Yet if history is discreetly evoked and invoked in Something Wild, it is rather its opposite -Nature -- which is given us as the overall frame and inhuman, transhuman perspective in which to contemplate the events of Blue Velvet. The father's stroke, which opens the film like an incomprehensible catastrophe -- an act of God which is peculiarly an act of scandalous violence within this peaceful American small town -- is itself positioned by David Lynch (director of Eraserhead and Dune) within the more science fictional horizon of the Darwinian violence of all nature. From the shot of the father lying paralyzed, the camera withdraws into the bushes surrounding the house, enlarging its microscopic focus as it does so, until we confront a horrible churning which we take first and generically, in good horror-film format, to be the hidden presence of the maniac, until it proves to be the mandibles of an insatiable insect. The later insistence on robins with worms twisting desperately in their beaks also reinforces this cosmic sense of the dizzying and nauseating violence of all nature -- as though within this ferocity without boundaries, this ceaseless bloodshed of the universe as far as the eye can see or thought can reach, a single peaceful oasis had been conquered by the progress of humanity and whatever divine providence guided it; namely -- unique in the animal kingdom as well as in the horrors of human history as well -- the North American small town. Into this precious and fragile conquest of civilized decorum wrenched from a menacing outside world, then, comes violence -- in the form of a severed ear; in the form of an underground drug culture and of a sadomasochism about which it is finally not yet really clear whether it is a pleasure or a duty, a matter of sexual gratification or just another way of expressing yourself.

History therefore enters Blue Velvet in the form of ideology, if not of myth: the Garden and the Fall, American exceptionalism, a small town far more lovingly preserved in its details like a simulacrum or Disneyland under glass somewhere than anything the protagonists of Something Wild were able to locate on their travels, complete with high-school leads on the order of the most authentic fifties movies. Even a fiftiesstyle pop psychoanalysis can be invoked around this fairy tale, since besides a mythic and sociobiological perspective of the violence of nature, the film's events are also framed by the crisis in the paternal function -- the stroke that suspends paternal power and authority in the opening sequence, the recovery of the father and his return from the hospital in the idyllic final scene. That the other father is a police detective lends a certain plausibility to this kind of interpretation, which is also strengthened by the abduction and torture of the third, absent, father, of whom we only see the ear. Nonetheless the message is not particularly patriarchal-authoritarian, particularly since the young hero manages to assume the paternal function very handily: rather, this particular call for a return to the fifties coats the pill by insistence on the unobtrusive benevolence of all these fathers -- and, contrariwise, on the unalloyed nastiness of their opposite number.