4. Cracking Up

5. Lip, Slip, Slap: The Slippery Slide Of Sadism

There are two scenes that I will take as metonymic of the kind of exchange that the text initiates with the interpreting subject. These are the lipstick scene between Frank the psychotic and Jeffrey the would-be detective, and the S and M gagging scene featuring Dorothy and Frank. The characters, however, should not be seen as standing in place of text and analyst; there is no one-to-one relationship between fictional film characters and characters who figure in dramas of the unconscious, or those players involved in the drama of transference. This is not to say that there are no correspondences or identifications, but rather I wish to signal a concern with the dynamic of exchange and a relative disinterest in identifying whose who. In the lipstick scenario she (the ingenue analyst) is seduced, lured into the complicity of exchange and interpretation. But the kiss, emblematic of this exchange, materializes as an act of violence, not only a slap on the smacker but also an act of contamination. To offer an interpretation of Blue Velvet, to open your lips (to speak, to be kissed) is to invite abuse, to risk getting egg on your face, or more precisely, lipstick smeared all over in an act of desecration. The film enacts a sadistic fantasy of transference by wishing its symptoms of perversion on the analyst or viewer.

Before turning to talk of gagging, a brief aside: the red lips are clearly homologous with the red shoes that Dorothy wears (even when she wears nothing else) and in turn these shoes or slippers echo a pivotal motif from two other films: The Red Shoes and The Wizard of Oz. In both these films the red shoes are transferred magically from one body to another; but once they have been put on they can never be taken off (or at least they can only be taken off by an act of severance, cutting, mutilation). [2]

There is just one more question I need to briefly address before turning to the S and M gagging scene. That question is: what is the meaning of "Blue Velvet?" I need to pose this question because the scene itself offers an answer, thereby precluding interpretation. It is therefore not simply in its thematics or depiction that the scene is metonymic of the kind of exchange that the text initiates with the interpreting subject, but in its performativity or textual practice. However, in order to work it requires complicity – paradoxically, an act of interpretation. So here we go. Firstly, "Blue Velvet" is purely immaterial – a song, a series of sounds. Secondly, it is nothing but a piece of material. These conceptions are not actually incompatible. The important point is that "blue velvet," though material in its effects, is not an object per se. It is a textural potential that may he manifested in a variety of part-objects. It is a materialization of blue fantasies. One of its manifestations is the film itself, given as a gift to the viewer/analyst, but also as a gagging device, to gag interpretation. The potpourri primal scene featuring Frank and Dorothy and voyeuristically witnessed by Jeffrey is characterized by an excessive acting-out of sadomasochistic tropes. Despite the fact that a certain degree of distance or separation is instituted – between fictional protagonists, and between viewer and screen – a connection or identification is also maintained. The piece of blue velvet that runs between Frank and Dorothy, that they grip between their teeth, binds them together in a bondage ritual. It is effectively a double bind and a running gag; it invites interpretation (to be identified as umbilical cord, fetish object, and so on) and gags criticism (or interpretation). The sadistic force of this gagging device is more forcefully driven home when we see the strip of blue velvet gagging the corpse of Don, the dead father. The Name of the Father – The Don – is certainly significant in Blue Velvet, but defined predominantly as Absent (or dead). It is in the body of the mother, battered black and blue, that the fantasy of revenge materializes; or to put this slightly differently, the one presumed to know materializes as a perversion of the maternal function (similar perhaps to Madonna's performance of "Material Girl").

The gist of my argument must now be emerging: that perversion in Blue Velvet is to be located not simply on the leve! of depiction, but on the level of textual perversity. Perversion here has to do with the simultaneous eliciting of, and desire to gag, interpretation. The notion of interpretation entails a conception of the analyst, who is here invoked as a textual presence, as the mother "presumed ro know." Symptoms of perversion are, in a sadistic scenario of wish-fulfillment transferred onto her body. Although my argument derives from a mode of wild analysis, it is also constrained by certain conditions of possibility. These include conditions for the possible intelligibility of Blue Velvet, I shall now go on to situate the film within a context of the postmodern, a context that I think provides the conditions for a certain kind of transference. This kind of transference will be characterized as The Oblivious Transfer.

