Moral Decision in Blue Velvet

 I’ve written at some length in several posts, including my most recent one, about the importance of weakness in a protagonist. I also wrote about screenwriting instructor John Truby’s differentiation between psychological and moral weaknesses. However, I have yet to address another of John Truby’s 22 steps that he lays out in his Anatomy of Story. It is the step in which the protagonist’s arc comes to a head. You may think this is the story’s climax or what Truby calls the battle. You would be close, but not correct. While this step usually occurs during the battle, it is an independent step that many writers execute poorly or not at all. While this is common in stories of lower quality, I was shocked that this step was not as effective in a much more critically respected film: David Lynch’s neo-noir, Blue Velvet. The step in question is the moral decision. The moral decision of Blue Velvet’s protagonist squanders a great deal of its potential, partially because the main storyline falters in setting up Jeffrey’s weakness and because Lynch complicates his story using multiple genres.

 

Let’s first address the main storyline, which uses Truby’s Detective genre form. If you’ve done the work of giving your protagonist a weakness and then confronted them repeatedly with that weakness over the course of the story, they’ve had to grow in incremental ways, often interspersed by instances in which they slip back into their weakness and try to reach whatever goal they’re pursuing in an ineffective or immoral manner. By the time they reach the battle, however, they will have to not only face their antagonist and try to attain their goal, but they will also have to make a harsh decision. Either they fall tragically back into their weakness and lose their goal, or they make a difficult change and reach the goal. In the latter case, they also receive a revelation about their true self, and how to live a more morally conscientious life.

 

Despite having a moral and an immoral pole, this decision must be believable and complex. A compelling moral choice doesn’t run along the lines of, “you can either shoot this barrelful of helpless puppies, or you can find them good homes.” It has to be a choice in which one option is immoral but justifiable, and the other option is moral but apparently out of reach, or whose beneficent consequences are uncertain. Examples of moral choices are: whether to take revenge on the men who murdered your family or to make peace, as in The Godfather. It might be whether to run away with the woman you love or to go off and fight the Nazis, as in Casablanca. It might be to insist that you were right in your initial judgment of another’s character rather than admit that you were wrong, as in Pride and Prejudice.

 

"Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

While Blue Velvet’s protagonist, college boy Jeffrey Beaumont, does have a compelling moral choice—whether to shoot a homicidal maniac or run away and leave him for the police—it is not as well set up as it could be. Though Jeffrey is set up as a clean-cut college boy from a wholesome family, Lynch doesn’t detail his weakness as someone who has qualms about taking a life in any detail. Nor does Lynch take the opposite tack and cast Jeffrey as harboring his dark side that he has struggled to control before the events of the story unfold. Jeffrey, to our knowledge, does not wrestle with any weakness in the story’s opening. His dark side only emerges after he gets swept up in the strange events of Frank’s criminal activities when he comes across a severed ear in a field. When we finally get to the battle where Jeffrey decides to kill his antagonist—the psychosexual sadist, Frank Booth, it doesn’t have the power it might have had if Lynch had more purposefully built these aspects of Jeffrey’s character up earlier.

 

Now let’s discuss the second genre, which Lynch uses for his subplot: the love story. Though detective and love stories are often combined, leading some to believe that they are one genre, they are two distinct story types, each with its own unique set of beats, which the writer needs to hit for the story to work its magic on the audience. The love story in Blue Velvet has many great moments, which Lynch executes very well. Jeffrey first meets his main love interest after he visits Detective Williams at his home, questioning him further about the severed ear he brought to Williams’s attention earlier. Detective Williams’s daughter, Sandy, overhears Jeffrey talking to her father and catches him outside the house to tell him details about the case she overheard her father discussing at home. Though Sandy has a boyfriend, the two strike up a flirtatious friendship and investigate the case independently.

"Honey, let me explain..."

In the early stages of this relationship, Jeffrey also begins his affair with Dorothy Vallens, a lounge singer, who is the first lead, of which Sandy informs Jeffrey when they meet. Unlike Jeffrey’s relationship with Sandy, which defies even Norman Rockwell’s standards of wholesomeness in many respects, Jeffrey’s illicit affair with Dorothy is a sadomasochistic relationship in which Jeffrey taps into his violent side. Jeffrey manages to keep this affair a secret from Sandy, who eventually dumps her current boyfriend for him until Dorothy turns up naked and raving at Jeffrey’s doorstep. Jeffrey and Sandy then take Dorothy to Sandy’s house, where Dorothy reveals in front of both Sandy and Sandy’s mother that she and Jeffrey are lovers and even screams out at one point, “I love you! Love me!” which naturally sends Sandy into bouts of tears. She then slaps Jeffrey when he tries to excuse his behavior. Then, a few scenes later, she declares her love for Jeffrey over the phone, and the two are reunited in the movie's final scene. We then see an image of a happy Dorothy, now reunited with her missing son, apparently over her unhappy love for Jeffrey. At no point does Jeffrey have to sacrifice to save his relationship with Sandy, reveal his dark side to her consciously and of his own accord, or apologize to Dorothy for not disclosing his relationship with Sandy.

 

This massive part of the story is just wrapped up with a jarring and hard-to-swallow happy ending that lowers the power of the film overall. Jeffery has wrestled with the dark side of the world and himself, but he and the people around him don’t appear changed in any natural way. It’s not demonstrated that they have been forced to grow stronger by their experiences and learn to live life more deeply. Though Blue Velvet has many strengths from which writers can learn, its flawed execution of the moral decision also has a lot to teach us about how not to write fulfilling character arcs.