Critique of Twin Peaks
by David Koukal, Cybertek, Inc
with many thanks to John R. Andrews
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The moral of "Twin Peaks."
To wax enthusiastic over a television program
for only a long moment: What are we to make of the dark end of Lynch's
nightmare vision? An absurdist morality play with an uncanny ability to both
entertain and disturb (rare in a medium that usually leaves no lasting
intellectual or emotional impressions on its audience), a story that reached
the heights of comedy, a TV program that achieved a style never before seen
via that medium, a tale rich in metaphor and motif that, in the end, was
simply too good for its audienceafter all this, how can we conscience its
irrevocably terrifying conclusion? "Twin Peaks" was a soap opera with a
difference: whereas the average sample of the genre limpidly animates its
characters through a variety of motivations, some more admirable than others,
Lynch boldly drew large the antithetics of good and evil and made his
characters prisoners within the resulting turmoil. This brought a vitality
to the story notably missing from the workaday soap. All in all, the
violence was more jarringly violent, the erotic more so, not by relying on
gratuity but because of superior (and more dramatic) animating agents. The
good were more pure, the bad more menacingly sinister when motivated by
forces that were by pragmatic, "realistic" standards fundamentally irrational
(after all, who is really that good, that bad?). The simple and the complex
were thereby combined, creating a relationship which generated both mystical
beauty and base, even taboo, tragedy. Lynch spoke compellingly to forces
considered superstitious by our supposedly sophisticated secularism, and that
he did so in the seemingly "mined out" genre of the soap opera is a testament
to his accomplishments not only as a director of great style but also as a
satirist, moralist, and social critic. Some would say that such terms are
wasted on a director that merely possesses a good eye (not to mention an ear
that has elevated the soundtrack to an art form in and of itself), but I would
insist on their applicability. Obviously, Lynch was satirizing soap
operas. For the most part soaps have pretenses to a glamorous realism but at
the same time offer plots that are improbable; in this respect "Twin Peaks"
was hardly different. Occasionally soaps test the bounds of credibility,
and so did "Twin Peaks"; is there any real difference between the freezing of
Port Charles (of "General Hospital" fame) and the UFO's which abducted Major
Briggs? Lynch introduced four elements to the genre that distinguished his
creation from the rest. First, he chose to emphasize the "unreal" component
of soaps by combining metaphor and motif with absurdity and surrealism in
order to challenge the sensibilities of his audience. Second, he assumed
the intelligence of his audience (a bold assumption) by presenting them with
mysteries they could become involved in. (On the whole, the plot of "Twin
Peaks" was abnormally cohesive by TV standards; basically, everything "fit,"
which allowed the audience to play Lynch's game..) Third, by simply applying
his genius as a director, he showed his audience how good a soap could look.
Last and most important, Lynch presented a moral spectrum that re-acquainted
his audience with the almost medieval concepts of good and evil. In the
beginning Lynch's characters seemed to be motivated by workaday soap opera
vices (greed, jealousy, envy, adultery, lust, etc.). However, as the plot
confronted more and more socially taboo subjects (pornography, incest,
torture, sado-masochism), the story started to spin away from superficially
material explanations of human behavior. It became more and more apparent
that his characters were agents of forces beyond themselves, converting
human failings to human tragedy. Lynch's metaphysical and at times mystical
framework more readily explained switches in character, which in the
conventional soap occur mainly to shift the formula of the pseudo drama onto
another tack and re-generate a neverending story line. Lynch's characters
were not motivated by the producer's need to "spice up" a stale story; nor
were they motivated by the allure of material gain. Rather, they were
motivated because they inhabited a certain point on Lynch's moral spectrum,
and the closer a character came to either end of this spectrum (Cooper at one
end, Killer Bob at the other), the more intriguing they became. Simply put,
Lynch enticed us with moral extremes, and in so doing revealed the
irredeemable shallowness of soaps in general. In satirizing the soap opera
(though some would say it is difficult to satirize anything so self-
satirizing), Lynch was by extension satirizing American society (one would
encounter similar difficulties, I should think); this in turn justifies my
appellations of "moralist" and "social critic," for a satirist must be both.