6. Postmodernity and The Oblivious Transfer

Situating Blue Velvet thus enables an understanding of a problem about representation and reading (or interpretation) that is not particular to this film, but more generally a condition of the postmodern. The problem has to do with the presentation of an epistemologically self-conscious discourse, and a mode of address that invokes a knowing audience. [4] The tendency towards detailed description and listing, the predilection for quotation and allusion does indeed invoke a knowing audience but it is a particular kind of knowledge that is at issue. What is repeated (obsessively, it could be argued) in the activities of naming or listing, quoting, pastiche, and so on, is the knowledge that there is no difference – between the thing and the name, the source and the quotation itself, the real and its parody, the copy and the original. In brief: there is no original. And hence no scope for hermeneutic endeavor. The problem, which exists as a potential trap, is that while this kind of postmodern text disavows difference it nevertheless invites a form of hermeneutic identification – identification of the original, the source.

Blue Velvet addresses a viewer who is knowing on at least two counts: first about films, the history of cinema, a viewer who comes prepared with "screen memories"; and second about psychoanalysis. The postmodern inflection encourages a particular kind of viewer identification – the invocation of a "knowing" viewer incites the ob- sessive identification of tropes and allusions (psychoanalytic and filmic). But this is very different from the kind of identification called for in more orthodox narrative films, where emotional identification either with a fictional character or with a situation is necessary for the mobilization and working-through of unconscious fantasies. In Blue Velvet the self-distance and self-irony of the text discourages the viewer from identifying too closely with the subject. The film, or these kind of films, operate an economy of detachment. The severed ear that inaugurates the hermeneutic chain in Blue Velvet epitomizes this. But there is also a logic of separation or detachment operative in the kind of engagement elicited by the film. In the postmodern kind of identification there is a will to mastery posited precisely on detachment, on a paradoxical separation (paradoxical because there is also the assumption that there is no separation – between original and copy, and so on). If the reader of Blue Velvet is invoked as an analyst, then that invocation assumes a logic of detachment (the analyst is not involved in the discourse). However, this detachment is somewhat precarious, and far from absolute.

Analysis can only be produced our of some kind of identification and transference. So, even in these postmodern texts transference takes place, but a mode of transference characterized, at least initially, by a logic of detachment. The kind of postmodern procedures of exchange by which signifiers circulate and new knowledge is produced might be characterized by the notion of the "Oblivious Transfer. "The Oblivious Transfer is a procedure derived from number theory; in a high-tech world of electronic mail and telephone-linked computers where communication is possible despite distance it is a way of guaranteeing the security of secret messages, the correct transfer of funds, protocols for sending certified mail, and signing contracts at a distance. It falls within the domain of public-key cryptography, and is dealt with as part of the key-exchange problem.

The transfer is somewhat like a simple game played with a locked has requiring two different keys. A sender transfers the locked box to a recipient, who finds one key trial partially unlocks the box. The sender has both keys and, without seeing what the recipient has done, must now pass on one of the two keys. Depending on which key is sent, the recipient will either succeed or fail in opening the box. Although the sender's choice controls the outcome, the sender never knows which choice to make to guarantee a certain result. [5]

The Oblivious Transfer evokes another image of exchange, a conceit that materializes in the film as something closer to scriptural jest perhaps than to Lacanian theology. The immaculate conception involves an exchange that emphasizes distance, detachment, the bypassing of erotogenic zones (or, one might argue, the eroticizing of some other zone of exchange). The Annunciation is sometimes figured as a haft of light or stream of words issuing from the Angel and entering the Virgin's ear. [7] Thus she becomes pregnant with meaning, the word is made flesh. The analyst, receiving (hearing) the words of the analysand, is presumed to know (that is, presumed pregnant). But she returns these words to the subject, makes the words into flesh. The transference and detachment or separation essential to the cure is materialized in Blue Velvet as the severed ear, the word made flesh. If the polarities between analyst and analysand become uncertain we might see that there is a form of reversal happening here – the ear, as an organ of incorporation can also be repudiated, expelled like feces from the body and returned to sender. Thus the severed and rotting flesh found by or given to the would-be analyst/detective, the heir apparent.

NOTES