She Wore Blue Velvet

I'd like to admit that after the first run through of Blue Velvet, I also thought the movie was going to be about space aliens. You aren't alone! But the second time through I kept the creepy beetle scene in my head while focusing on the beginning of the clip and then I realized that the scene is divided in two completely different halves. The first half begins with a perfect day: birds chirping, bright colors, a friendly firefighter waving, children crossing the street in a straight designated line, flawless houses behind white picket fences- it's almost too perfect. The second half is a sharp contrast: black floating gun on TV, the rattling spigot, the man in pain falling to the ground, the erratic barking of the dog, and finally the creepy ass beetles. The fact that there were several odd things going on in the second half convinced me it wasn't just about the invader beetles, but instead it was about their contrast with the events in the first half of the scene. I noticed that the song "Blue Velvet" played through the first half and even into the second half with the black revolver, the man falling over, the dog barking. The song sounds sweet and happy like the first half but doesn't match up with the images in the second part. It served to contrast the two in a kind of paradox. I thought about the beetles again and realized that they were in the ground, under the surface, below the perfect world. And by this point "Blue Velvet" had stopped playing and creepy, eerie sounds took over as the background music. The disturbing sequence of events from the black pistol to the black beetles in the ground coupled with the shift in background music, led me to the conclusion that there's something really weird going on under what seems to be a perfect Utopia.