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.

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.

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.

Why hobbits need to be short

It’s never easy to adapt a beloved novel for the screen. On the one hand, you have a book that has been widely acclaimed as one of the greatest works of speculative fiction of all time, with a devoted fanbase and an enormous invented backstory spread across many novels and appendices. On the other, you have a genius director who moved on from his early, bizarre, low-budget features to a triumphant mainstream success with multiple Oscar nominations, but whose skills as a storyteller have sometimes been less reliable than his unquestioned visual talents. The result, after a protracted development process clouded by rights issues, financial difficulties, and the departure of the previous director, is an overlong movie with too many characters that fails to capture the qualities that drew people to this story in the first place. By trying to appease fans of the book while also drawing in new audiences, it ends up neither here nor there. While it’s cinematically striking, and has its defenders, it leaves critics mostly cold, with few of the awards or accolades that greeted its director’s earlier work. And that’s why David Lynch had so much trouble with Dune.

But it’s what Lynch did next that is especially instructive. After Dune‘s financial failure, he found himself working on his fourth movie under far greater constraints, with a tiny budget and a contractual runtime of no more than 120 minutes. The initial cut ran close to three hours, but eventually, with the help of editor Duwayne Dunham, he got it down to the necessary length, although it meant losing a lot of wonderful material along the way. And what we got was Blue Velvet, which isn’t just Lynch’s best film, but my favorite American movie of all time. I recently had the chance to watch all of the deleted scenes as part of the movie’s release on Blu-ray, and it’s clear that if Lynch had been allowed to retain whatever footage he wanted—as he clearly does these days—the result would have been a movie like Inland Empire: fascinating, important, but ultimately a film that I wouldn’t need to see more than once. The moral, surprisingly enough, is that even a director like Lynch, a genuine artist who has earned the right to pursue his visions wherever they happen to take him, can benefit from the need, imposed by a studio, to cut his work far beyond the level where he might have been comfortable.

Obviously, the case of Peter Jackson is rather different. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was an enormous international success, and did as much as anything to prove that audiences will still sit happily through a movie of more than three hours if the storytelling is compelling enough. As a result, Jackson was able to make The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey as long as he liked, which is precisely the problem. The Hobbit isn’t a bad movie, exactly; after an interminable first hour, it picks up considerably in the second half, and there are still moments I’m grateful to have experienced on the big screen. Yet I can’t help feeling that if Jackson had felt obliged, either contractually or artistically, to bring it in at under two hours, it would have been vastly improved. This would have required some hard choices, but even at a glance, there are entire sequences here that never should have made it past a rough cut. As it stands, we’re left with a meandering movie that trades largely on our affection for the previous trilogy—its actors, its locations, its music. And if this had been the first installment of a series, it’s hard to imagine it making much of an impression on anyone. Indeed, it might have justified all our worst fears about a cinematic adaptation of Tolkien.

And the really strange thing is that Jackson has no excuse. For one thing, it isn’t the first time he’s done this: I loved King Kong, but I still feel that it would have been rightly seen as a game changer on the level of Avatar if he’d cut it by even twenty minutes. And unlike David Lynch and Blue Velvet, whose deleted scenes remained unseen for decades before being miraculously rediscovered, Jackson knows that even if has to cut a sequence he loves, he has an audience of millions that will gladly purchase the full extended edition within a year of the movie’s release. But it takes a strong artistic will to accept such constraints if they aren’t being imposed from the outside, and to acknowledge that sometimes an arbitrary limit is exactly what you need to force yourself to make those difficult choices. (My own novels are contractually required to come in somewhere around 100,000 words, and although I’ve had to cut them to the bone to get there, they’ve been tremendously improved by the process, to the point where I intend to impose the same limit on everything I ever write.) The Hobbit has two more installments to go, and I hope Jackson takes the somewhat underwhelming critical and commercial response to the first chapter to heart. Because an unwillingness to edit your work is a hard hobbit to break.