“I’m Seeing Something That Was Always Hidden”: Innocence and Coming into Knowledge Through the Gaze in Blue Velvet and Malèna

Abstract

There are numerous twentieth and twenty first century films in both the Anglo-American and European cinematic traditions that both directly and indirectly speak to the ethical, moral, artistic, and cultural tensions surrounding the concept and praxes of cross-generational love. From Neil Jordan’s Interview With a Vampire (1994) to Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional (1994), the characterization of cross-generational love/amorousness has taken on polyvalent aesthetic and narratological forms and expressed varying approaches to the subject matter and its latent transgressiveness. While these two examples of cross-generational relationships are both firmly couched within the heteronormative framework of older men/younger women, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000) are two examples of a tradition that reverses this configuration by presenting narratives predicated on the relationship between a younger man and an older woman: Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) and Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) in the former, and Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro) and Maddalena Scordia (Monica Bellucci) in the latter. While both films address the various issues and debates concerning socially acceptable and/or transgressive love and desire and the relationship each has with the concept of coming-of-age, they do so from vastly different cultural and cinematic traditions. Lynch’s exploration into the relationship between age, sadomasochism, and radical psycho-sexual power dynamics is framed within the experimental aesthetics and narratology of a psychological thriller set in 1960s–70s suburbia. Tornatore’s exploration of the relationship between age, unrequited love, and their associated psycho-emotional phenomena is framed as a bildungsroman that occurs against the backdrop of sociopolitical and cultural upheaval during World War II. Using Tornatore’s Malena and Lynch’s Blue Velvet as dialogic case studies, this chapter will explore both films’ engagement and presentation of the relationship between violence, age, sexuality, and desire.