Out of the past

You shouldn’t have been that sentimental.

—Vertigo

About halfway through the beautiful, devastating finale of Twin Peaks—which I’ll be discussing here in detail—I began to reflect on what the figure of Dale Cooper really means. When we encounter him for the first time in the pilot, with his black suit, fastidious habits, and clipped diction, he’s the embodiment of what we’ve been taught to expect of a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI occupies a role in movies and television far out of proportion to its actual powers and jurisdiction, in part because it seems to exist on a level intriguingly beyond that of ordinary law enforcement, and it’s often been used to symbolize the sinister, the remote, or the impersonal. Yet when Cooper reveals himself to be a man of real empathy, quirkiness, and faith in the extraordinary, it comes almost as a relief. We want to believe that a person like this exists. Cooper carries a badge, he wears a tie, and he’s comfortable with a gun, but he’s here to enforce human reason in the face of a bewildering universe. The Black Lodge might be out there, but the Blue Rose task force is on it, and there’s something oddly consoling about the notion that it’s a part of the federal government. A few years later, Chris Carter took this premise and refined it into The X-Files, which, despite its paranoia, reassured us that somebody in a position of authority had noticed the weirdness in the world and was trying to make sense of it. They might rarely succeed, but it was comforting to think that their efforts had been institutionalized, complete with a basement office, a place in the org chart, and a budget. And for a lot of viewers, Mulder and Scully, like Cooper, came to symbolize law and order in stories that laugh at our attempts to impose it.

Even if you don’t believe in the paranormal, the image of the lone FBI agent—or two of them—arriving in a small town to solve a supernatural mystery is enormously seductive. It appeals to our hopes that someone in power cares enough about us to investigate problems that can’t be rationally addressed, which all stand, in one way or another, for the mystery of death. This may be why both Twin Peaks and The X-Files, despite their flaws, have sustained so much enthusiasm among fans. (No other television dramas have ever meant more to me.) But it’s also a myth. This isn’t really how the world works, and the second half of the Twin Peaks finale is devoted to tearing down, with remarkable cruelty and control, the very idea of such solutions. It can only do this by initially giving us what we think we want, and the first of last night’s two episodes misleads us with a satisfying dose of wish fulfillment. Not only is Cooper back, but he’s in complete command of the situation, and he seems to know exactly what to do at every given moment. He somehow knows all about Freddie and his magical green glove, which he utilizes to finally send Bob into oblivion. After rescuing Diane, he uses his room key from the Great Northern, like a magical item in a video game, to unlock the door that leads him to Mike and the disembodied Phillip Jeffries. He goes back in time, enters the events of Fire Walk With Me, and saves Laura on the night of her murder. The next day, Pete Martell simply goes fishing. Viewers at home even get the appearance by Julee Cruise that I’ve been awaiting since the premiere. After the credits ran, I told my wife that if it had ended there, I would have been totally satisfied.

But that was exactly what I was supposed to think, and even during the first half, there are signs of trouble. When Cooper first sees the eyeless Naido, who is later revealed to be the real Diane, his face freezes in a huge closeup that is superimposed for several minutes over the ensuing action. It’s a striking device that has the effect of putting us, for the first time, in Cooper’s head, rather than watching him with bemusement from the outside. We identify with him, and at the very end, when his efforts seemingly come to nothing, despite the fact that he did everything right, it’s more than heartbreaking—it’s like an existential crisis. It’s the side of the show that was embodied by Sheryl Lee’s performance as Laura Palmer, whose tragic life and horrifying death, when seen in its full dimension, put the lie to all the cozy, comforting stories that the series told us about the town of Twin Peaks. Nothing good could ever come out of a world in which Laura died in the way that she did, which was the message that Fire Walk With Me delivered so insistently. And seeing Laura share the screen at length with Cooper presents us with both halves of the show’s identity within a single frame. (It also gives us a second entry, after Blue Velvet, in the short list of great scenes in which Kyle MacLachlan enters a room to find a man sitting down with his brains blown out.) For a while, as Cooper drives Laura to the appointment with her mother, it seems almost possible that the series could pull off one last, unfathomable trick. Even if it means erasing the show’s entire timeline, it would be worth it to save Laura. Or so we think. In the end, they return to a Twin Peaks that neither of them recognize, in which the events of the series presumably never took place, and Cooper’s only reward is Laura’s scream of agony.

As I tossed and turned last night, thinking about Cooper’s final, shattering moment of comprehension, a line of dialogue from another movie drifted into my head: “It’s too late. There’s no bringing her back.” It’s from Vertigo, of course, which is a movie that David Lynch and Mark Frost have been quietly urging us to revisit all along. (Madeline Ferguson, Laura’s identical cousin, who was played by Lee, is named after the film’s two main characters, and both works of art pivot on a necklace and a dream sequence.) Along with so much else, Vertigo is about the futility of trying to recapture or change the past, and its ending, which might be the most unforgettable of any film I’ve ever seen, destroys Scotty’s delusions, which embody the assumptions of so many American movies: “One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be rid of the past forever.” I think that Lynch and Frost are consciously harking back to Vertigo here—in the framing of the doomed couple on their long drive, as well as in Cooper’s insistence that Laura revisit the scene of the crime—and it doesn’t end well in either case. The difference is that Vertigo prepares us for it over the course of two hours, while Twin Peaks had more than a quarter of a century. Both works offer a conclusion that feels simultaneously like a profound statement of our helplessness in the face of an unfair universe and like the punchline to a shaggy dog story, and perhaps that’s the only way to express it. I’ve quoted Frost’s statement on this revival more than once: “It’s an exercise in engaging with one of the most powerful themes in all of art, which is the ruthless passage of time…We’re all trapped in time and we’re all going to die. We’re all traveling along this conveyor belt that is relentlessly moving us toward this very certain outcome.” Thirty seconds before the end, I didn’t know what he meant. But I sure do now. And I know at last why this show’s theme is called “Falling.”

The number nine

Note: This post reveals plot details from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

One of the central insights of my life as a reader is that certain kinds of narrative are infinitely expansible or contractible. I first started thinking about this in college, when I was struggling to read Homer in Greek. Oral poetry, I discovered, wasn’t memorized, but composed on the fly, aided by the poet’s repertoire of stock lines, formulas, and images that happened to fit the meter. This meant that the overall length of the composition was highly variable. A scene that takes up just a few lines in the Iliad that survives could be expanded into an entire night’s recital, based on what the audience wanted to hear. (For instance, the characters of Crethon and Orsilochus, who appear for only twenty lines in the existing version before being killed by Aeneas, might have been the stars of the evening if the poet happened to be working in Pherae.) That kind of flexibility originated as a practical consequence of the oral form, but it came to affect the aesthetics of the poem itself, which could grow or shrink to accommodate anything that the poet wanted to talk about. Homer uses his metaphors to introduce miniature narratives of human life that don’t otherwise fit into a poem of war, and some amount to self-contained short stories in themselves. Proust operates in much the same way. One observation leads naturally to another, and an emotion or analogy evoked in passing can unfold like a paper flower into three dense pages of reflections. In theory, any novel could be expanded like this, like a hypertext that opens into increasingly deeper levels. In Search of Lost Time happens to be the one book in existence in which all of these flowerings have been preserved, with a plot could fit into a novella of two hundred unhurried pages.

Something similar appears to have happened with the current season of Twin Peaks, and when you start to think of it in those terms, its structure, which otherwise seems almost perversely shapeless, begins to make more sense. In the initial announcement by Showtime, the revival was said to consist of nine episodes, and Mark Frost even said to Buzzfeed:

If you think back about the first season, if you put the pilot together with the seven that we did, you get nine hours. It just felt like the right number. I’ve always felt the story should take as long as the story takes to tell. That’s what felt right to us.

It was doubled to eighteen after a curious interlude in which David Lynch dropped out of the project, citing budget constraints: “I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done.” He came back, of course, and shortly thereafter, it was revealed that the length of the season had increased. Yet there was never any indication that either Lynch or Frost had done any additional writing. My personal hunch is that they always had nine episodes of material, and this never changed. What happened is that the second act of the show expanded in the fashion that I’ve described above, creating a long central section that was free to explore countless byways without much concern for the plot. The beginning, and presumably the end, remained more or less as conceived—it was the middle that grew. And a quick look at the structure of the season so far seems to confirm this. The first three episodes, which take Cooper from inside the Black Lodge to slightly before his meeting with his new family in Las Vegas, seemed weird at the time, but now they look positively conventional in terms of how much story they covered. They were followed by three episodes, the Dougie Jones arc, that were expanded beyond recognition. And now that we’ve reached the final three, which account for the third act of the original outline, it makes sense for Cooper to return at last.

If the season had consisted of just those nine episodes, I suspect that more viewers would have been able to get behind it. Even if the second act had doubled in length—giving us a total of twelve installments, of which three would have been devoted to detours and loose ends—I doubt that most fans would have minded. It’s expanding that middle section to four times its size, without any explanation, that lost a lot of people. But it’s clearly the only way that Lynch would have returned. For most of the last decade, Lynch has been contentedly pottering around with odd personal projects, concentrating on painting, music, digital video, and other media that don’t require him to be answerable to anyone but himself. The Twin Peaks revival, after the revised terms had been negotiated with Showtime, allowed him to do this with a larger budget and for a vastly greater audience. Much of this season has felt like Lynch’s private sketchbook or paintbox, allowing him to indulge himself within each episode as long as the invisible scaffolding of the original nine scripts remained. The fact that so much of the strangeness of this season has been visual and nonverbal points to Lynch, rather than Frost, as the driving force on this end. And at its best, it represents something like a reinvention of television, which is the most expandable or compressible medium we have, but which has rarely utilized this quality to its full extent. (There’s an opening here, obviously, for a fan edit that condenses the season down to nine episodes, leaving the first and last three intact while shrinking the middle twelve. It would be an interesting experiment, although I’m not sure I’d want to watch it.)

