Blue Velvet's Necessity (1)

In the previous very long, and winding, essay I established an approach that placed contemporary metaphysicians Timothy Williamson and Kit Fine in relationship with the films of film director David Lynch. I presented the films as metaphysical machines, testing out what kind of modal metaphysics was being staged. It offers an alternative approach to receiving Lynch to the psychoanalytic, Deleuzian, affect theory and narratology approaches familiar in the critical literature. It offers an application of analytic philosophy to a field dominated by so-called continental approaches with a view to popularising the analytic approach. It also placed it (briefly) into a post-Kantian (at times post Aristotelian) context by gesturing to Frederick Beiser's work on German Idealism and Post Kantianism to show that even if analytic philosophy does not need historical awareness in a deep sense, it can be useful to know it!   

Ok, so now let’s turn to another of Lynch’s works, Blue Velvet, and see where all this might take us. Blue Velvet begins like a postcard of small town American innocence and then insists, with almost clinical patience, on showing how that innocence is not simply a lie but a surface condition that depends on what it excludes. The film follows Jeffrey Beaumont, a young man who returns to his home town of Lumberton after his father collapses, and it pivots on a discovery that is both literal evidence and a metaphysical prompt, a severed human ear found in a vacant lot. 

The first thing Lynch does, before plot, is establish a regime of appearance. The camera gives you a blue sky, a white picket fence, red roses, a fireman waving, the bright, slightly too polished colours of a civic brochure. Then the father waters the lawn, the hose tangles, his body drops, the sprinkler keeps ticking like an indifferent metronome, and Lynch takes the camera down into the grass until the frame is filled with dark, churning insects. The point is not simply that horror hides under beauty, it is that the beauty is itself a kind of framing device, a way of looking that requires a kind of not looking. The camera’s movement is staging a descent from the public order of shared norms into something like a natural order of chewing persistence, where the world continues without our consoling stories. 

Even at this early stage you can feel why a Finean lens, rather than a Williamsonian one, is going to matter. If you approach the film with a single dominant modality in mind, the temptation is to treat the opening as evidence for one overarching claim, perhaps that reality necessarily contains both surface and depth, or that any apparently normal world is necessarily underwritten by violence and decay, or that the narrative is showing how a possible world that looks wholesome is in fact a possible world containing concealed crimes. 

But the film resists a single necessity claim. It does not merely tell you that the underworld exists, it makes you register different kinds of constraint through different channels, visual, sonic, affective, and normative. That is where Fine’s idea that necessity is plural becomes a description of what the film is doing to you as you watch it. 

Kit Fine’s modal pluralism is the claim that there are different irreducible kinds of necessity, for example metaphysical necessity, natural necessity, normative necessity, and that none can simply be reduced to the others. This is a metaphysical claim about sources. Natural necessity is tied to the natural order, laws, dispositions, the kinds of regularity and constraint that science tracks. Normative necessity is tied to the normative order, what must be done, what counts, what is required or forbidden, the kinds of “must” that are not law like regularities. Metaphysical necessity is tied, in Fine’s broader work, to what things are, their identities and essences, the way in which an object’s nature can ground modal truths about it. 

Now watch the opening of Blue Velvet again in that spirit and the opening descent into insects is not symbolism. It is Lynch marking that the natural order has its own kind of compulsion, its own way of insisting, and it does not depend on the town’s moral vocabulary. The sprinkler keeps spraying after the father collapses. The insects do not become insects because anyone interprets them as such. They are a natural necessity in the background of the scene, and their ugliness is the ugliness of a world that is indifferent to the human wish that the lawn remain a lawn and not a skin over feeding. 

This already sets up a Finean distinction that will matter later when the film turns to sexual coercion and violence. Later, the horror will not feel like indifferent nature. It will feel like an order, a command, a ritual, a perversely structured “must” that binds people. That is not the same kind of necessity as beetles under grass. 

Jeffrey’s discovery of the ear is the hinge between orders. Plot wise, he finds it in a vacant lot and takes it to Detective John Williams, and through Williams’s daughter Sandy he hears the name Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer. But the ear is also a crafted philosophical object. Lynch himself has said the ear needed to be “an opening”, a hole into something else, and that it felt like a way “into the mind”. That is almost too neat, but it is the first instance of a pattern the film repeats: a body part, a sound, a texture, becomes a threshold between worlds. The metaphysics is not delivered in a speech, it is delivered as an affordance for curiosity. 

This is why the film’s sound and music are modal operators in the broad sense, they change what kind of “must” is in force. In the opening, Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” plays as part of the nostalgic surface world, sweet, simple, retro. The song itself was part of Lynch’s originating ideas for the film, along with the severed ear and a mood tied to a time. Later, the same title song becomes Dorothy’s performance, and then the meaning of the sweetness shifts. It becomes a velvet covering over bruises. 

Lynch’s collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti, beginning here, is part of how that shift is achieved. The score does not simply underline emotion, it produces a pressure field around scenes, a sense that something is already bound to happen even when the frame looks calm. Jeffrey’s entry into Dorothy’s world is staged with a kind of procedural innocence, as if he were doing detective work, posing as an exterminator to get into her apartment building, then stealing a spare key while she is distracted by a man in a yellow jacket whom he later nicknames the Yellow Man. 

The details matter because Lynch makes you feel the slide from investigation to complicity. Jeffrey is not simply uncovering facts, he is being recruited into a new normative space, the space of secrecy, trespass, voyeurism, and erotic danger. A Williamsonian lens, if you lean into it, tends to emphasise continuity: the same rational agent using broadly continuous inferential practices to update beliefs, moving from one theory of what is going on to a better one. That can describe a certain surface structure here, clue, inference, hypothesis, test. But the film is interested in something else: the way that, in entering Dorothy’s apartment and hiding in her closet, Jeffrey is not just collecting information, he is stepping into a different kind of “must”, a different constraint on action and perception. 

This is where Fine’s plurality of necessity begins to feel like an interpretive instrument rather than a thesis imposed on the film. Jeffrey’s curiosity is not governed only by epistemic norms, the norms of good belief formation. It is also governed by affective compulsion, by a felt necessity that is not the same as logical compulsion. The film wants you to feel that he “has to” look, even when he knows he should not. That “has to” is not natural necessity, it is not metaphysical necessity either, and it is not simply a rational requirement. It is closer to a normative necessity that has been perverted, mixed with desire and dread. Fine’s picture gives you permission to treat that as a real kind of constraint rather than a mere psychological decoration around the real metaphysics. 

When Jeffrey and Sandy go to Dorothy’s nightclub and watch her sing, Lynch stages performance as a kind of metaphysical mask. Dorothy’s voice, her slow movements, the lighting, all produce a thick atmosphere of longing and threat. The audience consumes the performance as a safe aesthetic object, but Jeffrey is there as someone who has already crossed a boundary. The song “Blue Velvet” here is not simply a song, it is a normative device, it tells the audience what to feel, it tells Dorothy what role she is playing, and it tells Jeffrey what kind of world he is approaching. 

Dorothy finds Jeffrey in the closet, forces him to strip at knifepoint, then Frank arrives and beats and rapes her while inhaling gas from a canister, shifting between sobbing and rage. The scene is not erotic, it is coercive and terrifying, and Lynch films it to make you register that terror as a structure, not an accident. 

Before Frank enters, the air in the apartment already feels pressurised. Jeffrey is hidden, the closet frame becomes a frame within the frame, a cinema inside cinema. You are forced into complicity because your access to the scene is through Jeffrey’s voyeur position. You are watching someone watch. That doubling is not a mere trick, it is Lynch giving you a formal analogue of the film’s metaphysical problem: there is a surface world that thinks it sees, and there is a deeper world that watches back, that has its own rules. 

Frank’s entrance is filmed as a change of law. The room becomes a jurisdiction. He arrives with other men, he treats Dorothy as property, he uses the gas as part of a ritual. It matters that it is ritualistic, because ritual is where normative necessity becomes visible. A ritual is not a mere regularity, it is a repeated “must” enacted in time, a structure of requirement that participants either submit to or are destroyed by. Frank’s violence is a performance of domination with a script. 

If you take a Williamsonian approach first, the temptation is to say: what the scene shows is that the actual world contains horrors that we might have preferred to locate in merely possible worlds, but the metaphysical lesson is that those horrors are part of the same reality we must theorise about. Williamson’s broader necessitism, the thought that everything is necessary in the sense that everything exists necessarily, encourages you to read the film as a disclosure of what is in the world, not as a flirtation with alternative ontologies. 

On such a view, Dorothy’s suffering, Frank’s depravity, Jeffrey’s complicity, are not modal anomalies, they are necessary constituents of the actual world’s inventory. The philosophical moral becomes something like: stop trying to keep “darkness” in a realm of mere possibility, accept that actuality contains it, then do your explanatory work within a single modal framework. There is a certain harsh honesty in that. It even fits the opening descent into insects. The world is not obliged to be the world of the postcard. The actual is what it is, and if you are serious you do not build a metaphysics that sanitises. 

But the problem is that, as an interpretive lens for this particular scene, a purely Williamsonian emphasis on the necessity of what exists tends to flatten what Lynch has so carefully differentiated. The scene is not only saying that such things happen. It is showing that they happen under a distinctive kind of compulsion, a compulsion that is not captured by the thought that, well, they exist in the actual world. Frank’s power is an order that binds Dorothy. Jeffrey’s position is that he is forced into a morally poisoned form of spectatorship. The camera coerces a kind of attention. 

Here Fine’s plurality gives you a sharper description of what the scene is doing. Start with natural necessity. Frank’s inhalation of gas, Dorothy’s bodily vulnerability, the physical dominance in the room, these belong to the natural order, to what bodies can do to bodies. But the scene’s horror is not exhausted by that. The horror is also normative. Frank speaks to Dorothy as if certain acts are required of her, as if her refusal has no standing. He does not merely cause pain, he issues a perverse legislation of the situation, a local morality of domination in which he is sovereign. That is a different kind of necessity. It is not that the laws of nature require Dorothy’s submission. It is that a humanly instituted, criminally enforced normative order has been imposed in this room, and within that order certain things count as mandatory. If you have only one modality in play, you either naturalise that, turning it into brute force, or you moralise it in a way that loses the formal structure of obligation that the scene is staging. 

Then there is something like affective necessity, the felt compulsion of dread and paralysis. Fine’s discussions often distinguish metaphysical, natural, and normative necessity, and the normative category is already broad enough to include many “musts” that are not law like. In the scene, the dread is not a free floating feeling, it is a mode of apprehension that locks Jeffrey and the viewer into a kind of frozen attention. You cannot look away easily because the scene is designed to make looking feel compulsory and shameful at once. Lynch uses tight framing, the closet slats, the partial views, to make the act of seeing itself into a moral predicament. The sound intensifies this. Frank’s voice, the canister, the abrupt shifts in tone, they function like switches between regimes. 

This is another reason that sound and music are metaphysically salient here. They do not just accompany the scene, they legislate the viewer’s experience of it, producing a necessity of attention. The Williamsonian lens can capture the film’s refusal of escapism, its insistence that the actual world contains what polite surfaces deny. But Fine’s lens captures the way Lynch distinguishes kinds of constraint without always naming them. 

The room is not just a place where something happens, it is a place where different necessities collide, natural vulnerability, normative domination, affective compulsion, and the fragile metaphysical necessities of identity and role. Dorothy is not simply an individual who happens to be harmed, she is forced into an essence like role, singer, hostage, object, mother separated from child, and the scene’s cruelty consists partly in the way Frank tries to reduce her to one thin role, while the film keeps showing the thickness of what she is. That is exactly the kind of pressure that Fine’s essentialist and pluralist resources are designed to describe, the idea that what something is can ground what is possible or required for it, and that there are different sources of modal constraint that do not collapse into one master modality. 

The craft of the scene reinforces this. Lynch shoots the apartment not as a neutral container but as a charged chamber, a place where proximity is danger. The closet becomes a philosophical device. It is a hiding place, but also a position of knowledge, and also a position of guilt. The viewer’s epistemic access is purchased at the cost of moral contamination. That, again, is not well described as a mere fact about the actual world. It is better described as a clash of modalities, the epistemic “must” to see, the moral “must not”, the affective “cannot move”, and the criminal normative “you will”. 

Blue Velvet is famous for the way it makes the familiar strange by making it too vivid. Colours are saturated, lighting is often clean to the point of artificiality in the suburban scenes, then becomes murkier and more claustrophobic in Dorothy’s spaces. The performances are calibrated to make tonal shifts feel like ontological shifts. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey with an open faced earnestness that reads at first as naive goodness, then as a kind of pliable curiosity, and then, disturbingly, as a capacity for being drawn toward what horrifies him. 

Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy with a mixture of theatrical poise and private collapse, the singer role and the victim role tearing at each other. Dennis Hopper’s Frank is not played as a realistic criminal so much as a force that changes the air in the room, a violently unstable bundle of childishness, rage, and ritual. These are not merely acting choices, they are metaphysical cues. They tell you what kinds of necessities are being staged. Even the film’s use of pop music participates in this. 

Lynch’s use of “Blue Velvet” as a nostalgic surface and then as Dorothy’s wound, and the Badalamenti collaboration, is central to how the film’s emotional logic works, with the score and the songs producing an atmosphere that is at once romantic and nauseating. The sweetness of the music is not cancelled by the darkness, it is infected by it, and that infection is part of the film’s metaphysics: it suggests that the aesthetic surface is not simply false, it is a real layer of experience that can coexist with atrocity, sometimes as denial, sometimes as seduction, sometimes as grief. 

A Finean would say, in effect, that you are seeing the irreducibility of normative and affective structures, you cannot replace them with natural facts without losing the phenomenon. That is exactly the complaint I have been pressing in the wider Fine versus Williamson exchange, that a single, flattened modality forces you to discard data, especially affective and aesthetic data, in order to preserve a metaphysical fit. In that sense the first third of Blue Velvet is already staging a dispute about method. Do we interpret the film by subsuming everything under one explanatory project, one master modality, one concept of necessity, perhaps the necessity of what exists, or the necessity delivered by our best overall theory of the world? 

Or do we interpret it by allowing that the film itself is an argument for plural sources of constraint, that what happens in the room cannot be captured without distinguishing natural compulsion from normative imposition and from the affective necessities that structure attention and dread? Blue Velvet’s artistry lies in making those differences felt before they are thought, as if it wants to teach you the grammar of “must” by putting you inside a situation where several “musts” conflict and none of them can be cancelled by the others. 

That is why the ear is such a good starting object. It is literally an organ of hearing, but it is also, as Lynch suggests, a hole into something else. The film is inviting you to listen to what kinds of necessity are being sounded. Not one. Several, layered, competing, sometimes nested, sometimes violently opposed. And once you notice that, the move to a Finean staging becomes less like a choice of philosophical fashion and more like a fidelity to the film’s own differentiated world. The film develops by returning to the opening movements and lingering on what is usually passed over too quickly, the ordinary gestures, the town’s choreography of normal life, and the way Lynch films them as if they were already theatrical. 

The father’s collapse is a rupture in an image of civic health. The body falls, the hose continues, the frame stays composed long enough for you to notice the indifference of continuation, the world keeps doing what it was doing. In a purely naturalistic description, that is just the persistence of physical processes. But Lynch makes it into something like an ontological statement by letting the shot’s timing teach you what kind of world you are in. The world is not tailored to human meaning. That is a natural necessity presented as an affective fact. You feel it as dread precisely because the film refuses to cut away quickly and restore a human rhythm. Then the camera goes down into the grass and shows the insects. 

Again, you could read this as a metaphor for evil under the surface. But the image is more brutal and less moralising than that. The insects are not guilty. They are not demonic agents. They are just doing what such creatures do. Their presence says something like: beneath the suburban aesthetic there is a natural order that is not obligated by that. When the film later stages sexual violence, it is important that you do not confuse these orders. If you think the insects already represent human depravity, you will miss the film’s later insistence that depravity is not merely nature, that it includes a normative deformation, a humanly instituted domination that carries its own scripts, symbols, and compulsions. 

