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LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 35

Publication:
LA Weeklyi
Location:
Los Angeles, California
Issue Date:
Page:
35
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

World of Doughnuts The real secrets of Twin Peaks VIRGINIA LEE HUNTER The first time I saw this new spin at work in the pilot with all its kinkiness, perverse humor and melodramatic emotionalism it reminded me of something, but I wasnt sure what. Later, I realized that Twin Peaks gives me much the same thrill I get from Kiss Me Deadly, Written on the Wind, The Crimson Kimono, Touch of Eiil and Vertigo to name a few of the perverse, underappreciated 50s movies made just at the time when Hollywood studios (like the TV net-woiks today) felt their audience slipping away all too quickly. Then, as now, the most talented artists were searching for angles madness, nymphomania, anarchic weirdness to revitalize forms flattened out by endless repetition. (Unlike now, however, those movies creatois didnt grace the covers of chic magazines, nor were they billed as the great hopes of the film industry.) David Lynch passed his adolescence in the 50s, and, despite its halfhearted drugs plot and a timeless cast dredged up from die collective unconscious of Variety stringers, Twin Peaks' world springs from the small-town ethos of the Eisenhower years. Women are either passive or naughty.

Black people and gays arent part of the picture. Juvenile delinquents and muscular truckers are the scariest people on Earth. Brothels are places of ineffably seductive licentiousness, with sleeky madams named Blackie and party girls as sweet and accessible as so many glazed doughnuts. One Eyed Jacks is a 50s teenage boys fantasy Sodom as Disneyland. And this is certainly appropriate to a world whose hero (and Lynch surrogate), a squeaky-clean FBI agent, is himself an adolescents projection of mastery.

Special Agent Dale Cooper is almost relentlessly healthy as he attempts to put things right and reaffirm Twin Peaks sense of community and meaning. For all its violence and evil (yet essentially benevolent) humor, the same can be said of Twin Peaks, whose effect on its fans a marginal group of 15 million or 20 million has been to give them an obsession in common. I was abroad when Twin Peaks first aired, and though I loved watching the reruns, I felt cheated of an essential part of the experience. Traveling around the country awhile back, I kept hearing the same story: how people who seldom talked to each other began chortling over the same Twin Peaks moments, how everybody worried the same clues (when Bobby barks in the jail is he really saying the letter found under Laura Palmers how every Friday the talk around the office was about the dwarf in that dream sequence or Leos soap-in-a-sock. Even now, months later, my gosh-and-giggle Iowa cousins insist that riulngW 'J.

'f i f' ft rt try green color coding and its reliance on Angelo Badalainentis incomparable music (imagine hearing that in an elevator to the 50th floor), it accentuates moods and emotions previously shunned by American TV. Prime times never dared anything like Mrs. Palmers agonized crying jag when she hears about Laura; for once, a character actually has an appropriate response to a loved ones death. Equally unfettered is Twin Peaks humor, ranging from playful throwaways about Ben 8c Jerrys Ice Cream to such trademark, goofy-wicked moments as dim waitress Shelly spoofing Leland Palmers wacko leap onto his daughters coffin. Yet what seems avant-garde on TV is usually not avant-garde once you turn the set off.

Saturday Night Live passed for revolutionary in 1975 by making the kind of jokes that with-it types had been making since Lenny Bruce ODd; Twin Peaks' comic style was already familiar to millions from the movies (not least Blue Velvet), 80s fringe comics (including the one that generated The Simpsons) and the endless stream of wry, queasy jokes that sluice through our daily lives. Twin Peaks didnt really create its audience; rather it corralled the millions already primed for its mixture of mysterioso storytelling and jokes about doughnut platters the size of shuffleboard courts. But because television reaches so many people more people watch Twin Peaks each week than have ever seen Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart combined its offerings can change the whole cultural terrain. Within weeks, David Lynch became a hip icon and Twin Peaks a model of how to save network Rome from cables rampaging Vandals. I only hope that those TV execs slavishly searching for the next Twin Peaks have the sense to realize that theres nothing really revolutionary about the show.

True, it has enough style to feed Michael Mann for a year; true, it sends up and overturns the conventions of high-gloss schlock. But only to revive the melodramatic impulse and old-fashioned plotting that produce its most breathtaking moments: Benjamin Horne crooning This is the stuff that dreams are made of, as he unwittingly heads in to fuck his daughter. With its cachet of serious art. Twin Peaks lets sophisticated (or hip, or pretentious) viewers enjoy the pleasures found in romances, crime novels or anything likely to star Joan Collins: naked emotions, preening villains, serpentine schemes and scads of entertaining characters whose stories tie up as neatly and provocatively as the cherry stem in Audrey Hornes talented mouth. Like most fans.

Im eager to find out why Laura Palmer was killed, but I also watch to check in with a bunch of characters whose peculiarities I enjoy and whose unpredictable destinies Im eager to see. Lynch and Frost have put a new spin on traditional storytelling, nothing more, and Im responding as I should. I want to see whats going to happen next. (Wonder what ol Audreys up to this week?) BY JOHN POWERS Lauras still alive (and theyve never seen Laura) Creating this kind of common obsession may sound less impressive than some of the overweening claims originally made for the show, but who cares? The show does one of the most valuable things that popular culture can do: however temporarily, it brings disparate people together. Try this at home.

wmm- 'Mir HEN THE PILOT FIRST AIRED LAST SPRING. Twin Peaks was treated as a cultural sensation something deep and disturbing, and on network TV to boot. Here was an avant-garde show filled with big themes about the dark side of our souls, a radical expose of the worms wriggling beneath the grin of small-town America. (Alfred Hitchcock saw through that grin in Shadow of a Doubt, 47 years earlier.) Brainy publications gave it the dreaded encomium postmodern (meaning, essentially, (hat its makers had seen Laura and Dallas) and pontificated about Laura Palmers body as fetish object In the weeks that followed, this official line began to seem rather silly as Twin Peaks turned into something less ambitious, yet more sheerly fun than the pilot a terrific TV show, with all the frothy weightlessness that implies. To be honest, my own feelings for the show were captured less by the thoughtful, trend-conscious reviewers that sang its artiness and depth than by junky mags like People or 7V Guide, which actually wrote one of its synopses from the point of view of the Log Ladys log.

Not to say, of course, that Twin Peaks is routine TV. With its flagrant orangeblue- 1 151 MIAVCAN CHRONICUX THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC ljy new documentary series from Lynch In 1 Frost, shows the horrors of television huh without a popular touch. The fact it even reached the air made you realize two things: Twin Peaks has temporarily given Lynch and Frost carte blanche, and network execs are now thrashing around like the pallbearers at the Ayatollah Khomeinis funeral. Created by Mark Frost alone a more significant credit than you might initially suspect American Chronicles is, Frost says, dedicated to an eclectic sight sound journey across Amer- SEPTEMBER 28-OCTOBER 4, 1990 LA WEEKLY 35.

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About LA Weekly Archive

Pages Available:
162,014
Years Available:
1978-1999