The character of Dorothy Vallens, brilliantly portrayed by Isabella Rossellini in David
Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, is a woman stuck in a complex predicament with various male figures circling around her, with her essentially powerless to change things for herself. The malicious Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, is a gangster who is holding Dorothy’s husband and son hostage as leverage to keep Dorothy Vallens singing at a night club, and as his sex slave. Meanwhile, innocent college boy Jeffrey Beaumont, as played by Kyle MacLachlan, has been snooping into her life in an attempt to solve the mystery of a severed ear he found in a field. His search results in him being stuck in the living room closet of Dorothy Vallens’ apartment, witnessing Frank abuse and rape her while Frank is high on nitrous. Trapped in this tortuous situation, Dorothy Vallens becomes the epitome of a woman trapped in the maelstrom of a patriarchal system swirling uncontrollably around her.
This is clearly a situation in which a woman is being sexually exploited by the two key men around her. Although Frank’s relation to her is the most obviously sexual from his bizarre rape of her, the act of voyeurism as focused through Jeffrey is in itself a sexual act. It may begin as an attempt to unravel the mystery of the severed ear he found in a field, but Jeffrey does not have to spy on the acts of Frank and Dorothy while trapped in her closet. Instead of shying away from what is going on in Dorothy’s living room, or simply overhearing what Frank is doing to her, Jeffrey intentionally stares at them through the slats of the closet. It is in this act that Jeffrey becomes a willful sexual participant, exploiting the misery of Dorothy to satisfy his own libidinal curiosity.
Even when Dorothy attempts to take control of the sexual morass in which she has become entrenched, she has become so indoctrinated that she cannot help but victimize herself. Jeffrey initially hides in the living room closet when Dorothy comes home, and it is before Frank arrives that he accidentally reveals himself. Frightened, Dorothy grabs a large knife from the kitchen and forces Jeffrey out of her closet at its point. The elongated knife is a phallic symbol, representing Dorothy’s attempt to take over the patriarchal role she has come to associate with dominance. Assuming that Jeffrey’s motive could be nothing but sexual, she decides that he must make a habit of hiding in women’s closets in the hopes of seeing them undress. In her attempt to subvert the dominance she is used to being at the receiving end of, she tells Jeffrey to instead undress for her, to which he responds that all he wants is to leave. “No way, I want to see you get undressed!” Dorothy screams at him while forcibly pointing the phallic knife at his face. She then forces Jeffrey onto her sofa, where she begins to coax him into some sort of sexual scenario, but is interrupted by the arrival of Frank before it can go anywhere. It is this point at which Jeffrey enters her closet again and becomes the willing, voyeuristic participant in Frank’s abuse of Dorothy. After her rape, Dorothy lies helpless on the floor until Jeffrey comes out to comfort her. Her previous attempt at dominance over Jeffrey completely shattered by the forceful entry of a male, her attempt to coax Jeffrey into a sexual situation with her at this point is now subservient, and descends into her pleading for Jeffrey to hit her. What began as an attempt on Dorothy’s part to overturn the patriarchy around her has been completely reversed, no matter how ardent her attempt.
As mentioned before, Frank’s dominance over Dorothy extends beyond his control of her directly, as he has extended this dominance over the other men in her life. Frank is the embodiment of hyper-masculinity, doing drugs and raping women as he pleases, all the while exerting his control over the men around him, keeping them in line as an alpha male will dominate the other males of his species he comes in contact with. He has kidnapped both Dorothy’s husband and son, directly showing her that there is no room in her life for any man other than him. He then uses the well-being of her family as a way to keep her from bringing any other men into her life in an attempt to challenge his role. Moreover, Dorothy is forced to keep her job as a singer at a nightclub, an arena in which other men may be allowed to view what Frank has claimed as his own, while being completely unable to challenge his ownership. In this scenario Dorothy cannot help but wish for something more, even if she cannot define it herself, in effect desiring nothing and the desire existing unto itself since it is not something Frank has defined for her. “As the embodiment of desire, Dorothy draws men to her. They want to discover the secret of her desire, what it is that she wants, and the fact that she wants nothing, that nothing can satisfy her, compels them all the more” (McGowan 99). In his desire to control not only Dorothy but the men around her, this tantalizing inaccessibility plays directly into Frank’s controlling desires, and in turn transforms Dorothy into a focal point for the interplay of male-female desire.
