Twin Peaks (Season 2)

The second season of David Lynch's notorious TV melodrama, Twin Peaks ends with the resolution of most of the mysteries involving the death of Laura Palmer -- this end point concludes the eighth episode of series 2.  This is the 17th episode of the program as a whole and, apparently, there are 13 more parts to the original Twin Peaks on tap on Netflix.  (A third season premieres in May starring many of the actors who appeared in the initial outing a quarter century ago.)  By reputation, the remaining 13 episodes aired in 1991 and 1992 embody a significant decline in the show's quality -- a program already profoundly mannered becomes, it is alleged, even more stylistically perverse.   Merely baroque flourishes become mannerist in the show's decadence.  Since I recall nothing about Twin Peaks' swan-song and alleged decine, I will have to make final assessments after watching the show's final 13 parts.  I do have some faint recollection that even after the series imploded, Lynch continued to toy with its premises and ventured a film prequel, Twin Peaks - Fire Walk with Me, a movie universally derided by critics but that I recall admiring with sufficient enthusiasm to debate with skeptical friends. 

Seventeen episodes of Twin Peaks is about 15 hours of television and, certainly, represents enough investment in the program to draw some general conclusions.  Although Twin Peaks was, more or less, sui generis at the time that it first aired, I now have some basis for comparison with later works, chief among them Raul Ruiz' Mysteries of Lisbon, a Portuguese TV show that was redacted to a five hour film and shown briefly in this country.  Both Twin Peaks and Mysteries of Lisbon are essentially 19th century popular fiction adapted for television -- the plots are complex with innumerable vividly delineated and eccentric characters:  people thought to be dead reappear in disguise and there are bizarre coincidences, obsessional vendettas, and obscure genealogies -- characters turn out to be related in unexpected ways and amour fou with other varieties of madness is ubiquitous.  Ultimately, Twin Peaks is rooted in Victorian and pre-Victorian novels -- it is like Middlemarch on hallucinogens and the more lurid parts of Dickens mixed with more than a little Dostoevski.  As is characteristic, the second year's episodes exaggerate and, even, caricature people and situations established with more tact in the 1990 series.  The show has not yet developed new narratives and, so, it must be content with amplifying points made previously.  This is particularly clear in that series two of Twin Peaks (through the 17th episode) not only solves Laura Palmer's murder, the mystery motivating the show's plot, but, also, restages her death in a particularly grievous and alarming way.  Lynch and his co-writer Frost can't quite figure out a way to mature the narrative beyond its Poe-like obsession with the death of a beautiful, pale, young woman and so the show simply posits a Laura Palmer look-alike, another luscious gamine adolescent girl played by the same actress -- she is supposed to be Laura's cousin -- and similarly slaughtered for our delectation, this time in a bloody scene staged in relentless close-ups.  The effect is disheartening -- Lynch and Frost seem to suggest that girls like Laura Palmer, free-spirited and sexually adventurous, must necessarily be sacrificed at the altar of their father's lust and cruelty.  Lynch's work, most notably Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, often features a conspiracy of teenage amateur detectives working with the gee-whiz fervor of the Hardy Boys to solve a sinister adult mystery.   But the stakes are always shockingly high -- the Boy Scout heroes are working against horrific villains who think nothing of torturing teenage girls to death.  The weird mismatch between the can-do optimism and fervor of the amateur sleuths and their vicious adversaries is part of the kinky appeal of Lynch's plots.  Thus, there is an inevitable misdirection in Lynch's narrative.  The audience expects a Hardy Boys plot and denouement and is ill-prepared for the psychopathic mayhem actually on display -- things become very grim and serious with lightning rapidity.  I have made this point before but it bears repeating:  People remember Twin Peaks as a quirky comedy with droll, eccentric characters.  The whimsy, however, is tangential to Lynch's true purposes which are unseemly and perverse.  In the sixth episode of the Twin Peaks season two, Lynch achieves the dramatic high point in the Laura Palmer narrative -- unlike other episodes Lynch directs a script written by his partner, Mark Frost, so we confront the unvarnished products of Lynch's imagination.  We discover that Laura Palmer's father, the avuncular grief-stricken Leland is inhabited by a feral, long-haired monster who howls and rages like a wolf.  When Leland looks in the mirror, he sees this monster, a spirit named Bob, instead of his own face.  Leland Palmer has already raped and tortured to death his own daughter.  In the sixth episode of Season Two, he beats to death Laura's Doppelgaenger, her cousin from Missoula.  This part of the narrative appeals to Lynch and he pulls out all the stops, filming the last third of the episode with white-hot ferocity.  Agent Cooper had gone to the Roadhouse tavern with Sheriff Harry S. Truman.  A pale woman appears on a red stage and sings a torch song that is so voluptuously lugubrious it seems that she can scarcely keep her eyes open.  At Leland Palmer's house, all hell has broken out.  Lynch films the interiors of the house, an ordinary suburban dwelling, from a perspective about two inches off the carpet, tracking along the floor with ominous The Shining-style camera movements -- the moving camera and the doleful music make the chairs and tables in the house look sinister mesas and buttes in a blasted desert.  Leland Palmer's wife, for some reason unknown to us, is crawling across the floor like a worm, dragging herself by her arms -- we can't see her hindquarters and have the disconcerting sense that the woman has been ripped in half.  The show cuts back to the Roadhouse where the female singer has drifted into a trance.  Hank Worden is sitting at the bar.  He's the tall, skinny, bald-headed man who played side-kick to John Wayne in about a dozen movies, most famously acting the part of Mose Harper in The Searchers.  We have seen him before as "The World's Most Decrepit Room Service Waiter", a deranged fellow who forced milk and cookies on Agent Cooper as he lay bleeding to death on the floor of his room at "The Great Northern".  We're astonished to see this man, the actor Hank Worden, still alive -- he seemed to be immemorially ancient in The Searchers in the mid-fifties.  Hank Worden gestures to Cooper and we see that he is very tall and improbably emaciated -- he has been filmed to emphasize his gauntness throughout the show.  Worden is a kind of giant and, immediately, Lynch cuts to the stage where the musicians in their doleful trance vanish -- another gaunt and haggard-looking giant appears on stage and says in huge and eerie close-up "It's happening again"; he has an accent that we can't quite place.  Lynch then cuts to Leland Palmer's house where Bob is shrieking and gnashing his teeth.  Palmer/Bob savagely punches the girl who looks like his daughter in the face and there is blood everywhere.  Palmer's wife continues her implacable creeping like a worm in the carpet.  An exterior shot shows a well-lit suburban house with the most horrible screams emerging from it.  This is genuinely terrifying -- each appearance of the leering, sparkly eyed Bob is shocking.  As with the scene in which Agent Cooper was shot, the room service waiter, merely giving him a thumb's up and setting his milk and cookies on the night-stand, no one does anything to rescue the doomed girl -- the show has slipped into one of its periodic moments of paralysis.  Leland Palmer/Bob beats the girl to death and the episode ends.  This is alarming stuff and the conviction with which Lynch stages the murder is unseemly and disturbing. 