Of course, this kind of aggressive attack on the structure of the narrative doesn’t come without a cost. In the case of Twin Peaks, the primary casualty has been the Dougie Jones storyline, which has been criticized for three related reasons. The first, and most understandable, is that we’re naturally impatient to get the old Cooper back. Another is that this material was never meant to go on for this long, and it starts to feel a little thin when spread over twelve episodes. And the third is that it prevents Kyle MacLachlan, the ostensible star of the show, from doing what he does best. This last criticism feels like the most valid. MacLachlan has played an enormous role in my life as a moviegoer and television viewer, but he operates within a very narrow range, with what I might inadequately describe as a combination of rectitude, earnestness, and barely concealed eccentricity. (In other words, it’s all but indistinguishable from the public persona of David Lynch himself.) It’s what made his work as Jeffrey in Blue Velvet so moving, and a huge part of the appeal of Twin Peaks lay in placing this character at the center of what looked like a procedural. MacLachlan can also convey innocence and darkness, but by bringing these two traits to the forefront, and separating them completely in Dougie and Dark Cooper, it robs us of the amalgam that makes MacLachlan interesting in the first place. Like many stars, he’s chafed under the constraints of his image, and perhaps he even welcomed the challenges that this season presented—although he may not have known how his performance would look when extended past its original dimensions and cut together with the rest. When Cooper returned last night, it reminded me of how much I’ve missed him. And the fact that we’ll get him for two more episodes, along with everything else that this season has offered us, feels more than ever like a gift.

The conveyor belt

For all the endless discussion of various aspects of Twin Peaks, one quality that sometimes feels neglected is the incongruous fact that it had one of the most attractive casts in television history. In that respect—and maybe in that one alone—it was like just about every other series that ever existed. From prestige dramas to reality shows to local newscasts, the story of television has inescapably been that of beautiful men and women on camera. A show like The Hills, which was one of my guilty pleasures, seemed to be consciously trying to see how long it could coast on surface beauty alone, and nearly every series, ambitious or otherwise, has used the attractiveness of its actors as a commercial or artistic strategy. (In one of the commentary tracks on The Simpsons, a producer describes how a network executive might ask indirectly about the looks of the cast of a sitcom: “So how are we doing aesthetically?”) If this seemed even more pronounced on Twin Peaks, it was partially because, like Mad Men, it took its conventionally glamorous actors into dark, unpredictable places, and also because David Lynch had an eye for a certain kind of beauty, both male and female, that was more distinctive than that of the usual soap opera star. He’s continued this trend in the third season, which has been populated so far by such striking presences as Chrysta Bell, Ben Rosenfield, and Madeline Zima, and last night’s episode features an extended, very funny scene between a delighted Gordon Cole and a character played by Bérénice Marlohe, who, with her red lipstick and “très chic” spike heels, might be the platonic ideal of his type.

Lynch isn’t the first director to display a preference for actors, particularly women, with a very specific look—although he’s thankfully never taken it as far as his precursor Alfred Hitchcock did. And the notion that a film or television series can consist of little more than following around two beautiful people with a camera has a long and honorable history. My two favorite movies of my lifetime, Blue Velvet and Chungking Express, both understand this implicitly. It’s fair to say that the second half of the latter film would be far less watchable if it didn’t involve Tony Leung and Faye Wong, two of the most attractive people in the world, and Wong Kar-Wai, like so many filmmakers before him, uses it as a psychological hook to take us into strange, funny, romantic places. Blue Velvet is a much darker work, but it employs a similar lure, with the actors made up to look like illustrations of themselves. In a Time cover story on Lynch from the early nineties, Richard Corliss writes of Kyle MacLachlan’s face: “It is a startling visage, as pure of line as an art deco vase, with soft, all-American features and a comic-book hero’s jutting chin—you could park a Packard on it.” It echoes what Pauline Kael says of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet: “She even has the kind of nostrils that cover artists can represent accurately with two dots.” MacLachlan’s chin and Rossellini’s nose would have caught our attention in any case, but it’s also a matter of lighting and makeup, and Lynch shoots them to emphasize their roots in the pulp tradition, or, more accurately, in the subconscious store of images that we take from those sources. And the casting gets him halfway there.

This leaves us in a peculiar position when it comes to the third season of Twin Peaks, which, both by nature and by design, is about aging. Mark Frost said in an interview: “It’s an exercise in engaging with one of the most powerful themes in all of art, which is the ruthless passage of time…We’re all trapped in time and we’re all going to die. We’re all traveling along this conveyor belt that is relentlessly moving us toward this very certain outcome.” One of the first, unforgettable images from the show’s promotional materials was Kyle MacLachlan’s face, a quarter of a century older, emerging from the darkness into light, and our feelings toward these characters when they were younger inevitably shape the way we regard them now. I felt this strongly in two contrasting scenes from last night’s episode. It offers us our first extended look at Sarah Palmer, played by Grace Zabriskie, who delivers a freakout in a grocery store that reminds us of how much we’ve missed and needed her—it’s one of the most electrifying moments of the season. And we also finally see Audrey Horne again, in a brutally frustrating sequence that feels to me like the first time that the show’s alienating style comes off as a miscalculation, rather than as a considered choice. Audrey isn’t just in a bad place, which we might have expected, but a sad, unpleasant one, with a sham marriage and a monster of a son, and she doesn’t even know the worst of it yet. It would be a hard scene to watch with anyone, but it’s particularly painful when we set it against our first glimpse of Audrey in the original series, when we might have said, along with the Norwegian businessman at the Great Northern Hotel: “Excuse me, is there something wrong, young pretty girl?”

Yet the two scenes aren’t all that dissimilar. Both Sarah and Audrey are deeply damaged characters who could fairly say: “Things can happen. Something happened to me.” And I can only explain away the difference by confessing that I was a little in love in my early teens with Audrey. Using those feelings against us—much as the show resists giving us Dale Cooper again, even as it extravagantly develops everything around him—must have been what Lynch and Frost had in mind. And it isn’t the first time that this series has toyed with our emotions about beauty and death. The original dream girl of Twin Peaks, after all, was Laura Palmer herself, as captured in two of its most indelible images: Laura’s prom photo, and her body wrapped in plastic. (Sheryl Lee, like January Jones in Mad Men, was originally cast for her look, and only later did anyone try to find out whether or not she could act.) The contrast between Laura’s lovely features and her horrifying fate, in death and in the afterlife, was practically the motor on which the show ran. Her face still opens every episode of the revival, dimly visible in the title sequence, but it also ended each installment of the original run, gazing out from behind the prison bars of the closing credits to the strains of “Laura Palmer’s Theme.” In the new season, the episodes generally conclude with whatever dream pop band Lynch feels like showcasing, usually with a few cool women, and I wouldn’t want to give that up. But I also wonder whether we’re missing something when we take away Laura at the end. This season began with Cooper being asked to find her, but she often seems like the last thing on anyone’s mind. Twin Peaks never allowed us to forget her before, because it left us staring at her photograph each week, which was the only time that one of its beautiful faces seemed to be looking back at us.

The secret museum

A while back, I published a novel titled The Icon Thief. It was inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic installation Étant Donnés, which Jasper Johns once called “the strangest work of art in any museum.” From the moment I first saw it, I knew that it was destined to form the basis of a conspiracy thriller, and since someone clearly had to do it eventually, I figured that it might as well be me. (As Lin-Manuel Miranda said to Grantland: “What’s the thing that’s not in the world that should be in the world?”) Here’s how two characters in the book describe it:

“I went to see the installation last year,” Tanya said. “It’s in its own room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When you go inside, you see an antique wooden door set into a brick archway. At first, it looks like there’s nothing else there. But if you go closer to the door, you see light coming through a pair of eyeholes. And if you look inside—”

“—you see a headless woman on a bed of dry grass,” Maddy said. “She’s nude, and her face is missing or obscured. In one hand, she’s holding a lamp. There’s a forest with a moving waterfall in the background. Duchamp built the figure himself and covered it in calfskin. The illusion is perfect.”

And while I’ve noted the affinities between David Lynch and Duchamp before, last night’s episode of Twin Peaks, which featured the discovery of a headless body in a field—with one hand raised in a familiar pose—is the clearest indication that I’ve seen so far of an ongoing conversation between these two remarkable artists.

I’m not the first one to propose that Lynch was influenced by Étant Donnés, a connection that the director recently seemed to confirm himself. Five years ago, Lynch produced a lithograph titled E.D., pictured above, which depicts a mirror image of the body from the installation, partially concealed by what looks a lot to me like a velvet curtain. In his spectacularly useful monograph on the piece, the scholar Michael R. Taylor writes:

American filmmaker David Lynch…attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1966 and 1967 and had a solo exhibition in 1969 at the Paley Library Gallery in Philadelphia, a time period that coincided with the public unveiling of Duchamp’s final work. Lynch’s interest in erotic tension and forbidden pleasure are particularly evident in the unsettling yet spellbindingly beautiful film Blue Velvet. In one particularly disturbing scene, the teenage character played by Kyle MacLachlan peers from behind the slats of a wardrobe door to witness a violent sexual encounter between a psychotic criminal (Dennis Hopper) and his female victim (Isabella Rossellini), apparently referencing earlier readings of Étant Donnés as a voyeuristic scene of sadistic violence.

In reality, Blue Velvet seems like less an intentional homage than a case of aesthetic convergence. Lynch has spoken of how the story came out of his youthful fantasies: “I had always wanted to sneak into a girl’s room to watch her into the night, and…maybe, at one point or another, I would see something that would be the clue to a murder mystery.” This is very close to the experience of seeing Étant Donnés itself, although, according to one source, “Lynch states to this day that he has not actually seen the piece in person.” And while I don’t think that he has any reason to lie, I also don’t see any particular reason to believe him.

