Underneath the Blue Sky and Green Grass: An Analysis of the First and Last Few Minutes of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet Abstract: The stark contrast in the superficial optimism in the first and last few minutes of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and the dark underbelly of everything in between, may suggest a more pessimistic outlook than the redemptive resolution of the film suggests. To understand Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s successful hybrid of his most commercially appealing films (The Elephant Man, The Straight Story) and his penchant for unabashed surrealism (Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire), one must look to the visual design of the film and its symbiotic relationship with a more blatant message spoken in the journey of the protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont. The source of this design, like the plot of the film, is the metaphor for the contrast between something desirable on the surface versus something seedy and disgusting underneath. The author tells a story about a superficially picturesque neighborhood having a seedy underbelly, and this is revealed, without much subtlety, in the first three minutes of the film. The overemphasis of normalcy in the montage suggests something very abnormal, assisted by extreme saturation of colors, the lack of dimension, the slowness of movement, and the generally stationary nature of the shots as the members of the neighborhood engage, in sociological terms, in “positive rebellion”. This opening is not only an amusing exposition for the metaphor, it is essential as a book end that assures the cyclical nature of the film. Colors play an integral role throughout, and most often a color is used as an identity for either a character or a theme that the character represents while wearing it or standing beside it. The three primary colors especially play a role, the most obvious being the color blue, which appropriately grows to represent the dark aspects of the town, most notably in the velvet robe