February 01, 2008
Twin Peaks
A Damn Fine Cup of Coffee
Okay, here goes: Hi, my name is Raph, and I’m not that into David Lynch. I am aware of the undue pain and suffering this has caused my fellow film buffs, New Yorkers, brainiacs and generally cultured people, and I’m sorry. But I stand before you with good news: there is a light at the end of the “I don’t get it” tunnel, and its name is Twin Peaks.
Have you ever watched the American version of a foreign movie, or the movie version of your favorite book, or, God help you, a televised version of your favorite book? In the new, more accessible version, everything seems muted, stripped of any edge or subtlety or obscurity. Watching the no–F word version of The Big Lebowski on TV, while perversely entertaining, is like replacing ice cream with a bowl of straight-up ice. We can agree: dumbing down the original results in a crappy product. But what if the original wasn’t dumbed down enough? What would happen if, say, a television network had some say over the work of a director who, for my tastes, is usually too edgy, too subtle, too obscure? In my experience, the result is a show that’s still far weirder than anything else you’ll come across in TV-land, but just reigned-in enough to let some genius shine through.
The first season of Twin Peaks, and the first half of the second season, deals with one question: who killed the beautiful, troubled teenager Laura Palmer? More specifically, who wrapped her in plastic and dumped her in the river so that she could wash up on the shore in the most compelling first five minutes of a pilot I’ve ever seen? Normally, this kind of premise for a show would give me pause. I find that dramas which deal with a set of circumstances— a mobster who sees a therapist; a family running and living above a funeral parlor; life and politics in a mining town in the Old West— work better than those which rely on a specific storyline. The entertaining but ultimately hacky NBC drama Heroes is stifled by this inflexibility; it’s not about heroes in general, but about a national conspiracy to contain the powers of the heroes and a scary murderer man on the loose and the mysterious origins of these powers, etc. etc. etc. Twin Peaks, while constructed around one story, allows itself to act like a slice of life. The people who are affected by Laura’s death are a vast ensemble of bizarre characters, and, as it turns out, the town of Twin Peaks would be a place worth examining, even without a sexy murder story. It is, in the words of one of those characters, “A place both wonderful and strange.”
The list of characters in the series is vast, but if there is a protagonist, other than the absent figure of Laura Palmer, whose high school portrait grins eerily through the end credits of each episode, it is FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who is sent from headquarters to investigate the murder in the pilot, and sticks around for the rest of the series. In Cooper, Lynch finds the ideal element with which to introduce us to this most unusual of settings. On the one hand, Cooper is an outsider; he learns, as we do, about the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson), a sagelike figure who, you guessed it, carries a log around with her; the slow but sweet Sheriff’s Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz), who is moved to tears by the sight of a murder scene; and the eyepatched Nadine (Wendy Robie), who is obsessed with inventing silent drape runners. On the other hand, Cooper is a big ball of idiosyncrasies himself, and perfectly suited for Twin Peaks. He constantly dictates diligent notes into a tape recorder, addressing a woman named Diane whom we never see; uses his dreams and cryptic Tibetan methods to deduce hard evidence; and exudes an almost maniacal enthusiasm for pie and coffee— “This must be where pies go when they die,” he says of Twin Peaks hangout the Double R Diner.
Cooper sets a tone for the series which is, in a word that’s absent from most descriptions of David Lynch’s work, playful. The beauty of Twin Peaks is the ease with which it moves between the sinister and the silly, and sometimes even combines the two. This unique blend is the can’t-put-your-finger-on-it quality which makes the show such a cult phenomenon— fans tear scripts apart searching for hidden messages and attend lavish festivals in actual towns called Twin Peaks (most of the show was filmed in Snoqualmie and North Bend, Washington). Every lighthearted scene contains an undercurrent of menace, because we know the evil that lurks just off-frame in the town’s woods. At the same time, even the creepiest scenes contain an element of the absurd— a small man (Michael J. Anderson) dancing and speaking backwards, or a prophetic giant (Carel Struycken). The effect, of a world so specific unto itself, is nothing less than hypnotizing.
Angelo Badalamenti’s distinct soundtrack is largely responsible for the unified atmosphere of Twin Peaks. There are a few different themes used on rotation: a something-creepy-is-happening theme, a schmaltzy, stringy love theme, and a jazzy, something-kind-of-quirky-is-happening theme. Four or five episodes in, my ears were already so accustomed to the rotating themes that even the vaguest strains would put me in the mood for cherry pie. It’s worth noting, too, that this rotating-theme device has since been picked up by other TV series, and not only dramas in the Twin Peaks family. The cancelled comedy Arrested Development had different themes for certain characters and recurring situations, and a Curb Your Enthusiasm connoisseur can predict what degree of trouble Larry David is in based on which piece of classical music is playing in the background.
The narcotic-like hold the first season of Twin Peaks had over me is what makes me wonder how much ABC’s involvement may have curbed some of Lynch’s tendencies which I normally don’t care for. Were the moments of slapstick, and the jazzy music which softened some of the scarier scenes and downgraded them from horrifying to creepy, a result of filming for a wider and, yes, maybe slightly dumber audience? My suspicions were confirmed when I rented the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch’s prequel to the show which followed Laura Palmer on the last day before her death. The film, unrestrained by television standards, was more sexual, scarier, bloodier, more confusing, and much, much worse than the series. Its cryptic elements would be too much for even the citizens of Twin Peaks to handle: an unexplained monkey; a meaningless cameo by a screaming David Bowie; and the small man’s insistence on eating a nauseating concoction made from corn and what looked like pancake syrup. Peggy Lipton, a Twin Peaks actress who didn’t make it to the movie (like many other sorely missing cast members), has said that she wasn’t impressed with Fire Walk With Me because in it, all of the town’s bad deeds and debauchery are out in the open, while on the show, evil lives behind closed doors. This sounds to me like the difference between a director having to work around censors and being given carte blanche to run wild with his ideas.
For an example of wildly running ideas which don’t work out so well, by the way, check out the second half of the second season, after Laura’s killer is revealed: Twin Peaks becomes a cameo circus, for better or worse, for the likes of David Duchovny (better, as a cross-dressing FBI agent), Billy Zane, and Heather Graham (worse, not acting her way out of a paper bag as Agent Cooper’s love interest). Without a murder mystery, the sinister element is filled in by a James Bond–grade villain (Kenneth Welsh), whose diabolical scheming, which we’ve seen thousands of times before, is no match for the ever-mysterious and supernatural circumstances surrounding Laura’s killer.
I should emphasize here that I am in no way advocating censorship by saying that ABC’s supervision of Lynch made for a better show. The beauty of art is that I can feel however I want about the work of someone like Lynch (sorry, everbody, but Mullholland Drive— what? Thanks to those who have tried to explain it to me, but I’ll never, ever get it. Ever.) and still appreciate him as an artist with a unique style that might not necessarily be my cup of tea. But, speaking as a writer, I also appreciate the freedom that comes with having to work within restrictions. With their Dogme movement, Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier forced themselves to make films without lighting or special effects or, well, anything; Georges Perec wrote himself a big fat novel without ever using the letter “E”; and, perhaps unintentionally, by being forced to work within certain guidelines by philistine TV studio execs, David Lynch created a world which I’m pretty sure is where television shows go when they die.
