Postmortum on Twin Peaks Eps1-4

This article by John Tatlock does a good job at articulating the differences in the new Twin Peaks iteration without going into spoilers. I won't go into too many details, but here are some semi-spoilerish thoughts on what exactly is happening with Twin Peaks and why this is what we are getting in 2017 (and don't expect that to change any time soon).

The first thing to note about Twin Peaks The Return is that the show is pretty tedious. It tests and plays with the limits of patience, particularly a fan's patience, waiting for the old series to emerge.  This series has zero melodrama and deep feeling, articulated with the abundant and some might say ironic use of Angelo Badalementi’s score work on the original show.  Here, in 2017, David Lynch does not do fan service. That said, hardcore fans of the show will notice the recurrence of minor details, or the completion of motions set in place during the initial run or in the film Fire Walk With Me. There are the odd cues and callbacks to things like the Arm, the blue rose, or a flickering light, but there is no legend to guide you through it.  Whereas 90s Dale Cooper served as the series guide by bringing his crew up to speed as mysterious events unfold, here there is no narrator, no guide, no clues connecting the dots, which are in complete disarray like splatter art.  At one point, Deputy Hawk appears to be going through an existential crisis about whether a seemingly trivial bit of evidence might be relevant or not.  If Twin Peaks gave birth to the postmodern show, as many said at the time, Twin peaks the return is full postmodernism, signs and signifiers completely detached from all meaning, no center in sight.

It becomes pretty clear by the time Brett Gelman and Michael Cera arrive on screen in episode 4 that Lynch is making this show in full awareness of the Adult Swim roster, much of which thrived on a surreal horror-comedy that was clearly in debt to Lynch himself. In fact, there's an acknowledgment of many items that have trickled through the TV/film matrix both over the last 25 years and prior.  It’s unclear if distracting allusions to the Addams Family and The Wild One are inserted to be canny, clever, or intentionally awkward, but they play as the latter.  Just as the tonal shift of the Twin Peaks film was announced with its opening shot of a TV screen being smashed (and then with an FBI agent making vague threats to "Deputy Cable"), the new series, available as a TV Show, streaming show, or, at a later date, as an 18 hour movie, seems to just be trapped somewhere in a virtual consciousness, figuring itself out.  One of the major plot points in episode one concerns a giant unexplained glass cage based out of TV capital NYC which has no known origin or originator- it's a literal manifestation of a mystery box, the genre Twin Peaks helped to create (though the mystery in the box was never intended to be solved- for further physical manifestations of this, see Westworld's McGuffin map).

The series takes place in a world in which language and communication have become so corrupted that the mere concept of rational thought and dialogue seems like an impossibility. The show's initial concern is returning Cooper from the Black Lodge, but something from that world seems to be infecting everything outside of it. Gone is the witty banter and maudlin lovelorn confessions of the initial series.  Instead, there are impossibly long pauses, stunted phrases, and often stupid, just plainly and hopefull-intentionally idiotic back and forths.  One can pull from this tenuous narrative gauze a potential thought project about aging. The geriatric experience is made manifest in the slow processing of language, the way characters have to repeat themselves, and the deep frustration that comes from realizing that even utilizing filters like repetition and drawn-out-speech does not clear the deep confusion of existence.   The whole thing seems like a product of dementia or senility (in fact, Cooper is probably suffering from it), a borderline sensibility that Lynch no doubt realizes will be leveled against him by his harshest critics.  Indeed, reuniting much of the old cast, many of whom were already in late adulthood when the show first aired over 25 years ago, finds a number of them missing- Miguel Ferrer, Jack Nance, Frank Silva, David Bowie, Warren Frost, Don Davis, and Catherine Coulson have all passed away in recent years.  If the initial run was about youth and the uncomfortable proximity between rebellion against adulthood and total corruption into its darker tenets (as personified in Laura Palmer, but elsewhere as well), the renewed series has thus far focused on the cold, empty, and lonely terror of old age.



