If the superego’s power comes from warning and reprimand, it would be rendered impotent if the ego had no room for minor disobedience and reinterpretation of the rules. Like the superego, he is not concerned with discipline and punishment so much as with creating a space for the ego to play within the limits of normality. He strongly warns Jeffrey against further pursuing his investigations, but keeps a cool head every time Jeffrey defies his warning. He lets Sandy, a high-schooler, go on a date with the older Jeffrey, but not without giving the young suitor some good old-fashioned paternal advice. Playing watchdog is the domain of Freud’s superego, keeping the ego in check from the wild ways of the id.ĭetective Williams is the head of a solid, wholesome family, but not too strict or overbearing. Since Jeffrey’s father suffers a heart attack at the beginning of the film, it is Sandy’s father, the cold, eye-balling Detective Williams ( George Dickerson), who stands as the film’s ultimate authority figure. Detective Williams – the superego – Budweiser And the colour resounds with envy (like Iago’s “green-ey’d monster” in Othello), as Jeffrey isn’t content with the simple life but is desirous of opportunity, experience and adventure. The green also signifies Jeffrey’s naiveté, like spring vegetation ready to be cut and uprooted from the solid earth. Though the green Heineken bottle skews our perception through its tinted glass, it doesn’t completely darken our access to reality. His affinity with Heineken therefore occupies the wonderful medial position of a curious mind but within the limits of normal reality. He has developed a worldly curiosity that could be related to the humanities but still retains his practical sensibilities, as exhibited by how comfortable he feels taking over his father’s hardware store (albeit with the intention of borrowing equipment to use as a disguise). (It’s nice to assume he attends a big-city university to contrast with his return to small-town Lumberton.)Īs to what Jeffrey is studying, one can only guess. Jeffrey presents the beer as somewhat refined and sophisticated, discovered at whatever big-city college he has returned from. Neither wholly familiar nor completely foreign, it lies somewhere in between – like the ego. Heineken is a mainstream European beer that is popularly commercialised in North America. But Jeffrey also bends to the demands of the superego, whether he’s assuming responsibility for shielding Sandy from the underworld (and guilt for involving her in it) or he’s trying to protect Dorothy from Frank. Nor can he resist the temptations of mystery, such as uncovering the identities of Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth. He’s easily overcome by visceral urges, like retrieving a severed rotten ear from an empty field. Once he finds the severed ear after visiting his hospitalised father, Jeffrey demonstrates his enthusiasm for adventure and willingness to take risks, and we’re willing to go along with him.Īlthough he starts out as normal as can be, the representative ego of the film, Jeffrey is soon struggling between other forces. Either way, it’s the least interesting of all three Freudian concepts in itself, just as Jeffrey is presumably a naïve dullard before the film’s events kick off.īut this bland normality is the perfect vehicle to bring us into Lynch’s twisted narrative as it gives the viewer an easy, non-specific point of identification. The other is that there is no core self and the ego is just an empty subjective space which sometimes gives the id more room to play and at other times gives the superego more room to punish. One is that the ego is the core self which constantly has to negotiate the drives of the id and reprimands of the superego. Just as Jeffrey ( Kyle MacLachlan) is Blue Velvet’s main character, so the ego is the main character of the life narrative. Here goes a thought experiment inspired by one of Lynch’s little details. Pabst, Heineken and Budweiser stand in respectively for the id, the ego and the superego, and add another dimension to the dynamics between the characters who drink them. If we take these three beer brands as personality cues, we can extend an interesting line of inquiry through Sigmund Freud’s triumvirate domain of selfhood. Maniacal, gas-huffing Frank meanwhile enthuses that he only drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon, adding that he’ll “fuck anything that moves”. No, she answers, but her police-detective dad likes Bud. In David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, college prep Jeffrey Beaumont asks the eager high-schooler Sandy if she’s ever tried Heineken.
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