Beyond life and death

Note: This post discusses plot points from every incarnation of Twin Peaks.

A few days ago, I went back and rewatched the last scene of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I’ve never quite been able to work myself up to the belief that this movie is some kind of lost masterpiece, and I think that my true opinion of it may be closer to that of David Thomson, who called it “the worst thing [David] Lynch has done—and, I trust, the least necessary or sincere.” Set it alongside Blue Velvet, or even Mulholland Drive, and it shrivels at once into a collection of superficial notions, precious conceits, and inadvisable ideas. Yet it has also been a part of my life to an extent that puts most better films to shame. I’ve always loved the soundtrack, or, more precisely, about half of it, which I knew by heart years before I saw the movie. When I got a video store membership in college, back in the days when this actually meant picking up and returning physical videocassettes, it was literally the first tape I rented. I watched it alone in my dorm’s common room, and I got sick later that night, which may not have been the film’s fault, but has always colored my impressions of it. That was half a lifetime ago, and I haven’t watched it from start to finish in over fifteen years, but it still feels like a movie that I’ve only recently discovered. A lot of it has faded, perhaps mercifully, but I still remember pieces of it—mostly the sequences that have the least to do with the original series—as vividly as if I’d seen them only yesterday. And on a stylistic and tonal level, it’s clearly the closest precursor to the revival of Twin Peaks.

The only problem with taking Fire Walk With Me as a spiritual prequel to the third season is that final scene, which just doesn’t fit. It comes right after what must be one of the ugliest and most depressing sequences ever to conclude a movie that got a wide theatrical release. Laura Palmer is bound, tortured, and killed by her father, in excruciating detail, and it seems both gratuitous and obligatory: Leland lays out the clues—the locket, the plastic sheet—as dutifully as if he’s dressing the set for the production crew, and he reports to his superiors to be milked for all the pain and suffering that has just been endured by the audience. If the film ended there, it would be unbearable, to the point where it would be hard to go back and enjoy the series on its own terms ever again. Instead, we’re treated to a strange, unspeakably moving coda in which Laura, joined by Cooper, has a vision of an angel in the Black Lodge, set to Angelo Badalamenti’s gorgeous instrumental “The Voice of Love,” followed by a fade to white. The implication is that Laura has gone on to a better place. On some level, it’s a concession to the viewer, who has just been forced to watch one of the bleakest hours of cinema imaginable, but it also feels true to its director, half of whose movies end with a similarly hokey but heartfelt moment of transcendence. I may not entirely believe in the golden, glowing images that open and close Blue Velvet, but I think that Lynch does, and they’ve always felt closer to his deepest sensibilities than the despairing endings of Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive.

It doesn’t take long for the new season to throw it out. When we’re reunited with Laura, or her doppelgänger, she’s still in the Black Lodge, visibly aged but mouthing the same words as always, and when Cooper tells her that Laura Palmer is dead, she chillingly replies: “I am dead. Yet I live.” She removes her face like a mask, revealing a glowing void, and when we last see her, she’s sucked upward, screaming, into space. There’s no angel there, either. It’s enough to make the ending of Fire Walk With Me seem like an apocryphal footnote, discarded as soon as it was no longer useful, in the manner of a show that has always assembled itself out of its own rough drafts. (It’s worth remembering that Cooper’s first visit to the Black Lodge was originally the ending to the European cut of the film, which was repurposed as a confusing vision that looked exactly like what it really was—a deleted scene recycled as a dream sequence, complete with clumsy cuts back to Cooper tossing and turning on his pillow.) You could even argue that the scene is no longer necessary. When Fire Walk With Me first came out, it felt like the climax of a frustratingly long wait, and it’s startling to realize that it premiered at Cannes less than a year after the final episode aired. These days, viewers wait longer between the regular seasons of your average prestige drama. The series and its movie prequel were conceived as a continuous whole, but after Kyle MacLachlan declined to come back for anything but a cameo, Lynch and Mark Frost were unable to tie up any of the tangled threads that the show had left unresolved. Instead, they gave us Laura and the angel, which doubled as an emotional farewell to Twin Peaks itself.

