New contributor Abbie Saunders reflects on David Lynch’s finest piece of work: his short lived television series, Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks marked director David Lynch’s first venture into writing and directing for television, a decision that would not only leave its mark on the world, but drive his collected oeuvre in a new direction. The themes and techniques that Lynch explores in Twin Peaks would later come to shape one of his most successful feature films of all time, Mulholland Drive.
Beginning with the corpse of a young girl washed up on the bank of a lake, Twin Peaks went on to prove itself a milestone in the detective and crime genre. Using the detective story as a vehicle through which to explore the social intricacies of the inhabitants of its town, Twin Peaks has since paved the way for current crime dramas, such as Broadchurch, whilst retaining the surreal character of Lynch’s feature films. Lynch introduced a world in which nothing is as it seems, and its influence is still felt today.
Epic form, tragic narrative?
In many ways, Lynch has become renowned for challenging linear narrative structures. However, his use of length has not only had a colossal impact upon the contrast between his feature films and TV series, but loosely recalls a more archaic approach to narrative theory. As in classical literature, tragedy typically unfolds within a two- hour play that spans a 24-hour time period, while epic spans thousands of pages of poetic narrative, often tracing events that unfold over years.
Blue Velvet takes on a more traditionally tragic form; the 120-minute running time to confines the film’s plot and characters. There is a sense in which the curtailed running time must propel the plot towards an ultimate resolution, tragic or otherwise. There is a mystery to be solved – the discovery of a severed ear at the opening of the film sequence – and just under two hours in which it can be solved. Apart from the tension incurred by the sexual violence and aggression which pervades the matter, the time-span alone gives this film an infinitely faster pace than Twin Peaks.
With 28 episodes at 47 minutes long, and an extra two episodes at 94 minutes long, Twin Peaks presents its viewer with a total viewing time of around 1,500 minutes. The two series combined run more than ten times the length of Blue Velvet alone, in which a similar discovery is to be made – the murderer of homecoming queen Laura Palmer. Its length, however, allows a more extensive cast, a more extensive plot, and, indeed, a more extensive exploration into the themes with which Lynch’s films are so often preoccupied.
The tension between Realism and Surrealism
It’s difficult to articulate the boundary between realism and surrealism in Lynch’s films. Often, the surreal is used as a vehicle through which the real is realised. In this sense, Twin Peaks can be seen to set the tone for Lynch’s later feature film, Mulholland Drive. Certain events, circumstances and scenes seem surreal because they unfold outside of a linear time frame. And yet, somehow, Lynch creates a surreal filmscape in which the true nature of life is realised. While certain events do not unfold in a comprehensible manner or chronological order, it is not the contradiction, but the tension between realism and surrealism that so effectively characterises the strangeness of life. The poignant inconsistencies which define humanity are realised through this tension. Through the hyper-sensitisation of realistic detail, characters become caricatures of themselves.
In Twin Peaks, when Leland Palmer throws himself onto his daughter’s coffin in a fit of despair, he breaks the lowering mechanism in the process, clinging onto the coffin out of safety as much as emotional frenzy. Lynch uses as much exaggerated melodrama as he does genuine anguish, creating something at once utterly surreal and entirely feasible. He finds the point in life at which tragedy and comedy meet, challenging his viewer to respond correctly: when do we laugh, and when do we cry?
The force of this tension is never felt as strongly as in Twin Peaks. In the pilot episode, for a period of 98 seconds, the viewer bears witness to Mrs Palmer crying down the telephone. What begins as genuine anguish, quickly becomes amusing, and continues to the point at which it becomes entirely uncomfortable.
Irony and the detective genre
Murder, mystery, and a preoccupation with detection are the thematic similarities which predominantly link Lynch’s TV series with his feature length films. Twin Peaks, at the opening of the saga, behaves almost as Blue Velvet did before it, tossing its viewer a single contained event or clue – a departure point from which the viewer is plunged into a pit of co-existing artificiality and reality, but unable to detect any apparent truth.
The characterisation of Twin Peaks is also typical of Lynch’s feature films. As Sandy and Jeffrey’s relationship in Blue Velvet behaves as the ultimate ironic inversion of Sandy and Danny’s relationship in Grease, Twin Peaks serves to expose the sinister underbelly of the principal components of American suburban society: the homecoming queen, the Varsity sports jock, the department store owner, the girls who work in the diner, the men who work at the petrol station, all of which are revealed to be in some way corrupt – a violation of the suburban code to which the inhabitants apparently subscribe.
The irony of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack contributes to the ageneric atmosphere created by the TV series. Badalamenti has scored both Lynch’s feature length films and TV series, but the scope and length of Twin Peaks gave Badalamenti a greater variety of themes with which to work.
In Ronald A. Knox’s (1888-1957) Ten Rules of Golden Age Detective Fiction he suggests that the reader or viewer should always be one step ahead of the secondary protagonist, and one step behind the principal detective. More traditional film noir detective features often follow this code, which, in a certain sense, dictates a viewer’s commitment to a detective film, and their commitment to the process of decoding. Lynch’s feature films, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, for instance, unfold over a significantly shorter time, and offer less artistic freedom to explore narrative digressions to the extent that Lynch pursues them in Twin Peaks.
In a TV series, it is usually more important than ever for the viewer to commit to the plot: the cliffhanger, the sense in which every clue should naturally give birth to another, the seamless link between discovery and explanation are vital in coaxing the viewer to commit. However, all of these traditional components in detective fiction are components that Lynch rejects. The viewer spends most of the 1,500 minutes of Twin Peaks feeling lost among the information provided by the fabrication of dreams, lies, and subjective visions.
How, when truth cannot be found among the dreams and lies, how does Lynch’s TV series, whose plot line initially offers itself as a traditional ‘detective’ story, manage to be so riveting, addictive, and highly watchable? Because Twin Peaks is so true to human nature and the reality of life: questions often cannot be answered, the individual gives as much weight to dreams and uncertainty as to clues and codes, and life is dictated by lies, theories, and digressions. By capturing one of the most surreal anti-detective sequences in television history, Lynch’s Twin Peaks remains as true to itself as it does to life. Sometimes there is no resolution.
It’s true: Twin Peaks is as polarising as Lynch’s feature films. Some viewers take issue with the surreal quality of the plot and Badalamenti’s score, with the force of the emotional and sexual violence, with the distinct lack of answers that Lynch’s narratives ultimately provide.
Twin Peaks is as frightening, disorientating, and thought-provoking as any of Lynch’s feature films. But what Lynch’s films do, Twin Peaks does better. Its form allows it to follow irrelevant digressions to the bitter end, to revel in extended scenes of simultaneously surreal bitterness and amusement, and to heighten its own irony to the extent that you feel compelled to laugh when the tragic theme that accompanies musings on Laura Palmer’s death repeats itself yet again. This deep inquiry into morality and humanity is not propelled towards a resolution in the same way as Lynch’s films; it is an inquiry that provides no answers, that gets lost inside itself, and makes the world seem darker than it did before. And this is why the surreal, epic quality of Twin Peaks is one that captures the essence of reality most realistically.
