The picket fence is a type of timber fence often used decoratively for domestic boundaries, distinguished by their evenly spaced vertical boards, the pickets, attached to horizontal rails. The white picket fence came to symbolise, particularly in the US, the ideal middle-class suburban life: the nuclear family with its 2.4 children, a dog, a station wagon, a large house and peaceful living. With his film Blue Velvet, David Lynch deployed the picket fence as a visual ploy to subvert suburban living as “stultifying at best, soul-poisoning at worst. The visual monotony of a given neighborhood’s cookie-cutter architecture becomes a predictable stand-in for the unthinking conformity of the community’s expectations, as well as the narrowness of the denizens’ dreams and desires.”