For more than twenty years, that was the last image of the show that we’d ever have. We didn’t know what happened to the characters, but we had reason to hope that they would find peace. Now we’re being given eighteen more hours, which seem likely to provide more information about what happened next than we ever wanted, even if much of it is yet to come. Even after the third and fourth episodes, there’s a sense of the pieces being laboriously being slid into place: we’ve seen a lot of familiar faces, but they often just deliver a line and then disappear, as if they were among the wax figures on display in the Black Lodge—and the fact that several of the actors have since passed away makes their reappearances seem even more ghostly. (This isn’t to say that there haven’t been a lot of incidental pleasures. The latest episodes have been bewildering, but they also serve as a reminder of how funny Twin Peaks can be. My favorite moment so far hasn’t been Michael Cera’s Wally Brando, but the way in which Robert Forster turns away without a word at the end of the scene, as if even he realizes that there isn’t anything else to say.) Eventually, we seem destined to learn a lot more about what Shelley, Bobby, James, Audrey, and the rest have been doing, and those reunions will feel more bittersweet than they would have if a quarter of a century hadn’t elapsed. As Frost warned us, this is going to be a season about aging and death, a remarkable epilogue for a series that covered about a month of real time in its original run. But I have a hunch that its ending will be very much like the one that we’ve already seen. In the premiere, Leland whispers to Cooper: “Find Laura.” I think he will. And I suspect that we’ll see the angel again.

The voice of love

Note: I can’t wait to write about the return of Twin Peaks, which already feels like the television event of my lifetime, but I won’t be able to get to it until tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m reposting my piece on the show’s indelible score, which originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on August 10, 2016.

At some point, everyone owns a copy of The Album. The title or the artist differs from one person to another, but its impact on the listener is the same: it simply alerts you to the fact that it can be worth devoting every last corner of your inner life to music, rather than treating it as a source of background noise or diversion. It’s the first album that leaves a mark on your soul. Usually, it makes an appearance as you’re entering your teens, which means that there’s as much random chance involved as in any of the other cultural influences that dig in their claws at that age. You don’t have a lot of control over what it will be. Maybe it begins with a song on the radio, or a piece of art that catches your eye at a record store, or a stab of familiarity that comes from a passing moment of exposure. (In your early teens, you’re likely to love something just because you recognize it.) Whatever it is, unlike every other album you’ve ever heard, it doesn’t let you go. It gets into your dreams. You draw pictures of the cover and pick out a few notes from it on every piano you pass. And it shapes you in ways that you can’t fully articulate. The particular album that fills that role is different for everyone, or so it seems, although logic suggests that it’s probably the same for a lot of teenagers at any given time. In fact, I think that you can draw a clear line between those for whom the Album immersed them deeply in the culture of their era and those who wound up estranged from it. I’d be a different person—and maybe a happier one—if mine had been something like Nevermind. But it wasn’t. It was the soundtrack from Twin Peaks, followed by Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night.

If I had been born a few years earlier, this might not have been an issue, but I happened to get seriously into Twin Peaks, or at least its score, shortly after the series itself had ceased to be a cultural phenomenon. The finale had aired two full years beforehand, and it had been followed soon thereafter, with what seems today like startling speed, by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After that, it mostly disappeared. There wasn’t even a chance for me to belatedly get into the show itself. I’d watched some of it back when it initially ran, including the pilot and the horrifying episode in which the identity of Laura’s killer is finally revealed. The European cut of the premiere was later released on video, but aside from that, I had to get by with a few grainy episodes that my parents had recorded on VHS. It wasn’t until many years later that the first box set became available, allowing me to fully experience a show that I ultimately ended up loving, even if it was far more uneven—and often routine—than its reputation had led me to believe. But that didn’t really matter. Twin Peaks was just a television show, admittedly an exceptional one, but the score by Angelo Badalamenti was something else: a vision of a world that was complete in itself. I’d have trouble conveying exactly what it represents, except that it takes place in the liminal area where a gorgeous nightmare shades imperceptibly into the everyday. In Blue Velvet, which I still think is David Lynch’s greatest achievement, Jeffrey expresses it as simply as possible: “It’s a strange world.” But you can hear it more clearly in “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” which Badalamenti composed in response to Lynch’s instructions:

