Talk:Frank Booth

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Don Vallens *is* alive throughout the majority of "Blue Velvet." Frank didn't cut off his ear to persuade Dorothy (falsely) that he was alive. There are a number of signs to support this.

1) When Jeffrey first sees Dorothy speaking on the phone, she says "Don? Don? Is little Donnie alright?" and then a moment later, "Frank, what's the matter with him?" This would indicate that Dorothy was speaking to Don but was unable to carry on a proper conversation with him due to his having lost one (or both, depending on whether or not one considers the screenplay to be canonical) of his ears.

2) Most importantly, when Jeffrey finds Don's body in the Deep River Apartments toward the end of the film, it is clear that he has been recently killed. There is a bandage around his head (why bandage a corpse?), he is tied down to the chair (why tie a corpse down?), he has the swatch of blue velvet stuck in his mouth (which Frank employs when engaging in sex and violence, neither of which would apply to an inanimate object), and so on. Don also shows no signs of decay, which he would, had he been dead for as long as Dorothy seems to have been in the situation with Frank. Also, if one looks closely, one can see brain matter smeared across the counter behind Don's head, indicating that he was shot in the head in Dorothy's apartment. Also also, Dorothy tells Jeffrey at Sandy's house that "They've hurt his head," which jives with the idea that Don was shot in the head very recently.

3) Jeffrey says that he believes that Frank cut the ear he found off of Don in order to warn Dorothy to stay alive. Jeffrey's interpretation of events may be incorrect, but it's certainly evidence to the contrary of the Don-being-dead-all-along theory.

Aside from Don's status, there are some outright errors. It is most logical to assume that Frank beat, stripped, and dumped Dorothy because of the police operation which had been instigated against him when Det. Williams began to investigate Det. Gordon's (The Yellow Man's) crime ties. Also, Dorothy was dumped in front of Jeffrey's house, not in front of Sandy's.

There's also a fair bit of conjecture being presented as fact in other bits of the article, but I'm too lazy to have a look at 'em now.

Do I need to do anything other than justify this idea here before editing the article itself?

No, go for it, but you should qualify the statement by saying it's not 100% clear, just pretty likely. Tempshill 04:32, 20 August 2006 (UTC)