In short, I was wrong when I wrote two weeks ago: “This might represent the only time in which my love of Twin Peaks will overlap with my professional interests.” And for those who are inclined to dig deeper, there are plenty of parallels between Lynch and Duchamp, aside from their obvious interest in voyeurism and the exposed female body. There’s the waterfall in the background, for one thing, and the fact that no photos of the interior were allowed to be published for fifteen years after it was unveiled—which reminds me a little of Laura telling Cooper that she’ll see him again in twenty-five years. But they also form a line of succession. Temperamentally, the two men couldn’t seem more different: Duchamp may have been “the most intelligent man of the twentieth century,” as Guillaume Apollinaire famously said, but his career came down to a series of chilly, not particularly funny jokes that can be appreciated solely on an intellectual level, not an emotional or visceral one. In other words, he’s very French. By comparison, Lynch is quintessentially American, and even his weirdest visual byways come from a place of real feeling. He’s not as penetrating or rigorous as Duchamp, but far more accessible and likable. On a more fundamental level, though, they can start to seem like brothers. Duchamp spent two decades building Étant Donnés in secret, and there’s something appealingly homemade about the result, with its trompe l’oeil effects cobbled together out of bits of wire and a biscuit tin. Lynch has always been the same sort of tinkerer, and he’s happiest while working on some oddball project at home, which makes it all the more amazing that he’s been entrusted on a regular basis with such huge projects. When you try to imagine Duchamp tackling Dune, you get a sense of how unlikely Lynch’s career has really been.

And the way in which Lynch has quietly revisited Étant Donnés at unpredictable intervals beautifully illustrates how influence works in the real world. When the installation was first put on display in Philadelphia, Lynch was in his early twenties, and even if he didn’t see it in person, it would have been hard to avoid hearing about it at length in art circles. It was a scandal, and a striking image or a work of art encountered at a formative age has a way of coming back into the light at odd times. I should know: I spent my teenage years thinking about Lynch, sketching images from his movies, and listening to Julee Cruise. Every now and then, I’ll see something in my own work that emerges from that undercurrent, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time. (There’s a scene in The Icon Thief in which Maddy hides in a closet from the villain, and it’s only as I type this that I realize that it’s an amalgam of Lynch and Duchamp—Maddy fights him off with a snow shovel inspired by Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm.) And Lynch seems to have been haunted by his spiritual predecessor as much as he has haunted me. Lynch has said of his early interest in art: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it. Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” He claims that it was Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit that inspired him to construct his existence along those lines, but Duchamp was the best possible model. Of the countless artists who followed his example, Lynch just happens to be the one who became rich and famous. And as we enter the closing stretch of Twin Peaks, I can think of no better guide than Duchamp himself, who once said, in response to a question about what his work meant: “There is no solution because there is no problem.”

The genius naïf

Last night, after watching the latest episode of Twin Peaks, I turned off the television before the premiere of the seventh season of Game of Thrones. This is mostly because I only feel like subscribing to one premium channel at a time, but even if I still had HBO, I doubt that I would have tuned in. I gave up on Game of Thrones a while back, both because I was uncomfortable with its sexual violence and because I felt that the average episode had degenerated into a holding pattern—it cut between storylines simply to remind us that they still existed, and it relied on unexpected character deaths and bursts of bloodshed to keep the audience awake. The funny thing, of course, is that you could level pretty much the same charges against the third season of Twin Peaks, which I’m slowly starting to feel may be the television event of the decade. Its images of violence against women are just as unsettling now as they were a quarter of a century ago, when Madeline Ferguson met her undeserved end; it cuts from one subplot to another so inscrutably that I’ve compared its structure to that of a sketch comedy show; and it has already delivered a few scenes that rank among the goriest in recent memory. So what’s the difference? If you’re feeling generous, you can say that one is an opportunistic display of popular craftsmanship, while the other is a singular, if sometimes incomprehensible, artistic vision. And if you’re less forgiving, you can argue that I’m being hard on one show that I concluded was jerking me around, while indulging another that I wanted badly to love.

It’s a fair point, although I don’t think it’s necessarily true, based solely on my experience of each show in the moment. I’ve often found my attention wandering during even solid episodes of Game of Thrones, while I’m rarely less than absorbed for the full hour of Twin Peaks, even though I’d have trouble explaining why. But there’s no denying the fact that I approach each show in a different state of mind. One of the most obvious criticisms of Twin Peaks, then and now, is that its pedigree prompts viewers to overlook or forgive scenes that might seem questionable within in a more conventional series. (There have been times, I’ll confess, when I’ve felt like Homer Simpson chuckling “Brilliant!” and then confessing: “I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.”) Yet I don’t think we need to apologize for this. The history of the series, the track record of its creators, and everything implied by its brand mean that most viewers are willing to give it the benefit the doubt. David Lynch and Mark Frost are clearly aware of their position, and they’ve leveraged it to the utmost, resulting in a show in which they’re free to do just about anything they like. It’s hard to imagine any other series getting away with this, but’s also hard to imagine another show persuading a million viewers each week to meet it halfway. The implicit contract between Game of Thrones and its audience is very different, which makes the show’s lapses harder to forgive. One of the great fascinations of Lynch’s career is whether he even knows what he’s doing half the time, and it’s much less interesting to ask this question of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, any more than it is of Chris Carter.

By now, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Lynch knows exactly what he’s doing, but that confusion is still central to his appeal. Pauline Kael’s review of Blue Velvet might have been written of last night’s Twin Peaks:

You wouldn’t mistake frames from Blue Velvet for frames from any other movie. It’s an anomaly—the work of a genius naïf. If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition…It’s easy to forget about the plot, because that’s where Lynch’s naïve approach has its disadvantages: Lumberton’s subterranean criminal life needs to be as organic as the scrambling insects, and it isn’t. Lynch doesn’t show us how the criminals operate or how they’re bound to each other. So the story isn’t grounded in anything and has to be explained in little driblets of dialogue. But Blue Velvet has so much aural-visual humor and poetry that it’s sustained despite the wobbly plot and the bland functional dialogue (that’s sometimes a deliberate spoof of small-town conventionality and sometimes maybe not)…Lynch skimps on these commercial-movie basics and fouls up on them, too, but it’s as if he were reinventing movies.

David Thomson, in turn, called the experience of seeing Blue Velvet a moment of transcendence: “A kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director had made the medium alive and dangerous again.”

Twin Peaks feels more alive and dangerous than Game of Thrones ever did, and the difference, I think, lies in our awareness of the effects that the latter is trying to achieve. Even at its most shocking, there was never any question about what kind of impact it wanted to have, as embodied by the countless reaction videos that it inspired. (When you try to imagine videos of viewers reacting to Twin Peaks, you get a sense of the aesthetic abyss that lies between these two shows.) There was rarely a scene in which the intended emotion wasn’t clear, and even when it deliberately sought to subvert our expectations, it was by substituting one stimulus and response for another—which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t effective, or that there weren’t moments, at its best, that affected me as powerfully as any I’ve ever seen. Even the endless succession of “Meanwhile, back at the Wall” scenes had a comprehensible structural purpose. On Twin Peaks, by contrast, there’s rarely any sense of how we’re supposed to be feeling about any of it. Its violence is shocking because it doesn’t seem to serve anything, certainly not anyone’s character arc, and our laughter is often uncomfortable, so that we don’t know if we’re laughing at the situation onscreen, at the show, or at ourselves. It may not be an experiment that needs to be repeated ever again, any more than Blue Velvet truly “reinvented” anything over the long run, except my own inner life. But at a time when so many prestige dramas seem content to push our buttons in ever more expert and ruthless ways, I’m grateful for a show that resists easy labels. Lynch may or may not be a genius naïf, but no ordinary professional could have done what he does here.

Invitation to look

Note: This post discusses plot elements from last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

In order to understand the current run of Twin Peaks, it helps to think back to the most characteristic scene from the finale of the second season, which was also the last episode of the show to air for decades. I’m not talking about Cooper in the Black Lodge, or any of the messy, unresolved melodrama that swirled around the other characters, or even the notorious cliffhanger. I mean the scene at Twin Peaks Savings and Loan that lingers interminably on the figure of Dell Mibbler, an ancient, doddering bank manager whom we haven’t seen before and will never see again, as he crosses the floor, in a single unbroken shot, to get a glass of water for Audrey. Even at the time, when the hope of a third season was still alive, many viewers must have found the sequence agonizingly pointless. Later, when it seemed like this was the last glimpse of these characters that we would ever have, it felt even less explicable. With only so many minutes in any given episode, each one starts to seem precious, especially in a series finale, and this scene took up at least two of them. (Now that we’ve finally gotten another season, I’m not sure how it will play in the future, but I suspect that it will feel like what it must have been intended to be—a precarious, unnecessary, but still pretty funny gag.) Anecdotally speaking, for a lot of viewers, the third season is starting to feel like that bank scene played over and over again. In theory, we have plenty of room for digressions, with eighteen hours of television to fill. But as the tangents and apparent dead ends continue to pile up, like the scene last night in which the camera spends a full minute lovingly recording an employee sweeping up at the Roadhouse, it sometimes feels like we’ve been tricked into watching Dell Mibbler: The Return.

Yet this has been David Lynch’s style from the beginning. Lynch directed only a few hours of the initial run of Twin Peaks, but his work, particularly on the pilot, laid down a template that other writers and directors did their best to follow. And many of the show’s iconic images—the streetlight at the corner where Laura was last seen, the waterfall, the fir trees blowing in the wind—consist of silent shots that are held for slightly longer than the viewer would expect. One of the oddly endearing things about the original series was how such eerie moments were intercut with scenes that, for all their quirkiness, were staged, shot, and edited more or less like any other network drama. The new season hasn’t offered many such respites, which is part of why it still feels like it’s keeping itself at arm’s length from its own history. For better or worse, Lynch doesn’t have to compromise here. (Last night’s episode was perhaps the season’s most plot-heavy installment to date, and it devoted maybe ten minutes to advancing the story.) Instead, Lynch is continuing to educate us, as he’s done erratically throughout his career, on how to slow down and pay attention. Not all of his movies unfold at the same meditative pace: Blue Velvet moves like a thriller, in part because of the circumstances of its editing, and Wild at Heart seems like an attempt, mostly unsuccessful, to sustain that level of frantic motion for the film’s entire length. But when we think back to the scenes from his work that we remember most vividly, they tend to be static shots that are held so long that they burn themselves into our imagination. And as movies and television shows become more anxious to keep the viewer’s interest from straying for even a second, Twin Peaks remains an invitation to look and contemplate.