Start it off foreboding, like you’re in a dark wood, and then segue into something beautiful to reflect the trouble of a beautiful teenage girl. Then, once you’ve got that, go back and do something that’s sad and go back into that sad, foreboding darkness.

And it wasn’t until years later that they realized that the song had the visual structure of a pair of mountain peaks, arranged side by side. It’s a strange world indeed.

If all forms of art, as the critic Water Pater famously observed, aspire to the condition of music, then it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Twin Peaks aspired to the sublimity of its own soundtrack. Badalamenti’s score did everything that the series itself often struggled to accomplish, and there were times when I felt that the music was the primary work, with the show as a kind of visual adjunct. I still feel that way, on some level, about Fire Walk With Me: the movie played an important role in my life, but I don’t have a lot of interest in rewatching it, while I know every note of its soundtrack by heart. And even if I grant that a score is never really complete in itself, the music of Twin Peaks pointed toward an even more intriguing artifact. It included three tracks—“The Nightingale,” “Into the Night,” and “Falling”—sung by Julee Cruise, with music by Badalamenti and lyrics by Lynch, who had earlier written her haunting song “Mysteries of Love” for Blue Velvet. I loved them all, and I can still remember the moment when a close reading of the liner notes clued me into the fact that there was an entire album by Cruise, Floating Into the Night, that I could actually own. (In fact, there were two. As it happened, my brainstorm occurred only a few months after the release of The Voice of Love, a less coherent sophomore album that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.) Listening to it for the first time, I felt like the narrator of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” who once saw a fragment of an undiscovered country, and now found himself confronted with all of it at once. The next few years of my life were hugely eventful, as they are for every teenager. I read, did, and thought about a lot of things, some of which are paying off only now. But whatever else I was doing, I was probably listening to Floating Into the Night.

Last year, when I heard that the Twin Peaks soundtrack was coming out in a deluxe vinyl release, it filled me with mixed feelings. (Of course, I bought a copy, and so should you.) The plain fact is that toward the end of my teens, I put Badalamenti and Cruise away, and I haven’t listened to them much since. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t give them a lifetime’s worth of listening in the meantime. I became obsessed with Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted, the curious performance piece, directed by Lynch, in which Cruise floats on wires high above the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, not far from the neighborhood where I ended up spending most of my twenties. Much later, I saw Cruise perform, somewhat awkwardly, in person. I tracked down her collaborations and guest appearances—including the excellent “If I Survive” with Hybrid—and even bought her third album, The Art of Being a Girl, which I liked a lot. Somehow I never got around to buying the next one, though, and long before I graduated from college, Cruise and Badalamenti had all but disappeared from my personal rotation. And I regret this. I still feel that Floating Into the Night is a perfect album, although it wasn’t until years later, when I heard Cruise’s real, hilariously brassy voice in her interviews, that I realized the extent to which I’d fallen in love with an ironic simulation. There are moments when I believe, with complete seriousness, that I’d be a better person today if I’d kept listening to this music: half of my life has been spent trying to live up to the values of my early adolescence, and I might have had an easier job of integrating all of my past selves if they shared a common soundtrack. Whenever I play it now, it feels like a part of me that has been locked away, ageless and untouched, in the Black Lodge. But life has a way of coming full circle. As Laura says to Cooper: “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years. Meanwhile…” And it feels sometimes as if she were talking to me.

