Blue Velvet

I was almost exactly one year old when Blue Velvet first came on the screen in October 1986. Maybe that’s why, on some subconscious level, I want to see it now through the lens of early infant development, especially as Melanie Klein understood it. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence, and I’m trying to find a smart way to start this post? Either way, Klein believed that at the very beginning, the world is seen either black or white. In the infant’s mind, love and hate are utterly divided and are projected onto the mother’s breast, which splits into either a nurturing presence or a rejecting one. This essential duality of human nature seems to find its uncanny reflection in the world of Blue Velvet, a film that begins with an image of perfection that quickly cracks.

Building on that, one may assume that the film opens with a lie: sunny suburbia where nothing bad can ever happen is only a curtain, and it’s about to be torn down. Jeffrey’s father's collapse in a way shatters the illusion. The scene in which he falls to the ground while watering the lawn does more than foreshadow a personal crisis—it signals the breakdown of the adult world’s control and the illusion that held it together. What begins as a crack in external reality forces Jeffrey into contact with unconscious forces that surface in the face of chaos. Perhaps he’s pulled toward what he senses lay beyond his father’s reach—things too dark to have been acknowledged.

Into the breach between truth and illusion, two women appear. Jeffrey meets Sandy, the blonde essence of innocence, and Dorothy, the bruised and broken singer. The contrast is clear: light and darkness. Yet it also becomes clear that, for Jeffrey, the split isn’t so clean. He is not simply attracted to Dorothy, but to what she represents: an object of both desire and suffering, where love is inseparable from threat. From a Kleinian perspective, their relationship reflects the internal conflict between love and aggression. The two women become stages on which he rehearses versions of himself, each shaped by desire, repression, and—above all—inner conflict. What at first seems clearly separated—Sandy being good and Dorothy as the corrupted one—soon falls apart. As Jeffrey begins to act on his desires, he also begins to deceive Sandy. The caring and rejecting figures are no longer separate but come as one fractured experience of love, power, guilt, and longing, just as Klein describes. The reality takes on a darker shape in his relationship with Dorothy. When she asks him to hurt her, he hesitates only for a moment. There’s something compelling about her suffering—something that makes him feel powerful. This moral fall is not the loss of innocence, but a slow unmasking of a desire that is twofold: he doesn’t just want Dorothy; he wants to control something that reflects the darkness within himself.

The film externalizes this psychological threat in the form of Frank Booth, who comes as a figure of excess—a grotesque embodiment of what lies beneath repression. He is a caricature of the Kleinian infant. Jeffrey fears him, but Frank also represents something dangerously familiar. In a sense, Frank is only a few repressions away from Jeffrey himself. Lynch doesn’t cast evil as a stranger but reveals it as the flip side of desire, stripped of its mask—something that could hurt us if we ever dared to come too close.

Freud’s idea that civilization suppresses primal drives is reflected in the film’s opening and the images of neat lawns and a perfect blue sky. But Lynch moves beyond Freud’s distinctions into the more complex world of primal phantasy that Melanie Klein explored—where love and hate are not opposites but deeply connected from the beginning. In that sense, Jeffrey doesn’t simply discover darkness; he discovers that his longing for love is inseparable from the parts of himself he was, until now, trained not to see.

What he experiences with Dorothy is not a typical love story but a confrontation with the hidden infantile self that Klein described as envious, split, and desperate to control the source of pleasure it depends on. So, Frank is not just a monster, but a symbol of the internal evil Jeffrey is forced to face—an embodiment of the raw death drive that lives within him. Frank screams, sucks, devours; he is what wanting looks like when stripped of inhibition. Jeffrey doesn’t want to be like Frank, but the deeper he’s pulled into Dorothy’s world, the more he believes that only someone as violent as Frank could satisfy her—and truly belong to her world. And in a sense, he’s right, which only means that his own desire has already been infected by trauma. The two don’t fall for themselves; they fall into a tainted love, where something is at stake for both of them: for Dorothy, it’s a connection that might bring her closer to the child taken from her; for Jeffrey, it’s a way to confront—and to master—the darkness he’s beginning to recognize in himself. The more Jeffrey sees, the more the contrast between good and evil dissolves. For Klein, psychological health isn’t about choosing sides but recognizing that love and hate live in the same place. Jeffrey’s attraction to both Dorothy and Sandy is not so much about who they are, but more about what they awaken in him.