It also invites us to listen, and while much of Lynch’s fascination with stillness comes from his background as a painter, it also emerges from his interest in sound. Lynch is credited as a sound designer on Twin Peaks, as he has been for most of his movies, and the show is suffused with what you might call the standard-issue Lynchian noise—a low, barely perceptible hum of static that occasionally rises to an oceanic roar. (In last night’s episode, Benjamin Horne and the character played by Ashley Judd try vainly to pin down the source of a similar hum at the Great Northern, and while it might eventually lead somewhere, it also feels like a subtle joke at Lynch’s own expense.) The sound is often associated with electronic or recording equipment, like the video cameras that are trained on the glass cube in the season premiere. My favorite instance is in Blue Velvet, when Jeffrey stumbles across the tableau of two victims in Dorothy’s apartment, one with his ear cut off, the other still standing with his brains shot out. There’s a hum coming from the shattered television set, and it’s pitched at so low a level that it’s almost subliminal, except to imperceptibly increase our anxiety. You only really become aware of it when it stops, after Jeffrey closes the door behind him and, a little later, when Frank shoots out the television tube. But you can’t hear it at all unless everything else onscreen is deathly quiet. It emerges from stillness, as if it were a form of background noise that surrounds us all the time, but is only audible when the rest of the world fades away. I don’t know whether Lynch’s fascination with this kind of sound effect came out of his interest in stillness or the other way around, and the most plausible explanation is that it all arose from the same place. But you could build a convincing reading of his career around the two meanings of the word “static.”

Taken together, the visual and auditory elements invite us to look on in silence, which may be a reflection of Lynch’s art school background. (I don’t know if Lynch was directly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, a work of art that obsessed me so much that I wrote an entire novel about it, but they both ask us to stand and contemplate the inexplicable without speaking. And when you see the installation in person at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as I’ve done twice, the memory is inevitably entwined with the low hum of the room’s climate control system.) By extending this state of narrative suspension to the breaking point, Twin Peaks is pushing in a direction that even the most innovative prestige dramas have mostly avoided, and it still fascinates me. The real question is when and how the silence will be broken. Lynch’s great hallmark is his use of juxtaposition, not just of light and dark, which horrified Roger Ebert so much in Blue Velvet, but of silence and sudden, violent action. We’ve already seen hints of this so far in Twin Peaks, particularly in the scenes involving the murderous Ike the Spike, who seems to be playing the same role, at random intervals, that a figure of similarly small stature did at the end of Don’t Look Now. And I have a feeling that the real payoff is yet to come. This might sound like the wishful thinking of a viewer who is waiting for the show’s teasing hints to lead somewhere, but it’s central to Lynch’s method, in which silence and stillness are most effective when framed by noise and movement. The shot of the two bodies in Dorothy’s apartment leads directly into the most dramatically satisfying—and, let it be said, most conventional—climax of Lynch’s career. And remember Dell Mibbler? At the end of the scene, the bank blows up.

Live from Twin Peaks

What does Twin Peaks look like without Agent Cooper? It was a problem that David Lynch and his writing team were forced to solve for Fire Walk With Me, when Kyle MacLachlan declined to come back for much more than a token appearance, and now, in the show’s third season, Lynch and Mark Frost seem determined to tackle the question yet again, even though they’ve been given more screen time for their leading man than anyone could ever want. MacLachlan’s name is the first thing that we see in the closing credits, in large type, to the point where it’s starting to feel like a weekly punchline—it’s the only way that we’d ever know that the episode was over. He’s undoubtedly the star of the show. Yet even as we’re treated to an abundance of Dark Cooper and Dougie Jones, we’re still waiting to see the one character that I, and a lot of other fans, have been awaiting the most impatiently. Dale Cooper, it’s fair to say, is one of the most peculiar protagonists in television history. As the archetypal outsider coming into an isolated town to investigate a murder, he seems at first like a natural surrogate for the audience, but, if anything, he’s quirkier and stranger than many of the locals he encounters. When we first meet Cooper, he comes across as an almost unplayable combination of personal fastidiousness, superhuman deductive skills, and childlike wonder. But you’re anything like me, you wanted to be like him. I ordered my coffee black for years. And if he stood for the rest of us, it was as a representative of the notion, which crumbles in the face of logic but remains emotionally inescapable, that the town of Twin Peaks would somehow be a wonderful place to live, despite all evidence to the contrary.

In the third season, this version of Cooper, whom I’ve been waiting for a quarter of a century to see again, is nowhere in sight. And the buildup to his return, which I still trust will happen sooner or later, has been so teasingly long that it can hardly be anything but a conscious artistic choice. With every moment of recognition—the taste of coffee, the statue of the gunfighter in the plaza—we hope that the old Cooper will suddenly reappear, but the light in his eyes always fades. On some level, Lynch and Frost are clearly having fun with how long they can get away with this, but by removing the keystone of the original series, they’re also leaving us with some fascinating insights into what kind of show this has been from the very beginning. Let’s tick off its qualities one by one. Over the course of any given episode, it cuts between what seems like about a dozen loosely related plotlines. Most of the scenes last between two and four minutes, with about the same number of characters, and the components are too far removed from one another to provide anything in the way of narrative momentum. They aren’t built around any obligation to advance the plot, but around striking images or odd visual or verbal gags. The payoff, as in the case of Dr. Jacoby’s golden shovels, often doesn’t come for hours, and when it does, it amounts to the end of a shaggy dog story. (The closest thing we’ve had so far to a complete sequence is the sad case of Sam, Tracey, and the glass cube, which didn’t even make it past the premiere.) If there’s a pattern, it isn’t visible, but the result is still strangely absorbing, as long as you don’t approach it as a conventional drama but as something more like Twenty-Two Short Films About Twin Peaks.

You know what this sounds like to me? It sounds like a sketch comedy show. I’ve always seen Twin Peaks as a key element in a series of dramas that stretches from The X-Files through Mad Men, but you could make an equally strong case for it as part of a tradition that runs from SCTV to Portlandia, which went so far as to cast MacLachlan as its mayor. They’re set in a particular location with a consistent cast of characters, but they’re essentially sketch comedies, and when one scene is over, they simply cut to the next. In some ways, the use of a fixed setting is a partial solution to the problem of transitions, which shows from Monty Python onward have struggled to address, but it also creates a beguiling sense of encounters taking place beyond the edges of the frame. (Matt Groening has pointed to SCTV as an inspiration for The Simpsons, with its use of a small town in which the characters were always running into one another. Groening, let’s not forget, was born in Portland, just two hours away from Springfield, which raises the intriguing question of why such shows are so drawn to the atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest.) Without Cooper, the show’s affinities to sketch comedy are far more obvious—and this isn’t the first time this has happened. After Laura’s murderer was revealed in the second season, the show seemed to lose direction, and many of the subplots, like James’s terminable storyline with Evelyn, became proverbial for their pointlessness. But in retrospect, that arid middle stretch starts to look a lot like an unsuccessful sketch comedy series. And it’s worth remembering that Lynch and Frost originally hoped to keep the identity of the killer a secret forever, knowing that it was all that was holding together the rest.

In the absence of a connective thread, it takes a genius to make this kind of thing work, and the lack of a controlling hand is a big part of what made the second season so markedly unsuccessful. Fortunately, the third season has a genius readily available. The sketch format has always been David Lynch’s comfort zone, a fact that has been obscured by contingent factors in his long career. Lynch, who was trained as a painter and conceptual artist, thinks naturally in small narrative units, like the video installations that we glimpse for a second as we wander between rooms in a museum. Eraserhead is basically a bunch of sketches linked by its titular character, and he returned to that structure in Inland Empire, which, thanks to the cheapness of digital video, was the first movie in decades that he was able to make entirely on his own terms. In between, the inclination was present but constrained, sometimes for the better. In its original cut of three hours, Blue Velvet would have played much the same way, but in paring it down to its contractually mandated runtime, Lynch and editor Duwayne Dunham ended up focusing entirely on its backbone as a thriller. (It’s an exact parallel to Annie Hall, which began as a three-hour series of sketches called Anhedonia that assumed its current form after Woody Allen and Ralph Rosenbaum threw out everything that wasn’t a romantic comedy.) Most interesting of all is Mulholland Drive, which was originally shot as a television pilot, with fragmented scenes that were clearly supposed to lead to storylines of their own. When Lynch recut it into a movie, they became aspects of Betty’s dream, which may have been closer to what he wanted in the first place. And in the third season of Twin Peaks, it is happening again.

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 darkness of future past

Note: Spoilers follow for the first two episodes of the third season of Twin Peaks.

“Is it future, or is it past?” Mike, the one-armed man, asks Cooper in the Black Lodge. During the premiere of the belated third season of Twin Peaks, there are times when it seems to be both at once. We often seem to be in familiar territory, and the twinge of recognition that it provokes has a way of alerting us to aspects of the original that we may have overlooked. When two new characters, played appealingly—and altogether too briefly—by Ben Rosenfield and Madeline Zima, engage in an oddly uninflected conversation, it’s a reminder of the appealingly flat tone that David Lynch likes to elicit from his actors, who sometimes seem to be reading their lines phonetically, like the kids in a Peanuts cartoon. It isn’t bad or amateurish acting, but an indication that even the performers aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing there. In recent years, accomplished imitators from Fargo to Legion have drawn on Lynch’s style, but they’re fully conscious of it, and we’re aware of the technical trickery of such players as Ewan McGregor or Dan Stevens. In Lynch’s best works, there’s never a sense that anyone involved is standing above or apart from the material. (The major exceptions are Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet, who disrupt the proceedings with their own brand of strangeness, and, eerily, Robert Blake in Lost Highway.) The show’s original cast included a few artful performers, notably Ray Wise and the late Miguel Ferrer, but most of the actors were endearingly unaffected. They were innocents. And innocence is a quality that we haven’t seen on television in a long time.

