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Nov. 12th, 2012 10:42 pmI rewatched most of Twin Peaks. I simply couldn't handle the awfulness of the post-reveal episodes so skipped most of them. The non-Lynch earlier ones weren't terribly watchable either - I guess you notice direction more on repeat viewings, and it's hard to overstate how much Lynch's episodes stood out from the crowd, to the point where if I ever bother to revisit this show I'll just watch those. Possibly making an exception for the pretty well-handled reveal, which was done by the River's Edge director, who I guess Lynch and Mark Frost hired out of guilt for stealing so much from that movie. The show's DNA is like half River's Edge, half Blue Velvet.
Lynch's final episode is probably a waste of genius, the bitter execution of his own dying dog, but pretty riveting nonetheless, especially for the nightmare content.
The narrowness of his range stood out this time, in his non-adaptations, or rather how devoted he is to telling one essential story through a few key tableaux, which of course a lot of great artists have been - Shelley, Bergman, maybe even Shakespeare.
Lynch's vision is scandalously close to Blake's, but Blake's inability to dramatize his myths, maybe his greatest artistic flaw, leaves Lynch looking original. Both believe in a fundamental, abiding human innocence, that can be obscured but never destroyed. Nearly every villain on the show has at least one scene where they reminisce about a more innocent time - and given the large number of people presented as corrupt, hence as potential murderers of Laura, that adds up to a lot of scenes. The manichaeanism of the show (and its music) is only bearable because of this asterisk, which turns good vs evil into people vs an invasive mystery. Matched with this basic Kateness of all Nans is the related phenomenon of most every non-villain giving in to the temptation to transgress boundaries at some point, though usually for a good cause. Neither of these scenarios is unheard of in tv dramas, but here they're the heart of the show, the thing repeated and highlighted, discussed and fetishized.
Experience is usually what tarnishes a person in Lynch, though that's less clear in Twin Peaks because of the demon metaphor. Still, even here curiosity and corner-cutting snare people one by one, over time, and going back isn't really an option. The way forward, which in Blake's Jerusalem is rather unsatisfyingly figured as hard artistic labor, is unclear in Lynch - young people can pull back, wiser but sadder, after minor missteps, but those gone further astray are only saved by a more or less Christian sorting out of their own good from what obscures it in the face of death, enacted in a physics-violating, hence mental, labyrinth from which what's good finally escapes, usually into a sea of light. The light-enthusiast side of Lynch and the Blake of the epics are both subject to criticism here: if we're innocent why the need for purgation? If God is us, a place or substance we come from, in some sense abide as, and rejoin, we're either pre-saved or can only be saved by chance; if God is separate from us, his having life operate as a car wash full of suffering is even crueler than it is in an Original, rather than Parasitic, Sin scheme. They dodge these problems by having both exist at once - God is both what we already are and the big brother that constructs a world where we can't not regain that knowledge of what we are.
Here again Lynch comes off weirdly better (not that I'd compare them as artists, I'm just saying we don't think of the tangled ideas as an impediment when absorbing what Lynch gives us). Probably this is because we want a screenplay, a story, to have a God of this sort - it's a machine to get something about a person resolved, after all - whereas Blake's fusion of saga and prophecy leaves us not really knowing what we expect. Using actors, Lynch is also able to give faces to both his god and demon groups, so that even when their function is similar to that of Blake's figures, mere personifications of isolated aspects of the personality, they stay concrete and memorable. The more concrete you make God the easier it is to sell us on the compatibility of his all-knowydoiness with his goodness: he looks like us, he's just a guy just a-tryin'. Of course the flipside of this is that it's very hard to keep God concrete enough to be believable as God - you have to vague him away, like Milton, or make him strange, like Lynch's giant and dwarf. Lynch's decision works better, at least in the case of the giant connected to the old man. The giant's sad helplessness was beautiful - it undercut how he could possibly be what he was, given the scheme, but in film image can take precedence over idea, or perhaps I mean scene over story. We need the ideas to get us there, but the final effect can contradict the script's grammar so long as it fits a separate one. I'm not so sure you can do this in poetry - perhaps Carson gets away with it? Ashbery often tries to, but for me he's jarring.
Speaking of the giant, one of Lynch's key, repeated scenes is the spectacle of total pity, where the good in us forgives us by forgiving what's common to everyone - probably the first of which is the opera scene in Elephant Man, unless I'm forgetting something in Eraserhead. It's moved to implausible night clubs in his later work; music-heavy scenes at the edge of a road, illuminated by headlights, are maybe a variation on this one. I think we're to understand that these spectacles keep the good going, even if they often fail to do this for the characters - they're stand-ins for what the film or show is supposed to be. I think one reason the Mulholland Drive club scene so completely supplants the roadhouse scene where the giant returns Cooper's ring is that, like in Lost Highway, it's clearer that there's no apparatus for saving us outside our own imagination. Which is why imagining the right things in time is the only thing that might save us - but the only people who are sad about this are the ones in our own heads. And the ones who see the danger we're in, and they're in - the audience. Our pity is total because the totality has none.
The music for Mulholland Drive does this better too. Twin Peaks' is beautiful and well-integrated into the show, monotonous as it sometimes becomes: there's the happy peaceful calm of the credits theme, of good things being discovered as even better; the jaunty Audrey "but here's something even more exciting, if maybe a bit dangerous" pied piping; the uh-oh, not-as-good-as-we thought tag that's pretty much a slowed down version of Law and Order's "scene change" one; the elaboration of that one when something Darth Vadery is happening. Unfallen, tempted, falling, fallen. Then the exaltation that reworks the heights of the credits theme. But Mulholland Drive's! The promising and sinister are the same damn thing. The exaltation takes place within it, not apart from it - rendering the terrible beautiful but without letting you forget it is terrible. For me it's by far the best-used movie music. I'm not even sure what it would be like by itself - if I heard it separately I'd mentally replay the movie.
