A journey through Blue Velvet: film, fantasy and the female spectator

New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 1988 Number 6

A journey through Blue Velvet: film, fantasy and the female spectator
Barbara Creed pages -

Abstract

Creed examines David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, a text that with its open Freudian ‘signposts’ appears to render interpretation redundant, but which can nevertheless itself be subjected to analysis as a ‘hysterical text’. She reads the film in relation to Freud’s idea of fantasies, showing that it comprises at least three types: the public fantasy of cinema, a dream fantasy of the protagonist, and a series of primal fantasies in the narrative. Creed looks at themes of castration, voyeurism, masochism and Oedipality in the film, and considers its staging of gender in relation to cinematic gaze and shot composition. She questions whether the female in film can be afforded her own gaze, and shows how Blue Velvet stages the interchangeabilty of the primal subject positions mother-child-father, discussing works by Laplanche, Metz, Silverman and Mulvey along the way.

SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article

You have the following options:

  1. If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
  2. If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below


    Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate

  3. Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
    PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
    DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
    A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription.
  4. Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon

To cite this article
Barbara Creed (1988) A journey through Blue Velvet: film, fantasy and the female spectator, New Formations, 1988(6), -

Share this