Yet it doesn’t take long to realize that some things have also changed. There’s the heightened level of sex and gore, which reflects the same kind of liberation from the standards of network television that made parts of Fire Walk With Me so difficult to watch. (I’d be tempted to observe that its violence against women is airing at a moment in which such scenes are likely to be intensely scrutinized, if it weren’t for the fact that Lynch has been making people uncomfortable in that regard for over thirty years.) The show is also premiering in an era in which every aspect of it will inevitably be picked apart in real time on social media, which strikes me as a diminished way of experiencing it. Its initial run obviously prompted plenty of theorizing around the nation’s water coolers, but if there’s anything that Twin Peaks has taught us, it’s that the clues are not what they seem. Lynch is a director who starts with a handful of intuitive images that are potent in themselves—an empty glass cube, a severed head, a talking tree. You could call them dreamlike, or the fruits of the unconscious, or the products, to use a slightly dated term, of the right hemisphere of the brain. Later on, the left hemisphere, which is widely but misleadingly associated with Lynch’s collaborator Mark Frost, circles back and tries to impose meaning on those symbols, but these readings are never entirely convincing. Decades ago, when the show tried to turn Cooper’s dream of the Black Lodge into a rebus for the killer’s identity, you could sense that it was straining. There isn’t always a deeper answer to be found, aside from the power of those pictures, which should be deep enough in itself.

As a result, I expect to avoid reading most reviews or analysis, at least until the season is over. Elements that seem inexplicable now may or may not pay off, but the series deserves the benefit of the doubt. This isn’t to say that what we’ve seen so far has been perfect: Twin Peaks, whatever else it may have been, was never a flawless show. Kyle MacLachlan has been as important to my inner life as any actor, but I’m not sure whether he has the range to convincingly portray Dark Cooper. He’s peerless when it comes to serving as the director’s surrogate, or a guileless ego wandering through the wilderness of the id, but he isn’t Dennis Hopper, and much of this material might have been better left to implication. Similarly, the new sequences in the Black Lodge are striking—and I’ve been waiting for them for what feels like my entire life—but they’re also allowed to run for too long. Those original scenes were so memorable that it’s easy to forget that they accounted for maybe twenty minutes, stretched across two seasons, and that imagination filled in the rest. (A screenshot of Cooper seated with the Man from Another Place was the desktop image on my computer for most of college.) If anything, the show seems almost too eager to give us more of Cooper in those iconic surroundings, and half as much would have gone a long way. In the finale of the second season, when Cooper stepped through those red curtains at last, it felt like the culmination of everything that the series had promised. Now it feels like a set where we have to linger for a while longer before the real story can begin. It’s exactly what the Man from Another Place once called it: the waiting room.

Lynch and Frost seem to be reveling in the breathing space and creative freedom that eighteen full hours on Showtime can afford, and they’ve certainly earned that right. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, Twin Peaks may have benefited from the constraints that a broadcast network imposed, just as Wild at Heart strikes me as one of the few films to have been notably improved by being edited for television. When Lynch made Blue Velvet, he and editor Duwayne Dunham, who is also editing the new season, were forced to cut the original version to the bone to meet their contractually mandated runtime, and the result was the best American movie I’ve ever seen. Lynch’s most memorable work has been forced to work within similar limitations, and I’m curious to see how it turns out when most of those barriers are removed. (I still haven’t seen any of the hours of additional footage that were recently released from Fire Walk With Me, but I wish now that I’d taken the trouble to seek them out. The prospect of viewing those lost scenes is less exciting, now that we’re being given the equivalent of a sequel that will be allowed to run for as long as it likes.) In the end, though, these are minor quibbles. When I look back at the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, I’m startled to realize how little of it I remember: it comes to about three hours of unforgettable images, mostly from the episodes directed by Lynch. If the first two episodes of the new run are any indication, it’s likely to at least double that number, which makes it a good deal by any standard. Twin Peaks played a pivotal role in my own past. And I still can’t entirely believe that it’s going to be part of my future, too.

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.

Don’t stay out of Riverdale

In the opening seconds of the series premiere of Riverdale, a young man speaks quietly in voiceover, his words playing over idyllic shots of American life:

Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world. Safe. Decent. Innocent. Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale.

Much later, we realize that the speaker is Jughead of Archie Comics fame, played by former Disney child star Cole Sprouse, which might seem peculiar enough in itself. But what I noticed first about this monologue is that it basically summarizes the prologue of Blue Velvet, which begins with images of roses and picket fences and then dives into the grass, revealing the insects ravening like feral animals in the darkness. It’s one of the greatest declarations of intent in all of cinema, and initially, there’s something a little disappointing in the way that Riverdale feels obliged to blandly state what Lynch put into a series of unforgettable images. Yet I have the feeling that series creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who says that Blue Velvet is one of his favorite movies, knows exactly what he’s doing. And the result promises to be more interesting than even he can anticipate.

Riverdale has been described as The O.C. meets Twin Peaks, which is how it first came to my attention. But it’s also a series on the CW, with all the good, the bad, and the lack of ugly that this implies. This the network that produced The Vampire Diaries, the first three seasons of which unexpectedly generated some of my favorite television from the last few years, and it takes its genre shows very seriously. There’s a fascinating pattern at work within systems that produce such narratives on a regular basis, whether in pulp magazines or comic books or exploitation pictures: as long as you hit all the obligatory notes and come in under budget, you’re granted a surprising amount of freedom. The CW, like its predecessors, has become an unlikely haven for auteurs, and it’s the sort of place where a showrunner like Aguirre-Sacasa—who has an intriguing background in playwriting, comics, and television—can explore a sandbox like this for years. Yet it also requires certain heavy, obvious beats, like structural supports, to prop up the rest of the edifice. A lot of the first episode of Riverdale, like most pilots, is devoted to setting up its premise and characters for even the most distracted viewers, and it can be almost insultingly on the nose. It’s why it feels obliged to spell out its theme of dark shadows beneath its sunlit surfaces, which isn’t exactly hard to grasp. As Roger Ebert wrote decades ago in his notoriously indignant review of Blue Velvet: “What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.”

As a result, if you want to watch Riverdale at all, you need to get used to being treated occasionally as if you were twelve years old. But Aguirre-Sacasa seems determined to have it both ways. Like Glee before it, it feels as if it’s being pulled in three different directions even before it begins, but in this case, it comes off less as an unwanted side effect than as a strategy. It’s worth noting that not only did Aguirre-Sacasa write for Glee itself, but he’s also the guy who stepped in rewrite Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which means that he knows something about wrangling intractable material for a mass audience under enormous scrutiny. (He’s also the chief creative officer of Archie Comics, which feels like a dream job in the best sort of way: one of his projects at the Yale School of Drama was a play about Archie encountering the murderers Leopold and Loeb, and he later received a cease and desist order from his future employer over Archie’s Weird Fantasy, which depicted its lead character as coming out of the closet.) Riverdale often plays like the work of a prodigiously talented writer trying to put his ideas into a form that could plausibly air on Thursdays after Supernatural. Like most shows at this stage, it’s also openly trying to decide what it’s supposed to be about. And I want to believe, on the basis of almost zero evidence, that Aguirre-Sacasa is deliberately attempting something almost unworkable, in hopes that he’ll be able to stick with it long enough—on a network that seems fairly indulgent of shows on the margins—to make it something special.

Most great television results from this sort of evolutionary process, and I’ve noted before—most explicitly in my Salon piece on The X-Files—that the best genre shows emerge when a jumble of inconsistent elements is given the chance to find its ideal form, usually because it lucks into a position where it can play under the radar for years. The pressures of weekly airings, fan response, critical reviews, and ratings, along with the unpredictable inputs of the cast and writing staff, lead to far more rewarding results than even the most visionary showrunner could produce in isolation. Writers of serialized narratives like comic books know this intuitively, and consciously or not, Aguirre-Sacasa seems to be trying something similar on television. It’s not an approach that would make sense for a series like Westworld, which was produced for so much money and with such high expectations that its creators had no choice but to start with a plan. But it might just work on the CW. I’m hopeful that Aguirre-Sacasa and his collaborators will use the mystery at the heart of the series much as Twin Peaks did, as a kind of clothesline on which they can hang a lot of wild experiments, only a certain percentage of which can be expected to work. Twin Peaks itself provides a measure of this method’s limitations: it mutated into something extraordinary, but it didn’t survive the departure of its original creative team. Riverdale feels like an attempt to recreate those conditions, and if it utilizes the Archie characters as its available raw material, well, why not? If Lynch had been able to get the rights, he might have used them, too.

Cain rose up

I first saw Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain when I was fourteen years old. In a weird way, it amounted to a peak moment of my early adolescence: I was on a school trip to our nation’s capital, sharing a hotel room with my friends from middle school, and we were just tickled to get away with watching an R-rated movie on cable. The fact that we ended up with Raising Cain doesn’t quite compare with the kids on The Simpsons cheering at the chance to see Barton Fink, but it isn’t too far off. I think that we liked it, and while I won’t claim that we understood it, that doesn’t mean much of anything—it’s hard for me to imagine anybody, of any age, entirely understanding this movie, which includes both me and De Palma himself. A few years later, I caught it again on television, and while I can’t say I’ve thought about it much since, I never forgot it. Gradually, I began to catch up on my De Palma, going mostly by whatever movies made Pauline Kael the most ecstatic at the time, which in itself was an education in the gap between a great critic’s pet enthusiasms and what exists on the screen. (In her review of The Fury, Kael wrote: “No Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many ‘classic’ sequences.” I love Kael, but there are at least three things wrong with that sentence.) And ultimately De Palma came to mean a lot to me, as he does to just about anyone who responds to the movies in a certain way.