One of the more idiosyncratic elements of Frank’s twisted relationship with Dorothy is his fetishistic need to have her act as a mother to him, while he unravels an oedipal need to fantasize that he is having sex with his mother. Frank mutters “mommy” and tells her that “baby wants to fuck” before slipping into a primal rage seated somewhere in his id and lets out an expletive-ridden, violent rant about fucking. Meanwhile, Jeffrey lives out his own oedipal fantasy as he hides in Dorothy’s closet and watches Frank’s violent acts upon her. “Many have indeed noticed the Freudian elements of this scene: Jeffrey like a child has beheld the primal scene—sex between his parents” (Wilson 69). Both Frank and Jeffrey are then complicit in forcibly rewriting Dorothy’s familial relationships in the absence of her actual husband and son. The fact these relationships are being forced upon Dorothy by an outside system is emphasized by the twisted nature in which Jeffrey and Frank have become affiliated with her. Frank is acting as the son in his sexual relationship with her, while he is as a father in Jeffrey’s sexual relation to her. This creates another dichotomy in terms of Jeffrey’s relationship to Dorothy, as he is as the son in relation to his own voyeurism, but also as a brother to Frank in that they both act like a son in each of their sexual relationships to Dorothy. Meanwhile, Dorothy is then constantly forced into acting as both a mother and a wife in terms of the men focusing around her.
Jeffrey Beaumont, in his boyish innocence, largely acts as a foil to Frank Booth’s exaggerated hyper-masculinity. He is shown as having no intentions to abuse the women around him in any way; he is simply a young man worried about the well-being of his hometown after his gruesome discovery of a severed ear. From this well-intentioned curiosity begins Jeffrey’s downfall and subsequent gradual indoctrination into the patriarchal system surrounding him. After finding the ear, he goes directly to the sheriff for help, and it is from this initial request of a patriarchal figure to right things that Jeffrey begins to become a man in the system, slowly losing his boyhood innocence. From his visits to the sheriff Jeffrey becomes friends with the sheriff’s daughter Sandy Williams, played by Laura Dern, who is in her senior year of high school. After bonding over their mutual curiosity of where the ear in the field came from and following leads based on what Sandy has overheard her father saying, the two fall for each other in what is a mutually respectful relationship. However, at a certain point Jeffrey begins to clearly take over the investigation, robbing Sandy of any authority, and he ends up being the one in Dorothy’s apartment, which leads to his involvement with the relationship between Dorothy and Frank. As detailed before, Jeffrey then becomes caught up in the patriarchal abuse of Dorothy, which for him also extends into a patriarchal abuse of Sandy. He refuses to let her in on his sexual experiences in the apartment and tries to keep her outside of it, while not in any way trying to cut off his blossoming relationship with Sandy. As such, Jeffrey proceeds to abuse his position as a trusted male figure and keeps up a sexual relationship with Dorothy while further developing one that is romantic with Sandy.
Eventually the extreme of masculinity in Dorothy’s life overtakes Jeffrey’s attempts to maintain a position of control around the women in his life, as Frank discovers that there is some sort of relationship between Jeffrey and Dorothy. He then takes Jeffrey on a joy ride with Dorothy and his cronies, during which he forces Jeffrey to first be a voyeur of various criminal activities before directly asserting his and his pack’s dominance over Jeffrey through physical violence. Jeffrey is shaken, but he still attempts to maintain control over what he can in his life by focusing on his role as a dominant male figure to Sandy. Although his curiosity is not completely abated by his run-in with Frank, he is unwilling to listen to Sandy’s advice that he should drop the case, but is willing to attempt to drop it once her father steps in and advises him to do so.
He then focuses completely on Sandy until Dorothy violently forces herself back into his life with a sudden appearance at Sandy’s parent’s house while he is there. At this point his dominant role begins to slip again and the sheriff intervenes once again to straighten things out, but Jeffrey cannot help but try and prove himself to Sandy and solve the case, so he heads off to catch Frank on his own. This leads to a game of cat and mouse in which Frank’s hyper-masculinity again overrides Jeffrey, and it is only with yet another intervention by the sheriff that Jeffrey comes out unscathed. In short, Jeffrey is a young male attempting to inherit the power of the patriarchy in fits and starts after unintentionally becoming introduced to the system of power associated with it.
Dorothy Vallens may be far from the typical figure of a subservient woman because of the forcible manner in which she is consumed by the men around her, but her relationships with Frank Booth and Jeffrey Beaumont both reveal that she is at least as much a victim of patriarchy as a suburban housewife, if not more so. David Lynch may not attempt to subvert the patriarchy with Blue Velvet, but his caricatures are apt depictions of how the patriarchal system rips apart the traditional American family rather than supporting it. Dorothy Vallens, who might have been a happy, strong woman with her husband and son, has been reduced to a self-victimizing object at the hands of the hyper-masculine gangster Frank Booth. Jeffrey Beaumont is an innocent college youth falling for an equally innocent high-school senior named Sandy Williams in a relationship that begins on equal footing, until Jeffrey is suddenly plunged into the dark heart of the patriarchal system when he is a given a key (the severed ear) to learning the depravity of Frank and Dorothy’s relationship. Dorothy, Jeffrey, and Sandy may have lived relatively peaceful lives if it weren’t for the intrusion of Frank as the alpha male, and as such the audience is aware that the happy scene at the end of the film, with all three relaxing in a pristine, small-town, American household, is but a fallacy belying the dark truth of their pasts and the system from which they have been born.
Works Cited
McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Wilson, Eric G. The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to
Mulholland Dr. New York: Continuum, 2007.
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