Twin Peaks: Variety & Character
This year, the tensest moment of my Thanksgiving holiday in Albuquerque had nothing to do with politics.
“I mean do you have an argument? Because I’d like to hear it.”
Bill was standing across from me at the kitchen table, half-finished plates of pumpkin pie before us. Bill my brother-in-law is a little older than me, in his forties, and a little bigger. His name isn’t Bill. I had never gotten the least hint of aggression off of him in the years I’d known him. I was getting a hint now.
“I don’t really have an argument.” I grinned nervously. “I mean, it was just all great for me.” I searched for a concession. “There were some weak parts for sure—the back story on that guy with the dishwashing glove for example. That seemed pretty half-baked.”
Bill nodded vigorously. “And that is what it was like everywhere.”
By this time it was clear that Bill hadn’t just found the 2017 reincarnation of Twin Peaks to be a dud. He found it actively offensive. It was a generically incoherent, nonsensical stew of art video, crime narrative, and a bunch of other stuff that never came together. Even more unforgiveable: it was filled with bad filmmaking and bad acting. Worst: it was done in bad faith.
Because my brother-in-law was neither a newcomer to Lynch nor an inveterate Lynch-hater. He loved the original Twin Peaks. When I brought up Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, in order to explain my predisposition to let Lynch be Lynch, both he and my sister-in-law (who came in to support him at some point) were unhesitating: great movies. OK, Bill hadn’t seen all of Inland Empire, but this was not an anti-Lynchian. So at the heart of his position was a tough feeling to address: betrayal. Lynch was capable of greatness, but the new Twin Peaks was a travesty of Lynchian style, a mockery of the characters and world of the original series, a cynical money-grab at the expense of, well, adoring, blind followers like me.
Bill even had the gall to compare Twin Peaks to George Lucas’s ill-begotten Phantom Menace, and mentioned something I didn’t quite catch about Jar Jar Binks.
Upon reflection, after I had extricated myself from this awkward pass, I realized that my profession might be on the line as well. He didn’t quite say it, but I almost heard, “So, English Professor, what do you have to say about this? How’s your PhD going to help you now?”
So here goes.
I have rewatched the first three episodes, with just as much pleasure as the first time, if not more, and I have a few hypotheses to lay out, for the greatness of this work.
First, generically, let’s call it a variety show, or vaudeville, or, if you are more classically inclined, Menippean satire. (Although I don’t know enough about the history of either television or the variety show to speak with authority, I would suspect that this is Lynch’s response to the lengthy, episodic nature of TV.) The strongest signal of the generic nature seems to me not the emotional variety, of including terrifying Eros-tinged violence, alongside such a farce as Dougie’s first breakfast at home (with the tie on his head)—
—but of course the musical presentations in the Big Bang Bar at the end of most episodes. These are musical performances meant to give us pleasure, that also exist within the fictional world of the show. They have little connection to what is happening in the show. To me they seem pretty clearly to be a mixtape of bands David Lynch likes, presented for the pleasure of fans of Twin Peaks. What a simple and beautiful gesture.
Indeed, I would say the whole show is suffused with a love of the aesthetic for its own sake, and this is one of the qualities of the variety show: why is it here? It is here because it is beautiful. That is reason enough in Twin Peaks. Or, at a different register, it is here because it is fun, because it is amusing, or diverting.
A number of the cameos in the show are also accommodated by the frame of diverting variety, where we might begin the main act with a few shorts, or have an interlude or two. David Duchovny as Denise, Chief of Staff in the FBI, for example. But that interaction advances the plot and develops character in some ways. Michael Cera as Wally, or really as Marlon Brando in The Wild One, is interlude all the way. Michael Cera wanted to be in the show, so Lynch wrote him a part, we suppose. We like Michael Cera, and watching Cera do Brando is very amusing indeed. That’s it. Moving on.
So anyway I think that understanding the genre and being prepared to accept things offered to us because they are beautiful or diverting or amusing, and offered at that particular moment because, by Lynch’s sense of the rhythm of the show, we needed something of that nature—something different—at that particular time—this understanding is critical to not being constantly annoyed by what we see. So that’s one thing for Bill.
