But everyday life has become irreducibly surreal. Blue Velvet inaugurated a whole tradition of films that used the lawn as a fertile field of domestic trauma. The symbolism is based on the fact that lawn mowers are so dangerous. More than 60,000 injuries related to mowing are treated in hospital emergency rooms each year. Countless toes, fingers, and limbs are severed as people put parts of themselves into the moving blades, fall under machines, run into friends, or even drive off cliffs while riding them.
Mowers escape, catch fire, and explode.
Special medical techniques have been developed to handle such accidents. Only automobiles cause more injuries. The domesticating machine is deadly. At the same time, an environmentalist critique of the hundreds of millions of small garden engines in the United States develops. Legislation regulating air and noise pollution is eventually passed and enforced.