Perversion the Social Relation

Exotic Rituals and Family Values 99his film Blue Velvet in which an apparently "normal" middle-class familylife is disrupted first by illness—the father's heart attack—and then, inthe early zoom shot, by the discovery of a human ear hidden in the suburbanlawn of the heart attack victim. In Blue Velvet, the surface of thenormal is revealed to conceal a variety of psychic, material, and sexualhorrors including kidnapping, rape, torture, and so on. In Exotica, however,the surface of the ostensibly tawdry is peeled back to reveal decent,damaged people with whom viewers find it increasingly easy to sympathize.In either case, of course, the effect is strategic alienation: we'reforced to recognize ourselves in the other, the other in ourselves.I have akeady noted that one of the film's most insistent motifs is theway in which all of the characters' "perversions"—behaviors that involvethe deployment of a fetish as a defense against the reality of castrationor radical loss—clearly derive from or are at the very least enactedwithin specific family legacies. Francis is the most dramatic caseof this phenomenon. A regular visitor to the club Exotica, apparentlywith eyes for no dancer but Christina, Francis is actually drawn to herin part because of their shared personal history, which is fragmentedlyrevealed through flashback and fully clarified only toward the film's end.As a high school student, Christina babysat for Francis's eight-year-olddaughter, Lisa, before the child was kidnapped and murdered. In fact,in a scene we eventually witness in flashback, Christina and Eric are thetwo people who actually find Lisa's body in the course of a communalsearch. In these search scenes, numerous volunteers walk slowly in lineacross an open field. Though we later learn that they are looking forLisa's body, the shots of the search initially appear as pastoral visionswhose beauty has the effect of relieving the film's general air of depressiveurban vulgarity. Only much later do we learn that the bucolic sceneis the site of a discovery that brings Eric, Christina, and Francis togetherat the Exotica.For Francis, the vision of Christina dancing in a uniform identical tothe one in which his daughter was both photographed (in family photosshown in shots of the interior of Francis's house) and found dead is, onthe one hand, a return to the vision of his daughter alive. On the otherhand, the fact that Lisa's "return" is achieved in a strip club suggestshow overdetermined is Francis's relation to Christina, and to Lisa. Onesignificant aspect of Francis's loss of his child is that the police briefly