But of course the variety show is not all there is: there is a main act, a main narrative, and this is plenty serious, as well as, typically for Lynch, quite intellectually challenging to pull together or to resolve. And I’m sure that by now there are plenty of very good efforts to rise to that challenge.
How I want to end is by responding a bit to another strong objection by Bill, namely that the new show betrayed the characters of the old, or exploited them, operating in bad faith with respect to the original. I have not rewatched the original, and yet I have a strong sense that this is not the case.
Let’s take the examples of Andy and Lucy, and the Dougie version of Agent Cooper. With Andy and Lucy, I would say that I do not think that their oddities and slowness and vacancy are presented with scorn. Those qualities are highlighted for comic effect, but not for ridicule. One indication of this is that both Hawk and Sheriff Truman take them seriously and treat them with respect and consideration, while not being blind to their idiosyncracies. They are modeling our reception. In contrast, Deputy Chad Broxford treats them with contempt. And he turns out to be corrupt and evil. That is a pretty clear indication of where Lynch stands.
I will make a final pitch for Dougie. Dougie is ridiculous at times, and comical, but he also seems to me a profound revision or version of Agent Cooper. In the fiction of the show, he is a glitch or mistake: Cooper has only partially returned from the Black Lodge. But many of his most important qualities are very much on display, are indeed, perhaps, amplified even as he has lost much of his ability to navigate the world and conduct ordinary social intercourse. To me this is informed by very serious observation—of, say, people with dementia, who display aspects of their personalities increasingly unburdened by contact with day-to-day matters. What is Disability Studies scholarship saying about Dougie? I do not know, but to me, this seemed a serious effort to imagine a neurologically distinctive version of someone we know, and also to imagine that person as having a fabulously productive, indeed heroic set of interactions with his world.
I have not made my way all the way back to the end, but based on my memory of the desolation of the ending, of Laura Palmer always being born to suffer in whatever universe, and Cooper always being born to try to do her justice or undo the cruelty done to her, and always falling short, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the Dougie version of Cooper is indeed more successful, more valuable, and better integrated into the lives of those he loves and works with than Cooper is. And that says something.
So this concludes my serious arguing. Now a few more random points.
For one, I can see what Bill means, I think, in terms of acting and production values. The young man who watches the glass box, and the young woman who pursues him—these are flat characters, woodenly acted. But this seems very much a choice: they are caricatures of empty-headed youths, perhaps of a particular New York undergraduate brand of empty-headed youth, fascinated by being close to “a billionaire” whom they never see. Fascinated by a job that involves staring for hours at an empty box waiting for something to materialize.
When weird things happen—as in when they are attacked by a strange figure that does indeed emerge from the box (charged by their mindless erotic energy perhaps?)—maybe Bill is unimpressed by the camera-waving distortion of these freak-outs. It doesn’t look like a lot of CG money is being spent here.
But from where I sit, those moments seem fresh in their campiness, and plenty disturbing as they also seem a special Lynchian take on the digital glitch (something alas compounded by the actual glitches we experienced watching the show on a smart TV with the Amazon Prime app streaming Showtime).
So rather than plagued by flat acting and cheap special effects, I was ready to buy this as a satiric take on New York college students, and fresh retro filmmaking for horror, that works.
Here are some other things that I love.
I love the pacing. The show sells us (sells me) almost immediately on its dream-logic, anti-narrative approach to storytelling. (And this is continuous with past Lynch.) The time we spend in the Black Lodge certainly helps to establish this. The Black Lodge seems to take Kubrick’s end of 2001 null time-space zone and give it greater psychomachic qualities: a maze that we might be able to escape from, with help, with timing, with some luck.
I love the dialogue here. Laura says, “I am dead. And yet I live.” There was a moving lyrical quality to this—I have to think more about why. It comes to us of course through a subtitle given to the backwards-ish-filtered talk of the denizens of the Lodge who are not Cooper.
Where I would go next is to Lynch’s view of evil. What was startling to me in the first couple of episodes was how violent and how dark they were—more so than I think would have been possible to include on network TV when this first aired.
But this will have to wait for another post.
So I think this is ready to try back on my brother Bill who is not named Bill. How will it fare? That will have to wait for another post too.
