Michel Chion: David Lynch

It takes a long time to see it, but, like Laura Palmer later in Fire Walk With Me, who feels herself going down faster and faster, or her prostitute mother who chain smokes even before her daughter's death, or with the abandoned woman in Industrial Symphony No. 1, or with Marietta Pace in Wild At Heart, covering her face with lipstick in the bathroom and cracking up, or with Mary X in Eraserhead, in Blue Velvet Dorothy is prey to a sense of terminal depression. Once we have understood this, one can find ample evidence for it. She even says as much...

When you realise that the script's extravagant logic in fact revolves around the notion of forestalling Dorothy's suicide, by means of electro-shocks and strong sensations, through blackmail, Blue Velvet acquires a more interesting and beautiful meaning more in tune with the disturbance it provokes in us. Dorothy's hushed plea as she leans over the basin after Jeffrey leaves, her touching 'Help Me' is thus not a woman's request to help her recover her son and husband. She requests nothing of the sort from Jeffrey. Nor is it a 'Help me with my sexual frustration.' It is about a woman collapsing, slipping into the void of a terminal depression.