[Blarg]

I like the pairing with Blue Velvet. I'll have to watch SOAD again and note the scene you're mentioning.

SOAD also pairs up well with Night of the Hunter to me. Both show young people in peril from the very people they should be able to count on most, their families. Both were decidedly bleak and psychologically frank for their time -- or for our time, really, too. Robert Mitchum and Joseph Cotton were both clever, murderous seducers with veneers that were, to their intended audience, smooth enough. They put me in mind of magicians, for whom children are the toughest audience, as they simply are uninterested in misdirection and won't look at what they are supposed to, but will instead look at the hand palming the coin and demand it be turned face up before them. At which point the stage collapses, and everybody else who wanted to believe in magic, even if just for a moment, is brought up short.

It's the wanting to believe that makes us so vulnerable to people happy to enable our self-indulgent leap away from the mundane, no matter how improbable. When we let them give us what we want, we might be shaking hands with the devil. And wind up drowned, or strangled, or pushed from a train.

Don't we know that it's coming? Can we really believe in magic? Maybe we do know it's coming, almost certainly, and our real lives are so desperate that it's worth it to escape the way we live now. Perhaps that's the darker message at the core of these movies.