Jeffrey’s walk back from the hospital, and his discovery of the ear, are filmed in a manner that makes curiosity feel fated without turning it into literal destiny. He cuts through a vacant lot, an in between space, neither home nor institution. He sees something on the ground, he approaches, the camera gives you enough detail to know what it is without sensationalising the gore. He picks it up, puts it in paper, carries it to the police. The procedural tone is important. It is the tone of the public normative order, the order in which you find evidence and take it to authorities. 

But Lynch is already undermining that order. The ear is not just evidence, it is an intimate part of a person, a piece of someone’s embodied life. The public order treats it as an object of investigation. The film asks you to feel it as a violation that cannot be neutralised by procedure. A Williamsonian reading would naturally emphasise Jeffrey as a rational agent updating his beliefs. He finds a puzzling datum, he consults the appropriate experts, he forms hypotheses. That is not wrong, and it is part of the film’s surface logic. Yet Lynch is also showing how epistemic norms can be drawn into other normative economies. Jeffrey’s curiosity quickly becomes something he cannot fully justify in the language of civic duty. He does not just want the truth in the abstract. He wants entry. He wants proximity. He wants to see what is not for him. 

This is where the pluralist framework begins to pay its way again, because it lets you say: the epistemic “ought” is being braided with a different “ought”, a desire saturated compulsion that is not reducible to mere bad reasoning. Sandy enters as a figure of suburban intelligibility. She is the detective’s daughter, she is friendly, she speaks like someone raised inside the public moral order, and she provides information, Dorothy Vallens is somehow linked to the ear. 

In another film this would be the clean helper character. In Lynch, she is a lure. She does not merely give Jeffrey a clue, she gives him a permission slip to transgress, and the permission is sweetened by flirtation, by the sensation that mystery is romantic. This matters because it shows how normative necessity can appear as attraction. The film’s suburban world is full of norms, politeness, family duty, lawful investigation, but it also has norms of adventure, of masculine testing, of sexual curiosity, and those can be mobilised to justify trespass. A Finean approach is good at describing that, because it does not force you to pretend that only one kind of necessity is real. The film is showing competing normativities. 

The night club scene is the first moment where Lynch makes performance into a metaphysical apparatus. Dorothy’s singing of “Blue Velvet” is a demonstration of how the aesthetic can bind. The audience watches her, the lighting idealises her, the song’s nostalgia wraps the room in a mood that feels safe because it is familiar. But Jeffrey is watching with knowledge of the ear, and that knowledge changes the modality of the scene. The same song now carries a different “must”. It is no longer simply, feel nostalgic, it is, feel nostalgic while something else is present, something you do not yet understand. The film’s music is doing modal work, it is changing what follows from what, not in a logical sense but in a phenomenological one. The score and the songs are part of how Lynch makes the film’s metaphysics experiential. 

Then Jeffrey breaks into Dorothy’s apartment and hides in her closet. This is the decisive step from investigation to complicity. The cinematography makes the closet into a machine for turning the viewer into a participant. The narrow slats constrain the field of view. You see fragments, not wholes. You register details with heightened intensity because you cannot see everything at once. That is not a trivial stylistic choice. It is a way of staging how knowledge, in this world, is always ethically contaminated. The film does not allow you the fantasy of omniscient, innocent spectatorship. You know because you spy. You learn because you trespass. You see because you hide. And you cannot fully separate that from the desire that brought you there. 

Dorothy discovers Jeffrey and forces him, at knifepoint, to strip, then she sends him back into the closet. Even this pre Frank moment is crucial for the Finean case, because it shows the instability of roles. Jeffrey entered as an investigator, he becomes a trespasser, then a captive, then again a voyeur. Dorothy enters as performer, becomes sovereign in her own apartment for a moment, then becomes captive again when Frank arrives. The film is constantly shifting the essential descriptions that seem to fit the characters, as if to test whether any of those descriptions can be their essence. A Finean wants to say: do not confuse essence with role. Roles can thin and thicken. A person can be forced into a role that is not essential to them. The horror of coercion is partly that it tries to rewrite what someone is, to make a contingent relation look essential. That is exactly what Frank tries to do. 

Frank’s entrance, again, feels like a change in the space’s law. He appears with an entourage, he treats the room as his. His violence is ritualistic, including the gas inhalation, his oscillations between sobbing and rage, his insistence on certain words, certain behaviours. The scene’s power comes partly from the sense that you are watching a local normative order being imposed with total force. 

A Williamsonian might respond by saying: yes, this is part of the actual world, and our metaphysics should not pretend otherwise, it should be continuous with our best theories, including moral and psychological theory, and it should not be tempted by exotic modal stories that treat such evil as belonging to “another world”. That is a serious point, and it can even be linked to the post Kantian anxieties we discussed in the previous essay about objectivity without an impossible view from nowhere. 

But the Finean pressure returns when you ask what exactly is being imposed. It is not a natural law. It is not a metaphysical law. It is a humanly instituted domination that carries the form of a requirement. Dorothy is compelled not just causally but normatively, compelled in the sense that Frank treats her as if she is under obligations that he has authored. This is why calling it simply “force” is inadequate. Force is there, but the force is organised as authority. Frank is staging himself as sovereign, and sovereignty is a normative phenomenon, even when it is criminal. In that room, he tries to make it the case that certain things must be done. 

That “must” is a deformation of the normative order, a counterfeit morality enforced by violence. Fine’s framework makes it easier to say that. Normative necessity is a real category, and it is precisely what is being weaponised. The scene’s sound design intensifies that weaponisation. Frank’s voice is not merely dialogue, it is an instrument. The gas canister’s hiss is not merely a prop sound, it becomes like a signal that the ritual has begun. The room’s ambient sound seems to narrow, as if the world outside has been turned down. This is part of Lynch’s general practice, treating sound as equal to image, but here it has a specific metaphysical effect: it makes the room feel like a sealed domain, a pocket order in which a different set of constraints is active. 

When the film later takes Jeffrey back into the daylight, you feel the shock because your senses have been trained to notice that worlds can be entered and exited, and that each world has its own internal “musts”. Now the question becomes not simply which one captures the scene’s horror, but which one captures the scene’s structure without discarding data. 

The Williamsonian lens, in its strongest form, has a commendable impulse to integrate rather than segregate. It warns against the temptation to treat the dark as ontologically elsewhere, as if you could keep the metaphysics tidy by relocating ugliness to a merely possible domain. Blue Velvet itself mocks that temptation, and the opening images already do so. But the risk on the Williamsonian side is that integration becomes homogenisation. You integrate by treating everything as one kind of fact, one kind of necessity, one inventory of what exists, perhaps necessarily. Then you lose the internal articulation that Lynch is making you feel. 

The Finean lens, by contrast, lets you say: the film is not only revealing that something exists, it is revealing the kind of necessity by which it holds, the source of its compulsion. The insects under the grass hold by natural necessity. The suburban manners hold by normative necessity, the shared “this is how we do things”. Frank’s domination holds by a perverted normative necessity, a counterfeit authority backed by violence. Jeffrey’s compelled looking holds by an affectively saturated necessity that is not identical with either nature or morality, but which can plausibly be treated as a species of normative compulsion, a “must” of attention created by desire and fear. The music holds by aesthetic necessity, in the sense that it binds feeling and meaning in ways that are not captured by factual description. If you refuse these distinctions, you make the film flatter than it is. 

So, to make the explicit case for staging it all via Fine, the case is that Blue Velvet is an artwork that keeps distinguishing sources of compulsion, and it does so precisely through texture, camera movement, framing, sound, and performance. Fine’s modal pluralism is a philosophical way of taking that differentiation seriously rather than treating it as decoration around a single metaphysical core. The core is not merely that evil exists, but that it exists through different orders, nature’s indifference, society’s surfaces, and domination’s counterfeit normativity, and that trauma is what happens when these orders collide inside a person’s life. A pluralist modality map is not something you impose on the film, it is something the film is already teaching you to perceive. 

The middle stretch of Blue Velvet is where the film stops looking like a mystery that happens to contain nightmare material, and starts behaving like a world whose modal structure has been damaged, bent, and then made to look, from the outside, deceptively normal. Jeffrey is no longer simply a curious agent following clues. He becomes a hinge between two orders that the film insists are not merely two regions of the same space, but two different ways a space can be real. 

One way is the well lit, socially legible Lumberton of lawns, fire engines, friendly faces, and a romance that seems to arrive already packaged as a recognisable script. The other way is the interior night of Dorothy’s apartment and Frank’s orbit, a domain that is not just morally darker but metaphysically stranger, a place where what is possible for a person seems to alter in the act of being forced, watched, and named. Jeffrey keeps returning to Dorothy and keeps trying to hold onto Sandy. The film makes that sound like an ordinary narrative tension, temptation versus innocence, but it films it as a tension between competing necessities. 

Each return to Dorothy looks, on the surface, like a choice. The camera and sound keep pressing another idea: that the choice is being produced by the situation itself, as if the situation carries a kind of compulsion that is not reducible to psychology alone. The film keeps giving you moments where Jeffrey could stop, could tell the police more, could step back. The fact that he does not step back is part of the plot, but it is also part of the film’s modal argument: some spaces generate their own “must”, a coercive sense that the next step is not merely likely but required by the shape of what has already happened. This is one of the points where a Finean lens begins to do real work. Fine’s general strategy is to reverse the explanatory direction that many philosophers take for granted, not taking modality as basic and then defining essence in terms of it, but taking essence as prior and letting necessity arise from what something is. 

In his classic “Essence and Modality” line of thought, the claim is that there are facts about what an object is, in virtue of which certain modal claims hold, rather than the other way round. If you apply that to Blue Velvet, you start to see instead of a chain of contingent events that happen to include violence and perversity, a progressive disclosure of essences that were always already there, and of the way those essences can be thickened, distorted, or made to dominate the space of possibilities. 

Take Dorothy first. Early on, she is introduced through Sandy’s whisper and then through performance. She sings “Blue Velvet” at the Slow Club, and the film frames her as an image that is both public and intensely private, a person whose interior has been made into spectacle. The plot makes explicit that she is being coerced through the captivity of her husband and child, forced into sexual servitude by Frank. But the metaphysical point is subtler: coercion here is not merely an external constraint on a freely choosing agent. It is a force that reshapes what Dorothy can be in the world of the film. Fine’s emphasis on grounding lets you say something sharper than “she is traumatised.” It lets you say: the facts that ground the modal profile of Dorothy’s life have changed. The hostage situation is not simply a contingent background condition. It is a re grounding of her practical identity. It changes what is possible for her without changing what is logically possible in the abstract, and that distinction matters. 

That is also why the middle section’s most disturbing developments feel like the unfolding of a structure. Jeffrey’s involvement shifts from investigatory to participatory. He continues to see Sandy, he continues to act like a boy with a detective itch, but he is also pulled into a pattern with Dorothy that becomes explicitly sadomasochistic. The film refuses to treat this as a private kink floating free of the rest of the story. It treats it as an expression of how power and trauma have reorganised the space of relations. Fine’s pluralism about necessity, the idea that there are different kinds of necessity rather than one monolithic modality, becomes unusually apt here. The film keeps staging, alongside the logical and physical necessities that continue to hold, a set of affective and normative constraints that behave like necessities inside the characters’ lived worlds. 

If you ignore those, you can still describe the plot, but you lose what the film is doing. Now contrast that with a Williamsonian reading. Williamson’s broader programme, in work like Modal Logic as Metaphysics, is to defend necessitism and a robust, disciplined approach to modality where quantification and necessity are treated as part of an overall theoretical package, continuous with scientific style theorising, and not something we get to tailor to our intuitions case by case. This orientation tends to resist multiplying modalities in an unprincipled way. It also tends to treat the metaphysical facts as stable in a way that can sit uneasily with the film’s sense that the world itself is warping. 

If you are wearing Williamson’s spectacles, the film looks like an exploration of epistemic limitation and practical entanglement inside a single fixed domain of being. Jeffrey is discovering, in a hard way, facts that were already there. Dorothy is a person with a determinate identity across the narrative, even as her knowledge and agency are compromised. Frank is not a metaphysical anomaly but a brutal inhabitant of the same world, and the horror is that the same world contains him. That reading has real strengths. It captures the way Blue Velvet keeps the suburban surfaces in frame even as the nightmare deepens. Lynch does not let you leave Lumberton behind. He keeps re showing the ordinary, and he keeps showing that the ordinary is not a different universe, it is next door. The stability of Williamson’s metaphysical picture, one world, one domain of objects, fits that insistence that the horror is not elsewhere. It is here. 

But the weakness is that the film starts signalling that what matters is not only what exists, but what is salient, what binds, what counts as a reason, what compels. If your metaphysics treats all the objects as equally there, and treats necessity as largely uniform, you risk flattening the film’s own differentiation between kinds of constraint. The middle section feels, to many viewers, like it is not just showing new facts, but changing the rules of what a fact can do to you. This is exactly where the textures of cinematography and sound become philosophical data. 

Lynch and Badalamenti’s sonic world is doing modal work. The film’s use of vintage pop songs, especially “Blue Velvet” and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”, is not merely ironic juxtaposition. It is a way of placing the characters inside pre existing forms, as if their lives are being compelled to move along grooves cut by cultural memory. The soundtrack is deliberately a mix of pop and orchestral score, with Badalamenti’s music and Lynch’s taste for older songs creating a timeless, uncanny atmosphere. Critically, Lynch even used music on set to shape performance and mood, including playing Shostakovich while filming, and the score alludes to Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony. That matters for our question because it shows the film building a world in which affect is not a private response to events, but a structuring medium. The dread is not commentary, it is architecture. 

If we take Fine seriously on the thought that different necessities attach to different grounds, then the film’s affective and aesthetic organisation becomes part of what grounds modal claims about the characters’ lives. This is not a claim that the music makes things literally necessary in some cosmic sense. It is the claim that the film is presenting a kind of necessity that belongs to lived agency and to the formation of identity under pressure. The slow, hovering score cues, the sudden silences, the way a song can lock a scene into a ritual mood, all of this suggests that the space of possibilities is being narrowed in a manner that is not captured by physical constraints alone. The middle section, in particular, uses sound to make certain transitions feel inevitable even when, at the level of plot summary, they remain optional. 

Consider the sequence that leads into Frank catching Jeffrey and dragging him deeper into his world. Jeffrey suspects Frank has abducted Dorothy’s husband and son, he observes Frank’s drug dealings and meetings, and then Frank catches Jeffrey leaving Dorothy’s apartment, abducting him and Dorothy and taking them to Ben’s place, where Dorothy is made to see her family and Jeffrey is forced to watch Ben’s lip sync of “In Dreams”, which moves Frank to tears. But what makes the sequence land is how it is filmed and sounds. Frank’s world is not just violent, it is ceremonial. It has its own liturgy: the inhaled gas, the shifts in voice and register, the sudden tenderness that is not redemption but another mode of control, and the way performance becomes a weapon. 

In a Williamsonian idiom, you might describe this as a psychological profile interacting with contingent circumstances. Frank happens to be the kind of person who mixes brutality with sentimentality, who responds to music in a way that reveals some recognisable human depth. Jeffrey happens to be unlucky, and also reckless. There is a strong implication that different choices would have led elsewhere. The world is one stable setting, with agents making decisions under uncertainty. 