Ultimately, what Lynch offers is not resolution, but recognition: that desire is rarely clean, and intimacy can only be real when we stop pretending. At the end, the illusion returns. The sky is sunny, and the robins sing again. Only now, we know what lies beneath. Lynch doesn’t seem particularly interested in answers or healing—but instead leaves us with the unsettling sense of what we might see if we dared to look inward with our eyes open too wide.

"Mulholland Drive"

Mulholland Drive begins like an American dream: an aspiring actress arrives in Hollywood, ready to take on the world. Yet from the start, something feels off—like a smile held too long, or a scene that lingers past its welcome. That scene of the elderly couple in the taxi, laughing maniacally? Those things creep right under your skin. It’s strangely unsettling and leaves you without explanation. Just like much of the film, where the surreal vibe seems not to be a glitch but the design. The movie doesn’t follow a conventional plot but unfolds in fragmented moments—much like dreams, or the unconscious itself, where nothing is what it seems.

And I think that’s exactly what Mulholland Drive is—a dream on the screen. On the surface, it’s a dream about dreams coming true, but this quickly turns into a nightmare. When I watched Mulholland Drive recently, I thought about Melanie Klein and the way she understood envy. She spent a lot of time studying infants and analysing children. Eventually she came to see envy not as just a feeling, but as something deeper—almost structural, a foundation of the self. And it was something we deal with right from the moment we take the first breath. If we’re innately fractured by envious hatred, maybe that explains why we are so often not satisfied. Envy doesn’t just make us crave what someone else has—it spoils desire itself. The more we envy, the more impossible it becomes to get what we want, because envy feeds on absence rather than satisfaction.

This ties into another of Klein’s theories, object relations—the idea that we don’t just interact with people, but rather we carry versions of them inside us. Every relationship is shaped by the ghosts of the ones that came before, especially the very first one. Eventually, we just cast new people into old roles, hoping for a different ending.

From this perspective, Mulholland Drive becomes a stage where Diane Selwyn is acting out her psychic breakdown. Her dream is not just a wish-fulfilment in Freud’s traditional sense—it’s a play unfolding on the unconscious stage, where internal objects come to life. Diane’s self splits to cope with unbearable envy toward Camilla, who is everything that Diane ever wanted to be. In her dream, Diane becomes Betty—an idealized version of herself. Rita, on the other hand, is a version of Camilla stripped of everything Diane took for herself.

The scene in the theatre is the moment when the dream falls to pieces. Diane cannot reconcile the hatred and longing within her. No hay banda. There is no band. It’s a revelation that exposes how one’s emotions—hatred, envy, or love—may unconsciously be tied to internal objects of one’s own making. Seeing other people in our dreams is no different from seeing them in real life—it’s just the tape. The music without the band is the music played by unconscious phantasy; it’s what fundamentally shapes our perception of reality. Emotions and past experiences live within us and shape our feelings and thoughts.

Once the dream ends—after the blue box is opened—Diane wakes up. Her face is tense and dull, her expressions reveal pain. The emotions buried in her dream are real, yet her face can only reveal so much. The tape keeps playing, but now it’s a music only she can hear. This isolation shows at its rawest in the scene when she masturbates—desperate and stripped of illusion—where desire and self-loathing collapse into one. When her feelings become too overwhelming, they not only destroy the object (Camilla), but also attack the self.

