Posts Tagged acmi
Apologising to Laura Palmer
This is an extended remix of half my presentation from last week’s Twin Peaks nine-hour marathon at ACMI. I was especially gratified to demand – and receive – a rousing round of applause for the regularly ignored Mark Frost, too.
Did you see the Twin Peaks homage-slash-reunion on this week’s episode of Psych?
The fact that it’s so odd to Peaks’ actors, all grown up, shows how few have had successful post-Peaks careers. Kyle MacLachlan might’ve been on Sex and The City and Desperate Housewives, but it’s always a little sad to see Agent Cooper playing these neutered, neurotic characters. Ray Wise has fared better, with memorable roles including the Devil himself on short-lived slacker comedy Reaper.
Sometimes this curse that follows cult TV stars can almost seem like a gift to that show’s fans; it lets the characters freeze, unaging, with the men and women who embodied them tucked out of the public eye like they’re trapped in Dorian Gray’s attic.
The fact that the New York Times considered this Psych episode newsworthy shows how Twin Peaks still circulates strongly through popular culture. Recently, there have been a bunch of twenty-years-later articles, all unearthing fun facts about the show; like the fact that it was David Lynch himself who placed the sand, grain by grain, on Sheryl Lee’s face for the infamous ‘wrapped in plastic’ moment.
She said: “It was a great learning experience playing a corpse. I got to be a sponge and soak up everything.” I always wished Sheryl Lee – as Laura Palmer, and later, her cousin Maddie – deserved to be bestowed the status of full-blown Scream Queen, equal to Fay Wray or Jamie Lee Curtis.
But I’ve also made the case – in print, no less – that Twin Peaks is a much more satisfying show if you see it as a soap opera, and not a mystery. Laura is just a reason to kick off the plot. She gives some characters something to hide and others something to uncover. Sure, we’re told Laura is “full of secrets” – but when we look deeply into her eyes on video tape, it’s not to see into her soul. It’s just to see the reflection of something else in the same scene.
What if Laura’s not just wrapped in plastic, but made of plastic, too?
Today, though, I think I’ve changed my mind, and misjudged Laura Palmer by labelling her an easy narrative excuse. The follow-up movie Fire Walk With Me (infamously booed on its premiere at Cannes) is a Herculean attempt to turn Laura back into a human being. It acts as a kind of retroactive apology for how Laura was treated throughout the show.
Fire Walk With Me begins with the destruction of a television set; a not exactly subtle way of violently highlighting that what you’re about to watch will be different than anything you saw on TV. While Twin Peaks was regularly terrifying – in fact, I still believe it’s the most frightening thing to ever appear on network TV – the movie is relentless. It’s the kind of film that leaves you wanting a shower afterwards.
(I’m going to tread carefully from this point to avoid spoilers for a twenty-year-old show. That’s how much I care.)
Just as Laura can be seen as an excuse, so can some of the show’s supernatural elements. It never sat right with me how Laura’s killer was, in essence, forgiven for all crimes by Peaks’ possession plotline. Fire Walk With Me, however, strips those excuses away again.
After the Black Lodge and the backwards talking and the David Bowie cameo and the inexplicably chilling monkey-face that appears from behind a mask, Fire Walk With Me shows us the psychic toll of all this horror on Laura herself.
And it leaves us with a broken young woman who – despite all those TV Guide cover stories and I Killed Laura Palmer T-shirts – finally finds some kind of peace.
Everybody Hates Skyler
At the excellent panel on Breaking Bad at ACMI a few weeks ago, one point became alarmingly clear: everybody hates Skyler.
Skyler is the long-suffering wife of Walter White, Breaking Bad‘s chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. She can be whiny, and moralistic, and passive-aggressive – but others on the show are overtly horrible and aggressive-aggressive, and they’re not attacked in the same way. Lurk on any online discussion of the show and you’ll find furious ranting about how Skyler is a stupid bitch who should, like, die.
Is this sexism? Well, yeah, of course. But I’d argue it’s sexist for more complicated reasons than you might expect, and that characters like Skyler are being badly served by the basic building blocks of their respective stories.
First, families – mostly wives and children, of course – are often on these shows to motivate their men. To give them something worth fighting for. Although, as David Surman pointed out at ACMI, one of the fascinating things about Breaking Bad is how Walt’s protests that he’s doing everything “for his family” so quickly become unconvincing.
Beyond that, these women can exist as a show’s voice of morality – and unfortunately, the alchemy of TV dialogue seems to inevitably transmute this into ‘nagging’.
Rita on Dexter, for example, began as an interesting character in her own right. She was a broken woman, and romanced by the emotionally-dead Dexter specifically for that fact; as an easy cover story for his serial killer’s lone wolf tendencies. As she became more confident, though, her character broke in a different way. By the end of season four, she only existed to tell Dexter that he needed to pick up the kids from school, and maybe look disapprovingly afterwards.