In a Finean idiom, you can instead say that the scene at Ben’s is staging a confrontation between essences and the necessities that flow from them. Frank’s essence, in the film’s sense, is not simply “a bad man.” It is a role in a system of domination that requires theatricality to sustain itself. The lip sync is not a break from violence, it is a device that grounds a particular kind of authority. Frank’s tears do not soften him, they demonstrate his capacity to incorporate sentiment into coercion. The necessity here is not that he must cry, but that his power must be able to metabolise every register of feeling, including nostalgia and yearning, without relinquishing control. The song becomes part of the grounding of the scene’s modal profile: 

in this room, with this arrangement of gazes and bodies, something like “In Dreams” is not a detachable soundtrack choice but a mechanism by which the possible and permissible are being set. This is also where Fine’s insistence that modality is not exhausted by one privileged kind of necessity matters. In the Ben sequence, there is a kind of social necessity, the necessity of roles within a criminal hierarchy, and a kind of aesthetic necessity, the necessity of performance as a means of binding a group. There is also an affective necessity, a felt inevitability that Jeffrey is being pulled through a door he cannot close behind him. 

A purely Williamsonian approach can of course acknowledge all this as phenomenology and as evidence about psychology, but it tends to keep metaphysics less willing to treat these registers as revealing distinct modal structures. The cost is that the film’s own insistence that dread and beauty are forces that organise life, becomes harder to register as philosophically central. You can see the difference in the way each lens would answer a simple question: what kind of “must” is operating when Jeffrey continues to return to Dorothy even after seeing Frank’s violence? The Williamsonian answer is likely to be: there is no “must” beyond the ordinary nexus of desire, curiosity, fear, and bad judgement. The rest is dramatic presentation. 

The Finean answer can be: the film is showing how trauma and power create necessities within a form of life, constraints that are not mere preferences but conditions of intelligibility for the participants. Dorothy’s world becomes a world in which certain moves are available only as self injury, confession, submission, or complicity. Jeffrey’s entry into that world changes what kind of agent he is able to be, not by altering his metaphysical existence but by altering the grounds of his agency. 

Once you see it that way, the famous Lynchian contrast between suburban idyll and underworld begins to look less like a simple duality and more like a problem about grounding. The surface town is full of norms and scripts that ground one kind of necessity, the necessity of politeness, romance, civic order. The underworld is full of coercive scripts that ground another kind of necessity, the necessity of secrecy, compliance, ritualised humiliation. The middle of the film is where Jeffrey begins to live in both at once, which means he begins to experience conflicts between necessities that do not share a common measure. 

That is a Finean thought almost by default: when necessities are plural, conflicts between them are not always resolvable by reduction. Sometimes one necessity does not defeat another because they are not competitors within one ranking, they are constraints generated by different grounds. Even the performances can be described in those terms. 

Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey with a mixture of sincerity and a kind of blank openness, as if his face is a screen that different worlds can write on. Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy with a frankness that is never merely eroticised, it is anguished and confrontational, a performance that insists we not treat her as a symbol. Dennis Hopper plays Frank as a volatile assemblage of registers. The point, for our purposes, is that these acting choices contribute to the film’s modal organisation. Jeffrey’s openness makes it believable that his possibilities are being re scripted. Dorothy’s intensity makes it believable that her identity has been re grounded by coercion and grief. Frank’s register shifts make it believable that the same person can inhabit incompatible emotional modalities without integrating them into a stable self, which is a way of showing that identity does not always guarantee coherence. 

The cinematography reinforces that by repeatedly changing how space is given to you. Dorothy’s apartment is filmed as a trap, not only because of what happens there, but because of how the camera positions Jeffrey as watcher and then as watched. The Slow Club is filmed as a stage where the audience’s desire is part of the scene’s moral physics. Ben’s place is filmed as an enclosed theatre, a room that exists to force participation. The film builds domains. And domains, in a Finean key, are precisely the kinds of things that can ground local necessities. If we now begin to put pressure on the lenses, the evaluative question becomes which framework is better at accounting for the film’s insistence that aesthetic form is not optional to what is happening? Williamson’s metaphysical seriousness, his refusal to let our intuitions about possibility govern the theory too easily, fits a certain kind of philosophical integrity. It prevents you from treating Lynch as if he has revealed a second supernatural realm. It keeps you attentive to the fact that the horror is part of ordinary reality. 

But Fine’s pluralism and his grounding first approach fit the film’s deeper claim that realities can differ not by inventory but by structure, by the kinds of dependence relations and constraints that organise lives. Blue Velvet is not primarily about discovering that Frank exists. It is about discovering what Frank makes necessary for others, and how those necessities do not look like the necessities of physics or logic, but they bind more intimately. A last detail helps fix the point. 

The “In Dreams” lip sync is sometimes remembered as an odd interlude, but if you read it with a Williamsonian caution, you might say: it shows Frank’s complexity. He is not a cartoon villain. If you read it Fineanly, you can say something more structurally revealing: the scene shows that the regime of violence requires a regime of feeling, and that the music is part of the grounding of Frank’s authority. He is not simply responding to the song. He is using the song, and being used by it, as a device that makes certain relations between people necessary within that room. Jeffrey must watch. Dorothy must be made to see. Ben must perform. Frank must be the one who can be moved and still remain the sovereign of the moment. Those are not physical constraints, but they are necessities of a social metaphysics staged as cinema. 

From here, the film continues to thicken, pushing Jeffrey toward the point where the underworld’s necessities begin to contaminate the daylight world more openly, and where the film’s question becomes less “what happened to Dorothy’s family?” and more “what kind of world lets this be the underside of its normality?” That is where Fine’s emphasis on grounding, and on the possibility that different kinds of necessity structure different regions of our life, becomes not an imposed philosophical gloss but a way of taking the film at its word, as a work that is using sound, image, performance, and dread to argue that the real is not just what exists, but what binds. 

As the film moves from its opening shock, the severed ear and the first descent into Dorothy Vallens’s flat, it begins to show why questions about modality start to register as a way of talking about how a world can become structured by compulsion, by coercion, by ritualised repetition, by the sense that something is not merely happening but has a kind of grip on what can happen next. Lynch sets this up with an almost perverse clarity. You can follow what happens, yet the events carry a pressure that is not exhausted by the sequence of causes and effects. 

This is where a Finean lens starts to bite harder than a Williamsonian one, not because Williamson lacks resources for brutality or for perversion, but because the film keeps insisting on modalities that feel layered rather than uniform. On a Williamsonian picture, especially one sympathetic to necessitism and to a broadly unified metaphysical necessity, you are tempted to describe the middle section of the film as the tightening of a net whose strands are in principle all of the same ontological kind. There is this world, with these people, and the necessity at work is the necessity of what there is, together with whatever is fixed by the actual nature of those things. 

The metaphysical story says Jeffrey is a young man whose curiosity becomes involvement, Dorothy is a woman trapped by blackmail and terror, Frank is a sadistic gangster whose drug use and sexual violence are part of his pattern, the police are compromised in part, and the suburban surface is not the whole of the town. The modal work in such a description is largely classificatory. It sorts what is essential to a person from what is accidental, it distinguishes what could have been otherwise from what could not, and it treats the film’s disquiet as an effect of discovering the true extension of what exists behind the respectable front. 

The trouble is that Lynch does not shoot it as if it is merely a revelation of hidden facts. He shoots it as a reconfiguration of the space of possibility. The more Jeffrey returns to Dorothy’s apartment, the less it feels like an ordinary location in an ordinary town and the more it feels like an ontologically charged site, almost like a machine for producing a certain kind of relation. Each visit thickens an atmosphere, and that thickening is part of what the film is about. The cinematography and sound design turn the apartment into a chamber in which necessity is not only metaphysical but also affective, normative, bodily, ritualistic. Even if one insists, as Williamson might, that these other modalities are not metaphysically basic, the film keeps presenting them as basic for understanding what is happening to Jeffrey, and perhaps for understanding what is happening to the world of Lumberton as a whole. 

Fine’s modal pluralism gives you a vocabulary for that without forcing you to pretend that all the pressure is metaphysical necessity in one uniform sense. Fine argues for irreducibly different kinds of necessity, often glossed as metaphysical, nomic or natural, and normative, with each kind traced to a different source, not all collapsible into one master notion. Blue Velvet’s middle section is almost a demonstration piece for why an audience might find that attractive. The film keeps asking you to register at least three different kinds of “cannot be otherwise”, and to feel the difference between them. 

First, there is the brute compulsion of Frank’s control. Dorothy’s husband and child have been taken, and her actions are constrained by that terror. The plot makes this explicit, but Lynch stages it as an atmosphere that leaks into everything. Here we are in the vicinity of what Fine would treat as something like a natural or causal necessity in a local system, not a law of nature in the physicist’s sense, but a constraint that behaves with the hardness of law for the people caught inside it. Dorothy cannot simply choose differently without catastrophic consequences. In a Williamsonian metaphysical register you can say, yes, given these actual arrangements, this is how things go. But that tends to flatten what the film wants you to notice, namely that this hardness is socially manufactured and psychically sustained. It is a necessity made out of threats, surveillance, routines, humiliation, and the predictability of violence. The camera contributes to the sense that Frank’s presence is not merely a person entering a room but a force-field that alters what can be done and said once he is near. Even when he is absent, he is in the modal background as a constraint on the space of action. 

Second, there is a normative necessity in the sense of role, taboo, shame, and the fragile scripts that suburban life asks people to perform. Jeffrey’s relationship with Sandy is shot in a different key, bright and open enough to feel like another genre, almost a teen romance with a noir undertow. The film is named after a song, and the very fact that it is named after a song matters, because songs in Lynch are often carriers of a social and emotional normativity. The nightclub performance of “Blue Velvet” is a little ceremony of public desire, a stylised script of longing, and it gives Dorothy an official role that sits perversely alongside her private captivity. 

The middle section keeps crossing Jeffrey between these registers. He moves from Sandy’s wholesome warmth to Dorothy’s bruised intensity, and the crossings themselves become the film’s way of showing that what counts as “possible” for a person is partly set by what kinds of role they can inhabit without psychological collapse. Fine’s way of talking about normative necessity, as a distinct modality with its own source, lets you say that the film is mapping not just what is the case, but what is required, permitted, forbidden, and demanded in different social micro-worlds. 

Third, there is something that feels like an affective necessity, which is not always separated out in textbook lists, but sits naturally with Fine’s general insistence that there are multiple, non-reducible modal notions responsive to different structures. The dread in Blue Velvet is not merely fear of what will happen. It is dread that something is already fixed in the texture of the world, as if the town’s normality is a skin that can tear at any point because what lies beneath is not chaos but a different order, an order with its own grim regularities. The film’s sound often does this work as much as its images do. There are stretches where the sonic environment holds you in a suspended expectation, and it is expectation as a kind of bondage. The viewer is trained into a modality, trained into a sense of what must come next, not because it is logically entailed, but because the film has produced a pattern of tension and release that starts to feel inexorable. 

If you then treat all necessity as one metaphysical kind, you miss what is distinctive about being coerced by a mood, being compelled by a rhythm, being pushed by an atmosphere. You can always insist that moods are not metaphysically fundamental. The film’s point is that they are existentially fundamental, and therefore hermeneutically fundamental. This difference becomes sharpest where Jeffrey’s involvement stops looking like investigative curiosity and starts looking like a form of capture. 

He continues seeing Sandy while entering a sadomasochistic relationship with Dorothy, and Dorothy encourages him to hit her. What matters is not simply that this happens, but how Lynch stages Jeffrey’s gradual loss of moral and modal innocence. At first, Jeffrey imagines that the underworld is an object of knowledge. He will see, report, understand, perhaps even rescue. As he returns to Dorothy, he becomes part of the economy he is trying to observe. The observer’s stance collapses. This is one of Lynch’s most disturbing themes, and it is also where metaphysics quietly enters. For the collapse of the observer’s stance is a collapse of a certain modal picture, the picture in which one’s agency stands outside the scene and can choose among options cleanly presented. 

A Williamsonian reading tends to treat that collapse as epistemic and moral, not as a signal of modal plurality. The story would go like this. Jeffrey gains evidence, he updates his beliefs, he becomes rationally sensitive to new facts, and unfortunately he is also tempted by the thrill and the sexuality and the danger. You can even borrow Williamson’s broader anti-exceptionalist sensibility, the idea that we refine our commitments the way we refine theories, and say that Jeffrey is like a naive theorist whose “folk morality” is being revised by harsh data. That sounds plausible, and in other Lynch films it might carry more weight, especially where the narrative machinery looks like a laboratory for self-deception. 

But Blue Velvet is not only about revising beliefs. It is about being altered at the level of what possibilities feel live. The film is not content with saying that Jeffrey learns the town has an underworld. It shows Jeffrey becoming a person for whom certain actions become thinkable, then doable, then almost demanded by the unfolding situation. Fine’s essence-first orientation helps here, but only if we treat “essence” with the subtlety Fine demands. Fine’s position is often summarised as the claim that essence cannot be reduced to necessity, that facts about what something is are not captured simply by listing what is true of it in all possible worlds. Essence is explanatory, it is not merely a modal residue. If we import that spirit into film interpretation, the suggestion is not that Jeffrey has a fixed, tiny essence called “good boy” that later gets replaced by a fixed essence called “corrupt boy”. 

The suggestion is that the film is probing what is constitutive of Jeffrey’s identity, what makes him him across the narrative transformations, and it is doing so by putting him into relations that reveal different layers of his nature. In other words, the film is less interested in what Jeffrey happens to do and more interested in what these actions disclose about the structure of desire, aggression, curiosity, shame, and the need for innocence. Those structures behave like essences in Fine’s broad sense, not as mystical inner cores, but as constitutive patterns that explain why certain modal transitions, from innocence to complicity for instance, are intelligible as transitions of this person in this world. 

The “In Dreams” sequence is a good test case. Frank takes Jeffrey and Dorothy to Ben’s lair, Frank permits Dorothy to see her family, and Ben performs an impromptu lip-sync to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”, which moves Frank to tears. This is a modal knot. The song itself is about dreaming, about a reality that is not controllable by waking will, and Lynch stages it as an emblem of how Frank relates to his own violence. Frank is not simply a calculating predator. He is a creature of ritual, of performance, of sentimentality that is not redemption but fuel. He is moved, then he destroys. If you insist on one metaphysical necessity, you will say that Frank’s psychology is contingent but something, and the scene is an illustration of that psychological something. 

Fine’s pluralism lets you say more precisely what the scene is doing. It is showing a normative necessity internal to Frank’s self-understanding, a requirement that violence be wrapped in theatricality, that domination be staged as romance, that tenderness appear, not to soften the brutality, but to give it an almost metaphysical permission. It is as if, for Frank, the world must contain this grotesque oscillation between feeling and harm. The lip-sync becomes a small metaphysical drama of grounding. The violence is grounded, in Frank’s own economy, in an aestheticised moment. That is not a causal grounding in the physicist’s sense. It is a grounding in the Finean sense of explanation by constitutive structure, the structure of a form of life in which certain gestures make other gestures possible. 

You can also see the relevance of the post-Kantian background here. What the German idealists and their successors are often trying to understand is how normativity and objectivity interact without collapsing into each other, how the structures of meaning and value are not mere projections, yet are not brute objects like stones. Blue Velvet’s middle section is a case study in that tension. Frank’s world is not merely his private fantasy. It is enacted, enforced, shared by a gang, by a corrupt network, by spaces like the nightclub and Ben’s room. Yet it is also saturated with symbol, song, gesture, and perversely sacred routines. 

A purely metaphysical necessity story risks treating this as colourful contingent content painted onto a fixed ontological canvas. A plural modal story treats it as part of the furniture of the world as lived, not optional decoration but a constraint on how things can unfold. This matters too for how we assess Dorothy. The easy moral psychology would treat her as a victim who is traumatised, coerced, perhaps also ambivalent, perhaps also drawn into repetition. The film asks for that, but it also asks you to hold something harder. 