Lynch's final episode is probably a waste of genius, the bitter execution of his own dying dog, but pretty riveting nonetheless, especially for the nightmare content.
The narrowness of his range stood out this time, in his non-adaptations, or rather how devoted he is to telling one essential story through a few key tableaux, which of course a lot of great artists have been - Shelley, Bergman, maybe even Shakespeare.
Lynch's vision is scandalously close to Blake's, but Blake's inability to dramatize his myths, maybe his greatest artistic flaw, leaves Lynch looking original. Both believe in a fundamental, abiding human innocence, that can be obscured but never destroyed. Nearly every villain on the show has at least one scene where they reminisce about a more innocent time - and given the large number of people presented as corrupt, hence as potential murderers of Laura, that adds up to a lot of scenes. The manichaeanism of the show (and its music) is only bearable because of this asterisk, which turns good vs evil into people vs an invasive mystery. Matched with this basic Kateness of all Nans is the related phenomenon of most every non-villain giving in to the temptation to transgress boundaries at some point, though usually for a good cause. Neither of these scenarios is unheard of in tv dramas, but here they're the heart of the show, the thing repeated and highlighted, discussed and fetishized.
Experience is usually what tarnishes a person in Lynch, though that's less clear in Twin Peaks because of the demon metaphor. Still, even here curiosity and corner-cutting snare people one by one, over time, and going back isn't really an option. The way forward, which in Blake's Jerusalem is rather unsatisfyingly figured as hard artistic labor, is unclear in Lynch - young people can pull back, wiser but sadder, after minor missteps, but those gone further astray are only saved by a more or less Christian sorting out of their own good from what obscures it in the face of death, enacted in a physics-violating, hence mental, labyrinth from which what's good finally escapes, usually into a sea of light. The light-enthusiast side of Lynch and the Blake of the epics are both subject to criticism here: if we're innocent why the need for purgation? If God is us, a place or substance we come from, in some sense abide as, and rejoin, we're either pre-saved or can only be saved by chance; if God is separate from us, his having life operate as a car wash full of suffering is even crueler than it is in an Original, rather than Parasitic, Sin scheme. They dodge these problems by having both exist at once - God is both what we already are and the big brother that constructs a world where we can't not regain that knowledge of what we are.
Here again Lynch comes off weirdly better (not that I'd compare them as artists, I'm just saying we don't think of the tangled ideas as an impediment when absorbing what Lynch gives us). Probably this is because we want a screenplay, a story, to have a God of this sort - it's a machine to get something about a person resolved, after all - whereas Blake's fusion of saga and prophecy leaves us not really knowing what we expect. Using actors, Lynch is also able to give faces to both his god and demon groups, so that even when their function is similar to that of Blake's figures, mere personifications of isolated aspects of the personality, they stay concrete and memorable. The more concrete you make God the easier it is to sell us on the compatibility of his all-knowydoiness with his goodness: he looks like us, he's just a guy just a-tryin'. Of course the flipside of this is that it's very hard to keep God concrete enough to be believable as God - you have to vague him away, like Milton, or make him strange, like Lynch's giant and dwarf. Lynch's decision works better, at least in the case of the giant connected to the old man. The giant's sad helplessness was beautiful - it undercut how he could possibly be what he was, given the scheme, but in film image can take precedence over idea, or perhaps I mean scene over story. We need the ideas to get us there, but the final effect can contradict the script's grammar so long as it fits a separate one. I'm not so sure you can do this in poetry - perhaps Carson gets away with it? Ashbery often tries to, but for me he's jarring.
Speaking of the giant, one of Lynch's key, repeated scenes is the spectacle of total pity, where the good in us forgives us by forgiving what's common to everyone - probably the first of which is the opera scene in Elephant Man, unless I'm forgetting something in Eraserhead. It's moved to implausible night clubs in his later work; music-heavy scenes at the edge of a road, illuminated by headlights, are maybe a variation on this one. I think we're to understand that these spectacles keep the good going, even if they often fail to do this for the characters - they're stand-ins for what the film or show is supposed to be. I think one reason the Mulholland Drive club scene so completely supplants the roadhouse scene where the giant returns Cooper's ring is that, like in Lost Highway, it's clearer that there's no apparatus for saving us outside our own imagination. Which is why imagining the right things in time is the only thing that might save us - but the only people who are sad about this are the ones in our own heads. And the ones who see the danger we're in, and they're in - the audience. Our pity is total because the totality has none.
The music for Mulholland Drive does this better too. Twin Peaks' is beautiful and well-integrated into the show, monotonous as it sometimes becomes: there's the happy peaceful calm of the credits theme, of good things being discovered as even better; the jaunty Audrey "but here's something even more exciting, if maybe a bit dangerous" pied piping; the uh-oh, not-as-good-as-we thought tag that's pretty much a slowed down version of Law and Order's "scene change" one; the elaboration of that one when something Darth Vadery is happening. Unfallen, tempted, falling, fallen. Then the exaltation that reworks the heights of the credits theme. But Mulholland Drive's! The promising and sinister are the same damn thing. The exaltation takes place within it, not apart from it - rendering the terrible beautiful but without letting you forget it is terrible. For me it's by far the best-used movie music. I'm not even sure what it would be like by itself - if I heard it separately I'd mentally replay the movie.