The voice of love

At some point, everyone owns a copy of The Album. The title or the artist might differ, but its impact on the listener is the same: it’s simply the album that alerts you to the fact that it can be worth devoting every last piece of your inner life to music, rather than treating it as a source of background noise or diversion. It’s the first album that leaves a mark on your soul. Usually, it makes an appearance as you’re entering your teens, which means that there’s as much random chance involved here as in any of the other cultural influences that dig in their claws at that age. You don’t have a lot of control over what it will be. Maybe it begins with a song on the radio, or a cover that catches your eye at a record store, or a stab of familiarity that comes from a passing moment of exposure: in your early teens, you’re likely to love something just because you recognize it. Whatever it is, unlike every other album you’ve ever heard, it doesn’t let you go. It gets into your dreams. You draw pictures of the cover art and pick out a few notes from it on every piano. And it shapes you in ways that you can’t fully articulate. The specific album is different for everyone, or so it seems, although logic suggests that it’s probably the same for a lot of teenagers at any given time. And I think you can draw a pretty clear line between those for whom The Album involved them deeply in the culture of their era, and those who wound up estranged from it. I’d be a different person—and maybe a better one—if mine had been something like Nevermind. But it wasn’t. It was the soundtrack from Twin Peaks, followed by Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night.

If I’d been born a few years earlier, this might not have been an issue, but I happened to get seriously into Twin Peaks, or at least its score, long after the series itself had peaked as a cultural phenomenon. The finale had aired two full years ago, and it had been followed shortly thereafter, with what seems today like startling speed, by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After that, it mostly disappeared. There wasn’t even a chance for me to belatedly get into the show itself. I’d watched a few episodes back when they first aired, including the pilot and the horrifying scene in which the identity of Laura’s killer is finally revealed. As far as I can remember, the premiere was later released on video, but nothing else, and I had to get by with a few grainy episodes that my parents had recorded. It wasn’t until many years later that the first box set became available, allowing me to fully experience a show that I ultimately ended up loving, but which was far more uneven—and often routine—than its reputation had led me to believe. But it didn’t really matter. Twin Peaks was just a television show, admittedly an exceptional one, but the score by Angelo Badalamenti was something else: a vision of a world that was complete and unlimited in itself. I’d have trouble expressing exactly what it represents, except that it has something to do with the places where a gorgeous nightmare impinges on the everyday. In Blue Velvet, which I still think is David Lynch’s greatest achievement, Jeffrey expresses it as simply as possible: “It’s a strange world.” But you can hear it more clearly in “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” which Badalamenti composed in response to Lynch’s instructions:

Start it off foreboding, like you’re in a dark wood, and then segue into something beautiful to reflect the trouble of a beautiful teenage girl. Then, once you’ve got that, go back and do something that’s sad and go back into that sad, foreboding darkness.

If all forms of art, as Water Pater puts it, aspire to the condition of music, then it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Twin Peaks aspired to the condition of its own soundtrack. Badalamenti’s score did everything that the series itself often struggled to accomplish, and there were times when I felt that the music was the primary work, with the show as a kind of visual adjunct. (I still feel that way, on some level, about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The movie means a lot to me, but I don’t have a lot of interest in rewatching it, while I know every note of the soundtrack by heart, even though I haven’t listened to it in years.) And even if I grant that a soundtrack is never really complete in itself, the Twin Peaks score pointed invisibly toward an even more intriguing artifact. It included three tracks—“The Nightingale,” “Into the Night,” and “Falling”—sung by Julee Cruise, with music by Badalamenti and lyrics by Lynch, who had earlier written her song “Mysteries of Love” for Blue Velvet. I loved them, obviously, and I can still remember the moment when a close reading of the liner notes clued me into the fact that there was an entire album by Cruise, Floating Into the Night, that I could actually own. (In fact, there were two. As it happened, my brainstorm occurred only a few months after the release of The Voice of Love, a much less coherent sophomore album that I wouldn’t have missed for the world.) Listening to it for the first time, I felt like the narrator of Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” who once saw a fragment of an undiscovered country, and now found himself confronted with all of it at once. The next few years of my life were hugely eventful, as they are for every teenager: I read, did, and thought about a lot of things, some of which are paying off only now. But whatever else I was doing, I was probably listening to Floating Into the Night.

