My ardor for David Lynch began at an
awkward time. I don’t mean to say as a teenager, when the sticky
possibilities of sex and desire emerge in forms that are just as
uncontrollably emotional or spiritual as they are corporeal, though that
certainly makes what Lynch calls “the darkness of confusion,”
highlighted throughout the psychosexual interior landscapes of Eraserhead (uncontrollable, giant sperms leaving a mess), Blue Velvet (wherein a young man awakes to the power of love and lust, as life and death), Wild at Heart (the boundless, almost agitated, hotter-than-Georgia-asphalt libidos of Sailor and Lula), and Twin Peaks
(to quote Laura Palmer, “Isn’t sex weird?”), more viscerally felt. The
time to which I’m referring was during Lynch’s dark age, following the
cancellation of Peaks and ill-regarded fate of its movie prequel, Fire Walk With Me, when the phenomenon that landed the director on the cover of Time was written off, to quote Murphy Brown, as a mere fad. In these years, Lynch, who’d created for film, TV (in addition to Twin Peaks, there was the doomed sitcom On the Air and an HBO miniseries Hotel Room), art exhibitions (paintings, sculptures, photography), comic strips (“The Angriest Dog in the World” for L.A. Weekly), and music (Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night and The Voice of Love albums, Industrial Symphony No. 1), had burned out in the public’s–and media’s–imagination. In Entertainment Weekly magazine, the
annual “Cool” issue put Lynch’s picture next to other former cover
celebrities M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice: yesterday’s news, and
embarrassing news at that. This was around the time that a certain young
filmmaker, who similarly captured the attention of the post-modern
counter culture, was in Cannes promoting his debut, Reservoir Dogs,
and mentioned, “David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I
have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something
different.”
Such are the vacillations of favor to disfavor. Twin Peaks
anticipates the present day’s golden period of enthralling serialized
television constructed in a proficient manner that often feels suited
for a motion picture: pronounced extreme close-ups, wide angle lenses,
memorable scoring by Angelo Badalamenti, etc. The ensemble, led by the
mystic FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) who struggles to unravel
the murder of local homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), was
replete with memorable characterizations, all with their own style and
brand but fitting in perfect consonance with the jazzy industrial and
deep woods cauldron of an isolated small town in the American North
West, a locale existing somewhere close to both the 1950s and the
1980s–and to both heaven and hell (or White Lodge and Black). How
different might have Twin Peaks‘ fate have been had it been not
a weekly network show in a pre-Internet/streaming/download time? In
1990, the aesthetics and marvelous richness of something like Peaks
couldn’t sustain momentum or retain much beyond a “demented soap opera”
descriptor, and it quickly collapsed into a gimmick box. It lost its
way after about fifteen episodes and was soon cancelled.
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