Incest for the millions:
Goldstein, Warren
REPORT FROM 'TWIN PEAKS' INCEST FOR THE MILLIONS SAYING NO TO DAVID LYNCH A couple of Saturday nights ago, as Leland Palmer (and his savage alter ego "Bob") were beating his (their?) niece to...
...Maybe so...
...Leland and his beast-like twin, the deranged long-haired mystery man, were twirling in a deadly dance with the dark-haired stand-in for Leland's murdered daughter...
...I think he's getting away with murder...
...WARREN GOLDSTEIN...
...No doubt Lynch will figure out how to put a tragic-flaw kind of moral in the story: that Leland's rape of his daughter (like Macbeth's guilty ambition) led to all the rest...
...I was seduced...
...The point for "Twin Peaks" (get it...
...I'm not about to claim the squeaky-clean virtue of ex-smokers or the recently converted...
...Audrey lusts for Agent Cooper, who can barely resist her, and in a scene which lasted quite a long time, nearly slept with her own father at the brothel...
...If taboo sex and violence with classy background music add up to a vision, I'll pass...
...Why else have Donna tell a dreamy story about her and Laura skinny-dipping and partying with college boys when they were thirteen and fourteen...
...James and Donna are sleeping with Laura through each other, while James nearly has a fling with Laura's look-alike cousin...
...Even this discovery is just part of the story...
...But I bet it's something a lot crasser...
...we'd be gradually seduced, in the way that a diabolical wife might addict her husband to a drug by doctoring his food over a period of months...
...The patterns here are all incest: brother-sister, father-daughter, and mostly the latter...
...Laura was sleeping with (at least) Ben Home, Dr...
...It was like nothing I'd ever seen on TV before, and if Leo Johnson's wife-beating seemed a little overdone, if Donna Hayward seemed a little too good to be true, well, then, the ensemble, the gestalt, the Lynchian vision, at least, seemed to work, to shake me up, to create unpredictable postmodern atmospherics in the place of one-liners and laughtracks...
...This isn't offbeat-the gori-ness quotient is out of control...
...That we all carry the marks of Oedipal struggle in our psyches...
...That all sex is incest...
...That way we wouldn't notice all at once...
...The genuine discomfort you feel is perfectly justified...
...Once you start this process, what you used to be able to chalk up to quirky weirdness looks much more malevolent...
...They're both high-school girls with the bodies of Playmates...
...niece to death, I turned off the television and said goodbye to "Twin Peaks" and David Lynch...
...1 can hardly believe I'm writing this stuff down...
...He's still pandering...
...The poles of sexuality in last season's episodes were good girl Donna and bad girl Audrey...
...If that was gratuitous what shall we call the week-by-week layering of details reconstructing Laura's murder: the number of men she slept with that night, the nature of her injuries, the kinds of drugs she'd consumed, how she'd been tied up, how she'd been pecked by the Myna bird named Waldo...
...The camera stayed close through this bloody and terrifying pas de deux, delighting in its ability to show both men...
...It's as though Lynch tried to think of a series of cruelties that would boggle any imagination and add them on, week by week...
...underneath all the fancy music it's fairly simple: forbidden sex sells...
...Nadine has survived her suicide attempt thinking she's sixteen while her husband is forty-ish...
...That scene, remarkable for its prolonged, calculated, almost loving gruesomeness, was the final straw...
...David Lynch will not be surprised that I cannot stop thinking about that final scene, which I turned off just as I guessed Leland/Bob was about to shove a small letter deep under Maddy's bloody fingernail...
...Jacoby, Leo Johnson, James, Bobby, and the patrons of One-Eyed Jacks...
...And it was sexy...
...Or how did you like the detail as Audrey, bound and helpless at the brothel, was frequently injected with drugs...
...The figure alternated between kissing the girl (as Leland) and screaming incoherently and making as if to bite her throat (as "Bob...
...There was bad sex and good sex, but sex was everywhere: from the discovery of Laura Palmer's naked body to Audrey's slinky come-ons to Flesh magazine to nearly everyone's secret love affairs...
...And now it's the morning after and I'm ashamed...
...But it's taken too long, and he likes the story too much...
...Jacoby's earplugs...
...What's Lynch saying...
...I mean, I thought the camera used to stay just a little too close to Leo as he beat Shelley with a bar of soap in a sock...
...Since last spring "Twin Peaks" has had me edgy and a little defensive, titillated and a little guilty-but completely in its spell...
...I know I wasn't alone...
...fans is that Leland killed his own daughter-that's who killed Laura Palmer...
...But what about now, as Leo vegetates in the wheelchair, drooling and flopping...
...Lynch had seduced me into his forbidden world...
...I suppose I knew it, didn't want to think about it...
...I loved the music and the atmosphere, the lurking danger that kept me from relaxing, Agent Cooper's wacky combination of steel-trap rationality and Tibetan intuition, Nadine's eyepatch, and Dr...
...For the real secret to "Twin Peaks" and Laura's murder, the real message of that scene, is incest: father-daughter incest...
Vol. 117 • December 1990 • No. 22