Dorothy is a public figure, a singer in a nightclub, and the film’s use of “Blue Velvet” as a named song and as a performance motif makes her public persona feel like a mask that is nonetheless real. Her private life, by contrast, is the place where she is stripped of dignity, but also the place where a certain kind of desire speaks, sometimes in ways that unsettle Jeffrey and unsettle the viewer. A Williamsonian lens might try to separate the metaphysical facts from the psychological ones, to say that what Dorothy is, metaphysically, is a person enduring certain events, and the rest is contingent mental life. 

Fine’s emphasis on essence as explanatory invites a different reading. Dorothy’s “what she is” in the world of the film is not separable from the role her suffering and her public performance play in structuring Jeffrey’s entry into darkness. In Finean terms you might say that certain relational facts are constitutive in this narrative, not merely accidental. Dorothy is not simply a person with properties. She is a node in an explanatory network, and her “essence in the story”, the features without which she would not be this figure, include being the hinge between song and captivity, between glamour and terror, between adult sexuality and the young man’s fantasy of rescue. 

The viewer’s own position is implicated. The film repeatedly makes looking feel like trespass. Jeffrey looks through slats, hides in closets, watches Dorothy undress, watches Frank assault her, watches criminal meetings. The audience watches Jeffrey watching. Lynch turns voyeurism into a formal device. If you treat modality as unified and world-based, you will likely treat this as a moral theme, the danger of curiosity, the fall of innocence. Maybe, but it is incomplete. The film is also exploring a modal structure of spectatorship, the way the act of looking transforms what is possible for the one who looks. Once Jeffrey has seen, he cannot unsee, and the film does not frame that only as knowledge gained but as a transformation of the field of action. 

Finean plurality helps you say that the “cannot unsee” is not metaphysical necessity in the sense of quantifying over possible worlds. It is a necessity of psychic life, a kind of internal law of affect and memory. It is closer to the necessity that traumatised time has, where the past is not merely past but present as constraint. A modal metaphysics that refuses to take such necessities seriously will be forced, in interpretation, to treat them as mere metaphor. 

Blue Velvet insists they are data. The most persuasive case for staging via Fine, then, is that it makes better sense of how the film uses texture to build necessity. The shift from Sandy’s daylight world to Dorothy’s night world is not only a change of setting. It is a change of modal regime. In Sandy’s scenes, the future feels open, the plot could go in multiple directions, the romance could be one story among others. In Dorothy’s scenes, the future feels canalised. The camera lingers, the space feels enclosed, the sound feels heavy, and the characters behave as if pulled by invisible cords. It is not that the script forces them, it is that the world is presented as having a certain internal “must”. 

Fine’s claim that we should not expect one reductive analysis of all modality, that there are different sources of necessity, gives you a principled way to honour what the film is doing without mystifying it None of this means that a Williamsonian reading collapses. It means it is under pressure to explain why it is entitled to treat these other necessities as secondary when the film’s own evidence, the cinematic evidence, suggests they are primary for understanding the shape of the world. Williamson would likely respond that metaphysics aims at what is fundamentally the case, and that affective and normative patterns, however important, supervene on the underlying distribution of entities and properties. The film does not refute that as a metaphysical thesis. It challenges it as an interpretive stance by demonstrating, in the viewer’s experience, that supervenient patterns can be what makes a world intelligible. 

That is a very post-Kantian thought. The structure of appearance is not a veil. It is a condition of sense-making. Beiser’s recurring insistence, in his reconstructions of post-Kantian debates, that the philosophers of that era were seeking objectivity without a view from nowhere, helps illuminate why this dispute feels alive when applied to Lynch. The modalities that matter in lived worlds are not always the ones a single-level metaphysics prefers to privilege. 

If we now pull the camera even closer, so close that the “argument” is no longer something we merely apply to Blue Velvet from the outside but something we watch being generated by the film’s own textures, then the Williamson–Fine difference stops being a dispute about where necessity “lives” and becomes a dispute about what we count as metaphysically salient in the first place. That is why the cinematography, sound design, and the management of affect matter so much here. 

Lynch is not simply telling us that there is a sunny surface and a dark underside, he is making the surface and the underside feel like different orders of reality by using distinct visual and sonic regimes, and by letting those regimes leak into each other in ways that are not just narrative twists but ontological insults. The film’s famous opening is not merely illustrative, it is a metaphysical prologue. The extreme saturation of the lawns and roses, the placid suburban geometry, the slow, almost ceremonious friendliness of the world, are not neutral content. They are a claim about what “counts” as the world when it is being presented as the world, a world that appears to run on settled norms and easy intelligibility. 

Then the camera dives, literally, into the grass, and the sound world changes into a harsh crawling turbulence, and the beetles become not an incidental detail but a revelation that what looked like a complete description was never complete. That shift is simultaneously epistemic and ontological. Epistemic because it is a shift in what is disclosed to an inquirer. Ontological because the film refuses to treat the revelation as merely adding more facts to the same plane, it treats it as exposing a different kind of being, something like a lower register that was always there but not metabolised by the earlier picture. 

A Williamsonian reading tends to make this intelligible by leaning on a disciplined continuity between the everyday and the theoretically ambitious. The argument becomes something like this: our ordinary practices of classification, inference, and expectation are reasonably reliable within their proper domain, but they are defeasible. The camera’s movement is like a rational pressure on complacent inference. What looked settled was never licensed to be treated as exhaustive, and the film is a lesson in the non monotonic character of our confidence. It is not that the “sunny town” was a false world and the “beetle world” the true one, it is that the initial model of the town was underdescribed, and a more adequate theory of the same reality has to integrate the disturbing data without falling into magical thinking. If you follow that line, the style itself becomes part of an anti exceptionalist epistemology. 

The bright Americana is a kind of folk theory of the town, and the underworld is the hard evidence that forces revision. This fits naturally with Williamson’s broader tendency to treat philosophical commitments, including modal ones, as continuous with theory choice and systematic inquiry rather than as emanations from a special metaphysical faculty. But the film itself keeps pushing against any easy assimilation of its materials into a single rationally revisable model, because the “data” are not merely additional facts. They are structured as powers, as bindings, as humiliations, as atmospheres that compel or deform agency. 

This is where Fine’s machinery starts to look less like optional metaphysical decoration and more like an attempt to respect what the film is actually doing. Fine is centrally concerned with the thought that modal and temporal structure should not be flattened into a single homogeneous necessity, and that what is fundamental is not a possible worlds story but a story about grounds, essences, and different ways in which things are constrained. 

Blue Velvet’s style is almost perversely Finean in this sense. It keeps staging constraint as plural. There is the constraint of social role, the constraint of sexual compulsion, the constraint of fear, the constraint of small town normativity, the constraint of cinematic fantasy, each of them “necessary” in its own way to the way the characters can be present to one another. If you try to treat all of those as merely more items for an overarching theory to accommodate, you risk missing the film’s insistence that the constraints have different depths and different kinds of authority over the agents in the scene. This becomes acutely visible once we move into the middle movement of the film, where Jeffrey is no longer just a curious observer but a participant who is being reformed by what he witnesses and by what he does. One of the most important stylistic decisions Lynch makes is that the underworld is not introduced as a cleanly separated locale with its own stable rules. It is introduced as a kind of contagion of perception. 

Jeffrey’s point of view is constantly being implicated, not only morally but ontologically, because the film makes our access to the underworld coincide with his access. The voyeurism is not an optional psychological trait, it is a method of disclosure. The closet scene, to take the emblematic case, is not just plot, it is a metaphysical staging of how realities are partitioned by vantage, concealment, and exposure. It matters that the scene is filmed with a tight management of thresholds, door frames, slats, partial views, and it matters that the sound design does not simply accompany the image but produces a second channel of knowledge that is both richer and more terrifying. You hear before you see, you infer from tone and breath and the percussive violence of Frank’s presence. The scene therefore treats inference as embodied, affective, and temporally stretched. 

Fine presses a view on persistence and time that resists taking a single dominant framework for granted, urging that the metaphysics of temporal existence has to be sensitive to what sorts of entities and structures we are dealing with, and to how different descriptions can track different aspects without one swallowing the other. Fine develops a hylomorphic approach to social groups, in which the reality of a group is not merely an aggregate of individuals but a structured entity whose form is crucial to what it is. And in his thinking there is a sustained engagement with the idea that tense and temporal talk is not a dispensable gloss but can be deeply revealing of how we are situated in time, including how “the same world” can be lived as different worlds because of where the subject stands in relation to it. 

If you apply these Finean motifs to Blue Velvet, the underworld is not best treated as a mere set of additional facts about Lumberton, but as the emergence of new forms that reorganise the same material into different social and affective objects. Frank Booth’s crew is an organised social form with a grotesque internal normativity, rituals, tokens, call and response speech patterns, and modes of command that have a reality as form, not merely as behaviour. The film keeps showing you that you cannot describe what is happening by listing actions, because the same action has a different metaphysical profile depending on the form it is embedded in. A slap in an ordinary domestic context is already terrible, but in Frank’s context it becomes part of a regime of possession. The “necessity” at work is not logical necessity, nor even just metaphysical necessity in a single blunt sense, but something closer to what I’ve called affective or normative necessity, the sense in which, once the form is in place, certain moves have a grim inevitability because that is what the form makes possible and makes likely, and because the participants are captured by it. This is why cinematography and sound are not optional here. 

Consider how Lynch films Dorothy’s apartment as a space of staged darkness and depth. It is a theatrical interior, a place where light is sculpted rather than natural, where the distance from the door to the living area feels like the crossing of a border. The camera often lingers as if the room itself is waiting, as if it has agency. A Williamsonian might want to describe this as a way of cueing the viewer’s expectations, a rhetoric that guides inference. That is not wrong, but it risks leaving the room as a mere epistemic prompt. Fine’s social and metaphysical sensibility makes it easier to say that the room is functioning as a constituted site, a place whose form is part of what makes the relevant events what they are. The room is not just where the acts occur. It is part of the act’s identity, the way a courtroom is not just where a verdict is spoken but part of what makes it a verdict. 

In Fine’s idiom, we would say something like: the room, as a structured site, is among the grounds of the social reality being staged. The famous “In Dreams” sequence, which arrives after Jeffrey is captured and taken on the nocturnal excursion, is almost a textbook example of why plural necessities matter. Ben’s lip syncing performance, Frank’s tears, Frank’s sudden rage, the way the song becomes an instrument of possession and humiliation, are not reducible to any single explanatory register. Even the song’s cultural life illustrates a plurality of meanings and attachments. The song is Roy Orbison’s ballad, but in the film it becomes something else, and Lynch himself has remarked on how the same song means different things to different people and in different contexts. The scene is its strange pivot where sentimentality, dread, camp, and violence cohabit. 

Critical writing on the scene stresses how Frank’s response to the song oscillates between vulnerability and brutality, and how the performance functions as a ritual within Frank’s group. If you read this Williamsonianly, you might say: the song acts as evidence of Frank’s complex psychology, and the ritual acts as evidence of a social micro system that Jeffrey must learn to model if he is to survive. The scene is a kind of forced update to Jeffrey’s theory of what human beings are like. It presses the viewer into recognising that simple moral categories do not track the full structure of motivation. That can be handled within a single disciplined inquiry model, even if the inquiry is horrific. Frank’s tears are data, Frank’s violence is data, the ritual is data, and an adequate theory must integrate them. Yet what the scene feels like is not a tidy integration but an eruption of irreconcilable kinds of necessity. The song is not merely a stimulus that triggers a psychological state. It is a binding object, a quasi sacred item in a private liturgy. Within that liturgy, Frank’s vulnerability is not just an accidental mood, it is a required passage, a structural moment, as if the form demands that sentimentality be enlisted as fuel for domination. 

This is where Fine’s hylomorphic social ontology helps. Frank’s group is not merely a set of agents plus shared beliefs. It is a formed entity with roles and scripts that exert pressure on what can happen next. The necessity is “in the form”, not merely “in the world”. And the film’s sound design makes this palpable. The song is diegetic, but it functions like an atmosphere that colonises the space. The viewer is made to feel that the melody is not simply heard but inhabited, and that inhabitation is coercive. Now take the “joy ride” aftermath, when the same song plays and Jeffrey is beaten, and Dorothy pleads for it to stop. This doubling, the same song in two contexts, makes the plurality point unavoidable. The same musical object is able to ground radically different necessities because the forms are different. Here the song is no longer a performance in a controlled ritual space. It is an accompaniment to public humiliation and bodily assault, played from the car stereo as if the world itself were mocking Jeffrey’s appeal to ordinary norms. 

If you insist on a single kind of necessity, you will be tempted to say the difference is only psychological or only semantic. Fine gives you the resources to say it is metaphysical in the relevant sense, because the grounds of what is going on are different. The scene is not just a new fact about Jeffrey. It is Jeffrey being pulled into a different order of social reality, a different form of life. 

This is also where the post Kantian pressure that we discussed earlier returns. The question is not whether there is an external world. The question is how worlds are constituted as worlds for agents, and how those constitutions can be violently incompatible while still occupying the same physical space. Lynch’s suburban America and Lynch’s underworld are not two planets. They are two forms that partition salience, and the film’s style is how that partition is enforced. 

A Williamsonian rationalism can describe the movement as an expansion of what the subject must acknowledge. A Finean grounded pluralism can describe it as the disclosure of multiple structures of necessity that were always there but that cannot be reduced to a single framework without loss. Williamson, at his best, reminds us not to build metaphysics by ignoring evidence, including evidence about how we reason and how our concepts actually function in practice. His anti exceptionalism has a kind of moral to it, do not protect your favourite logical or modal picture by sanitising the phenomena. Fine, at his best, reminds us that the phenomena include forms of constraint that are not adequately captured by one monolithic necessity, and that some of the most decisive constraints in human life are social, normative, affective, and temporal in ways that deserve metaphysical acknowledgement rather than relegation to psychology or “mere appearance”.  

Blue Velvet is almost engineered to force that choice. If you treat the dread, the erotic compulsion, the humiliation, the ritualised speech, the sound, and the sense of contamination as merely subjective colour that a good theory could in principle bracket off while retaining the “real” metaphysics, you will end up with a reading that feels like it has solved the film by refusing to look at it. If, on the other hand, you allow those textures to count as part of what the film is disclosing about the kinds of necessity that bind agents and constitute social realities, the Finean frame starts to look less like an optional lens and more like the metaphysics the film itself is staging. 

So once more: Blue Velvet opens as a deceptively benign Americana, a world of manicured lawns, chirping birds, and the sunlit smile of Jeffrey Beaumont cruising home after his father’s stroke. The film’s textures of sound and image work together from the start to unsettle this surface. The camera (photographed by Frederick Elmes) lingers on close-ups of grass blades, on infrared hues that feel almost too saturated, and on music that slips from the soothing strains of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a molasses-thick noir lament. The effect of these choices situates us in a world that feels both hyperreal and disturbingly opaque. 

The cinematography mirrors the modal philosophical issues at stake here: the film’s surfaces are all possibility, the possibility of order, of small-town normalcy, but the deep shadows, the unsettling sound mix, and the weight of what lies beneath the facade evoke the sense of necessity in the emotional and psychological forces that resist any easy resolution. 

When we bring analytic metaphysics to bear on Blue Velvet, not through sterile categorisation but through the texture of what is filmed, heard, and felt, the dispute between Williamson and Fine about modality becomes a live interpretive tool. Modal metaphysics is, as the general accounts of modality remind us, about the nature of possibility and necessity, about what could be the case and what must be the case in virtue of deeper constraints. Modal logic, on one view, is the logic of possibility and necessity as such, a formal structure that helps us track how claims about what might occur relate to claims about what must occur. But from the metaphysics of modality perspective we are invited to ask: are possibilities merely features of how we systematise reasoning, or are they anchored in essences that hold across worlds, contexts, and affective depths? 

