whether the bugs are thought of as truly evil or just symbols of dark, earthy, creepy things that we'd rather not think about, they are fundamental to life, and the idyllic images of the white picket fences, the waving fireman, etc., are the facade we put up when we'd rather not think about the darker things. Laura could have stayed with her football player boyfriend, but she chose not to. Jeff could have stayed away from the Valens apartment, but he chose not to. For both of them there was a curiosity about the mysterious dark side of things that had to be satisfied. But to keep from turning in to copies of Frank, they have to keep the sense of a world with robins in it to offset the flooding consciousness of the world of bugs. I think that the ending is positive because they both are able to learn about the dark side of life without getting killed, and still come back to believing that life is worth living. Barb Miller