Subject: Re: Blue Velvet ending (possible SPOILER)
From: larryy@Apple.COM (Larry Yaeger)
Date: 1991-08-21, 15:13
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks

In article <BARB.91Aug20194706@chamarti.ai.mit.edu> barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu writes:
> >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.
>> >>
>> >>   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.  [...]
> >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

For what it's worth, I always saw the surface level of that image as the
first part of Barb's interpretation... good overpowering evil (though the
idea that it actually feeds on evil is more profound, since it implies that
good *needs* evil to exist - a very Zen understanding).  But while I can
see Barb's subsequent interpretation of an exposure to knowledge, the
very consciously fake nature of the robin has always led me to Wylie's
interpretation as the deeper meaning of that closing scene... specifically,
that our usual visions of goodness and love are not at all real.  Still,
if goodness and love are *not* real, or at least not *enough*, then what
is?  Well, Barb's final interpretation might make a fine answer... good
*and* evil, and the knowledge of both.  Layers upon layers.
-- -larryy@apple.com "You wouldn't recognize a *subtle plan* if it painted itself purple, and danced naked upon a harpsichord, singing, 'Subtle Plans are Here Again'." - Edmund Blackadder