Applying these questions to Lynch’s film is a method for revealing how the film’s unfolding drama itself stages competing accounts of possibility, necessity, depth, and essence. Consider again the early scenes that introduce Blue Velvet’s lore of idealised town and hidden rot. What is shown is classically Lynchian: the mundane world of Lumberton conceals a dark underbelly that refuses to remain confined to shadows. The camera tracks Jeffrey’s arrival, moves through glowing suburban spaces, then cuts abruptly to the discovery of a severed human ear in a field. This ear, grotesque and yet framed with soft light, operates not just as a shock but as a modal hinge: it signals that the world we are inhabiting has possibilities that exceed the comforting normality we have been invited to inhabit. 

In modal philosophical terms, the film is insisting that mere epistemic possibility (what we think could be true based on surface appearances) is not enough to capture what really can be true when the deeper affinities of the world are exposed. The ear is necessary to the film’s metaphysics, it must be there if what the film wants to investigate is the tension between surface and depth; it is not an accidental detail but a revelation of a modality that refuses facile closure. Now contrast two ways of understanding this modal structure. 

On the Williamsonian reading the ear, the forensic inspection it invites, and the consequent plunge into Lumberton’s night world are all features of how our rational practice responds to evidence: the film presents us with a pattern of data (visual clues, character behaviour, sound effects) that logically requires us to revise our understanding of this diegetic world. Possibility in this framework is governed by our inferential commitments: we see the ear, we infer that there must be something amiss beneath the surface of the town, and so we see Jeffrey’s journey into the night as a rational unfolding of hypotheses about what is happening. The sound design, the dreamy overlay of Orbison against the guttural hum of night insects, functions like a network of clues, each piece of sensory evidence pushing us to revise what we thought to be possible. 

In the Williamsonian vein, modality is anchored in this kind of epistemic rationality: what the film invites us to accept as possible is constrained by how we, as viewers, integrate its phenomenological inputs into a coherent pattern of interpretation. Fine’s alternative insists that this epistemic picture is only half the story. On his view, necessity is grounded not merely in rational practice but in the essences of the things we are representing. 

Applied to Blue Velvet, a Finean reading would say that the ear is not merely a clue in a pattern of evidence but an essential disruption of the seeming order of the town. The film does not invite us simply to infer a hidden truth; it invites us to recognise that the very nature of this world, the way identities, desires, norms, and moral textures are configured, is such that the dark underside is not an accidental contingent feature but a necessary part of what this environment is. The sequence of close-up textures, the tactile sound of wind in grass, the unnerving distortions in the soundtrack, all these are doing more than hinting at hidden possibilities; they are laying bare the modal structure of the world itself: what must be true if this world is to be what it is. 

When Frank Booth enters later scenes, his presence intensifies the modal stakes. Frank does not function as a mere antagonist in a narrative sense. In a Finean metaphysics of modality Frank is an essential force, his violence, his perversity, his guttural screams of “Highway Patrol!” are not just possible behaviours among others but necessary features of the world once the film’s deeper structures are acknowledged. The camera lingers on Frank’s battered trailer lair in a way that refuses to let us see him as an aberration; instead, his lair is filmed with the same texture as the town’s surface, suggesting a structural co-implication of normal and abnormal. 

The film’s use of music here, which slips between jazz inflections and horror dissonance, makes this feel visceral rather than conceptual. Here the Finean claim about essences and modal grounding gets aesthetic purchase: what the film shows through sound and cinematography is that the possibility of deviance is not just up for inference but is woven into the fabric of the world itself. In this way the film’s affective texture becomes philosophical evidence for a Finean plurality of modal necessities so violence is not merely a contingent fact but a necessary counterpoint to the deceptive calm of the town. 

Williamson would say that Blue Velvet forces us to revise our prior commitments about what a small-town drama is about, showing us that the evidence gathered from sound, light, performance, and narrative demands a reassessment of modal expectations. But the Finean reading insists that something more is going on than rational revision: the film stages modality itself as part of the ontology of this world. It is not simply that we must update our beliefs in light of the severed ear; it is that the world of the film is such that the severed ear, the hidden depravity, and the ecstatic violence of Frank Booth are necessary co-constituents of what that world is. The camera never treats the mundane and the grotesque as separate layers that can be cleanly abstracted; rather, it films the grass and the ear, the soft suburban night and the visceral cries, in a way that binds them into a single modality of experience. 

The soft focus on manicured lawns next to the hyper-textured close-ups of human flesh create a tension that is not merely cognitive but affective. Sound plays across these images in ways that prevent a simple categorisation of mood or theme; small-town music cues are juxtaposed with industrial rumble, suggesting that what is possible in this world is not a set of discrete alternatives but an interleaved, always-already entangled set of affective and ontological realities. From a Williamsonian perspective we might describe this as a series of cues that push the viewer to revise interpretive strategies; from a Finean perspective we recognise that these textures do not just point to modal depth but are evidence of necessary interdependencies that cannot be collapsed into mere epistemic inference. 

The upshot is that Blue Velvet embodies a modal metaphysics that resists reduction to either pure rational revision or naive metaphysical essentialism. Yet the Finean lens seems to capture the affective, sensory density of the film in a way that the Williamsonian lens, focused on patterns of evidence and inference, struggles to match fully. Williamson’s account can tell us why we, as viewers, find ourselves constantly revising expectations, but it does less to show why the film itself imbues what is shown with a necessity that binds surface and depth together. Fine’s grounding in essences gives us a richer vocabulary for articulating how the grotesque and the banal are not just contingently juxtaposed but are ontologically entangled in the world the film presents. 

The more I go on, the more a narrow technical quarrel about actualism and possible objects seems to be really about intellectual temperament, about what you are willing to count as data, and about what you think a theory is allowed to keep fixed. That matters for Lynch because his are machines for forcing you to notice what your own interpretive habits are quietly excluding. And I think we’ve all met someone with the temperment that wants to say something like: stop adding weird and wonderful things to your ontology. Stick to just the things that are actually here, the somethings that we can observe with our senses – that book lying on the table, that wall, that field of grass and so on – and don’t talk about another book that might have possibly been on that table that isn’t actually something. And admit than when we generalise we’re just using a heuristic short-cut so we don’t have to name each individual thing – but there aren’t really general higher order things. It’s just a way of being practical but doesn’t capture anything real about the world. It just captures something about what we find useful. 

Nominalism in this light is practical, a sort of pragmatism then I guess? It doesn’t sound like a nuts view does it? So I want to pivot back (again) to the motivations that drive Williamson’s and Fine’s metaphysics so we can see why they are both challenging a philosophical climate in which modality and non nominalist quantification were treated as if they were metaphysically tainted by default, a position Quine famously defended, which seems hard-headed and scientific (and makes non-scientists who have physics-envy feel tough-minded by default if they adopt it) and which also taps into a sort of common sense with physics intuition. There is a history of inhibitions in twentieth century analytic philosophy that made it harder to take the modal and the higher order seriously without embarrassment because of Quine and his idea that ontology should be a desert landscape not a jungle. That sort of thing. 

Also, I want to bring in compossibility because I think this esoteric-sounding thing seems very useful when we push back against this Quinean inhibition. Compossibility (and non-compossibility) is easiest to explain by example and Fine gives us one. Imagine you have three handles and three blades on a table. You have not assembled any knives yet. Someone asks how many knives you can make. We naturally answer nine, because each handle can be combined with each blade. That answer treats the unassembled combinations as genuine possibilities, and it sounds as if we are implicitly counting things that do not exist yet. A possibilist is relaxed about that because they can say that, in addition to actual knives, there are merely possible knives, entities that exist in other possible worlds or in some domain of possibilia, and the nine counts those. An actualist, at least in the strict sense invoked here, wants to avoid that ontology. 

The actualist wants to say there are only actual knives, actual handles, actual blades. If the handles and blades are incinerated immediately after the question is asked, the nine possible knives were never made, so there were never any actual knives corresponding to them. Yet the claim that there were nine possible knives still seems correct. So the problem is to simulate the truth conditions of possibilist discourse while only quantifying over actual things. 

The first move Fine describes is a simple and initially attractive translation schema. When the possibilist says “there is a possible object x such that F(x)”, the actualist tries to paraphrase it as “possibly, there is an actual object x such that F(x)”. In modal notation, it is the familiar shift from an apparent possibilist quantifier “∃ᵖx” into “◊∃x”. That is, instead of quantifying over possibilia, you keep ordinary quantification over actual objects but you wrap it in a possibility operator. The intuitive thought is that “possibly there exists a knife” captures the sense of “there is a possible knife” without committing you to possible knives as objects over and above actual ones. So far, so Quine. 

Fine then explains why this does not quite do what is needed. The problem is that “possibly, there is an actual object x such that F(x)” is evaluated at some world, and in standard semantics the phrase “actual object” inside that scope is still relative to the world of evaluation unless you build in a special mechanism. If we move to another possible world and evaluate “there is an actual object”, the “actual” there threatens to mean actual in that other world, not actual in our world. But the actualist is trying to speak from the standpoint of the actual world, and to avoid importing an ontology of merely possible objects. 

The technical fix introduced in the passage is the introduction of an “actually” operator, often written as @, which forces evaluation back at the actual world even when you are inside modal contexts. Roughly, one says something like “possibly, there exists an x such that actually x is F”, or one uses a device that, when you have moved to a possible world in evaluation, brings you back to the actual world for part of the formula. Fine describes this as a two step journey, you go from the actual world to a possible world via the possibility operator, and then you return to the actual world via the actuality operator to check whether the object in question is actual here. It is a way of making the semantics respect the actualist’s insistence that the objects one quantifies over are anchored in actuality. 

A second route Fine mentions is one that does not rely on an actuality operator but relies instead on sentential quantification, quantifying over propositions rather than over individuals. The idea is that instead of saying “there is a possible object x such that F(x)”, you say something like “there is a proposition P that fully describes the actual world, and it is possible that there exists an x such that necessarily, if P then F(x)”. The role of P is to pin down actuality from within the modal context. You do not have to say “actually” explicitly, you instead quantify over a description of the actual world and force the relevant object to be something that would have to satisfy F whenever that complete description holds. 

Basically, the motivating picture is that you can encode “actuality” as “whatever matches this full true story of our world”, and then use necessity to keep the encoding stable across modal shifts. So far the project is still confined to first order quantification over individuals, roughly the level of talking about handles, blades, knives, people. The deep difficulty arrives when you attempt to extend the same reduction to quantification over sets or properties, the higher order realm. 

Fine gives a vivid reason why this is hard, using compossibility, the idea that two possibilities might each be possible on their own but not jointly possible. The “magic knife” tweak makes this vivid. If the blades and handles are such that, once assembled, they can never be separated, then choosing to make one knife blocks you from making another knife that shares a component. 

Two different knife assemblies are each possible, but not compossible, they cannot both be actualised together in one world because the same handle cannot be in two knives at once. Now consider a set whose members are those two non compossible knives. In many set theories, for a set to exist at a world, its members must exist at that world. But there is no world in which both knives exist, so there is no world in which the set exists. That means if you try to simulate quantification over possible sets by saying “possibly there exists an actual set such that …”, you will miss sets whose members cannot co exist. You will systematically under generate the higher order domain you were trying to mimic. 

This is the “problem of incompossibles” as Fine presents it: at the higher order level, the actualist translation threatens to collapse because higher order entities inherit compossibility constraints from their members. The temptation is to think that once you have a trick for individuals, you can mechanically lift it to sets and properties, that you can seamlessly move from first order talk of individuals to higher order talk of sets and properties. Fine is insisting that you cannot, because the structure of higher order domains does not simply mirror the structure of the first order domain when incompossibility is in play. The moment you start talking about sets of possibles, you are implicitly asking for a domain that is not constrained by joint actualisability in the way actual sets are, and that pushes you back toward something like possibilist ontology, or toward a radical reconception of what sets and properties are in modal contexts. 

Fine proposes a different organising picture to address exactly this. It introduces what Fine calls, informally, a “modal pluriverse”, the totality of possible worlds and the individuals and relations that appear across them. For the possibilist, this pluriverse is all there in a robust way, the barrier between actuality and non actuality is not an ontological barrier, it is just an indexical perspective. 

For the actualist, by contrast, the barrier is metaphysically serious, and the actualist initially only sees the slice of reality that is actual. The guiding thought of Fine’s new proposal is subtle: if the actualist can succeed in making sense of the pluriverse at the ground level, by giving a first order account that recovers the possibilist picture as a hypothesis, then the higher order should not introduce a new special problem. Why? Because once you have a complete grasp of what individuals there are in the pluriverse and how they are distributed across worlds, then your general understanding of sets, properties, and generalised quantifiers should determine what higher order entities there would be under that hypothesis. 

The higher order difficulty is framed not as a special modal problem but as a problem of how our general concepts of set and property behave under alternative suppositions about the first order domain. This is where Fine’s three step method appears. First, you specify the pluriverse from the actualist point of view. That means, in effect, you do something like introduce a possibly infinite roster of “possible individuals” using modal idioms that the actualist accepts, and then you describe each world in terms of which of those individuals exist there and how they relate. 

Second, you modify this specification so that it matches the possibilist’s perspective, which treats the barrier as moved away, so that the individuals that were described as “not existing” in some worlds are instead treated as existing in those worlds, because the possibilist is not treating existence as a world relative filter in the same way. 

Third, you amplify, which means that once you have that modified hypothesis in place, you can extend it to higher order talk by using your general understanding of what sets and properties would be given that first order layout. 

Fine anticipates an objection here, and this is important for connecting back to Williamson. He notes that this looks like a counterfactual analysis whereby you suppose a big hypothesis like “suppose necessarily everything exists”, and then ask what would follow. The worry about counterfactual analyses in general is that they are hostage to what you keep fixed, and you might smuggle in what you are trying to analyse. If you ask what would happen if necessarily everything existed, one perverse answer is that only abstract things would exist, which is not what you wanted. 

Fine claims his approach avoids that because they have been explicit about what is fixed at the ground level. The picture is that by fixing the first order facts in the right way, the higher order consequences follow from generic conceptual competence about sets and properties, rather than from mysterious counterfactual intuition. 

Then two of Williamson’s criticisms enter. One is about whether we can really understand an infinite string of quantifiers of the sort the first step seems to require. It is easy to understand a finite pattern “possibly there exists x1, possibly there exists x2”, but do we understand the limit, the infinite array? 

The other is cardinality, the worry that you are tacitly treating the possible individuals as forming a set of a certain size, and there may be no reason, given actualism, to assume that. Fine turns to one technical response to the first worry, branching quantifiers and branching operators. The key idea is independence. 

In ordinary quantifiers, scope is nested, one quantifier is inside another. Branching quantifiers are a way of representing that certain choices can be made independently rather than sequentially. Fine’s analogy with turning lights on and off at the same time is meant to convey that independence is a constraint on what operations can be performed in parallel without interference. You can’t switch the light on and off at the same time with the same switch. Fine says that if the semantic operations associated with quantifier-like devices are independent, then we can make sense of a branching structure without needing to ascend to a meta level that quantifies over possible objects in a way the actualist would reject. 

You can treat the different “possibly there exists xi” moves as independent semantic actions, each operating on its own variable, not nested, not requiring an infinite stack of scope. That is a lot of machinery, and it is easy to lose the thread, (and to be honest I’m not sure I have it right for that rason) but I think Fine’s moral is that the boundary between modal metaphysics and semantics is porous. 

The question “do merely possible individuals exist” does not stay just in metaphysics, it forces your hand in the semantics of quantification, in the logic of scope, and in what higher order entities you can recognise. It is also making a methodological point that bears directly on the Williamson Fine I’ve been pressing through Lynch: there is a genuine difference between treating modality as something your best overall theory and practice of reasoning licenses, which is closer in spirit to Williamson’s anti exceptionalism, and treating modality as plural, with different necessities rooted in different structures, which is closer to Fine’s preferred way of thinking. The whole actualism /possibilism simulation project is a laboratory in which that difference shows itself. 