Fittingly for a Lynch piece, the old cast of characters reappear but like dream caricatures of themselves. Albert doesn't talk much and yet seems crankier than usual. Andy is now almost too dumb.  Dr. Jacoby is now clearly insane, collecting and decorating golden shovels either in anticipation of digging something up or burying something deep. Lynch himself appears (in episode 4), revising his role as Gordon, to talk to a version of Cooper.  They both tell each other that's it's been great to see each other after such a long time, but it's obvious in their strained chat that neither of them is being honest. Lynch, as Gordon and - mind you- the director and author of the whole new series run- later becomes the only voice of levity when he confesses that perhaps for the first time, he has no idea what the hell is happening. Should we take this as a confession?  So much of this show reads as auto-critique, attempts to negotiate itself in the most Lynchian way, as a piece of intellectual property.  What people want, it assumes, is something old and dying, malfunctioning and regressive.  What it has to offer as an alternative, however, remains to be seen.

Lynching the Lynch Mob

I'm a little baffled by Sean Murphy's article on what he refers to as the David Lynch Dilemma. Is the dilemma really one about David Lynch or is it about idolatry and hero worship? Lynch seems to be as good a catalyst as any for discussion on blind approval, rightfully cited as an administrative tool of realpolitik. But Murphy also seems to take cause with Lynch's entire career, criticizing the way in which Lynch's films, in his view, pretends to seek, using pre-established accolades as an excuse to essentially wank off against a film canvas. The advocates most certainly exist, but beyond my disagreement with his assessment (or his inability to assess) I find certain faults in survey of Lynch's cult, which seems to simplify a broad a diverse range of people.

To my recollection, Lost Highway was not reviewed very favorably upon its release. Dune, which was before my time, wasn't either.. And Blue Velvet, though now regarded somewhat unanimously as an American film classic (which I, like the author, would dispute), had its fair share of naysers.

Much of this argument seems to imply that the discourse regarding Lynch starts and ends with "If you don't like it, you don't get it", which couldn't be further from the truth. There are scores of books written about Lynch's movies, websites and listservs dedicated to pondering even the most minute of his many splendored arcana, Twin Peaks conventions, and countless college term papers (including a few written about him by yours truly). While no one has ever come close to cornering an absolutist interpretation of Lynch's murkier work, there have been plenty of interesting ones posited. Check out The Modern Word's take on Mulholland Drive, for instance. Speaking unscientifically, Lynch may be the most discussed American director living today.

Fanboys will be fanboys and it's hard to relegate God to the deist, but of those I know and have discussed Lynch with, none would claim his every work to be a masterpiece. I find him endlessly fascinating, each of his films worth repeat viewings. I can only claim two to be priceless endeavors (Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead) and only one other that qualifies as a great film (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, though it was very difficult to divorce that film from the tonally antithetical series, which may surpass all of Lynch's other work combined).

Film, along with perhaps music as its only brethren, holds a perplexing identity in Western culture. It is essentially an artistic and creative medium, but its entire output is coordinated by market forces. As such, film audiences are trained to consume media, not to think about and analyze the social, political, and economic ways in which it shapes them. It's unsurprising then that moviegoers of various stripes are unable to describe why they like something they've seen. My parents, for instance, think that examining a motion picture beyond its surface narrative "ruins" the flick. They've involved for entertainment, escape, and hence surrender.

Why the draw towards Lynch then for viewers of similar mute consent, albeit of sensibilities decidedly divergent from the popcorn viewer? Lynch offers the abstract within a digestible form. His experiments take place within the context of narrative films, often with potable themes, photogenic tableaux, hypnotizing sound sculptures, and recognizable film archetypes- be they extolled, admonished, or perverted (the small-town boy, the femme fatale, the cocky director, amnesia, a "woman in trouble").

It's ironic to me that viewers are often left unable to vouch for their love of Lynch's films since much of his work seems to be concerned with the inability of language to articulate our desires (hence the "empty" dialogue), or to save ourselves from danger. They are, after all, enslaved to their script. It is a "recording. It is all an illusion".


