TWIN PEAKS
Directed and written by David Lynch, Mark Frost, and others. With Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Piper Laurie, Joan Chen, Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, and Richard Beymer.
“The year’s best show!” crowed the cover of Entertainment Weekly; “the wingdingiest thing to make it onto network television in many a full moon,” echoed Ken Tucker in the same magazine. “An erotic watershed in the history of broadcast TV,” claimed Amy Taubin in the Village Voice. “As in a Fellini film, strange moments abound,” wrote Timothy Carlson in TV Guide. And in the New Yorker Terrence Rafferty called it “an exhilarating ride, at once scary and mysteriously tranquil, like the children’s nighttime journey down the river in The Night of the Hunter.” This followed a favorable comparison of Twin Peaks to Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which Rafferty went so far as to imagine Bunuel turning his film into an extended TV series as well.
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Though it seems reasonable enough to regard Lynch, the director and cowriter (with Mark Frost) of the pilot, a surrealist, linking him with the Latin surrealism of a Bunuel (or even the Latin semisurrealism of a Fellini) is a grotesque kind of shorthand, one that pares away most of what makes both filmmakers distinctive. The drier Belgian surrealism of painters like Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte–bourgeois surrealists whose nearest well-known American equivalent might be Edward Hopper–is much closer to Lynch’s turf, as is the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. All these artists excel in taking familiar bourgeois settings and situations and eroding them with creepy undertones, a lingering sense of disquiet–a tactic that is quite different from inflating them into cartoons (Fellini), turning them into poetic fairy-tale landscapes (Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter), or exploding them (Bunuel).
Under the circumstances, it seems useful to point out that with a sheriff and a federal agent as its principal charismatic male buddies, a sentimentality about homecoming queens that borders on gush, a Reaganite preference for the wealthy over the poor (and for WASPS over everyone else), and a puritanical Peyton Place brand of sociology, Twin Peaks is ideologically no different from other prime-time serials; if it is supposed to be leading us to the promised land, it is still hauling the worst of our 80s and 90s baggage along with us. Lynch’s attitude toward this baggage, moreover, seems not so much committed as expedient. One might simply say that he’s an artist who likes to hang his work–his arresting compositions, weird ideas, and haunting sounds–in the biggest museums he can find; prime-time TV, baggage and all, offers the biggest museum in the world.
Lynch’s major achievement in all this is that he plays strictly by the dubious rules of his elected genre and still finds numerous opportunities to display his quirky humor and other forms of aesthetic distancing. The results are both formulaic and goofy–a far cry from the overall coherence of an Eraserhead (or a Feuillade serial, to cite another of Terrence Rafferty’s strained comparisons), but certainly a bright development in a moribund genre, and a story that sets up enough mysteries to get some genuine momentum going. (Whatever my doubts or misgivings about the series as a whole, I expect to stay plugged in through the final episode on May 24.)
ABC’s willingness to experiment with a show like Twin Peaks comes at a time when network TV, feeling the heat from both cable and video rentals, is clearly in trouble with a shrinking audience. The question of whether Lynch and Frost’s show may help to turn the tide by encouraging more experimentation is an important one, but it shouldn’t be confused with an appraisal of Twin Peaks in relation to Lynch’s other work, or even an appraisal on its own merits. Having at this point seen only a third of the nine hours produced so far, I obviously can’t pretend to make any final judgments on the whole, but the precipitous decline in overall quality between the pilot and first episode is not encouraging.
