Posts Tagged twin peaks
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.
David Lynch, Mark Frost, And Lightning Strikes
What’s your favourite thing David Lynch has ever done?
Wild At Heart still makes me giddy as a schoolgirl, and after many rewatchings I think that Lost Highway is very nearly a perfect film. In fact, I don’t really understand why Mulholland Drive gets so much love when it feels like a compromised version of the same story – albeit with lesbianism and that terrifying scene behind the Winkies.
If pushed, though, I’d probably say that Twin Peaks is his best – and just writing that sentence makes me feel sorry for Mark Frost. You know, the other half of the buzzing LYNCH / FROST logo that ends each episode.
Way back in 2004, I wrote this piece for a book on cult TV called Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion. It wasn’t meant to be Lynch-specific, but it was just so much easier, analytically speaking, to give him credit for everything.
Auteur theory is so seductive that we happily pretend it’s not entirely ridiculous. How can anything as inherently collaborative as movies or TV be the equivalent to a single artist alone in a room with a canvas and a paintbrush?
Even worse: it’s obvious that Twin Peaks was never a single-author text. It never had the same sense of a single controlling force of, say, Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing or Joss Whedon on Buffy the Vampire Slayer – and I’m sure those men would never say they were wholly responsible for the identities of their respective shows, either.
It’s slightly more plausible for a movie to be one individual’s unique vision, but still basically impossible. And even if it is? There’s a good chance it’d be better if it wasn’t. There are endless stories about Hollywood films being crippled by compromise after compromise, I know, but no one talks much about the opposite.
Do you know how unlikely it is that one human is truly talented at one single thing? So what are the odds that they’ll be good at everything?
The Wrapped In Plastic fanzine with its hand-drawn cover of "Twin Peaks's Invisible Man: Mark Frost".
It’s such an improbable, one-in-a-million lightning strike, and yet everyone seems to think they’ve been struck by the same blast. M. Night Shyamalan and Richard Kelly are both filmmakers with undeniable talent, but seemingly without a sense of their own limitations. If they’d work on other peoples’ screenplays, they might really have something.
Of course, I would say this. I’m a writer with zero urge to direct. (Directing would mean… actually… you know… talking to all those people? Every day? No thanks.)
Recently, Judd Apatow’s success with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up gave him the influence to make his most personal film without artistic compromise – and sadly Funny People turned out to be misshapen, self-indulgent, and unable to hold up to his more commercial films that came before it.
Lynch’s best movies, for me, are one that’s based on Barry Gifford’s vivid characters (Wild At Heart), and another script co-written by Gifford himself (Lost Highway). Lynch works best when his creative impulses are being somehow reigned in by another’s influence. The television structure and ongoing collaborators of Twin Peaks provided the perfect balance.
When we think of Twin Peaks, sure, we think of backwards talk and non sequiturs, but it was a soap opera, first and foremost, and deeply wedded to the all the TV conventions that implies. I feel sorry for the writers on the show who – so the story goes – would spend whole episodes getting the show back on track after Lynch would come back for an episode and throw all their plans into disarray.
(And yes, these were often the most memorable episodes, no doubt – but I bet that made it more annoying for the others involved, not less.)
So, to Mark Frost, who’ll I know never read this but what the hell:
Sorry.