According to Klein, if the first relationship fails—and if we don’t build a good internal object early on—we may never find peace within ourselves. Instead, we’re left exposed to the kind of paranoid anxiety that casts a shadow over Diane, embodied by the old couple, grinning at first but inevitably haunting her to death. Without a stable inner object to hold onto, the spectre of paranoia drags her down. And the suicide is not just an escape from guilt, but the result of envy turned inward—so powerful it not only destroys the object of desire, but the one who desires.

"Twin Peaks"

I miss those days when there was an old-school TV box with only a few channels to choose from. If you wanted to watch your favourite show, you had to be there on time—like 9 PM on Tuesday, no pausing, no skipping, just you, the show, and the ad breaks giving you just enough time to grab a sandwich or take a piss. You might say Netflix is better, and I won’t even try to convince you otherwise. Sure, you can watch anything, anytime, and never miss an episode. So maybe you’re right. But if you weren’t there in the ’90s, you’ll never quite get it. And if you were, then you know what I’m talking about.

There was a TV show that defined those days for me: Twin Peaks. I must’ve been around five years old when I first saw it—far too young. I watched it with my older brother, and it messed with my head in a way I still can’t shake off. I had dreams about it, where I walked through One-Eyed Jacks and touched those wooden corridors like I’d actually been there. I still do get those dreams, despite many years passed. In a way, I never dreamed about the characters, but the places. It reminds me of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where he wrote about how certain places—whether real or imagined—settle deep in our consciousness. And so, I believe Twin Peaks did to me. As if it wasn’t a story that I watched but a world I entered; a space that—as Bachelard might have said—became part of my inner geography. Whereas for some, Twin Peaks will always just be that weird TV series about a girl who got murdered, for others it became something else entirely. Who killed Laura Palmer? was the question that kept people awake at night—or worse, it became part of their own nightmares. It didn’t just glue you to the screen; it could possess you.

As if David Lynch didn’t just create a TV series—rather, he opened a portal to the strangest, unmapped corners of the mind. He projected a living model of the unconscious and made it a show, with Dale Cooper as the wandering consciousness at its centre. The series feels like a dream analysis, where Cooper isn’t just solving Laura Palmer’s murder but confronting the depths of his own psyche. From Bob’s terrifying appearances to Louise Dombrowski’s mesmerizing dance, Twin Peaks brings to the surface what usually hides beneath our feelings. In a sense it exposes the undercurrents that fundamentally shape who we are.

The hypnotic way the story unfolds blurs the line between dream and reality, revealing the hidden machinery of the mind—a vision of what Freud once called “the uncanny”: the return of the familiar made strange, or the strange made suddenly intimate. The uncanny in Twin Peaks lives in the woods that feel known but aren’t, the homes that seem warm until the lights flicker. The familiar world returns warped—and what we thought we’d buried rises again in eerie disguise. There’s the home video of Laura and Donna dancing at the picnic, caught in a loop of joy that’s already gone. Laura laughs and reaches toward the camera—as if still alive, still here—but we’re watching her from the other side of death. These moments stick not because they’re surreal, but because they feel almost real—like they came from a place inside us we pretend isn’t there. That’s the uncanny: not fantasy, but memory misremembered. Familiarity laced with dread.

The show plays out like an essence of a psychoanalytic session, where repressed returns in symbolic form. Laid out in front of you—almost as if on a silver tray—is a vivid reflection of everything that makes us twisted in a different way. It’s everything psychoanalysis tries to touch—but here, it simply is, no interpretation required. The series, in a poetic way, touches on the death drive, the Oedipus complex, and all those things that make psychoanalysts twist their tongues, outdoing each other in finding ever more bizarre ways to describe the same old stuff: why we are the way we are.

David Lynch poses the ultimate question—which isn’t Who killed Laura? but Who killed you? The question that sent Harold Smith into a breakdown. In other words, the question of who hurt us, shaped us, split us in a way that no matter how far we run, we cycle back—drawn to the primal crime scene that defined our fate. I was five years old, watching something I didn’t understand—but somehow, I knew it understood me.