One Thing After Another
by Terrence Rafferty,
New Yorker, April 9, 1990
with many thanks to Keith Dawson
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On the face of it, the idea of David Lynch's creating a series for television sounds like a joke. His movies, which include "Eraserhead," "The
Elephant Man," and "Blue Velvet," are everything that American television
isn't: adventurous, disturbing, erotic, visually exciting, and absolutely
personal. What could he possibly do for the bland, corporate medium of
prime-time television? And what could it do for him (other than make studio
moviemaking look liberating by comparison)? Next Sunday night, April 8th,
his series, "Twin Peaks," is having its premiere. The first episode, two
hours long, is directed by Lynch, from a script he wrote with Mark Frost
(who worked on "Hill Street Blues"), and it's miraculously good. It has both
the insidious weirdness of Lynch's best movie work and the wierd insidiousness of top-of-the-line TV trash. In form, it's a multi-character, multiplot continuing narrative: a soap opera that, like "Knot's Landing," is
named for its small-town locale. Lynch uses the conventions of the genre
with startling ease giving them a bit of a spin, of course, but never
really violating them. He heightens all the distinctive elements of soap
opera: the outre names, the cozy familiarity of the characters, and the
absurd financial intrigues, the guilty secrets, the constant spying and
eavesdropping, the earnest telephone conversations, the sudden outbursts of
emotion, and the unscrupulous arbitrariness of the plotting. Everything that
happens in "Twin Peaks" is in the normal range of TV serial drama, yet this
ordinary stuff is treated with an imaginative intensity that makes it
strange and new. It's as if Lynch didn't recognize any difference between
the highest movie art and the lowest television craft. The story is banal,
but the images grip you with as much power as anything we could see on a big
screen (and the score, by Angelo Badalamenti, is lush enough to fill any
theatre). Lynch hasn't just adapted himself to the peculiar qualities of the
medium; he actually seems to thrive on them. This all-American surrealist
takes to television like a parasite to an especially nourishing host.
In a sense, "Twin Peaks" is a smoother, less upsetting version of "Blue
Velvet." Just as the series based on Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" gently purged
the movie's four-letter words, blasphemous humor, and grisly medical detail,
this show does without the overt shocks of "Blue Velvet": the outrageous
degeneracy of the characters played by Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, the
explicit voyeurism, the unnervingly intimate violence. "Twin Peaks" does not
put a naked, bruised woman in our living rooms. The nude female body in the
first scene of the series is wrapped, discreetly, in plastic, and is dead;
it is found on a riverbank by a middle-aged fisherman. The corpse which
proves to be that of Laura Palmer, the local high school's homecoming queen
has blue lips and ratty, straggly hair. It's the deadest-looking thing
you've ever seen on television a medium that, over the years, has
repeatedly demonstrated its expertise in making human beings look lifeless.
We recognize this body as the device that will set a plot in motion: the
jarring element in a calmly beautiful Pacific Northwest landscape, the
object that will, in classic soap-opera fashion, reveal the passions
seething beneath the surface of an apparently placid community, or something
like that. But there's nothing mechanical about the way Lynch gets his story
going. He fills this expository scene with luxurious details, delicate
traces of mysteries within the mystery, hints that there may be things about
Twin Peaks which will remain elusive, unexplained: we see a lovely Oriental
woman (Joan Chen) gazing at herself in a mirror and humming; merging with
the barely audible melody is the sound of a foghorn in the distance; the
fisherman, just before he comes upon the body, mumbles, "The lonesome
foghorn blows"; the light of the mountain landscape is soft and gray; the
faint sounds accentuate the early-morning quiet; and every movement
(including the camera's) is eerily deliberate. We'll surely find out, in
some later episode, who killed Laura Palmer; but we may never learn what
song the Oriental woman hummed, or what made the fisherman voice that
ironic, self-conscious remark about a sound he must hear every morning or
why this idyllic setting fills us with such apprehension. Within five
minutes of the opening of "Twin Peaks" we know we're in David Lynch's world
unmistakable even on the small screen, shocking and beautiful even when
wrapped in a plastic shroud.