So when I heard that the Twin Peaks soundtrack was coming out today in a deluxe new vinyl release, I felt mixed feelings at the news. (Of course, I’m going to buy a copy, and so should you.) The plain fact is that toward the end of my teens, I put Badalamenti and Cruise away, and I haven’t listened to them much since. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t give them a lifetime’s worth of listening in the meantime. I became obsessed with Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted, the curious performance piece by Lynch in which Cruise floats on wires high above the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Much later, I saw Cruise perform, rather awkwardly, in person. I tracked down her other collaborations and guest appearances—including the excellent “If I Survive” with Hybrid—and even bought her third album, The Art of Being a Girl, which I liked a lot. Somehow I never got around to buying the next one, though, and long before I graduated from college, Cruise and Badalamenti had ceased to play a role in my life. And I regret this. I still think that Floating Into the Night is a perfect album, although it wasn’t until years later, when I heard Cruise’s real, hilariously brassy voice, that I realized the extent to which I’d fallen in love with an ironic simulation. There are still moments when I believe, with complete seriousness, that I’d be a better person today if I’d kept listening to this music: half of my life has been spent trying to live up to the values of my early adolescence, and I might have had an easier job of integrating all of my past selves if they shared a common soundtrack. Whenever I play it now, it feels like a part of me that has been locked away, ageless and untouched, in the Black Lodge. But life has a way of coming full circle. As Laura says to Cooper: “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years.” And it feels sometimes as if she were talking to me.

Meanwhile on Twin Peaks

I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that no other piece of pop culture news could have caused me as much happiness as the announcement of a continuation of Twin Peaks. What’s more, the shape it seems to be taking—a self-contained run of nine episodes on Showtime, with each installment directed by David Lynch—feels like the perfect form the show should have assumed all along, having suffered so much from narrative exhaustion and creative distraction near the end of its run. To say I’m excited is the understatement of the year, but I’m also doing my best to calibrate my expectations. Twin Peaks, at least for me, was always more about a mood and an idea than the experience of watching the show from week to week: after the passage of so many years, I think of it less as a series of episodes than a collection of scenes and images, all scored to the music of Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. It’s easy to forget how often it could feel routine or strained. But even Fire Walk With Me provided me with moments that have become a permanent part of my inner life, and if the new series can achieve even a fraction of this, I can only be grateful.

What’s less certain is where Twin Peaks fits into the contemporary television landscape that it shaped so profoundly. In a way, the show is still ahead of its time, and nothing on network television since has looked or felt much like it. Cable, though, is a different story, and shows like Mad Men have quietly internalized and refined many of its lessons, even if few seem as willing to take them so far, or able to grasp what made the original series so special. Twin Peaks was always easy to satirize: shows from The Simpsons to Psych to Scooby-Doo have all taken a shot at parody or homage, and the series itself seemed to awkwardly plagiarize its own history in its latter half. (It has more than a little in common with the fourth season of Community, a similarly well-intentioned effort that knew the words but not the music.) With both Lynch and Mark Frost returning, I’m hopeful that we’ll see less fan service and more of an intense effort to imagine what these stories would look like today. As Frost said to the New York Times: “There was always a sense that we were slightly handcuffed by the network restrictions of the time and place. Obviously, all that will be gone. We’re really free to do and go wherever we see fit.”

Of course, freedom carries risks of its own. I’ve noted before that Blue Velvet—my favorite American movie of all time—is in many ways Lynch’s most conventional film: strip away the surrealist trappings, and you’re left with a perfectly effective thriller, with extended sequences of suspense as good as anything since Hitchcock. It’s also clear that its focus and discipline were a product of severe constraints, particularly in its contractually mandated runtime of two hours. Lynch hit the mark exactly, with an enormous assist from editor Duwayne Dunham, and there’s no question that the movie benefited from its restrictions: the recently released deleted scenes are extraordinary, but I wouldn’t want to see any of them restored. Twin Peaks was equally indebted to the limitations imposed by network television. Its procedural and whodunit elements may look increasingly perfunctory as time goes on, but they kept viewers watching, and the limits on sex and violence allowed the show’s darker elements to exist within a quirky but harmonious whole. (You only need to watch the second half of Fire Walk With Me to see how these elements play, or don’t, when the balance is disrupted.)

