Analysis of the Opening sequence of Blue Velvet

In  David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) opening sequence, a man played by Jack Harvey suffers a stroke. This sequence consisted of three distant scenes; the first showing the perfect suburban town. The second showing a disturbing side to the town, and the seeming death of the man. The third scene, although calm, pushes you out, back into the perspective of the ideal suburban town. The opening sequence shows the viewer the type of town that is present in the movie, showing in a shorter and conscious moment what the film will be framed. 

The first scene of this sequence features many classical pictures that are associated with the ideal American suburban neighborhood. The first shots show a white picket fence with bright red flowers, only to dissolve to the second image of a firefighter waving, followed by another white picket fence with yellow flowers, and a crossing guard helping the children cross the road safely. These first few shots, all extremely saturated with bright artificial lighting, and soft transitions and movements help to create the image of the ideal town. A town that is happy, safe, and filled with families, the picture-perfect town. Each shot is long and slow, with the calm soothing song in the background disarm the viewer.  After setting the idea of this town into the viewer's head, the movie transitions to focus on one specific house, a white family home surrounded by a white picket fence, with the man presuming the husband gardening and the wife in the home drinking tea. It is in these last few seconds of this sense that you notice the lighting getting a little darker and the saturation decreasing, moving you to the second sense and the suspense beginning to come to the end. 

During the second sense, the image that is in the viewer's mind begins to shatter. This sense continues with more natural light thus less bright than earlier and with less saturation. In the first shot of this scene, you see that the woman is watching a sense of a gun, of violence. That is not something that would be entertaining to the ideal suburban wife who watches violence as a source of entertainment as she drinks her tea. The movie then cuts from the picture of the gun on the screen to the man who is gardening. Which then continues to move between three shots, eight times total, all of them the man is pulling the twisted hose. These transitions go from 4 seconds to 2 seconds quickly, ending with the man on the ground suffering from a stroke. It is at this part that you hear the man suffering. This scene is interesting in its way of the hose to the man. The hose just like the man’s vessel is blocked and results in the lack of flow of fluid. However once the man falls the water does return to flow from the hose, but he is seemingly dead. After the man falls and the water returns to flow, the shot becomes a long shot showing what is now a kid walking unknowingly around the man as he laid on the ground and a dog that is snapping at the now flowing hose. These shots of the dog are sharp cuts as he snaps drinking water. Which is a significant contrast to the next scene of the camera zooming into the grass till the viewer sees and hears beetles dark and crushing all over the shot, a different aesthetic to the flowers that the view was shown earlier. 

The final scene of this sequence pulls you back to the outside seeing the bright town. This scene showing two shots each remain on screen for a while, both are long shots. The first is of the welcome sign, highly saturated, and overly bright from the last image of the dark beetles with its artificial lights. This is then followed by a tracking shot of the town. This final scene pulls the viewer out of the tension of the last scene however it leaves them in more suspense, questioning what they saw in the first sense. The stiff firefighter, the constant recurrence of the bright red color, the view of the flowers from a low angle as if looked at by a small creature, like a beetle. This starts to cause the viewer to know that this seemingly lovely town is nothing like it seems. What lies underneath in the dark. 

The opening sequence of the movie Blue Velvet is a view into the setting of the town that the movie takes place in where not everything is as it seems. The small safe calm town has a lot of bugs hidden underneath.