Lynch began his critique in the "perfect place" of Rockwellian myth. The
town of Twin Peaks was surrounded by the unspoiled natural splendor of the
Pacific Northwest, and peopled by persons with almost uniformly WASPish last
names. A single Native American and one Oriental woman conspired to spoil
their pristine whiteness. True to the "small town" myth, everyone knew
everyone else (quite a trick considering the population stood at 51,201; Twin
Peaks was actually a small city), and one could be sure that they didn't lock
their doors at night. The sheriff's name was Harry Truman, bringing to mind
a more innocent, commonsensical era; Doc Hayward made house calls; the coffee
and the cherry pie at the R & R cafe was revered by all; the women were the
picture of luminous purity and wore tight sweaters. Though some were
certainly characters, "simple" and "decent" were the adjectives most
rightfully applied to the citizens of Twin Peaks, two words that have been
elevated to ideals in the American cultural lexicon. In Twin Peaks, as in
the lexicon the town embodied, there was no place for tragedy and evil.
Enter Dale Cooper, more an agent of good (read "simple" and "decent") than of
the F.B.I., in town to investigate the disappearance of the typically
overachieving and loved-by-all homecoming queen Laura Palmer. Laura had
secrets, and upon her death these were revealed by Cooper and Truman in-
between their sporadic celebrations of the American utopia, which consists
mainly of strong coffee, fresh air, and good pie. Laura's secrets were a
litany of American cultural taboos: vixen, coke freak, prostitute, entry in
flesh magazine, hints of sado-masochism, and finally and most
dramatically, victim of child abuse and incest, the ultimate affront to
the American sensibility of clean optimism. As the investigation
continued the secrets of the town were uncovered, and beneath the
seemingly pleasant surface of the Rockwellian myth Cooper discovered that no
one was innocent; virtually everyone was tainted with secrets as shameful
as Laura's. The ever-optimistic Cooper stubbornly pursued the truth; his pure
goodness shone in the night, which increasingly exposed twin realities.
In the end, these realities created between them a dissonance which could
not be reconciled. Ultimately, this optimism was the target of Lynch's
critique, and it was an attack worthy of Voltaire's admiration. (Indeed,
Lynch's analysis of American optimism was if anything more devastating because
there is no formal rationale for such an optimism, such as the Leibnizian
philosophy which provided the foundation for the optimism that was the object
of Voltaire's venomous assault.) In challenging his audience to reconcile
their culturally-imbued optimism with the darkest details of American life
(a life we know to be real; our mass media sensationalizes every detail,
and we voyeuristically lap up every morsel), Lynch drove home the point
that these things cannot be "simply" explained away by "decency"; in point of
fact,.they defy most known standards of decency. These things will not
go away, proclaimed Lynch, by optimistically wishing them to do so; i.e.,
American optimism is a chimera, a morality without content. Since this
optimistic creed is unable to remedy or even explain these dark details,
Lynch suggested another tack. He asked us to entertain the possibility
of pure evil, and the tragedy which accompanies it. Lynch was most
vulnerable to charges of misogyny, and admittedly "Twin Peaks" was highly
sexual (though I do not necessarily equate misogyny with eroticism).
Women suffered grievously at his hands. While masculine characters
occupied both extremes of the moral spectrum, Lynch's feminine characters
resided somewhere in the middle, mere decorative props costumed in the most
outrageously revealing outfits, and they were without exception negative,
weak, victimized, morally flawedor all of the above. Women seemed to be
the fodder for Lynch's narrative, i.e., they were simply meant to be
used. The strongest female character was possibly Norma Jennings, and she was
ever victimized by the vacillating memory of her lover's wife and a
weakness for her convict husband. Another candidate would be Audrey
Horne, who by all accounts was the most independent but also scheming and
manipulative. Lucy Moran was appealing, but with her Betty Boop voice and
awkward pregnancy she became a figure of fun. The rest were all peripheral,
abused, raped, or deceased. One may attempt to excuse this as simply
another part of Lynch's satire; after all, sex is half of what soap operas
are all about, violence being the other half. By displaying his sexism so
blatantly perhaps Lynch was revealing the heavily implied sexism of soaps
in general. Yet there was an exhibitionistic cruelty to Lynch's sexism,
a meanness that seemed unnecessarily excessive; in the end, he went beyond mere
sexism. Perhaps Lynch was elevating his point to social satire and claiming an
insight into the American male libido. Perhaps he is claiming that this
sexuality is based not on feminist notions of mutuality but on a disturbing
notion of misogyny. Whatever its origin, the misogyny of "Twin Peaks" was all
the more disturbing in light of the fact that most male viewers which I spoke
with tended to find the series highly erotic, while most female viewers found
its sexuality abhorrent (which would prove Lynch's point if he was indeed
