Media
McConnell, Frank
OUR TOWN LYNCH'S 'TWIN PEAKS' For years now readers of Graham Greene have been referring to the fascinating, seedy, morally ambiguous landscape of his novels as "Greeneland." Now, with the advent...
...He is vain, penny-pinching, and even silly: he talks constantly into his pocket recorder to his secretary, "Diane," and he obsesses about the cherry pie he had on his drive to Twin Peaks...
...Because shock-in the sense I have described that state as Lynch's special province-has, for inhabitants of the late American twentieth century, become a more or less permanent survival mechanism...
...The plot-involving teen bullies, bikers, drug traffic, adulteries right and left, crazed psychiatrists, and-I'm serious here-potential Norwegian investors in Twin Peaks property-is as byzantine and convoluted as any of the great films noirs of the 1940s, or as those of the literary father of the film noir, Raymond Chandler...
...And how...
...The uncanny-JFK's assassination, chemical weapons in Iraq-does come into your den as you eat your cherry pie, and you do swallow both those things at once...
...But it certainly is one of the most stunningly intelligent productions in long memory: a validation of Lynch's enormous talent and a validation of how very good TV-and I mean real TV, not PBS rehashings of Arthur Miller plays-can be...
...He is also brilliant: he almost instantly connects Laura's murder to a similar murder that had occurred a year ago in another part of the state, and he enlarges a videotape of Laura's eyes to see in their reflection the motorbike of her secret boyfriend...
...A severed human ear is discovered in the grass in an ordinary town on an ordinary afternoon {Blue Velvet...
...Of course...
...It is a world remarkably, almost boringly like our own-same people, same machinery, same constant background noise (the "Lynch noise," to aficionados)-except that it is open to the possibility of the monstrous...
...And how do Lynchburg people react to these eruptions of the unnamable into the quotidian...
...Lynch will have none of this: he is the lyric poet of shock-in the clinical sense of our numbness in the face of the uncanny, and especially the uncanny inside us...
...Inside rumors are that, by the end of the series, we still will not know who killed Laura Palmer...
...Because 'Twin Peaks," in the splendid tradition of the American detective film, insists that guilt is everywhere and nowhere at once, and that the role of the investigator-Agent Cooper, in this case-is to discover and to act out for us what Kafka wrote in hope and despair: that "Guilt is never to be doubted...
...though every time I rescreen my tapes I am convinced it is...
...It is a great series about TV: not just a rebirth of film noir but also "Dallas" or "Falcon Crest" as they might have been written by Faulkner, Chandler, or Jim Thompson...
...In one brilliant scene in the first episode, Cooper and Truman walk into a room in a bank to examine Laura's safety-deposit box...
...It's amusing that Lynch's first film, Eraserhead, was reviewed and for a while classed as a horror film...
...It's as simple as that...
...It makes no difference, and, in fact, I for one hope we don't...
...It is the bravest glance I know into the moral vacuity of our public life and into the dead panic we feel in the face of that vacuity...
...FRANK McCONNELL FRANK McCONNELL...
...Twin Peaks" is not just a great TV series...
...Now, with the advent of "Twin Peaks"-the David Lynch miniseries for ABC-I think we can start referring with equal admiration to the visionary realm of "Lynchburg...
...It's not just that "Twin Peaks" is a marvelous TV event because it's done by a "serious," "film" director...
...You go to the movie theater...
...But the gamble has already paid off, at least if anybody at ABC cares about a place in history...
...Lynchburg" as incarnated in "Twin Peaks" shares the same ambiance as Lynch's films, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, and Blue Velvet...
...He is, in other words, a kind of holy fool...
...Agent Cooper-played with what can only be called genius by Kyle MacLachlan-is almost painfully one of us, and maybe one of the truly original inventions in the history of the detective story...
...And-wonder of wonders-you go on with your life...
...Horror" distances the other, tells us that it can be exorcised...
...In "Twin Peaks," the northern town that gives its name to the series, Laura Palmer, the most beloved girl in her senior high school class, is found naked, raped, and murdered, on the beach of the local lake...
...But there's more...
...To say that would be to reaffirm the embedded cultural prejudice of this decade, that "film" is serious art and TV is garbage art...
...Lynchburg, in other words, is nearly everywhere...
...A baby is born out of wedlock and looks like a cross between an early fetus and a salamander {Eraserhead...
...In the 1990s, it's Our Town...
...This is a world in which everything is connected, from accidents to conspiracies, and therefore a world to which the only appropriate response is the stoic glance that neither believes nor disbelieves, but simply takes things, from corpses to cherry pie, as they are...
...The way you and I react to the monstrous that does, in fact, intrude upon our lives every day: with wonder, fear, and, above all, our indomitable habit of behaving "normally" even when the world around us-a world, say, where mass killers get gigs on TV talk shows-has gone to hell...
...ABC has taken what network folks call a "gamble" on the series...
...No one says anything else about the deer's head as the scene unfolds...
...TV comes to you...
...Twin Peaks" may not be the very best thing ever done on TV...
...Oh," says the bank lady as they stare at it...
...The sheriff-whose name is Harry S. Truman-discovers that the rape/murder was committed across the state line, so an F.B.I, special investigator, Dale Cooper, is also summoned to the scene...
...It fell off the wall...
...And that-no kidding-is as much of the story as I can tell you, without using flow-charts or enough words to fill a short story (and note that I'm writing this not yet midway through the series...
...A deer's head is lying on the conference table...
...In fact, "Twin Peaks" is better than Lynch's theatrical releases, great though they are, and it is better, I think, because TV is itself the perfect medium for the special kind of shock, the precise moral shiver, that is his predestined subject...
...It was otherwise thirty years ago: film had the garbage detail then, according to the critics...
...And this holy fool's investigation of the murder-murders?-at Twin Peaks, simultaneously canny and naive, is the real story of the series just as, say, Philip Marlowe's investigation of the originating crime is the real story of any of Chandler's novels...
...And then again, he can go into ecstasy over a cup of good coffee or over being told that the rabbit he has seen is a snowshoe rabbit...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 10