Let’s apply all this to Blue Velvet, and do it in a way that is faithful to the film’s textures rather than forcing the film into a dry grid. The standard commentary on Blue Velvet tends to oscillate between two poles. Either it treats the film as an exposure narrative, a boy discovers evil beneath the surface of small town America, or it treats it as a psycho sexual allegory, Jeffrey’s desire is awakened by Dorothy and Frank, and the town becomes an externalisation of internal conflict. What the modal machinery above lets you do is articulate something that the usual commentary often hints at but rarely formalises, namely that Blue Velvet is obsessively concerned with the status of the non actual, of the not yet, of the could be, of the shadow possibility that is not realised but is nevertheless governing the felt structure of the world. 

Take the opening sections of the film, where Jeffrey’s world seems to be stable, the bright lawn, the father watering the grass, the sudden stroke, the dog with the hose, the camera burrowing into the grass to reveal insects. A flat reading says, beneath the surface there is rot. A modal reading asks a different question, what is the ontological status of what is beneath. Are the insects merely a metaphorical possibility, a way of suggesting that evil could exist, or are they functioning as something closer to a necessary structure of this world, as if the bright surface is only intelligible given the subterranean swarm? 

The cinematography makes this feel like more than metaphor because the movement into the grass is not presented as a subjective hallucination, it is filmed as a discovery, as if the camera is disclosing the world’s own layered modal profile. Here is where the technicalities about incompossibility (the idea that two possibilities might each be possible on their own but not jointly possible) begin to matter. Blue Velvet repeatedly stages situations in which multiple incompatible versions of a person seem to be in play, Jeffrey the curious innocent and Jeffrey the complicit voyeur, Sandy the wholesome guide and Sandy as someone drawn to danger, Dorothy as victim and Dorothy as agent of a dark erotic pull. 

The film does not simply depict these as alternative psychological interpretations, it films them as if they are simultaneously in the room, even when, strictly speaking, they are not compossible under any single tidy moral description. This is exactly the structure that breaks naive actualist simulation at higher order, because a set that contains non compossible members is not actualisable, yet we still seem to need to quantify over it to describe what is going on. 

In the film’s idiom, you might say Jeffrey’s identity seems to require quantifying over a set of possible Jeffrey profiles that cannot all be realised cleanly together. Standard criticism often resolves this by choosing one profile as the truth and treating the others as masks. The Finean pressure is to resist that resolution, and to treat the plurality as metaphysically salient, not because there are literally multiple Jeffreys in different worlds that the film is showing, but because the film is constructing a modal pluriverse within its own normative and affective space, a space where certain possibilities have a kind of reality for the characters and for the viewer even if they are not actualised in a clean narrative way. 

Fine’s insistence on “modal idioms” and devices for returning to actuality becomes, in Blue Velvet, a way to describe how the film keeps snapping us back and forth between the actual surface of Lumberton and the possible, feared, desired, or fantasised underside. Frank’s world is not simply another location, it is a modal shift. When Jeffrey enters Dorothy’s apartment, the film’s sound design changes, the space becomes pressurised, the edges of the image and the timing of cuts make the apartment feel like a different world with different laws. 

Yet the film continually returns us to the bright daytime world, Sandy’s home, the police station, the school corridors, as if invoking an actuality operator, a device that insists on “back here, this is the actual world”. The horror is that the film then shows that the actual world is infected by what seemed merely possible. It is as if the operator that returns you to actuality cannot keep the two realms separated, which is precisely the kind of failure that makes a simple Williamsonian picture, a picture of orderly rational revision, feel too neat. 

To be clear, a Williamsonian lens can capture some of the film’s structure. It can say that Jeffrey and the viewer start with a model of Lumberton as safe, then the ear, the police hints, Dorothy’s behaviour, Frank’s violence, all supply evidence that forces a rational updating. On that story, the modal space of the film is essentially epistemic, what is possible expands as we learn more about the underlying causal story. But the Finean apparatus suggests a more radical claim: the film is less about expanding knowledge and more about confronting a pluriverse of possibilities that cannot be reduced to a single consistent actualist description. 

The dread and fascination in Blue Velvet are not merely about finding out what is true, they are about being compelled to acknowledge non compossible structures of desire and power that do not go away when the plot is solved. This is exactly where the technical problem of sets of incompossibles becomes interpretively fertile. The film is full of higher order objects in the broad sense, not sets in the mathematician’s sense but patterns, roles, normative profiles, thick descriptions. When we describe Frank Booth we do not just list his actions, we treat him as a type, an organiser of a certain structure of domination, perversion, and humiliation. When we describe Dorothy we do not just list what happens to her, we treat her as a locus of trauma, agency, erotic charge, and victimhood. 

Those thick descriptions behave like higher order entities whose membership conditions involve non compossible elements. Dorothy is not compossibly “pure victim” and “seductive agent” if you try to force those into a tidy moral world, yet the film demands that we hold both without resolving them. So if you insist on an actualist reduction that only allows what can be jointly actualised in one coherent moral world, you will under-describe the film’s reality. You will miss precisely what the film makes salient, namely that certain patterns are real in the sense that they govern affect, expectation, dread, and attraction, even when they cannot be stabilised into one consistent set of traits. 

If we now bring in Fine’s “three steps” picture and you can see something new about the film’s form. The first step, specifying the pluriverse from the actualist point of view, looks like the way the film begins by offering a catalogue of ordinary objects and roles, lawns, fences, firemen, schoolgirls, a father, a son. 

The second step, modifying the description toward the possibilist point of view, looks like the way the film gradually shifts the sense of what “exists” in Lumberton. The insects under the grass are not merely there as a hidden contingent detail, they begin to feel like a constitutive dimension. Frank’s world is no longer an aberration, it feels built into the same town. 

The third step, amplifying, looks like what happens in the viewer, once the film’s ground level ontology is adjusted, the higher order patterns proliferate automatically. Suddenly you see the town as a structure of repression, you see Sandy’s dream as not just a dream but a modal schema for interpreting the film, you see the robin at the end not as a simple symbol but as an attempt to reassert a stabilising necessity that the film has already shown to be fragile. The point is that once the ground level is altered, our higher order interpretive machinery produces sets and properties and patterns, thick descriptions, moral modalities, affective necessities. 

That is what Fine calls a “generic understanding”, the thought that if we understand the concept of a set or a property, we understand how it would behave under different first order distributions. Does this generate something film commentary has not seen before? It can, if it helps us resist a common flattening. Blue Velvet commentary often treats the ending as either sincere redemption or bitter irony. The modal pluriverse framework suggests a third option: the ending is a re specification attempt. It is a move to re establish an actuality barrier that the film’s own logic has undermined. The robin on the fence with a beetle in its beak can be read as a visual attempt to stabilise the relation between surface and underside, as if the underside can be contained, eaten, managed, placed back under the sign of daylight. 

But the film has already taught us the incompossibility lesson. The set of all the relevant possibilities cannot be jointly actualised in a clean way. If you insist on a world in which the robin symbolically resolves the insects, you are excluding other modal members that the film has made salient, the continuing trauma, Dorothy’s irreparable damage, Jeffrey’s complicity, the town’s structural violence and so on. 

The Finean lens says, do not pretend you can have the set that contains both the cleaned up surface and the acknowledged depth as compossible in the strong sense. The Williamsonian lens might say, perhaps the best overall theory of the film is one in which the ending marks the epistemic closure of the mystery. The Finean lens says the film is not primarily a mystery, it is a disclosure of plural necessities, including affective necessity, the necessity with which dread, attraction, shame, and power organise what can be lived as real. Fine praises open mindedness in logic and metaphysics. 

Blue Velvet is, in its own way, an argument for open mindedness about modality. It refuses Quinean hygiene and ontological desert landscapes. It refuses the idea that we should limit ourselves to what can be quantified over in a nominalist way, a neat roster of actual objects and their causal relations. It insists that the non nominal, the higher order, the thickly structured, is part of what the world is for the characters, and part of what the film is doing to the viewer. If we treat that as merely psychological fluff and not metaphysically salient, we misdescribe the film’s achievement, because the film’s textures, its sound pressure, its close ups, its performances, are precisely the means by which it makes those higher order necessities felt rather than merely asserted. 

What deepens the picture if we continue along this line is that the Finean technicalities are not just abstract scaffolding, they mirror a very precise anxiety about perspective and fixation that Lynch exploits relentlessly. The whole actualist project depends on the idea that you can keep something fixed while you allow other things to vary. You move to a possible world, but you keep actuality fixed by an operator or by a complete description P of the actual world. You then reason about what would be the case under that hypothesis. The worry about counterfactual analysis that Fine voices is exactly that this fixing can be illicit or question begging. You might think you are analysing modality, but you have already smuggled in what you want to preserve by choosing what stays fixed. 

That worry maps almost uncannily onto Blue Velvet’s ethical and affective structure. (Or so say I!) Jeffrey repeatedly believes he knows what is fixed. He thinks his own moral centre is fixed, that his curiosity is fixed as innocent, that Sandy represents a fixed normative anchor, that the police represent a fixed epistemic authority. He treats his excursions into Dorothy’s world as controlled counterfactuals. What would it be like if I went there? What would be the case if I looked but did not touch? What would follow if I intervened just enough? In modal terms, he is running hypothetical scenarios while holding his own identity and the town’s basic structure fixed. 

Lynch films these assumptions as if they are already fragile, but the real violence of the film is that the fixing fails. The act of entering the hypothetical alters what was supposed to be held constant. Jeffrey cannot go back to a pre inquiry version of himself. Sandy cannot remain untouched by what Jeffrey brings back. The town cannot return to being merely the place it was at the start. This is the cinematic analogue of the counterfactual worry in the talk. You cannot analyse the consequences of a hypothesis without first settling what is fixed, but in some domains, including this one, the fixing is itself unstable under the very operations you are performing. 

Fine’s insistence that the higher order should take care of itself once the ground level is right also acquires a dark resonance here. The claim is that if you get the first order facts straight, what individuals there are and how they are distributed across worlds, then your general understanding of sets and properties will automatically tell you what higher order entities exist. 

In Blue Velvet, once Jeffrey’s ground level ontology shifts, once he accepts that Frank’s violence and Dorothy’s captivity are not anomalies but real constituents of his town’s world, the higher order patterns proliferate without further choice. He does not have to decide to see sexuality as bound up with domination, or innocence as structurally complicit, or voyeurism as a mode of power. Those patterns assert themselves. They feel inevitable. This is why the film’s affect intensifies so quickly once the door is opened. The horror is not that one bad thing happens, it is that an entire configuration of necessity snaps into place. 

The Finean way of putting this would be to say that certain essences and grounds have been disclosed, and from them a whole network of necessities follows, not logical necessity, but normative, affective, and social necessity. Once Dorothy is positioned as she is, certain responses are not just likely, they are demanded by the structure. Once Frank’s form of life is encountered, certain humiliations and violences are not surprises, they are required by the form. This is also where the discussion of branching quantifiers and independent semantic actions becomes more than a technical aside. The idea there is that some operations can be carried out independently without interfering, while others cannot. In the semantics of branching quantifiers, independence allows you to avoid nested scope and infinite regress. 

In Blue Velvet, Lynch is obsessed with staging the failure of independence. Jeffrey believes that his looking is independent of Frank’s acting, that his curiosity is independent of Dorothy’s suffering, that his moral self image is independent of the roles he plays in the night world. The film shows, again and again, that these are not independent semantic actions. Looking is doing. Knowing is participating. Being there is being implicated. The wardrobe scene is not frightening only because of what Frank does, it is frightening because the film makes us feel that Jeffrey’s act of watching is already inside the scope of Frank’s violence. There is no branching here that preserves independence. Everything collapses into a single tangled scope in which the viewer, Jeffrey, Dorothy, and Frank are all caught. If we return to the incompossibility problem with this in mind, another layer of the film opens up. 

Remember, incompossible objects are those that cannot co exist in one world even though each could exist in some world. In Blue Velvet, the film keeps presenting us with states of affairs that feel individually intelligible but jointly impossible to stabilise. A town that is genuinely innocent and a town that structurally produces Frank Booth cannot comfortably be the same town. A Jeffrey who is a heroic investigator and a Jeffrey who derives erotic charge from domination cannot comfortably be the same person. A Dorothy who is purely a victim and a Dorothy who actively scripts scenes of humiliation cannot comfortably be the same agent. The film does not resolve these tensions by choosing one side. It forces us to hold them together in an uneasy, unstable way. 

From a Finean perspective, this is not a bug, it is the feature. The film is making us inhabit a space where the relevant higher order entities, identities, roles, moral profiles, are not compossible in the way our everyday categories demand, yet they are all demanded by the ground level structure that has been disclosed. This also sheds light on the ending in a way that goes beyond the usual irony sincerity debate. The robin with the beetle in its beak is often read as either a grotesque joke or a fragile hope. In modal terms, it can be read as an attempted re fixing of the barrier, a visual assertion that the surface world can contain and manage the underside. The bird eats the insect, the daylight reasserts itself, the family gathers, the music softens. But if we have taken seriously the lesson about higher order amplification, this attempt feels hollow not just emotionally but structurally. The film has already shown us that once the ground level ontology includes the underworld as a constitutive possibility, the higher order patterns do not simply evaporate. You cannot form the set that contains both the restored innocence and the acknowledged structural violence without excluding something that the film has made salient. 

The robin image is thus less a resolution than a demonstration of the kind of re specification that actualism would like to perform, and that the film has already undermined. This also makes sense of the fact that the robin is clearly a mechanical robin. 

Seen this way, the technical debate about whether an actualist can simulate possibilist discourse without loss is mirrored by a narrative and aesthetic debate about whether Jeffrey, and by extension the town and the viewer, can simulate engagement with darkness without ontological cost. The answer the film gives is no. Something essential changes. The talk’s emphasis on the risk of illicit fixing in counterfactual reasoning becomes, in Lynch’s hands, a warning about moral and existential reasoning. You cannot ask what would happen if you entered the underworld while keeping yourself, your norms, and your world intact. The very asking shifts the ground. What this yields, and what much commentary does not quite articulate, is a sense in which Blue Velvet is not just about hidden evil but about the structure of modal thought itself. It is about how possibilities press on actuality, how merely possible roles and desires acquire a kind of reality once they are entertained, how higher order patterns emerge inexorably once certain base level facts are admitted. 

The Finean framework gives us a language for that. It lets us say that the film is staging plural necessities, not only causal necessity but the necessity with which certain social and affective forms assert themselves once their grounds are in place. A Williamsonian framework can still describe the rational updates and evidential pressures, but it struggles to capture the sense in which the film’s horror is not just about learning something new, but about being unable to undo what has been disclosed. 

The In Dreams scene is the most revealing place to let all of this machinery bite, because it is the point where the film most explicitly suspends ordinary narrative explanation and forces us to confront structure. Ben’s lip synced performance is often described as camp or surreal, but that description already flattens what the scene is doing. The scene is built like a modal experiment. The song itself is an object whose identity is not in question, it is Roy Orbison’s recording, recognisable, sentimental, culturally saturated. Yet the film places it into two radically different configurations, and it is the configuration, not the object, that determines what is necessary and what is possible in that moment. 

From the point of view of the actualist simulation project described in the talk, you might say that the song remains the same actual object across contexts, and what changes are the contingent circumstances. But the scene resists that description. The way Frank reacts to the song is not an accidental psychological quirk layered onto a neutral stimulus. The song functions as a rule governed device inside Frank’s world. It licenses tears, it licenses vulnerability, it licenses a brief suspension of overt violence, and precisely through that suspension it intensifies Frank’s power. The necessity at work here is not that whenever the song plays Frank must cry, it is that given the form of life that Frank inhabits, this is what the song does. The scene makes this felt through its pacing and framing. Lynch holds the camera on Frank’s face for an uncomfortably long time, refusing to cut away, as if insisting that the viewer register that this response is not optional, not merely expressive, but required by the structure that has been disclosed. 