When I heard about the recut version of Raising Cain—in an interview with John Lithgow on The A.V. Club, no less, in which he was promoting his somewhat different role on The Crown—I was intrigued. And its backstory is particularly interesting. Shortly before the movie was first released, De Palma moved a crucial sequence from the beginning to the middle, eliminating an extended flashback and allowing the film to play more or less chronologically. He came to regret the change, but it was too late to do anything about it. Years later, a freelance director and editor named Peet Gelderblom read about the original cut and decided to restore it, performing a judicious edit on a digital copy. He put it online, where, unbelievably, it was seen by De Palma himself, who not only loved it but asked that it be included as a special feature on the new Blu-ray release. If nothing else, it’s a reminder of the true possibilities of fan edits, which have served mostly for competing visions of the ideal version of Star Wars. With modern software, a fan can do for a movie what Walter Murch did for Touch of Evil, restoring it to the director’s original version based on a script or a verbal description. In the case of Raising Cain, this mostly just involved rearranging the pieces in the theatrical cut, but other fans have tackled such challenges as restoring all the deleted scenes in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and there are countless other candidates.

Yet Raising Cain might be the most instructive case study of all, because simply restoring the original opening to its intended place results in a radical transformation. It isn’t for everyone, and it’s necessary to grant De Palma his usual passes for clunky dialogue and characterization, but if you’re ready to meet it halfway, you’re rewarded with a thriller that twists back on itself like a Möbius strip. De Palma plunders his earlier movies so blatantly that it isn’t clear if he’s somehow paying loving homage to himself—bypassing Hitchcock entirely—or recycling good ideas that he feels like using again. The recut opens with a long mislead that recalls Dressed to Kill, which means that Lithgow barely even appears for the first twenty minutes. You can almost see why De Palma chickened out for the theatrical version: Lithgow’s performance as the meek Carter and his psychotic imaginary brother Cain feels too juicy to withhold. But the logic of the script was destroyed. For a film that tests an audience’s suspension of disbelief in so many other ways, it’s unclear why De Palma thought that a flashback would be too much for the viewer to handle. The theatrical release preserves all the great shock effects that are the movie’s primary reason for existing, but they don’t build to anything, and you’re left with a film that plays like a series of sketches. With the original order restored, it becomes what it was meant to be all along: a great shaggy dog story with a killer punchline.

Raising Cain is gleefully about nothing but itself, and I wouldn’t force anybody to watch it who wasn’t already interested. But the recut also serves as an excellent introduction to its director, just as the older version did for me: when I first encountered it, I doubt I’d seen anything by De Palma, except maybe The Untouchables, and Mission: Impossible was still a year away. It’s safe to say that if you like Raising Cain, you’ll like De Palma in general, and if you can’t get past its archness, campiness, and indifference to basic plausibility—well, I can hardly blame you. Watching it again, I was reminded of Blue Velvet, a far greater movie that presents the viewer with a similar test. It has the same mixture of naïveté and incredible technical virtuosity, with scenes that barely seem to have been written alternating with ones that push against the boundaries of the medium itself. You’re never quite sure if the director is in on the gag, and maybe it doesn’t matter. There isn’t much beauty in Raising Cain, and De Palma is a hackier and more mechanical director than Lynch, but both are so strongly visual that the nonsensory aspects of their films, like the obligatory scenes with the cops, seem to wither before our eyes. (It’s an approach that requires a kind of raw, intuitive trust from the cast, and as much as I enjoy what Lithgow does here, he may be too clever and resourceful an actor to really disappear into the role.) Both are rooted, crucially, in Hitchcock, who was equally obsessive, but was careful to never work from his own script. Hitchcock kept his secret self hidden, while De Palma puts it in plain sight. And if it turns out to be nothing at all, that’s probably part of the joke.

The long and the short of it

One of the greatest compliments that we can pay to any story is that it seems shorter than it actually is. It’s obviously best for a narrative to be only as long as it has to be, and no more, which means that the creator needs to be willing to cut wherever necessary. (Sometimes it’s even better if these time or length limits are imposed from the outside. I’ve always maintained that Blue Velvet, my favorite American movie ever, was tremendously improved by a contractual stipulation that forced David Lynch and editor Duwayne Dunham to cut it from three hours down to two. And as much as I’m enjoying the streaming renaissance on Netflix, I sometimes wish that the episodes of these shows were shorter: without a fixed time slot, there’s no incentive to trim any given installment, and a literal hour of television tends to drag toward the end.) But it’s nice when a movie, in particular, grips us so completely that we don’t realize how long we’ve been watching it. I still remember being so absorbed by Michael Mann’s The Insider that I was startled to realize, when I checked my watch after the screening, that it was two and a half hours long: I would have guessed that it was closer to ninety minutes. And you only need to compare the experience of watching the original cut of Seven Samurai with, say, four episodes of the second season of True Detective to realize that three and a half hours can be something very different in subjective and objective time.

But there’s another storytelling trick that deserves just as much attention, which is the ability to make a short work of art seem longer. I’m not talking about the way in which even a twenty minutes of a bad sitcom can seem interminable, but of how a story can somehow persuade us that we’ve lived through a longer and more meaningful experience than seems possible to encompass within a limited timeframe. On some level, this is an illusion that you encounter in most narratives of any kind: with the exception of the rare works designed to unfold in real time, we’re asked to believe that the relatively short period that it takes to physically view or read the story really covers days, weeks, or months of action, and occasionally much longer. Many biopics, for instance, ask us to go through an entire lifetime in a couple of hours, and the fact that the result is usually so unsatisfying only indicates how hard it is to pull this off. But it has a greater chance of succeeding when it uses our perceptions of time to convince us, in a pleasurable way, that we’ve seen and felt more than could be packed into a single sitting. We could start with Citizen Kane, which is exactly a minute short of two hours long—which, like Blue Velvet, probably reflects an attempt to meet a contractually mandated length. Yet more than any other movie, it feels like a full picture of a man’s life, and the fact that it asks us to assemble Kane’s story from the fragments of other people’s memories offers a very important clue as to how this kind of thing works.

Because one of the best ways to create a subjective impression of length is through contrasts: the alternation of big and little, loud and soft, fast and slow. I got to thinking about this while listening to “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” which is one of the two or three best songs in Hamilton. It’s as epic a number as you could imagine, and it leaves you feeling as if you’ve lived through an unforgettable experience, but it lasts just four minutes. In his notes in Hamilton: The Revolution, Lin-Manuel Miranda explains how it works:

Part of the inspiration for the structure of “Yorktown” is what I call the “Busta Rhymes soft-loud-soft technique. On countless songs, Busta will give you the smoothest, quietest delivery and then full-on scream the next verse. It makes for a delightful tension and release, and it’s entirely vocal. Same here. “I have everything I wanted but I can’t die today / We’re going into battle / Here’s what my friends are doing / Hercules Mulligan!” Thank you and God bless you, Busta Rhymes.

It isn’t hard to see why this kind of alternation creates an impression of length, in the much same way that we find with the experiments with chronology in Kane. With every transition, the listener has to readjust, and the mental effort of these regroupings draws out our perception of time passing. The switching costs of moving from one moment to the next allow the story to do with a juxtaposition what would otherwise require a pause. As the old proverb says, a change is as good as a rest.

And this phenomenon emerges from something fundamental in how our brains are wired. As the neurologist David Eagleman says about the perception of time in everyday life:

When our brains receive new information, it doesn’t necessarily come in the proper order. This information needs to be reorganized and presented to us in a form we understand. When familiar information is processed, this doesn’t take much time at all. New information, however, is a bit slower and makes time feel elongated.

In other words, it takes a while for the brain to process new information, leading to a subjective impression of extended time. It’s why travel or a change of scenery can make our lives seem to slow down, and why we’re advised to use surprise or variety to keep the days from turning into a blur. The real challenge for artists is to combine different kinds of time within the same narrative. A movie or book that consists of nothing but action will quickly become boring, and so will a string of talky interior scenes. If you can speed it up and slow it down in the right proportions, the result, at its finest, will make you feel as if you’ve lived a rich, fulfilling life over the course of two hours. Hamilton does this beautifully. So does Kane—and you could even argue that the best reason to use a nonlinear narrative, rather than as a gimmick, is the ability it presents to treat time as a tool. You’re not just painting a picture; you’re asking the audience to assemble a puzzle. And it helps to use different kinds of pieces.

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.

My alternative canon #10: Miami Vice

Note: I’ve often discussed my favorite movies on this blog, but I also love films that are relatively overlooked or unappreciated. For the last two weeks, I’ve been looking at some of the neglected gems, problem pictures, and flawed masterpieces that have shaped my inner life, and which might have become part of the standard cinematic canon if the circumstances had been just a little bit different. You can read the previous installments here. 

The most striking quality of the movies of Michael Mann—who is probably the strangest living director to be consistently entrusted with enormous budgets by major studios, at least until recently—is their ambivalent relationship with craft. It’s often noted that Mann likes to tell stories about meticulous professionals, almost exclusively men, and that their obsession with the hardware of their chosen trade mirrors the director’s own perfectionism. This is true enough. But it misses the point that for his protagonists, craft on its own is rarely sufficient: a painstaking attention to detail doesn’t save the heroes of Thief or The Insider or Collateral, who either fail spectacularly or succeed only after being forced to improvise, and their objectives in the end aren’t the ones that they had at the beginning. This feels like a more faithful picture of Mann himself, who over the last decade has seemed increasingly preoccupied with side issues and technical problems while allowing the largest elements of the narrative to fend for themselves. It’s often unclear whether the resulting confusion is the result of active indifference, uncompromising vision, or a simple inability to keep a complicated project under control. The outcome can be an unambiguous failure, like Public Enemies, or a film in which Mann’s best and worst tendencies can’t be easily separated, like Blackhat. And the most freakish example of all is Miami Vice, which is either a botched attempt to create a franchise from an eighties cop show or the most advanced movie of the century so far. But as Mayor Quimby says on The Simpsons: “It can be two things.”

