I think that Lyne tries representing Alex a precarious character and the viewers begin to see this in the scene where Dan first meets Alex at the dinner party, she has big hair and is wearing a black dress we could say that this denotes her dangerous personality because she strikes the audience as perhaps beautiful to some of the audience but extremely mysterious.
Lyne presents Alex as a sexual predator we get an impression of this when she invites Dan into her apartment, as soon as she gets into the lift up she slams the door as if she were slamming her prey into a cage. She seems to be extremely aggressive whilst doing this and there is low key dark lighting which intensifies the effect, and adds to the character as sexually frustrated and craven.
Alex is also represented as a type of “witch” like character, I say this because Lyne tends to give her character dark lighting and she lives by a dark and bleak meat market district ringed by post apocalyptic oil drums that burned like a witches’ cauldron.
I think that Alex’s apartment also shows the audience Lyne’s representation of her, the apartment is deprived of character and is not really personalised on any way. Lyne again uses low key lighting to make and balances this alongside dark contrasts of grey to represent his ideology of a single woman’s apartment.
In comparison to this Lynch represents women as quirky but mysterious, the audience don’t seem to understand the motives of the female characters and even the characters themselves do not understand their own choices. Like Sandy (the detective’s daughter) appears from nowhere and gets caught up in Jeffery (main protagonists) detective case and even says ‘I can't figure out if you're a detective or a pervert’.
Lynch almost gives the audience a 1950s representation of women in the film but with a twist of realism, a lot of the women wear long bright dresses and seem to be controlled by their male counter parts. I think that Lynch manages to create and represent a world of women onscreen that is superficially normal but tinted with a weirdness that is all his own.
In “Fatal Attraction” Lyne gives us the impression that “housewives” such as Beth are seen as not much as a threat as single working women are. He in a way represents Beth as almost a perfect mother and wife that is making a really good example to other women.
Lyne tries to represents the career women as attractive at first and maybe for a brief affair but because she has career it will probably conflict with the “man of the house” as he too has a career and will rival the relationship. I think that Lyne is trying to show that the career woman is in ways unattractive because she is does stay at home cooking and cleaning for her husband and she is unable to behave in the manner of an ordinary housewife.
Lynch represents the women in “Blue Velvet” as a waver between light and dark, as represented by a budding romance with the police detective's blond daughter and dark as represented by the raven-haired victim of sexual assault who turns to him for help and satisfaction.
In “Blue Velvet” Lynch represents women almost as sex slaves to their male counterparts and Dorothy personifies this type of abused sexual slave, she has to endure pain for a man to gain pleasure. In this Lynch is truly representing a dark uninhabited side of women.
In the film “Blue Velvet” we can not really say that the film is misogynistic because Lynch never gets the audience to “hate” any of the women in the film instead he gets us sympathize with females such as Dorothy because of the frightening situation she is in. We the audience do not look at women as the “enemy” like in “Fatal Attraction” but we see them as the victim, they are represented as the sufferer and unlike “Fatal Attraction” we side with the female characters more than the male ones. Therefore I would be unable to agree with the assertion that this film is misogynistic.
I think that Faludi’s assertion that “Fatal Attraction” is misogynistic is right because Lyne seems to show certain hatred for career women and in ways represents them as sad through Alex’s deprived apartment. He represents career women as a sexual predators seeking married men and indeed trying to ruin their lives when they cannot get them. I think he tries to show that working women are abnormal and perhaps that they all live psychotic lives.
Faludi’s assertion is again right because he never gets the audience to identify with Alex, he shows her as a witch like character and even though she does things like slitting her wrists I think that the audience are never able to sympathize her grief instead they label her as stupid. Again when Alex is killed the audience seem to forget that she was actually pregnant and are actually celebrating her death rather than pitying her.
In conclusion I think that Lyne is misogynistic as he dominant ideology about career women is that they extremely dangerous and also that indeed the only good single women is a dead one.