And he holds us there, right up to the final blackout. He introduces a slew
of characters, establishes their tangled relationships, shows us the
terrain, scatters clues to the murder, revs up a fleet of subplots, hints at
an appropriate number of dark secrets and obscure motivations, throws in
plenty of goofy jokes and does it all seamlessly. He varies the tone,
sometimes radically, but he never breaks the odd, hushed mood, which is as
overpowering and immutable as the neutral sky. Although terrible things
happen, or seem about to, in Twin Peaks, it has the air of an enchanted
place, a fairy-tale woodland. As ominous as it is, we don't really want to
run away from it we want to remain enveloped in this dreadful forest, to
learn how to see in the complex darkness.
Besides, the show is tremendous fun. Soon after the discovery of the body,
Lynch goes to a bizarrely funny scene in which an associate of the victim's
father is making a business presentation, trying to persuade a roomful of
visiting Norwegians to buy Twin Peaks' resort lodge; all the dumb jokes and
excruciating cliches that come out of his mouth ("Health and industry go
hand in hand") linger in the air for a few seconds while they wait for the
simultaneous translation, and the effect is hilarious. The investigating
authorities here include a deputy sheriff who always bursts into tears at
crime scenes, an young sheriff whose name is Harry S. Truman, and an F.B.I.
agent (played by Kyle McLachlan, of "Blue Velvet"), who's entirely on his
own wavelength. Agent Cooper is a glittery-eyed Boy Scout type who chatters
constantly into a microcassette recorder; he records not only important
facts about the case but also the details of that days' lunch, the qualities
he looks for in a motel all kinds of mundane trivia. He loves to know the
names of things: Douglas firs, snowshoe rabbits. His mercurial alternation
of ferocious concentration on the investigation and equally intense
absorption in pure irrelevancies makes for some wild, original comedy. It
also expresses the spirit of the whole enterprise: in "Twin Peaks" even the
tiniest things matter, and there are moments when the sheer unfamiliarity of
what we're seeing hits us in peculiar ways when a sombre, frightening
scene produces a sudden access of delight.
For all the digressions and lush atmosphere and unpredictable laughs,
though, "Twin Peaks" does a sensational job of storytelling. It has
extraordinary momentum you can't wait for the next episode. (The series
will continue on the Thursday following the premiere, with Lynch and Frost,
as executive producers, supervising the remaining episodes. Seven hour-long
installments are scheduled; the show could return in the fall as a weekly
series.) But it almost doesn't matter whether the rest of the series is any
good. Even with the narrative unfinished, these first two hours are
thoroughly satisfying. Stories just go on and on anyway, until someone says
the hell with it and stops them. There's a great freedom, if you know how to
use it, in the one-thing-after-another arbitrariness of open-ended forms
like soap opera. The early surrealists loved the nonsensical, interminable
inventiveness of pulp serials (like the books and silent movies about the
arch-criminal Fantomas). David Lynch's sensibility works the same way: he
just wants to show us one astonishing thing after another, and quit when his
time's up. Looked at as a surrealist work, the chunk of "Twin Peaks" that's
on view this coming Sunday is no more unresolved than Bunuel's "The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie," in which the characters, after a bunch of
ludicrous and dreamlike adventures, are last seen striding purposefully down
a deserted country road. They could be going anywhere; if Bunuel had turned
the movie into a TV series some sort of demented, absurdist "Route 66"
we'd find out where, but we don't really need to. Works like Bunuel's and
Lynch's derive their force even their narrative force from the swift
movement of the artist's mind, a strong current of ideas and imaginative
energy. Lynch's talent flows freely in "Twin Peaks," and carries us into
unmapped territory. It's an exhilarating ride, at once scary and
mysteriously tranquil, like the children's nighttime journey down the river
in "The Night of the Hunter." Lynch sets us drifting through a vivid dream
of American life, and wakes us, two hours later, with the message that all
dreams (and all soap operas) imply: "To Be Continued."
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