This is exactly the sort of necessity that the Finean apparatus is designed to acknowledge. It is not logical necessity, and it is not merely causal necessity in the sense of stimulus response. It is a grounded necessity, grounded in the essence of a certain social and affective formation. Once you grant that such formations are part of the ontology of the film’s world, higher order patterns follow automatically. Frank’s tears are not evidence of a hidden softer self that might redeem him. They are evidence of how sentimentality itself can be weaponised inside a structure of domination. The film does not need to explain this verbally because it has already modified the ground level description of the world in a way that makes this pattern inevitable. 

Now consider how this plays against the notion of incompossibility. The scene tempts us to see two Franks, the weeping child and the violent tyrant. Many readings treat this as psychological complexity, a mixture of traits inside one person. The modal reading pushes harder. The film does not present these as two aspects that can be comfortably integrated. They are staged as states that exclude one another temporally and structurally. Frank’s vulnerability does not coexist with his violence, it precipitates it. The moment the song ends, the tears turn into rage. These are not two properties that jointly apply, they are two phases of a single form that cannot stabilise them at once. The necessity is sequential and structural, not additive. 

This is the cinematic analogue of incompossibility at the level of properties rather than individuals. The set containing Frank’s tenderness and Frank’s brutality cannot be realised as a stable set of co instantiated traits, yet both are demanded by the form the film has disclosed. Jeffrey’s position in the scene sharpens the point. He is present, watching, terrified, and his terror is not simply fear of what Frank might do next. It is fear of what this configuration of necessity implies about the world he has entered. Up to this point, Jeffrey has been operating as if he could simulate the underworld while keeping his own identity fixed. In this scene, that hope collapses. He is forced to witness not just violence but the logic that generates it. His horror is epistemic and ontological at once. He is learning not just that Frank is dangerous, but that the world he has stepped into is governed by necessities that do not respect his prior moral categories. 

The camera aligns us with Jeffrey’s gaze, but it does not let us share his hope of distance. The sound of the song floods the space, making it impossible to retreat into a purely observational stance. This is the failure of independence again. The semantic action of watching cannot be performed independently of the semantic action of being implicated. Fine insists that once the first order picture is right, the higher order follows from generic understanding. 

In Blue Velvet, once the film has shown us Frank’s world as a constituted form rather than an anomaly, we cannot help but generate higher order descriptions. We start to see patterns of masculinity, patterns of power, patterns of eroticisation of violence. These are not added by interpretation in a free floating way. They are demanded by what the film has already fixed at the ground level. That is why the film feels so heavy even in scenes where little happens. The weight comes from the sense that the space of possibilities has been irrevocably altered, and that alteration carries with it a whole array of higher order consequences. This also explains why attempts to read the film purely as a mystery, with clues and solutions, feel unsatisfying. A mystery framework treats the non actual as something to be eliminated. Once the culprit is identified and removed, the world can return to normal. 

The modal pluriverse framework developed by Fine’s way of thinking makes clear why that cannot work here. The problem is not that there is an unknown fact to be discovered, it is that the discovery itself changes what kinds of facts are possible and what kinds of identities can be sustained. The police may arrest Frank, but they cannot reconstitute the earlier world because the earlier world was never as ontologically simple as it appeared. Return now to the ending with this in mind. The bright images, the smiling faces, the bird, all attempt to perform a re specification of the pluriverse from an actualist perspective. They try to reinstate a description of the world in which only certain individuals and patterns count as real. The film does not undermine this attempt by explicit irony or horror. It undermines it by memory. The viewer cannot forget the earlier modification and amplification. The higher order structures have already been generated. 

The ending’s calm therefore feels fragile not because we suspect another crime, but because we recognise that the set of all salient properties the film has made visible is not compossible with this simple restoration. Something has to be excluded for the ending to work, and the film has trained us not to accept that exclusion without discomfort. What this sustained modal reading ultimately gives us, and what many commentaries circle without naming, is a way to articulate why Blue Velvet feels so destabilising even after it seems to close. The destabilisation is not just emotional residue, it is modal residue. The film has expanded and restructured the space of possibilities in which we understand its world, and that space does not contract again. 

The Finean framework, with its emphasis on plural necessities and grounding, captures this better than a framework that treats modality as a single uniform operator attached to our best theories. The film is not asking us to revise a theory, it is asking us to live with a transformed pluriverse. 

I want to slightly change focus at this point and show that Fine’s approach applies equally powerfully when we consider the metaphysics of the social ontologies. I’m thinking that maybe readers might be tempted to think that all this is fine when applied to aesthetics, but does it really have a purchase when we want to discuss social reality? What about institutions like banks and the law and family? Does modal metaphysics bite here too, you might ask? It’s always struck me that many social theories are actualists at heart (so there’s me throwing down a gauntlet ha) so if Fine’s approach does have purchase then these theorists need to either show that he’s wrong or else change their theories! I think it does purchase. Fine’s vocabulary helps because it refuses lazy reductions. You do not solve the problem of the social by saying it is really just the people, and you do not solve it by floating upwards into an abstract “institution” with no grip on the bodies. Instead you treat the social object as a structured whole, a compound of form and matter, and you allow that different operations generate different kinds of whole. 

Fine’s three operations in his material theory are fusion, rigid embodiment, variable embodiment. Fusion is just compounding, a heap, an apple plus an orange. Rigid embodiment is a structured whole in which the parts stand in certain relations that matter to the identity of the whole. A married couple is not just John plus Mary, but John and Mary as related as spouses. Variable embodiment is an enduring object whose manifestations can vary across times or counterfactual circumstances, so that what the object is at a time is a manifestation of a pattern that can be realised differently as the membership changes. 

Now consider what Blue Velvet does with couples, families, police, gangs, neighbourhoods, and “the town”. It repeatedly shows you the underlying matter, the bodies, the cars, the rooms, the streets, and then shows you that the identity of the social object is not exhausted by that matter. Jeffrey and Sandy walking together is not yet a couple in the rigid sense, it is a fusion of two teenagers in proximity, plus a certain distribution of looks, promises, hesitations. The moment the film shifts into an emergent structure, the moment the two become legible as a unit with a role, an arc, a social meaning, is not a mere addition of another body or another location. It is the imposition of a form. 

The social object “the good young couple” is not simply two individuals, it is two individuals under a structuring relation, and that relation is not just in their minds but in the town’s normative field, its expectations, its myths about innocence. That is why Sandy’s father, as a police officer, matters even when he is not on screen. He is a part of the social embodiment that gives Sandy and Jeffrey their intelligibility as “kids” near law, near safety, near the official story the town tells itself. At the same time, Dorothy and Frank are not a couple as a rigid embodiment of affection or reciprocity. They are a structured whole of domination, threat, compulsion, staged intimacy, and enforced performance. It is a rigid embodiment too, but with a form that is explicitly violent, and with a structure that includes others, Ben, the gang, the absent child, the police who do not arrive, the social silence that permits this to persist. 

We tend to talk about that world as “the underworld”, but Fine’s framework makes the underworld less like a separate place and more like a different structuring of some of the same matter. The same bodies can constitute different social objects at the same time, just as the same clay can constitute statue and lump, or the same biology can constitute hand and fist. Lumberton’s respectable male sociability and Frank’s male sociability can even share a participant type, the local man, the friend, the helper, while being different structures of relation, different forms. 

Fine says you can have two committees with the same members, library committee and kitchen committee, and they are distinct not because the matter differs but because the relational form differs. Blue Velvet constantly presents the viewer with the temptation to treat the same characters as simply the same people across contexts, but the film’s unease comes from the way the same person is not the same social part in different embodiments. Jeffrey in his father’s hardware store world is one thing, Jeffrey in Dorothy’s apartment is another, Jeffrey in Frank’s car is another. 

If you reduce this to psychology you miss the way Lynch is showing the social as an ontological field. Jeffrey is not merely choosing behaviours, he is being manifested as different social parts of different wholes. The same underlying human can be a temporal part rather than a spatial part in Fine’s technical sense, a contributor to persistence rather than location. The “town” can persist where its buildings are, while its members go elsewhere, and in Lynch’s terms the town can persist as an image, a story, a daytime surface, while its social reality is constituted by acts that occur off the surface, in apartments, cars, hidden rooms. 

Fine’s solution to the location puzzle is subtle and very Lynchian. He suggests that when you compose a whole you can designate parts as spatial parts or temporal parts. A fellow of All Souls can be a part of the college without contributing to the college’s physical presence. The building is the spatial part, the fellows are temporal parts. 

Blue Velvet is obsessively focused on what counts as the spatial part of a social object. Lumberton as image is lawns, roses, white fences, the fireman waving, the school corridor, the police office. Those are the spatial parts of “Lumberton” as it is presented to itself. But the temporal parts, the parts that sustain its continuity as a social reality, are not reducible to those surfaces. They include threats, bargains, sexual violence, and the town’s patterns of not knowing, not seeing, or not saying. 

Dorothy’s apartment is not a mere private location, it is a site where the town’s temporal parts become visible as if they had been spatial all along. The unease is that the film forces a redistribution of what counts as constitutive presence. The town is where its buildings are, and yet the town, as a lived social order, is also where its coercive relations are enacted, even if those enactments are officially “elsewhere”. This connects directly to Fine’s notion of mixed character, and his impatience with philosophers who say “strictly speaking” when ordinary language shows no such strictness. 

He mocks the move where someone says, we visited France, but France is a charter member of the UN, therefore “France” is ambiguous or non referring. He argues instead for a hybrid object, a structured whole whose different aspects make different predicates apt. Blue Velvet is saturated with such hybrid predication. Lumberton is a place you can drive through, but also an entity that can “keep secrets”, “be innocent”, “be rotten”, “look away”. It’s not ‘strictly speaking’ either one or the other, its all of these. That’s what hybrid tracks. Dorothy is a singer in a club, an abused hostage, a mother, a fetish object, a neighbour, a legal subject, a body, an image, and the film’s power rests on knowing that each predication is true in its context without reducing her to a single role. 

When Lynch shows the robin at the end, the town is once again being predicated as healed, orderly, natural, but the film has already made it impossible to treat that as a simple claim about surfaces. It is a claim about which aspect of the hybrid whole we are choosing to treat as its salient character. Another of Fine’s productive notions for Blue Velvet, though, may be his treatment of circularity and self reflexive cohesion. He says that in many social cases the content of the attitudes that sustain an entity involves reference to the entity itself. A department consents to the formation of a committee, but the content of the consent already quantifies over committees in a way that includes the very committee being formed. 

That looks vicious until you notice that in the social case the object can “hide behind a mental barrier”, existing, as it were, in the minds of the participants in a partial way that makes the circularity benign. He then generalises this into a methodological sermon, that we should often embrace this benign circularity rather than weaken the content or impose an over strong substantive criterion. 

Blue Velvet is, among other things, an anatomy of the mental barrier. It is not just that characters do not know, it is that the town sustains itself by a shared distribution of what is thinkable, sayable, and seeable. The town is mirrored in the minds of its members, not as an explicit creed but as a practical ontology, the sense that this is a safe place, a good place, a place where the police can manage the bad, a place where what happens in Dorothy’s apartment is not part of the town. That last clause is not a factual claim but a boundary in a social embodiment. 

If you apply Fine’s point, the town’s identity depends upon attitudes whose content involves the town itself, and those attitudes can be mistaken, strategically maintained, or selectively applied. This is where the film’s most unsettling circularity lives. The town is innocent because its members take it to be innocent, and they take it to be innocent by treating certain relations as non constitutive of the town, as merely private, merely deviant, merely elsewhere. The circularity is not merely cognitive, it is structural, a way of assigning which parts count as spatial parts of the town and which are relegated to temporal parts that sustain continuity without appearing on the surface. 

This gives you a way to see the ear in the grass as more than a symbol. It is the intrusion of an unassigned part, a piece of matter whose status within the town’s embodiment is undecided. Is it just biological detritus, a medical object, a crime scene, a message, a portal? The film is about that decision, about what counts as part of the town’s world. Jeffrey’s investigation is, in Fine’s terms, an attempt to redraw the signature of the whole, to decide that certain people and places are not merely temporal parts hidden behind a barrier but spatially constitutive of what Lumberton is. The police, by contrast, are an institution whose function is partly to stabilise the signature, to keep the town located where it wants to be located. 

The standard reading says there is an underworld beneath the surface. Fine’s reading, applied, is that there are multiple structured wholes sharing the same matter, and the horror is not simply that the underworld exists, but that the town’s identity is partly constituted by how it partitions that shared matter into salient and non salient parts, spatial and temporal parts, official and unofficial relations. 

The underworld is not merely below, it is co present, a different embodiment of overlapping materials, sustained by self reflexive attitudes, permissions, and silences that are themselves part of the town’s structure. That is also why the ending can feel both resolved and obscene. It is not just that evil persists, it is that the town can reassert a signature that makes the surface once again count as the town’s location, while relegating what happened to Dorothy to a temporal part that does not contribute to the town’s visible presence. The robin is not just kitsch, it is the reinstallation of a form, a return of a mixed character object to a preferred aspect, as if the social whole can choose which of its predicates it will wear. 

What begins to emerge, if we let Fine’s social ontology run quietly in the background, is a way of describing what Blue Velvet does to “community” that is more exact than the familiar moral fable about innocence and corruption, and also more exact than the psychological summary in which “Jeffrey discovers his own darkness”. Those summaries are not false, but they are coarse grained, they treat Lumberton as either a place with bad things in it, or a symbol for a mind with bad things in it. 

Fine’s talk, precisely because it is trying to avoid the lazy habit of saying “strictly speaking it is only the buildings” or “strictly speaking it is only the people”, gives you a vocabulary for the film’s special trick, which is to show how a social whole can remain “the same town” while the constituents that seem to matter to its identity slide between being spatial parts, temporal parts, and merely attitudinal parts, parts that exist as shared recognition or shared refusal of recognition. Fine is saying that we can treat social groups as compounds of matter and form. The matter is the people, the buildings, the locations, the artefacts, whatever is doing the work. The form is the pattern of relations and roles that makes those items count as a married couple, a committee, a college, a department, a nation. 

A “rigid embodiment” is, roughly, a structured whole at a time, the particular people related in the particular way that makes them the thing they are. A “variable embodiment” is a whole that persists through change, a family that remains the family while children are born, a committee that remains the committee while members rotate, a university that remains the university while staff come and go. That is the first move. 

The second move is more distinctive, and for our purposes it is the one that lands: Fine suggests that, when we ask where a social object is, or what properties it has, we should not assume that every constituent contributes in the same way. Some constituents contribute to spatial presence, some contribute only to temporal presence, and some contribute primarily through attitudes, through the shared “taking” of something as something, a recognition that can be circular, because it can involve reference to the very thing being constituted. 

Blue Velvet is unusually good at dramatising those distinctions without ever stating them. Lumberton’s opening sequence is not merely “suburbia with rot beneath”. It is a lesson in what counts as the town’s spatial part and what gets demoted into the status of a temporal part, or even into the status of a disavowed mental part. The manicured lawns, the white fence, the fireman waving, the high saturation sky, these are presented as the town’s spatial signature, its location in the world, what it is “where”. Then the father collapses, the camera drops into the grass, and we enter the moving underworld of insects. The insects are not, in any literal sense, a hidden second town, but in social ontological terms they are a reminder that the physical substratum is not identical with the town’s social presence. 

A town can be constituted by buildings and people, but it can present itself as the buildings, and allow the people, in certain respects, to function as mere temporal parts, replaceable, holidaying in Corsica, returning, while “the town” remains on the High Street. That is Fine’s All Souls example, reimagined as cinema, except Lynch is more severe, because he implies that the demotion is not innocent. 

