That I was a fraud had never been in question - who wasn't? Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?
... Eventually I stopped heaving, left the stall, and again splashed water on my face. The attendant asked me if I was all right. I blinked at him, breathed deeply, mumbled something about my family, and deposited a handful of coins in the bowl beside him, which might have been for mints.
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in who Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from buring windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and "Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
... You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
... almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.
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.
Yes, it's a fifties thing. Banal in a way. But it's kind of removed from that also. Misplaced, almost. A fifties/nineties combo was what Twin Peaks was all about. We weren't making a period thing.