It’s obviously impossible to predict what a duo like Lynch and Frost will do next, or how they’ll approach the remarkable opportunity that Showtime has presented. In my dreams, though, what I’d really like to see is a season that utilizes its newfound freedom while honoring the tone that its earlier incarnation established—which was largely the product of the handcuffs that Frost seems happy to lose. What made Twin Peaks special was that it was about a place that had something in common with network television itself, a town of superficial normality and charm that concealed monstrous depths. The Lumberton of Blue Velvet isn’t far removed from The Donna Reed Show, and the Twin Peaks that existed for two short seasons had those contrasts built into its own fabric, in a time slot that forced it into a kind of continuity with the history of television before and since. Maintaining that sort of mood on a cable channel where all constraints are voluntary will require a discipline that Lynch, in particular, hasn’t always shown, however wonderful the results can be. The return of Twin Peaks is the kind of miracle, on the level of a Beatles reunion, that real life rarely affords. But if there’s one thing Lynch has taught us, it’s that the result will always be different from what we expect.

The title shot

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s question: “What’s your favorite TV intro?”

A lot of positive developments have arisen from the proliferation of great television shows on cable and streaming services, but one that I’ve found especially gratifying is the return of the opening credit sequence. I’ve noted elsewhere that opening titles are becoming a lost art for movies—to the point where sometimes we don’t even get to see the title itself—and that’s all the more true for television, where executives are terrified, perhaps rightly so, that audiences will use any excuse to change the channel. As a result, it’s hard to imagine a sitcom these days getting the iconic extended credits of Cheers or The Simpsons, the latter of which rarely even survives syndication. (Admittedly, part of the problem is that the shows themselves are also getting shorter: with multiple commercial breaks eating into narrative time, a lengthy title sequence is a luxury that most showrunners can’t afford.) And that’s a real loss. For casual viewers, credits can be an annoyance, but for fans, they amount to a short film that ushers us instantly into the world that the show inhabits. If anything, that kind of transitional moment counts for even more on a network broadcast, in which shows with radically different tones and styles are often juxtaposed side by side.

Of course, it’s possible for a clever producer to make the most of the few seconds afforded by the network. The opening titles of Community make me happy every time I see them, and it occasionally toys with the format for special episodes, like “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” which is something I’d like to see more often. Still, it’s nice when a show has the breathing room to give us something really special. On cable, there’s less pressure to make every second count, and shows from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones have taken advantage of this fact. Netflix pushes it even further, with credits that can run to close to two minutes. Orange is the New Black goes a little far—as much as I like Regina Spektor’s theme song, I generally use it as an excuse to get a beer—but House of Cards has delivered an opening title sequence that instantly ranks among the greats. In some ways, it’s almost too good: House of Cards is both the most visually beautiful television series I’ve ever seen and deeply infuriating from a narrative perspective, and I always wish that the show itself lived up to the promise of its titles. (It helps that the credits are nothing but image and sound, without any dialogue to ruin the effect.)