I’ve watched Miami Vice with varying degrees of attention perhaps a dozen times, but I’m not sure if I could accurately describe the plot. The script and the dialogue seem to have arisen like an emergent property from the blocky, smudged images onscreen, which often threaten to push the story off the edges of the frame entirely, or to lose it in the massive depth of field. Frederik Pohl liked to describe certain writers as fiddler crabs, in whom a single aspect of their work became hypertrophied, like a grotesquely overdeveloped claw, and that indisputably applies to Mann. These days, he seems interested in nothing but texture: visual, aural, thematic. Digital video, which allows him to lovingly capture the rippling muscles on Jamie Foxx’s back or the rumpled cloth of Colin Farrell’s jacket so that you feel like you could reach out and touch it, was the medium that he had been awaiting for his entire career, and he makes such insane overuse of it here that it leaves room for almost nothing else. The film unfolds only on the night side of the city in which it supposedly takes place, just as it appears to have shot roughly half of a usable script. (This isn’t necessarily Mann’s fault: Foxx abruptly departed toward the end of production, which is why the last scene feels like a bridge to nowhere.) As with The Night of the Hunter and Blue Velvet, Miami Vice is one of those movies in which it can be hard to tell the difference between unintentional awkwardness and radical experimentation—which is inevitable when you’re forging a new grammar of film. It looked like a failed blockbuster, and it was. But you could also build an entire art form out of its shattered pieces.

A brand apart

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 topic: “What individual instances of product placement in movies and television have you found most effective?”

One of the small but consistently troublesome issues that every writer faces is what to do about brand names. We’re surrounded by brands wherever we look, and we casually think and talk about them all the time. In fiction, though, the mention of a specific brand often causes a slight blip in the narrative: we find ourself asking if the character in question would really be using that product, or why the author introduced it at all, and if it isn’t handled well, it can take us out of the story. Which isn’t to say that such references don’t have their uses. John Gardner puts it well in The Art of Fiction:

The writer, if it suits him, should also know and occasionally use brand names, since they help to characterize. The people who drive Toyotas are not the same people who drive BMWs, and people who brush with Crest are different from those who use Pepsodent or, on the other hand, one of the health-food brands made of eggplant. (In super-realist fiction, brand names are more important than the characters they describe.)

And sometimes the clever deployment of brands can be another weapon in the writer’s arsenal, although it usually only works when the author already possesses a formidable descriptive vocabulary. Nicholson Baker is a master of this, and it doesn’t get any better than Updike in Rabbit is Rich:

In the bathroom Harry sees that Ronnie uses shaving cream, Gillette Foamy, out of a pressure can, the kind that’s eating up the ozone so our children will fry. And that new kind of razor with the narrow single-edge blade that snaps in and out with a click on the television commercials. Harry can’t see the point, it’s just more waste, he still uses a rusty old two-edge safety razor he bought for $1.99 about seven years ago, and lathers himself with an old imitation badger-bristle on whatever bar of soap is handy…

For the rest of us, though, I’d say that brand names are one of those places where fiction has to retreat slightly from reality in order to preserve the illusion. Just as dialogue in fiction tends to be more direct and concise than it would be in real life, characters should probably refer to specific brands a little less often than they really would. (This is particularly true when it comes to rapidly changing technology, which can date a story immediately.)

In movies and television, a prominently featured brand sets off a different train of thought: we stop paying attention to the story and wonder if we’re looking at deliberate product placement—if there’s even any question at all. Even a show as densely packed as The Vampire Diaries regularly takes a minute to serve up a commercial for the likes of AT&T MiFi, and shows like Community have turned paid brand integration into entire self-mocking subplots, while still accepting the sponsor’s money, which feels like a textbook example of having it both ways. Tony Pace of Subway explains their strategy in simple terms: “We are kind of looking to be an invited guest with a speaking role.” Which is exactly what happened on Community—and since it was reasonably funny, and it allowed the show to skate along for another couple of episodes, I didn’t really care. When it’s handled poorly, though, this ironic, winking form of product placement can be even more grating than the conventional kind. It flatters us into thinking that we’re all in on the joke, although it isn’t hard to imagine cases where corporate sponsorship, embedded so deeply into a show’s fabric, wouldn’t be so cute and innocuous. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s a fake version of irreverence, done on a company’s terms. And if there’s a joke here, it’s probably on us.

Paid or not, product placement works, at least on me, although often in peculiar forms. I drank Heineken for years because of Blue Velvet, and looking around my house, I see all kinds of products or items that I bought to recapture a moment from pop culture, whether it’s the Pantone mug that reminds me of a Magnetic Fields song or the Spyderco knife that carries the Hannibal seal of approval. (I’ve complained elsewhere about the use of snobbish brand names in Thomas Harris, but it’s a beautiful little object, even if I don’t expect to use it exactly as Lecter does.) If it’s kept within bounds, it’s a mostly harmless way of establishing a connection between us and something we love, but it always ends up feeling a little empty. Which may be why brand names sit so uncomfortably in fiction. Brands or corporations use many of the same strategies as art to generate an emotional response, except the former is constantly on message, unambiguous, and designed to further a specific end. It’s no accident that there are so many affinities between advertising and propaganda. A good work of art, by contrast, is ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations, and asks nothing of us aside from an investment of time—which is the opposite of what a brand wants. Fiction and brands are always going to live together, either because they’ve been paid to do so or because it’s an accurate reflection of our world. But we’re more than just consumers. And art, at its best, should remind us of this.

The list of a lifetime

I miss Roger Ebert for a lot of reasons, but I always loved how fully he occupied the role of the celebrity critic while expanding it into something more. “Two thumbs up” has become a way of dismissing an entire category of film criticism, and Ebert was as responsible for its rise as anyone else, although he can hardly be blamed for his imitators. Yet he wouldn’t have been nearly as good at it—and he was damned good, especially when paired with Gene Siskel—if it hadn’t been built on a foundation of shrewdness, taste, and common sense that came through in every print review he wrote. He knew that a rating system was necessary, if only to give shape to his discussions with Gene, but he was also aware of its limitations. (For proof, you need only turn to his classic review of the Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard, which transforms, unexpectedly, into an extended essay on the absurdity of reconciling a thoughtful approach to criticism with “that vertical thumb.”) Read any critic for any length of time, whether it’s Pauline Kael or David Thomson or James Wood, and you start to see the whole business of ranking works of art, whether with thumbs or with words, as both utterly important and inherently ridiculous. Ebert understood this profoundly.

The same was true of the other major tool of the mainstream critic: the list. Making lists of the best or worst movies, like handing out awards, turns an art form into a horse race, but it’s also a necessary evil. A critic wants to be a valued guide, but more often, he ends up serving as a signpost, pointing up the road toward an interesting vista while hoping that we’ll take in other sights along the way. Lists are the most useful pointers we have, especially for viewers who are encountering the full variety of movies for the first time, and they’ve played an enormous role in my own life. And when you read Ebert’s essay on preparing his final list for the Sight & Sound poll, you sense both the melancholy nature of the task and his awareness of the power it holds. Ebert knows that adding a movie to his list naturally draws attention to it, and he pointedly includes a single “propaganda” title—here it’s Malick’s Tree of Life—to encourage viewers to seek it out. Since every addition requires a removal, he clarifies his feelings on this as well:

Once any film has ever appeared on my [Sight & Sound] list, I consider it canonized. Notorious or Gates of Heaven, for example, are still two of the ten best films of all time, no matter what a subsequent list says.

In short, he approaches the list as a game, but a serious one, and he knows that pointing one viewer toward Aguirre or The General makes all of it worthwhile.

I thought of his example repeatedly when I revised my list of my ten favorite movies. Four years had gone by since my last series of posts on the subject, and the passage of time had brought a bit of reshuffling and a pair of replacements: L.A. Confidential and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had given way to Vertigo and Inception. And while it’s probably a mistake to view it as a zero-sum game, it’s hard not to see these films as commenting on one another. L.A. Confidential remains, as I said long ago, my favorite of all recent Hollywood movies, but it’s a film that invests its genre with greater fluency and complexity without challenging the rules on a deeper level, while Vertigo takes the basic outline of a sleek romantic thriller and blows it to smithereens. As much as I love them both, there’s no question in my mind as to which one achieves more. The contest between Inception and Wrath of Khan is harder to judge, and I’m not sure that the latter isn’t ultimately richer and more rewarding. But I wanted to write about Inception ever so slightly more, and after this weekend’s handwringing over the future of original ideas in movies, I have a hunch that its example is going to look even more precious with time. Inception hardly needs my help to draw attention to it, but to the extent that I had a propaganda choice this time around, it was this one.

Otherwise, my method in ranking these films was a simple one. I asked myself which movie I’d save first—solely for my own pleasure—if the last movie warehouse in the world were on fire. The answer was The Red Shoes. Next would be Blue Velvet, then Chungking Express, and so on down the line. Looking at the final roster, I don’t think I’d make any changes. Like Ebert, who kept La Dolce Vita on his list because of how it reflected the arc of his own life, I’m aware that much of the result is a veiled autobiography: Blue Velvet, in particular, galvanized me as a teenager as few other movies have, and part of the reason I rank it so highly is to acknowledge that specific debt. Other films are here largely because of the personal associations they evoke. Yet any movie that encapsulates an entire period in my life, out of all the films I was watching then, has to be extraordinary by definition: it isn’t just a matter of timing, at least not if it lasts. (You could even say that a great movie, like Vertigo, is one that convinces many different viewers that it’s secretly about them.) Ebert knew that there was no contradiction in embracing The Tree of Life as both the largest cosmic statement since 2001 and an agonizingly specific evocation of his own childhood. Any list, like any critic, lives in two worlds, and each half gains meaning from the other. And when I think of my own list and the choices it made, I can only quote Ebert one last time: “To add a title, I must remove one. Which film can I do without? Not a single one.”

