The Aquarian stamp is all over the aesthetic choices of Blue Velvet: the mocking of American kitsch; ironic, jarring juxtapositions; unsettling behavioral choices given circumstance; disquieting, neurotic characters; postmodern mix-and-match. However, the movie is through and through about the Plutonian realm and the Apollonian spotlight that Lynch throws on the dark world gives tremendous insight into America's underbelly. Although the Plutonic realm of abuse and moral degradation in Blue Velvet is so perverted and so rarefied that it loses its human quality—from Dennis Hopper's over-the-top intonations to Dean Stockwell's freakish lip-syncing—it still has a power to transform and compel the viewer.

Lifting the sanitized cover off of a lily-white, homogenized America, Lynch exposes a seething underbelly and the worst potentials of the Plutonic archetype: sadomasochistic abuse, murder, and unredeemable aggression. More importantly, given that there is no proper outlet for the destructive and violent aspects of Pluto in the fictional town of Lumberton, it is secretly passed down vertically generation-to-generation and horizontally between members of the community in the form of abuse.

It is assumed by the viewer that Dennis Hopper's depraved Frank Booth's obsess ional craving for ritualized sadomasochism is a very primitive method of expunging abuse that he incurred as a child. Unfortunately, as Hopper's Booth fails to transform his rage, grief, and loss he feels, he transfers the unprocessed base feelings onto reluctant victims and martyrs. The process continues as Hopper's victim, Isabella Rossellini, models the behavior she sees as she dominates submissive Kyle Maclachlan. Hence, the Plutonic shadow side of the community is tossed about like a medicine ball between characters of the film, never being fully transformed, only transferred.