(An aside: was this same sort of hate circulating for Carmela on The Sopranos?)
Anyway, being nominated as a show’s moral guardian just a side-effect of these characters’ primary function: to stop the protagonist doing things.
Apparently, Billy Wilder once explained a three-act story like this: in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down. I think TV morality is often just another way of setting the tree on fire.
So Rita prevents Dexter killing. Skyler prevents Walt cooking meth. And this is where the hate comes in – because death and drugs are exactly what people want to see! I mean, it’s like a whole issue of Spider-Man where Peter Parker is trapped in the house by Aunt May and doesn’t get to punch Doctor Octopus in the face, right? God, I hate Aunt May!
There’s another common role for women, and it’s one especially prevalent in superhero comics. Years ago, Gail Simone referred to it as “Women In Refrigerators”. She realised how female characters always seemed to be injured or killed – just so their heroes had a reason to seek revenge. (A dead wife is even better motivation than a live one!)
The sexism, though, kicks in before the female characters are butchered. It starts when the hero is created. Male heroes tend to have female love interests; those love interests are the easiest to maim for maximum emotional impact; voila! Dead superwomen.
If we had more female superheroes, wouldn’t their boyfriends be the ones in danger? And the same goes for Breaking Bad and Dexter. If we had more females in active leading roles, would there be men doing the nagging-but-necessary plot-blocking?
Maybe. Or maybe gender is now so deeply embedded in these narrative structures that writers simply wouldn’t allow their male characters to fulfil the same function. And even if they did, I suspect that male Skylers simply wouldn’t generate the same levels of hate.
But why don’t we give it a try?
Blame Agatha Christie
I thought I’d put up some random, remixed selections from the lecture on ‘Loveable Murderers’ I gave at ACMI earlier this year. Relive the magic! The bloody, bloody magic! Here goes…
A random New Yorker finds a corpse. That’s the strict formula for the opening of an episode of NBC’s Law & Order. Do the math. 20 seasons, 22ish episodes a season. That’s at least 440 bodies. It’s a mountain of victims that any serial killer would be proud to claim.
And that’s without any of the Law & Order spin-offs, too. Now add in the death toll of the zillion other murder-focused TV shows currently on air. It seems reasonable, somehow, because murder isn’t like other crimes. In fact, on TV, it’s almost considered victimless – even when the victim is lying right there on the floor.
Murder is everywhere in popular culture, and it’s often presented as a clean and simple – if not bloodless – crime. When I was a kid, I’d get nervous every time there was the tiniest hint of sex on TV while my parents were in the room, but a corpse? No problem!
Take Murder She Wrote. It has ‘murder’ right there in the title, and yet it’s somehow the most family-friendly show imaginable, featuring Jessica Fletcher quietly solving crimes with common sense and folksy wisdom. But think about how many bodies she must’ve seen. Every town she visits, every holiday she takes…
The fact that Jessica Fletcher is a famous mystery novelist, of course, links her back to Agatha Christie – and Christie is emblematic of how murder often isn’t crime of passion. It’s a drawing room mystery. Her victims weren’t really people. Just puzzles to be solved. Similarly, these murder shows never contain much grief, do they? Their funerals are just informal line-ups to see who’s acting guilty.
As an aside, I can think of two pieces of fiction that turn this on its head. One mainstream, one otherwise, but both decidedly subversive. First, Mike Myer’s Austin Powers. There’s a running gag showing Austin killing a random henchman – before we cut to that henchman’s family or friends, devastated as they hear the news that their loved one has been unceremoniously killed.
Grant Morrison’s insanely experimental conspiracy comic, The Invisibles, dedicated an entire issue to the life story of a man who’d previously served as nothing but cannon fodder. We see his childhood, his motivations, his relationships – and then the issue ends back where he first appeared, killed in an instant by our uncaring heroes.
Anyway, in 1950, Raymond Chandler responding to the rise of bloodless murder mysteries with an essay called The Simple Art Of Murder. He was sick of the way that murder had become – in essence – sudoku with corpses. Praised the writing of his literary predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, he wrote:
“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”
The murderers mightn’t have good reasons to kill, but their stories sure do. Killing is a great structural gimmick. Kill someone and suddenly everything’s in motion: stakes are raised, friends are serving up big chunks of exposition, there’s a murderer to catch for dramatic tension, and so on. Twin Peaks is hardly the only soap opera to kick off with a killing.
This same storytelling principle was applied to dinner parties in real life, too. Remember the How To Host A Murder game of the mid-1980s? Everyone would be given characters and clues to be acted and read out throughout the meal. It’s an interesting thought experiment to plug other crimes into the title instead of the word ‘murder’ and see how they instantly become unacceptable.
I mean, I can pretty much guarantee that no one would have come to my lecture if it was on ‘Loveable Rapists’, would they?