making such a point). In the end, the question of whether Lynch is a
misogynist or was merely port in misogyny remains an open one to my mind. on
charges of excessive violence Lynch fares better, but make no mistake: in my
opinion "Twin Peaks" was the most violent program ever to be seen on prime time
television. The scenes depicting the deaths of Laura and her cousin Maddy were
the most devastating portrayals of violence I have ever seen on the small
screen. Even the death of Ben Horne, while containing an element of slapstick,
communicated an even greater element of horror, and the incidents of violence
that produced a weeping Deputy Andy conveyed a lasting feeling of pathos to the
audience. These scenes of violence were among Lynch's most impressive
accomplishments. They were effective not because of their clinical realism
(people bled in "Twin Peaks," but not excessively so); rather, Lynch invested
these scenes with an emotional energy that was disorienting and ultimately
terrifying. This energy accounted for and justified the violence (in terms of
the plot), and at the same time acted as the medium through which the horror
was passed on to the audience. Lynch's situations of impending violence seemed
close, claustrophobic, emotionally taut. This overlaying fabric of tension was
stretched tighter and tighter until it was inevitably torn to shreds by the
participants in the scene. The horrifying emotional din that resulted exposed
the inherent irrationality that surrounds and produces acts of violence. That
this violence was explicitly linked to pure evil only contributed to its
horror. All of this involved little blood, and no exposure of internal organs;
if we were revolted by Lynch's violence it was an emotional, not a physical,
revulsion. Any nightmares experienced in our sleep were due not to the realism
of any physical wounds we may have seen, but to the realism of the emotional
wounds Lynch left on the psyche of his charactersand by extension, on the
psyche of his audience. Ultimately, Lynch's tonic to the pseudoviolence that
predominates the visual mediums was to remind us that we should not be immune
to the terror of the idea of violence, as opposed to the mere spectacle of
violence. Rather than banalize violent acts through the clinical repetition of
a supposed realism, Lynch made violence emotionally real in all of its
corrosive uglinessour visual arts need more of this kind of violence. The
story of "Twin Peaks" was flawed in minor ways, but generally these flaws
sprung from the ambition of Lynch's project; Lynch actually had something to
say, whereas most in television are content to simply spoof the more
superficial aspects of reality. Though flawed itself, "Twin Peaks" implicitly
revealed the greatest flaw intrinsic to the genre (and the society) it was
satirizing, namely, that successful soap operas never end, which ultimately
renders their content meaningless. A story ever-unfolding with no conclusion
becomes something other than a storyit becomes a chaotic collection of
sensate fragments only marginally related to one another, a confusing plethora
of words and details unrooted in a forgotten beginning and never seeming to
advance towards any known end. Deprived of these touchstones the audience is
abandoned to find its own way, and of course it never will. All narrative must
end, or else it means nothing. The metaphor of the narrative is perfectly
applicable to society, history, metaphysics. Detached from all philosophical,
cosmological, and theological "ends," the audience of mankind is concerned only
with "means." In the absence of any projected conclusions, meaningful advances
are no longer possible. Indeed, the soap opera is the perfect analogy for mass
society: a clamoring aggregation ignorant of both its past and its future but
enamored with a dynamically stultified present. Obligingly, Lynch broke with
the genre and brought his narrative to an end, disturbing in itself but doubly
so in its content. In this end Lynch delivered the fatal blow to our mindless
optimism and made a distressing statement about the natures of both good and
evil, namely: The naive logic of the good is no match for the irrational
genius of evil. Ben and Audrey Horne's sincere conversions to altruism were
for naught as their lives ended through the machinations of evil, and Cooper,
for all his brilliance and mystical insight, could not consistently triumph
evil; he was overwhelmed by its many forms. Cooper's ultimate absorption by
evil may have seemed ambiguous to the hopeful; after all, he had traded his
soul for Annie's life. But the hopeful ignore the fact that Annie would now
surely be a victim of the evil within Cooperthe supreme irony. Make no
mistake, pure good was irrevocably vanquished; in this Lynch broke an unstated
rule of the medium when he allowed pure evil this triumph. In creating these
portraits of good and evil and their respective mediums of love and fear
(correlatives to the traditional formula of sex and violence), Lynch seemed to
be stating that fear held a decisive edge over love, both in sheer coercive
power and in its ability to deceive. Whether we agree with this disturbing
assessment or not, one thing beyond dispute is that this conclusion had no
place on television, the oracle of the cult of clean happiness. Ultimately,
this ending would sell no soap.
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