Film, as a visual and audial form of communication, has the verisimilitude of being the ultimate artform, and hence the ultimate artistic language, in that it assimilates all other art forms. Lynch's work shows the faults in this assumption by presenting sideshifting events, editing out large portions of important information, and leaving in huge gaps of unnerving speechlessness that confront the relationship between the author and the user. By focusing so heavily on non-plot-advancing devices, Lynch dictates that no narrator/director is reliable and that the altered state of film viewing is a tempered form of thought control.

Lynch's films mandate participation by making his viewers force meanings out of them. We interact with the characters all the more, because we too are put under great duress, cognitively of course, in being isolated in an alien world that defies a conventional categorical apparatus (shot from Chaplin's oft-quoted long-shot, all Lynch films could be Monty Python sketches). Those who reject the actions in a Lynch film as unperceivable weirdness for weirdness's sake refuse to accept disparate actions as narrative. It may as well be splatterart in this instance. Downright rejection of the existing plotlines and story arches, disparate though they may be, is also a refusal to draw corollaries based on the prerequisite of assumption as acceptable determinism. Being in a film universe is not enough. One must know this world, crack it, and thereby segregate it from one's own. Most films outside of the avant-garde usually leave a few stones unturned, but overall transpose an acceptable certainty of gaze to the minds of their audiences. Certainty not only that something has happened, but that it has happened for a specific purpose. Barring specific explanations, it has at least happened for the purpose of reaching the film's conclusion and to suspend our tension until the next time we enter the darkened multiplex.

Lynch's films are not so simple. His work informs us that sometimes reality only leaves us with crumbs. Our fate bears no specific seal, our lives leave no imprintable purpose. Weird shit happens and we'll never understand why. This is why Lynch's work is so commonly focused on the work of the unconscious mind, the dream state. About a third of our lives are spent asleep. Of those years spent unexamined, the most significant times is when we are watching our own personalized abstract films in dreams. If modern psychology is, as I believe it to be, one of the greatest breakthroughs of the 20th century (albeit probably still in its nascent stage and already being domineered by the corporate drug state), then we should agree that what goes on in dreams can teach us a great deal about our lives, even as their direct "meaning" is obscured.

People often criticize Lynch for proposing that even he has no idea what his films mean. Sometimes, he doesn't. He has often admitted this in interviews. As Salvador Dali once said, "The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning". Sometimes it's enough to recognize a visible cue, like an ear in a field or a melting clock, that will set the mind aflame in contemplation. Despite, or even absent a filmmaker's intentions, a film can have as many interpretations as there are vantage points, director's commentaries be damned. Call it Rorschach cinema (Maddin, Brahkage, Anger, Jordowsky, Deren, etc.).

Every year, millions of people hoard themselves to the cinemas to watch thousands of people die and hundreds of good looking people fuck each other, often within moments of each other. They walk out of the theaters smiling, never question what this could possibly do to their psyche. The sex in Lynch can be redemptive or manipulative (Twin Peaks), collaborative (Mulholland Drive) or alienating (the implied impregnation of Eraserhead), uniting (Wild At Heart) or devastating (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). The violence, however, is always putrid, regressive, and earth-shattering.

Lynch asks us to not surrender to cinema, to become its passive victim, but to become lucid in our viewing habits. The great art of the 20th and 21st century must always dangle in front of us the possibility that what we have experienced is not really art at all. We must be left with the perception that perhaps what we've been experiencing all along in every passing phenomenological art piece- cynical or optimistic, abstruse or obvious, is life itself. We live life while art gets to experience us. By its borders and its determinism, art is free to fool us into thinking it is still unpredictable years after it has already been created. If we feel used, it is because we have been. Our life is merely the catalyst for that old parasitic art. It has allowed us, to paraphrase Greil Marcus, to view heaven as hell and vice versa. Lynch, rather than showing the puppet strings, intoxicates you, spins you around in circles, drops you in the middle of the desert, and forces you to examine how you got there.


See also:
Salon's "Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Mulholland Drive"

Also Recommended:

Both seasons of Twin Peaks. There's no better guide to demystifying David Lynch than this series, which essentially guides you through the process as Cooper, Truman, et al. try to solve a metamystery.