Jeffrey Beaumont’s first encounter with something simultaneously terrible and beautiful sparks a process of self-transformation, that enigmatic outside object a confrontation as much as what we come to realize is an interior enigmatic. Whether the subject creates alterity or alterity subjectivizes itself within that subject, it’s this encounter of an aesthetics of the terribly beautiful that threatens a certain kind of ego encounter that defamiliarizes and dysregulates us from the usual ways in which we engage with the world. For Jeffrey it is so terrible as to be shockingly repulsive, being forced by Dorothy to look in spite of his will, yet, despite never getting a good look (him resisting her as much as possible, the will resists “grasping” what it is forced to endure) he cannot get what distorted image he retains out of his mind. That terrible and beautiful compels us in a way that both pushes away and pulls us towards looking, ing, retaining, precisely because we struggle to integrate it with a prior libidinal economy.

Despite never really seeing clearly that terribly beautiful, Jeffrey (and we) continue looking not to glean some unmissed detail but because he feels something roused within him previously unknown, and hereafter the rest of the film is his eavesdropping on his own dispossession. Of course, narratively it is about more but the film serves towards an audience doubling in its rousing, our viewing of and alongside Jeffrey in his own gradual integration of that object of enigma (and presumably taking home some of that compulsion to continue looking even after the life of the film) until what gets aroused becomes the perverse and the subject becomes an alterity, another enigmatic object to be encountered by others. Blue Velvet is so unnerving not because it invokes fear, rather, of how it is so irresistibly compelling to unearth a subjective encounter which continues to rouse more and more in spite of our inability to know what it will produce. We remain responsible regardless.