What really fascinates me about opening title sequences is that they’re effectively a statement of intent, a declaration in forty seconds of what the show is going to be about, and it’s often completed before the series even knows its own strengths. The X-Files evolved in striking ways over its first few seasons, but those eerie credits always remained superbly right, which made it all the more jarring when they were revised after David Duchovny’s departure. Long before its glory days, The Simpsons stated in its title sequence that this was going to be the story about an entire city, populated with hundreds of memorable characters, a vast increase in ambition from those original shorts on The Tracey Ullmann Show. And the opening of Star Trek, perhaps the most iconic of them all, evoked a sense of adventure and possibility that the episodes themselves only intermittently managed to capture. Occasionally, a show will outdo its own credits, but find itself stuck with the opening sequence it used for the pilot: I find Mad Men‘s credits a little pedestrian, although it’s too late to change them now, and I occasionally wish Breaking Bad had used something more like the wonderful fan-made extended credits that were recently posted online

For all these reasons and more, I still believe that Twin Peaks had the most effective opening titles of any television series in my lifetime. This is partially an accident of my own biography: I first saw the show when I was just old enough to start taking these things seriously, and Angelo Badalamenti’s score—especially the songs sung by Julee Cruise—was an integral part of my life for a long time. Watching them now, they seem insolently long and uneventful: a shot of a bird, a sawmill, and a long pan across running water, accompanied by a comically interminable cast list and the instrumental version of “Falling.” Yet for me, that opening sequence is Twin Peaks, and when I go back again to watch the show itself, I’m sometimes surprised at how unevenly it captures the mood of those images, which have taken up permanent residence in my dreams. That music and those languorous shots are the emblem both of the show that was and what could have been. Perhaps that’s why opening titles are so precious: in the end, the countless hours of the series that we love are distilled down to a few images, a handful of memorable lines, and a sense of something lost, but when we put on a favorite episode and see those titles once more, we fall into it all over again.

“It’s a strange world”: Blue Velvet at 25

The release of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, in a sparkling new Blu-ray, is my personal movie event of the year. In particular, the rediscovery of fifty minutes of deleted scenes feels like stumbling across a lost storehouse of images from my own dreams, like the vault door opening in Inception. I haven’t seen the new scenes yet—my copy is still in the hands of Amazon Prime—but I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a video release with so much anticipation. In its current form, Blue Velvet is as perfect and inevitable as any American film, and there are few other works of art I’ve internalized so completely. To find out that the characters were doing countless other things in the meantime, and that the footage still exists, is more exciting, at least to this viewer, than any other comparable rediscovery. Even if we found a full version of The Magnificent Ambersons tomorrow, it would have nothing on this.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, this movie and I go back a long way. I was lucky enough—if that’s the right word—to see Blue Velvet for the first time long before the appropriate age, on a videotape I snuck out of my parents’ movie collection. At that point, I was in my early teens, and while I already knew that movies were going to be a central part of my life, I still didn’t know enough to understand that I was watching something unusual. Blue Velvet hardly seemed routine—it took me several tries to get past the first forty minutes—but its strangeness felt weirdly natural: this, I thought to myself, is the kind of movie that grownups watch. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d seen a lot of other films, that I realized that one of my first big movie experiences was so far off the mean. In its innocence and cruelty, its pulp excitement and advanced artistry, Blue Velvet is like nothing before or since. And my sense of the possibilities of storytelling was permanently shaped by that first, accidental encounter.

At this point, I’ve seen Blue Velvet so many times that its strangeness has faded once more, and even its most outré moments seem familiar: when Dennis Hopper wipes that lipstick smear from Kyle MacLachlan’s face with a scrap of blue velvet, it seems as central to the history of movies as, say, Bogart and Bergman at the airport. Yet even after all this time, there are aspects of the film that remain a mystery. How serious is Lynch, anyway? When Laura Dern describes her dream of the robins, and Angelo Badalamenti’s score swells with the church organ in the background—or when, much later, Dern breaks down in her living room, her face growing red with sobs—it feels like an invitation to laughter, but I suspect that Lynch would disagree. Later, with the help of Barry Gifford, he would dabble in irony with Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, but in Blue Velvet, we’re getting Lynch in his purest form, and I don’t think he’s anything but sincere. He, too, believes that the robins will come.