The town has learned what to count as itself. The film’s famous ear is not just a clue in a detective plot, it is a displacement of parts. It is a body part, but it is no longer a part of a body in the ordinary way, it is a part that has been severed from the location of its whole, and therefore it becomes available to be recruited as a part of a different whole. It can become a part of “the case”, a part of “the secret”, a part of “Jeffrey’s initiation”, a part of “Dorothy’s tragedy”, a part of “the town’s truth”. In Fine’s language, it becomes matter waiting for a new form, and the form will determine what features it carries. In a police file, it is evidence. In Jeffrey’s pocket, it is an invitation. In Sandy’s father’s office, it is an institutional object, a node in the department’s structure. The same physical item is being pulled through different embodiment operations. 

The film’s unease partly comes from how quickly those operations occur, and how little stabilising language anyone has for them. The ear is a thing that forces reclassification. A lot of commentary treats Blue Velvet as if it is about transgression, and transgression is then understood as a crossing of moral boundaries or psychological boundaries. Fine’s frame suggests a different kind of crossing, a crossing of ontological boundaries inside the social world itself, a movement from one structured whole to another, where the same people and things can be re integrated by a different form. 

Frank is not simply a “bad man”, he is an alternative organising principle, a rival form. His crew is a social group with an internal structure that is not merely a bunch of criminals hanging around. There are roles, rituals, speech acts, triggers, permissions. When he says “Daddy”, the word is doing ontological work, it is not merely expressive. It generates a local structure of authority and submission in which certain actions become permitted and certain actions become obligatory, not in the legal sense but in the practical sense that Fine highlighted when talking about permission. The usual possible worlds picture, in which a permission statement is just “true in at least one ideal world”, cannot capture why “He can have candy or candy and ice cream” matters to Johnny. 

Lynch’s world is closer to Fine’s, because permission and obligation are tracked by the exact actions that are allowed and disallowed, and those actions are bound to roles. Frank is continuously manufacturing a code of conduct for the room, and he can update it at will. This also clarifies Dorothy. It is tempting to describe her as a victim trapped by Frank, and of course she is victimised, but Lynch is careful to show that what is happening is not only coercion of a person, it is the forced reconfiguration of social roles. Dorothy is being compelled to occupy a form she did not author, and yet that form has to run through her body and her voice. She is made to be “the singer”, “the object”, “the mother without her child”, “the woman who asks for it”, “the danger”. The cruelty is not only physical. It is ontological. She is being made into a social object, in Fine’s sense, whose characteristic features are determined by a kind specific rule, the way the colour of a house depends on its roof rather than its ink, except here the “rule” is the rule of the sadistic micro regime. When Dorothy says, in effect, “Don’t leave me”, she is not only expressing dependence, she is pressing Jeffrey to become a part of a structured whole that he can feel forming around him. 

This is why the film repeatedly makes the question “What are you?” wobble between the psychological and the social. Fine’s mixed character point, his insistence that we do not need to split “France” into two referents to explain “visited France” and “France joined the UN”, lines up with Lynch’s refusal to split Dorothy into a clean private person and a dirty public symbol. The same Dorothy can be the one you visit and the one who is the charter member of a local horror. 

Fine thinks many social entities are held together by a shared thought of the entity itself, “this is our association”, and that circularity, reference to the very entity being constituted, is often benign because it is made “behind a mental barrier”, within attitudes. That is an abstract way of describing something Lynch shows with almost comic directness: Lumberton is a town that thinks itself, constantly, as wholesome. Its wholesomeness is not merely a set of facts, it is an attitudinal form that has to be maintained. It shows up in Sandy’s language, in her dream, in her father’s posture as police chief, in the bright domestic interiors. It is not that these people are lying, it is that they are participating in a collective constitution. They are, in Fine’s phrase, stipulating a thesis, and the town is the thesis. 

This is why the film’s tonal shifts feel like violations. They are violations of constitution, moments when matter refuses the form that is supposed to organise it. And this returns us to the older thread about Fine’s modal and truthmaker work, and the broader question of hyperintensionality, the need to distinguish things that are equivalent “in possible worlds terms” but not equivalent when you ask what makes them true. In the earlier discussion we were pursuing a way of reading Lynch where the distinction between “it is raining or it is not raining” and “it is cold or it is not cold” matters, because although both are true in every possible world, they are made true by different kinds of facts. 

Blue Velvet can be read as an extended demonstration that the town’s official propositions are too thin. “Lumberton is safe” can be true in the sense that the visible order holds, the lawns are clipped, the police station functions. But what makes it true, what facts are doing the work, may involve a distribution of attention and a distribution of silence. The proposition is realised from below by an arrangement in which certain facts are excluded from being counted as relevant. 

The town’s self description is therefore hyperintensional in Fine’s sense, not because the sentence is presented differently, but because the realisation conditions differ. If one critic says “the town is innocent” and another says “the town is complicit”, they may even be looking at the same surface facts, but they disagree about the exact truthmakers. In Lynch, that disagreement is not merely interpretive, it is built into the social ontology of the place. This is also where Fine’s idea of different “signatures” of composition becomes unexpectedly cinematic. 

In his All Souls example, fellows can be temporal parts, so that even if they are in Corsica, the college is still on Broad Street. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey is, for a while, treated as if he can be a temporal part of normality and also a temporal part of the underworld, with no change to the town’s spatial presence. He can visit Dorothy’s apartment and still have breakfast in a bright kitchen. He can be both, because the town’s form is elastic enough to let individual bodies drift without forcing a reclassification of the whole. The film becomes frightening when that stops being tenable, when Dorothy appears naked and bruised on the suburban lawn. That moment is a forced change of signature. The underworld is no longer demoted to a temporal part that does not contribute to spatial presence. It becomes spatial. It is now where the town is. It is an ontological leak. This is why it shocks Sandy’s family not as a moral fact but as a spatial fact, a fact about what is here. 

In a Finean interpretation Lynch is not simply juxtaposing appearances. He is showing how a social object maintains itself by assigning different statuses to its parts, and how violence, sex, policing, and romance compete as forms that want to claim the same matter. Frank’s world and Sandy’s world are not two places, they are rival embodiment regimes. Jeffrey is pulled between them because he is available as matter for either, and because the town has not decided, cannot decide, which form is its own. Lynch commentary often oscillates between two impulses. One impulse is to treat him as a dream logic artist, immune to analysis in ordinary conceptual terms, as if the proper response is rapture. The other impulse is to treat him as a critic of American ideology, as if the proper response is decoding. Fine’s apparatus lets you hold onto what is right in both impulses while avoiding what is weak in each. 

You can agree that Lynch is concerned with ideology, but you can specify the ideology as a set of ontological habits, habits of constitution and exclusion, not merely a set of beliefs. You can agree that Lynch is concerned with dream logic, but you can specify dream logic as a hyperintensional sensitivity to what realises a proposition, not merely as surreal imagery. A dream is precisely the place where “equivalent” descriptions cease to be equivalent, where “I am safe” and “I am not in danger” can both be said, and yet the felt truthmakers differ, a shadow in the corner, a sound behind a wall, a face that does not fit its role. 

In that light, Blue Velvet becomes less a story about an innocent boy corrupted, and more a study of how the town’s distributed form recruits him. At first he is recruited by the police form, the institutional form that promises a stable mapping from evidence to truth. Then he is recruited by Frank’s form, which offers an obscene clarity about roles, about permission and obligation, about what counts as a fact in the room. Then he is recruited by Sandy’s form, which offers a myth of integration, robins and love and repair. Lynch’s pessimism, and his tenderness, both come from the recognition that none of these forms is merely “inside” the individual, they are social objects with structure, and they can coexist in the same space by demoting some of their constituents to mere temporal parts, until an event forces a reassignment of what counts as spatial presence. That is why the ending remains unsettled even when it looks settled. The robin on the fence is an ontological insistence, a reassertion of a signature, the town trying to reconstitute itself as wholesome by making the horror a temporal episode rather than a spatial constituent. Whether you take that as successful, as poignant, or as delusional depends on which truthmakers you think are still in play. 

Lynch leaves them in play. He does not let you collapse the film into a single proposition whose truth conditions are “in some worlds yes, in some worlds no”. He forces you to ask what makes any of your summaries true, and whether the thing doing the work is the thing you wanted to name. If we now let Fine’s apparatus touch the body directly, rather than hovering at the level of groups and institutions, something quietly radical happens to how Lynch’s images work. 

The body in Lynch is never simply a biological given, never just matter that later acquires meaning. It is always already a candidate for embodiment in Fine’s sense, a piece of matter that can be taken up into different structured wholes, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes incompatibly. This is why Lynch’s bodies feel unstable even when they are motionless. They are not just filmed, they are being sorted, classified, reassigned to forms. Fine’s key move is to resist the idea that there is a single, privileged level at which an object’s identity is fixed. Objects can be rigid embodiments, structured wholes whose identity depends on relations between parts, or variable embodiments, enduring entities manifested through different rigid embodiments at different times or counterfactual circumstances. 

Once you see this, Lynch’s obsession with bodies that seem to change status without changing substance begins to look less like surrealism and more like ontological precision. Take Dorothy’s body. It is tempting to say that Lynch sexualises it, victimises it, fetishises it. All of that is true, but Fine’s lens lets us say something sharper. Dorothy’s body is repeatedly re embodied. In the nightclub, it is a performing body, structured by song, lighting, audience, microphone, and the conventions of performance. The same flesh, the same voice, but the form is different. In the apartment, under Frank’s control, her body is a component in a sadistic ritual, a rigid embodiment of domination in which her bodily reactions are not merely effects but constitutive elements of the whole. Her fear, her compliance, her forced invitation are not psychological add ons, they are parts of the structure that make this social object what it is. When Dorothy appears naked and bruised on the suburban lawn, her body is abruptly re embodied again, now as a scandalous spatial part of the town. What had been allowed to function as a temporal part, sustaining the town’s hidden reality without contributing to its visible presence, is suddenly forced into spatial salience. 

The horror of that scene is not reducible to nudity or violence. It is the ontological shock of misplacement. The body is in the wrong embodiment regime. Fine’s insistence that objects can have mixed character, that they can legitimately sustain heterogeneous forms of predication, is crucial here. Dorothy’s body can be at once erotic and wounded, intimate and public, desired and feared, without this implying ambiguity or equivocation. Philosophers who want to say “strictly speaking it is only her body that is naked, not Dorothy herself” would, in Fine’s view, be committing exactly the mistake he warns against, inventing linguistic or conceptual scruples to protect an impoverished ontology. 

Lynch refuses that protection. He films Dorothy in ways that force the viewer to confront the hybrid object, the person whose bodily exposure is inseparable from her social exposure, whose humiliation is not a private mental state but a property of a structured whole that now includes neighbours, police, and witnesses. The severed ear is an even purer case. It is a body part that has lost its ordinary role within a biological whole and is now available to be taken up into other structures. Fine’s remarks about parts that do not contribute to spatial presence resonate here in an inverted way. The ear is spatially present, grotesquely so, but it no longer contributes to the spatial presence of the body to which it once belonged. Instead it contributes to the spatial presence of “the case”, of “the mystery”, of “the threat”. It is matter without its original form, and that is precisely what makes it so potent. Lynch films the ear not as evidence in the abstract but as an object whose new identity is underdetermined. Its cavities, its texture, its partial decay are not incidental details. They are the film’s way of insisting that this is not just a symbol but a piece of matter waiting to be integrated into a new embodiment. 

Fine’s work on truthmakers helps again here. The proposition “there is something wrong in this town” is not made true by an abstract fact. It is made true by this ear, in this grass, filmed in this way, with this sound design. That is an exact truthmaker. If you try to enlarge it, to replace it with “a violent crime occurred somewhere”, you lose something essential. Lynch’s camera repeatedly insists on exactness. It refuses to let you trade the body for a description. This is why the body in Lynch is never merely illustrative of a theme. It is the site at which truth is realised. 

Frank Booth’s body works differently, but no less revealingly. Frank’s body is a device for enforcing form. His inhaler, his posture, his sudden eruptions of violence, his ritualised speech are not just character traits. They are the mechanisms by which a particular embodiment is sustained. When Frank enters a room, the room’s ontology changes. Certain actions become permitted, others forbidden. Certain words acquire force. This is exactly the kind of permission structure Fine gestures toward when he criticises possible worlds accounts that treat permission as a thin modal notion. In Frank’s world, permission is not a matter of abstract possibility. It is a matter of what you are allowed to do next, in this room, under this gaze. The body is central to that. Frank’s breathing, his physical proximity, his gestures are part of the truthmaker for the claim “this is Frank’s space now”. 

Jeffrey’s body, meanwhile, is a site of variable embodiment. At different points in the film, the same body is manifested as son, boyfriend, investigator, voyeur, accomplice, victim, survivor. Lynch does not mark these shifts with costume changes or explicit declarations. He marks them with posture, framing, sound, and the presence or absence of others. Fine’s idea that an enduring object can be manifested differently across time and circumstances fits this perfectly. Jeffrey does not have to “change” in some deep psychological sense for these re embodiments to occur. What changes is the form into which his body is integrated. This is why the film’s moral discomfort cannot be resolved by saying “Jeffrey meant well” or “Jeffrey was corrupted”. Those are attempts to locate the essence of the body at a single level. Lynch shows that the body’s role is distributed across multiple structured wholes, and that those wholes can impose incompatible demands. 

Fine’s discussion of circularity also returns here, but now at the level of bodily identity. Social embodiments often require that participants take themselves to be parts of the whole. Frank’s rituals require others to recognise him as Daddy. Dorothy’s entrapment requires her to be forced to speak as if she consents, to articulate the very form that binds her. Jeffrey’s complicity grows as he continues to act in ways that presuppose the existence of the structure he is supposedly investigating. This is not just psychology. It is ontological self reference. The body is being recruited into a form that refers to itself, and the recruitment works precisely because the body can host attitudes, words, and actions that sustain the structure even when they are coerced or confused. 

This sheds light on Lynch’s distinctive way of filming pain and pleasure. He often lingers on faces, on skin, on small gestures, not to aestheticise suffering but to insist that these are not epiphenomena. They are constitutive. In Fine’s terms, they are parts of the rigid embodiment at that time. To strip them away as merely subjective is to misunderstand the nature of the object. A social horror is not something that happens and then causes feelings. The feelings are among the things that make it the horror it is. If we widen the lens slightly, this way of treating bodies also explains why Lynch’s films resist moral closure. Moral judgement often presupposes a stable object to which responsibility can be assigned. 

Fine’s ontology suggests that such stability is hard won and often absent in complex social embodiments. Blue Velvet does not deny responsibility. Frank is not excused. But the film also refuses to present responsibility as something that can be cleanly localised in a single body abstracted from the forms that shape it. Frank’s body is monstrous, but it is also an organising node in a network of permissions, silences, and recognitions. Dorothy’s suffering is hers, but it is also the manifestation of a social structure that exceeds her. Jeffrey’s guilt is real, but it is distributed across his participation in multiple embodiments that overlap and conflict. 

Seen this way, Lynch’s bodies are not symbols of ideas but sites where metaphysics is staged at the most intimate level. Fine’s insistence that we should not thin out our ontology to avoid discomfort resonates powerfully here. If we take the body seriously as a locus of form as well as matter, as something that can be re embodied without losing its identity, then the unease of Lynch’s cinema is not gratuitous. It is diagnostic. It shows us how fragile our everyday assumptions about persons, roles, and communities are, and how much work goes into keeping them stable. 

This returns us to the earlier tension between Fine and Williamson. Williamson would insist that all these bodies necessarily exist, that their existence is not in question, and that the real work is done by which propositions are true of them. Fine would respond that existence is the least interesting thing here. What matters is which forms are essential, which relations are constitutive, and which necessities govern which domains. Lynch’s bodies seem to side with Fine. They exist, yes, but their existence tells us very little until we ask what they are, what they are parts of, and under what form they are currently operating.