At this juncture, a few general observations about Lynch's themes and technique can be made.  As with Hawthorne, Lynch locates the Power of Darkness or evil in the primordial forests.  There is something lurking in the woods.  "The owls are not what they seem."  The owl represents relentless predation and Lynch suggests that his murderer is a kind of predatory animal in human form -- Bob howls but doesn't seem able to speak.  It a characteristic of Lynch's strange atavism, his "arrested development", that his vision of evil is essentially pre-adolescent -- evil is associated with adult sex, an enigmatic subject, and has something to do with monsters.  Mutilated or malformed people are couriers of the gods -- as in Mayan mythology, Lynch's dwarves and haggard giants, his one-armed man, and the other grotesques that haunt his films are seers, cousins to the hermaphroditic Tiresias.  In his world, bikers and juvenile delinquents pursue jailbait bobby-soxers -- again, Lynch's sexual impulses seem trapped in some version of fifties exploitation cinema.  Two modes of paralysis exist:  people mutter banal truisms with a flat-line affect, conversation is limited to clichés that everyone speaks but not one seems to believe.  In the Roadhouse, while Palmer is murdering the girl, the characters seem becalmed, drinking their beer and eating peanuts.  At key moments, the sense of urgency simply drains out of the characters and is replaced by a dreamlike torpor.  The other mode of paralysis is musical -- music induces trance states; people croon with their eyes closed on stages draped with placental-colored red velvet.  Angelo Badalamenti's score suggests different modes of ecstasy, all of which are soporific and numbing -- music enters a person and they close their eyes, dance slowly, infected, it seems, by some kind of insidious virus.  At the end of the Laura Palmer plot arc, an argument occurs in a sunny forest.  Is  evil an invasive force that possesses us from outside, something come to roost in our psyches from the dark woods?  Or is evil merely an embodiment as it were of all the conscious decisions that we have made, a sort of Frankenstein monster constructed of all of our misdeeds, and, now, confronting us with as simulacra of life?  Or, finally, is there an intrinsically evil aspect of each man or woman, a shadow personality, that can emerge and oust the ordinarily lawful and decent persona from control over events?  These are three distinct interpretations as to the interaction between Bob and Leland Palmer.  Lynch is very literal-minded:  opposing evil is a stolid and dutiful FBI agent, Harry S. Truman, the embodiment of small-town rectitude, Albert, an FBI agents who invokes science as the solution of human problems, Hawk, a Native-American lawman expert in his understanding of the woods and their darkness, and, finally, a military man engaged in shadowy and top-secret transactions in the defense of the nation.  These five men represent the powers arrayed against the darkness, each possessing his own instruments and expertise, and each presenting a certain stereotypical virtue.  It is reassuring to see all of these men together on screen at the end of the Laura Palmer plot, an envoi as it were to the viewer, suggesting that all will be well.  But the final image is a great owl flying from the light -- a tunnel representing the Bardo that the Buddhist Cooper repeatedly references -- toward the camera.  Since owls symbolize the predatory aspect of nature, an inescapable element in the dark woods, it is by no means clear who will gain the upper hand in the end.