But the most disorienting experience of all, if you’ve ever managed to forget this movie’s astonishing ambiguity, to watch it with an audience. I’ve seen it on the big screen maybe three or four times, and without fail, I’m unnerved by the laughter around me. This isn’t a moral reaction, but an aesthetic one: I want to be immersed in the dream, and part of that immersion involves taking Lynch’s emotional beats at face value. Even at the time of its first release, Gerald L’Ecuyer of Interview noted: “The amazing thing about watching the film is that some people in the audience are laughing while others are telling them to be quiet because they think it’s all deadly serious.” And that hasn’t changed. After my most recent viewing, at a midnight show at the glorious Landmark Sunshine in New York, I overheard a testy exchange between two audience members, one of whom had been laughing throughout the entire movie. When the other viewer implied that the laughter had seemed a little disrespectful, the first replied, with apparent sincerity, “But it’s my favorite movie of all time.”

Me and David Lynch

Yesterday was the 65th birthday of David Lynch, a director and artist whose influence on my own life is hard to exaggerate. There was a time, growing up, when I wanted to be David Lynch. And while my own writing has taken me in a markedly different direction, I sometimes regret the fact that I haven’t tried harder to live up to Lynch’s standards. He’s as singular an artist as they come, but his career still stands as as a challenge and inspiration for those of us who insist, despite his example, on moving in less peculiar circles.

The film at the center of Lynch’s work, and of my own imagination, is Blue Velvet, which I think is simply the greatest of all American movies—”as American as Casablanca,” as David Thomson says. I could write an essay or more on any aspect of Blue Velvet’s production—the performances, the cinematography, the sound, the incredible score by Angelo Badalamenti—but for the moment, I’m going to focus on just one element: the story. Because, strange to say, as far out as Blue Velvet is in other respects, on a narrative level, it’s Lynch’s most conventional movie, which has a great deal to do with its success.

Strip away the hallucinatory flourishes, and Blue Velvet is basically a thriller, the most ravishing of Technicolor noirs. It’s really the only film in which Lynch has displayed any interest in the actual creation of suspense—rather than in its forms alone—and you can sense his innocent delight in playing the audience like a piano. (The two major scenes in Dorothy Valens’s apartment, the first near the beginning, the second at the end, are still the most dazzling sequences of their kind I’ve ever seen.) And the fact that Lynch’s ultimate dreamscape is built on a solid foundation of genre is a lesson to artists everywhere. The result is a film that evokes every emotion that we can feel at the movies: amusement, excitement, dread, horror, sentimentality, and, finally, a kind of transcendent joy.

That same range of emotion is also the hallmark of Lynch’s second great achievement: Twin Peaks. When the show premiered on April 8, 1990, I wasn’t even ten years old, but, thanks mostly to my parents, I watched it anyway. Ever since, it has occupied a curiously prominent place in my subconscious. And the strangest thing is that my conception of the show encompasses the pilot, the finale, perhaps five or six other episodes, and the soundtrack, especially the songs sung by Julee Cruise. The rest I can take or leave. But what remains is a kind of invisible force that has left me looking forever for strangeness in small towns and poetry in a cup of coffee. In Twin Peaks, as in all of Lynch’s best work, beauty, humor, and horror live side by side, and they’re often all aspects of the same thing.

This conviction, which sometimes comes off as mysterious even to Lynch himself, is what sets him apart from all other American directors. On a superficial level, the style of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet is staggeringly easy to imitate, or parody, and Lynch has certainly had his share of followers. Few, if any, have managed to share his fundamental certainty that the strangeness and romance of life are inseparable. If his movies are weird, that’s because their urgent sense of beauty can be expressed in no other way. That’s why his example is so humbling, especially for a writer, like me, who finds it hard to move beyond reason, while Lynch, the great naif and Eagle Scout, is off reinventing movies.

Judging from his most recent work, or the lack thereof, David Lynch is no longer especially interested in being a movie director in any conventional sense. Which is wonderful for him, but it’s also our loss, and a permanent one. For an eyeblink, Lynch was at the center of our culture—on October 1, 1990, he was on the cover of Time magazine. Compared to that, how can the last twenty years feel like anything but a retreat?