My ten great movies #2: Blue Velvet

Years ago, after watching the fifty minutes of deleted scenes on the Blu-ray release of Blue Velvet, I became more convinced than ever that the secret hero of my favorite American movie was editor Duwayne Dunham. Some of the rediscovered scenes were extraordinary—the scene with Jeffrey and Dorothy on the rooftop, in particular, was one I’d been waiting to see my entire life—but including them in the theatrical cut of the film would have resulted in a movie like Inland Empire: fascinating, but shapeless and digressive, and of interest only to a small cadre of devoted fans. Dunham, who edited Return of the Jedi only a few years earlier and would later become a successful director in his own right, no doubt deserves much of the credit for paring the original cut down to its current, perfect two-hour form, a crucial step in the process that placed David Lynch, however briefly, at the center of our culture.

Because for all its strangeness and sexual violence, this is a remarkably accessible movie, an art film that takes the shape of a thriller and, rather than undermining the genre’s conventions, honors and extends them. For the only time in his career, with the exception of a few indelible moments on Twin Peaks, Lynch displays an almost childlike delight in the mechanisms of suspense for their own sake, and his great set pieces—bookended by the two scenes of Jeffrey peering through the closet door—deserve comparison to Hitchcock by way of Duchamp. (Some have detected the influence of Étant Donnés in Lynch’s vision here, which I can only imagine subconsciously influenced my decision to put Duchamp’s installation at the center of my first novel.) Like L.A. Confidential, this a total film, a work of art that evokes every emotion that we can feel at the movies, and for me, it’s even more: a vision, or a dream, that I’m grateful to revisit again and again.

Tomorrow: The best film ever made about the artistic process, and my favorite movie of all time.

An unfinished decade

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 topic: “What movie from our best films of the decade so far list doesn’t deserve to be on there?”

Toward the end of the eighties, Premiere Magazine conducted a poll of critics, directors, writers, and industry insiders to select the best films of the previous decade. The winners, in order of the number of votes received, were Raging Bull, Wings of Desire, E.T., Blue Velvet, Hannah and Her Sisters, Platoon, Fanny and Alexander, Shoah, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Do the Right Thing, with The Road Warrior, Local Hero, and Terms of Endearment falling just outside the top ten. I had to look up the list to retype it here, but I also could have reconstructed much of it from memory: a battered copy of Premiere’s paperback home video guide—which seems to have vanished from existence, along with its parent magazine, based on my inability, after five minutes of futile searching, to even locate the title online—was one of my constant companions as I started exploring movies more seriously in high school. And if the list contains a few headscratchers, that shouldn’t be surprising: the poll was held a few months before the eighties were technically even over, which isn’t close to enough time for a canon to settle into a consensus.

So how would an updated ranking look? The closest thing we have to a more recent evaluation is the latest Sight & Sound critics’ poll of the best films ever made. Pulling out only the movies from the eighties, the top films are Shoah, Raging Bull, Blade Runner, Blue Velvet, Fanny and Alexander, A City of Sadness, Do the Right Thing, L’Argent, The Shining, and My Neighbor Totoro, followed closely by Come and See, Distant Voices Still Lives, and Once Upon a Time in America. There’s a degree of overlap here, and Raging Bull was already all but canonized when the earlier survey took place, but Wings of Desire, which once came in second, is nowhere in sight, its position taken by a movie—Blade Runner—that didn’t even factor into the earlier conversation. The Shining received the vote of just a single critic in the Premiere poll, and at the time it was held, My Neighbor Totoro wouldn’t be widely seen outside Japan for another three years. Still, if there’s a consistent pattern, it’s hard to see, aside from the obvious point that it takes a while for collective opinion to stabilize. Time is the most remorseless, and accurate, critic of them all.

And carving up movies by decade is an especially haphazard undertaking. A decade is an arbitrary division, much more so than a single year, in which the movies naturally engage in a kind of accidental dialogue. It’s hard to see the release date of Raging Bull as anything more than a quirk of the calendar: it’s undeniably the last great movie of the seventies. You could say much the same of The Shining. And there’s pressure to make any such list conform to our idea of what a given decade was about. The eighties, at least at the time, were seen as a moment in which the auteurism of the prior decade was supplanted by a blockbuster mentality, encouraged, as Tony Kushner would have it, by an atmosphere of reactionary politics, but of course the truth is more complicated. Blue Velvet harks back to the fifties, but the division at its heart feels like a product of Reaganism, and the belated ascent of Blade Runner is an acknowledgment of the possibilities of art in the era of Star Wars. (As an offhand observation, I’d say that we find it easier to characterize decades if their first years happen to coincide with a presidential election. As a culture, we know what the sixties, eighties, and aughts were “like” far more than the seventies or nineties.)

So we should be skeptical of the surprising number of recent attempts to rank works of art when the decade in question is barely halfway over. This week alone, The A.V. Club did it for movies, while The Oyster Review did it for books, and even if we discount the fact that we have five more years of art to anticipate, such lists are interesting mostly in the possibilities they suggest for later reconsideration. (The top choices at The A.V. Club were The Master, A Separation, The Tree of Life, Frances Ha, and The Act of Killing, and looking over the rest of the list, about half of which I’ve seen, I’d have to say that the only selection that really puzzled me was Haywire.) As a culture, we may be past the point where a consensus favorite is even possible: I’m not sure if any one movie occupies the same position for the aughts that Raging Bull did for the eighties. If I can venture one modest prediction, though, it’s that Inception will look increasingly impressive as time goes on, for much the same reason as Blade Runner does: it’s our best recent example of an intensely personal version thriving within the commercial constraints of the era in which it was made. Great movies are timeless, but also of their time, in ways that can be hard to sort out until much later. And that’s true of critics and viewers, too.

A few tips on faking it

Note: Since I’m taking a deserved break for Thanksgiving, I’m reposting a few popular posts this week from earlier in this blog’s run. This post was originally published, in a slightly different form, on December 28, 2012.

It’s always satisfying when a story comes full circle, or when a moment near the end of the narrative reveals a pattern of symbols or themes that was only dimly visible before. This kind of structure requires both careful planning and some degree of luck: a story that is too obviously structured can seem artificial or contrived, while the best kind of deep structure can take even the author by surprise. More often, however, a writer will reach the end of a project only to find that its structure is shapeless or absent, with a story that seems like nothing but a series of loosely connected events. The smart thing to do at this point would be to throw out the whole thing and start again—something that few of us have the courage to attempt. The alternative is, well, to fake it: to look for a few quick fixes that will make the story look more structured than it really is, in hopes of fooling the casual reader or critic. Is it cheating? Sure. But it’s a form of cheating of which nearly every artist has been guilty at one time or another, and once you’re aware of it, you start to see it everywhere you look. With just a few simple tricks, soon you, too, will be faking it with the best:

1. If you can’t find a theme, pretend it’s there anyway. Ideally, theme ought to arise organically from the events of the story itself, rather than being conceived beforehand or imposed after the fact. Sometimes, though, you wind up a theme that seems thin or nonexistent. The answer, if you’re determined to fake it, is to pick a theme that seems appropriate and mention it on the slightest pretext. The great recent example is Pixar’s Brave, which repeats the word “fate” so insistently that it clearly hopes that nobody notices that it doesn’t have much to do with fate at all, or at least has little of interest to say on the subject. I’m not above this kind of thing myself: when the title of my second novel was changed at the last minute to City of Exiles, which I selected more or less because it sounded good, I went back and tweaked the draft in places to tease out the theme of exile wherever possible. Hopefully, this kind of retouching should be invisible, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find a real theme lurking there after all. In storytelling, as in jazz, sometimes you just need to fake it till you make it.

2. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. History, as Mark Twain says, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. So, too, does a good novel: elements that occur early in the story can, and should, come back to play a larger role. As before, we’d like to believe that this is the result of serendipity or good planning, but I’ve found that it doesn’t hurt to go back, when you’re nearing the end of a writing project, to see if there are elements that could be profitably reintroduced. A character who appears only once and never returns, or a detail introduced in the book’s early pages that doesn’t play a part later on, is an annoying loose end; bring them back again at an unexpected time, and you start to look pretty smart. In City of Exiles, for instance, an unscrupulous solicitor named Owen Dancy appears early in the book, only to never be mentioned again. This struck me as an oversight, so not only did I bring him back, but I had him play a crucial part in the epilogue. As soon as something occurs twice, it starts to look like structure, and three times is even better. This kind of systematic mining of one’s work for meaningful repetitions is something that every writer should do. Like the Plains Indians, we try to use every part of the animal.

3. When in doubt, go back to where you started. When we see the NO TRESPASSING sign at Xanadu for the last time at the end of Citizen Kane, it feels like a circle has closed; the same is true of the picket fence and red roses in the opening and closing shots of Blue Velvet. At its best, this kind of bookending reflects a ring or circular structure that has been part of the work from the beginning, but sometimes only the illusion of symmetry is required. You see this in movies, like the original Spider-Man, that repeat the opening narration again at the end: it feels like a recurrence of deeper themes, when it may just be a simple editing trick. (At a higher level, you have a movie like Raging Bull, which reportedly didn’t work at all in test screenings until a snippet of the closing scene was appended to the beginning.) A true ring composition demands detailed planning, while mechanically opening and closing on the same phrase or image requires no skill at all—but if you aren’t sure how to end a story, even the fake version will often get you ninety percent of the way there. Because it’s always satisfying when a story, or a blog post, comes full circle. Isn’t it?