SOURCE: Bundtzen, Lynda K. “‘Don't Look at Me!’: Woman's Body, Woman's Voice in Blue Velvet.” Western Humanities Review 42, no. 3 (autumn 1988): 187-203.

In the following essay, Bundtzen examines Blue Velvet from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective, challenging some of the methodologies’ assumptions.

… woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it.

—Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

David Lynch's Blue Velvet provides a feminist and psychoanalytic film criticism with a rare opportunity to test many of its assumptions. The character of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini...