WHY I LIKE THE NEW TWIN PEAKS AND WHY I DON'T THINK DAVID LYNCH IS WEIRD

Music fan or lyrics fan? We humans are a nasty bunch and like seeing people join lines. One of them is saying something like: music is the pure expression of the emotions. The other: the music wouldn't be there if the words weren't, they guide the music. I'm in the first line. I love religious music from the Renaissance. It's often only vocal but the words can never mean much to me because they are (a) religious and (b) usually in Latin. But the music can lift my heart with every play.

The recent hefty four episode beginning of the Twin Peaks reboot has seen the sides drawn up along similar lines. Some want more of the quirky dark of the original series and others, like me, could not be more pleased at the intensity of the new vision. I think there's a way between and I think that it will only come to those who wait.

The common wisdom of the first run of Twin Peaks is that it was a compelling mystery until the killer was outed and then just turned whacky, lost its way and tried, like fruit trees at the end of their lives, to give as much as possible at the last moment. The suits at the network forced the big answer out of Lynch and Frost and the vacuum left in the wake was all quirk and cuteness. Windom Earle wasn't scary enough to darken the froth. There was a lot of plot, more than the first season, but the music had gone soft.

And then came the finale in the red room, both white and black lodges depending on how courageous you felt. The red curtains, zigzag floor pattern were lit a little too high but the events and dialogue gave out a lot of lovely slippery unreality that ended with the worst that could happen. Come back, Dave, all is forgiven. But that was it and the David Lynch, whose name was known after Blue Velvet and had become an adjective after Twin Peaks was, to the best reckoning of the mainstream, as much a one-hit wonder as Men Without Hats.

Now he's back, they're back, it is hap-en-ning ag-gain. A call back from the finale between Cooper and Laura repeats the promise of the return in twenty-five years. A sombre version of the opening credits sequence plays out with the familiar twang of the theme and we're in. Well, we're somewhere. Black and white. The giant gives an aged Cooper a few cryptic pointers. There's a little bit of the old Twin Peaks world but everything has changed. No one comes into the diner yodelling about pie and coffee. Mostly, the Coop, still bad from the finale but gnarled by age and evil, is loose in the land. He enters in a car the way his good self did at the very beginning but it's in a nightscape with an ugly rock remix blasting. The good self is back in the lodge getting schooled in the situation. There's a murder case somewhere else and a dismal room in Manhattan with a glass box surrounded by electronics. We're in deep.

Which is the problem for a fair few on the social media commentariat. We get four hours of this bleakness, these strange settings (even in an infinite starfield in one scene), scary looking beings appearing and disappearing and some industrial strength ugliness. So where are the cute teens, snappy one-liner dialogue between the worldly and corrupt adults and the cosy unease? Where, also, is the story that we are might cling to? Who is the protagonist? Have we waited this long for such a mess of hints of greatest hits and stale whimsy served as fresh?

Well, that's what I've been reading, not seeing on the screen. I enjoyed seeing the brothers Horne again as well as the life at the station. But I LOVED the new lodge sequences, the unnerving new places and soundscapes. Yes, a lot of it seems disjointed and chaotic but I won't have try-hard or cheap surrealism flung at it. Why? Because a very clear arc is forming with two opposing forces in places as dark and nasty as where the original series left off. Did anyone really expect Cooper to get over the state he was in as though it were a head cold? There's a lot of climbing back to do and it has to start in some ugly places. That is actually as true to the original series as we could have hoped, at least initially.

Also, Lynch has done a fair few films since the early nineties and with one exception they have been getting increasingly intense with a lightless Twin Peaks prequel and three tilts at extreme fugue states, ending in his toughest since Eraserhead with Inland Empire. If anything, the pleasanter, familiar moments in the new series seem like the anomalies.

Another aspect I'm enjoying is the sense of the swansong happening here. There are aesthetic nods to everything Lynch has done from his student films to his painting and sculpture. There are even things taken from unproduced projects: the identity confusion in one thread owes a lot to the goofy One Saliva Bubble and there are plenty of glints and ideas from Ronnie Rocket. Lynch has declared that he and cinema are done and that this would be it forever. Like the scenes in the original finale that repeated moments from the pilot we are seeing Lynch stroll around his works and recall moments that are then mixed into the business at hand.

If you want energetic plotting you should remind yourself of the restless narrative threads of the second season of the original series which became all plot without point. Or you could revisit the alien conspiracy arc of the X-Files which stoushed any slight answer with louder questions. Or the entire run of Lost. You might want to remind yourself that one season of Breaking Bad kept inserting images of stuffed toys in a swimming pool which went unexplained until the final episode. You might recall that the great Mad Men more than once ended its seasons on notes so down they felt like second-last scenes. Remember the finale of the Sopranos? I mean the very very last minute or so. The golden age of television which followed Twin Peaks (and contributed to its birth and character) changed the game to include a lot of variety of approach. Still want fun quirk and stories? Take a look at Fargo or Mozart in the Jungle. They do both as a matter of course and are really, really good at them. This Twin Peaks isn't like that because it can't be ... yet.

But what about all that weird imagery, all that cod surrealism? Isn't that just a big wanky time waste? Not to me but I don't think of it that way. I also don't think of David Lynch movies as weird. First, when I see the eyeless woman in the purple room who tries with pathetic grunts to prevent Cooper from opening a door I see someone who is frightened. The scene is arrestingly strange but has a clear internal logic. As with all the more intense Lynch stuff, if you think it's alienating or baffling, clock the emotion and follow that (there is always clear emotion in a Lynch scene, overblown or not but always); it will pretty much always take you somewhere. A viewing of Inland Empire might be too big an ask but try a few scenes of it with this in mind and leave off trying to interpret symbolism and see how you get on with it that way (it might well still seem like crap but nothing's for everyone).

Second, I see scenes like that and want to walk around in them. Lynch's style is, for me at least, powerfully imaginative. When I saw the red room sequence in the advanced pilot for the original series (released on VHS rental here in 1990), as much as I enjoyed the loopy dialogue or noirish atmosphere of the main body I wanted as much of the series to come to be set in that curtained place where people say things backwards and origami birds fly past as shadows through the curtains. When the show turned out to be as conventional as it was I got into it but felt let down. And then when it went goofy it lost me. The music faded and the words bred like insects. Then the finale happened and things got back to where I wanted. And then it ended. Now it's back and where I wanted it to be, heavy on imagination with some pleasant call backs.

You want plot and the spirit of the old show? I think you'll get both. We have a tale that has drawn battle lines in the first few scenes and developed them already. The character interaction in the perceptibly real world is plausible and the look and feel of the world beyond life and death (as the finale was later titled for broadcast) plays by rules we can follow if we note how events affect their inhabitants. I believe that it's clear that these forces (the manifestations of Cooper and whatever else is in there) will converge and will most probably face off in the town of Twin Peaks. We have only seen the stirring in the murk where we had left off and there is still most of the series to come. Meantime, I have all the music I can eat.

Ten TV What-Ifs

 

Whether X-treme short form like The Forbidden Files or epic like Lost there's an edge that the fantastic holds for me that draws me to it without fail. What can fail is the execution which speaks for most. It is a tough call getting any new material onto a small screen that mostly illuminates only for the well proven let alone a series of stretchy concepts. History will always favour the bold in this case so while the original Star Trek is treasured but Land of the Giants is at best recalled with vague fondness.I've chosen tv rather than cinema here because it can stretch from the miniature to the mountainous to varying purposes. This isn't trying to be comprehensive. Like most of my list posts, it's what occured to me at the time. Happy to read anyone's favourites.

Twlilight Zone: Five years worth of short-form fantastic fiction shot like contemporary cinema and cast with veteran character actors as well as an impressive list of future stars, Rod Serling's brainchild still delights. I bought the entire set on dvd a few years back and slowly went through them over a year. There are certainly a few turkeys there but there would be with that much screen time. Interestingly, most of the longer fifty-minute episode season 4 is consistently below par; this is one series that knew its limitations (well, after it broke them). But overall such sharp and flavoursome scenaric punch is only rarely to be found in one place. I screened a few at Shadows to pretty much unanimous enthusiasm. I can only imagine what it felt like to find this kind of strangeness coming from a gluey little blue screen with rounded edges. It had to overreach with some of its performances and writing but, you know, it still cuts through. So does the Season 2 and onward theme tune which is still quoted in conversation as aural shorthand for weirdness.
Favourite ep: And When the Sky Did Open. A test crew pilot is visited in hospital by a crewmate. They have survived a crash from a spaceflight in an experimental craft. Problem is that the guy in the hospital has no memory of the third crew member who seems to have been erased from the previous day's newspaper headline.

Twin Peaks: Direct ancestor of all that is deep and strong about current US cable tv which thinks nothing of incorporating undeclared dreamscapes, experimental sound mixing or under-explained endings and is even celebrated for such. Lynch and Frost wanted the central murder investigation to become a MaGuffin for the dark undercurrents in the small logging town. Such were the times that the US network ABC forced the revelation of the murderer and, while that provided some fine headspinning moments, it was almost all downhill from there as irritating quirkiness and mainstream blandness crept into the dark and goofed about until what was available to wrest from the swell of failure was distilled into a forced if intriguing finale. But that first season and a good quarter of the second really did haunt its viewers. The cinemagraphic style and grownup music score set the bar for the decades to come.
Favourite ep: S02E01 Coop's on the floor of his hotel room from taking a bullet in the Season 1 cliffhanger and has a chat with "the world's most decrepit waiter" and then a whispering giant. Just gets better from that point.

The Forbidden Files/Les Documents Interdits: A series of twelve bitesized falls into weirdness quietly consolidated the found footage genre that would take root at the end of the decade with The Las Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project. Grainy small format film or home standard video images with glitchy sound and sometimes troubling edits and commentary beneath commentary provided some unnerving moments at a time when everything else was getting slicked up. I would tape Eat Carpet on SBS which featured these shorts while gallivanting on Saturday night and watch it the next morning, hungover and vulnerable. Sometimes this was a mistake. The first one I saw, The Ferguson Case, involved a reporter investigating a distress call for a gimmicky soft news show. He and the crew drive out to a huge mansion and roam through the house looking for the owner, going deeper and deeper until the live feed dies and all that's left on screen is static. I carried that around for days. Then there was the one about the witch..... I showed these, often with Twilight Zone eps, before the features at Shadows. They never failed to intrigue.
Favourite ep: The Ferguson Case (described o'erhead.)

The Stone Tape (1972): Almost a can of worms to even mention UK tv in this list as for three decades no other national tv industry provided us with more intriguing and tasty ideas that the British. I have to be very picky here but I think this one extends to all Kneale's fantastical work, anyway. Industrial scientists move into an old manse to set up the search for the new audio medium and find infinitely more than they dared expect. Clear thinking portrayal of the research underworld and its politics as well as a string of typically wow ideas from this master of them. Made in the day when this could be produced for broadcast on boxing day; reheated plum pudding and ghosts as you've never known them. Extraordinary at every turn. See also Quatermas (any of the stories) and the tv version of The Woman in Black (1985).

 

This video is an ad for the box set but it's funny.

Lost: The most sustained tease in tv history, Lost began as a sprawling weird tale that could inject a shot of weirder just as it started feeling soapy. The trouble was that it had to start outdoing itself and began to spin out of control. By the time the time zones were competing for our attention Lost lost mine. I watched the home stretch out of habit and shrugged at the finale. In successfully innoculating itself against Twin Peaks syndrome the constant new mysteries that were offered as diversions to unanswered questions robbed the thing of substance. Would that have happened to Twin Peaks if it hadn't have been forced to reveal the killer so early? Hard to say but I don't think at that time that it would have been any better than the quirk 'n' jerk that we got. The ever more intricate devices on show in Lost started feeling like plugging a cracked dam with blutac but for a while there ...
Favourite ep: Pilot. the plane has crashed and everyone's on the beach or wandering back to it from the jungle. It's not just any island.

Star Trek: I'm going to limit myself to the original series. The first time I saw this it was in repeat on local tv and I was a child. I considered it a great adventure series and missed most of the subtlety and metaphor. The second time I saw a string of episodes was as a young adult. I saw concepts that I'd missed and a great amount of irony, also missed the first time. Just before I went on holidays I bought a box set of the original series on blu-ray and luxuriated in the restoration. Also, I have been marvelling at a lot of depth in the writing and performances that I'd never registered before. I used to think of Spock the same way that Dr McCoy does, as a kind of moral dart board but seeing Nimoy's performance again and finding out that Spock is restraining himself from emotions rather than being unable to express them. I always kind of knew that he and McCoy were two sides of humanity that reached their completion in the Kirkian godhead but didn't know how much Spock was actually holding back which goes even further toward his difference from McCoy. 'Part from that the stories are by and large not just hamfisted allegories as I remembered but hold subtlety and are far more genuinely sci-fi than I remembered. Ace! If you're iffy about it or revisiting get the blu-ray set and opt out of the rejigged effects (nice that they aren't imposed but optional). You'll dig it.
Favourite ep: The Naked Time. A kind of sci fi folktale where an alien catalyst has a kind of Walpurgisnacht effect on the crew. Worth it for Sulu's turn as a shirtless, sword wielding swashbuckler.

The X-Files: The two aspects of this one I was meant to like were the unrealised sexual tension between the two leads and the alien conspiracy arc but I couldn't care about either. Lost successfully kept its tease going through some really fancy footwork on the mystery ambush. Just when you thought things were getting soapy bam, the guy you thought was a busker from Ohio suddenly has the power to transform into a shoe. The alien arc tried something like this but it ended up being too samey: this guy is going to be treacherous, that granny is really a CIA black ops chief, someone trusted is going to betray Mulder, if you can't explain it it's aliens and the senior FBI comptroller of missions is really working for the secret government nd so weiter und so weiter .... But the strength of the X-Files was telling barefaced monster tales, what ifs that whispered from shadows or big bold weird monsters like Tooms the Mr Stretcho of Pittsburg. The moody Canada for USA forests and condensed breath morning scenes showed an America that existed in a darkness concealed within its own light. Whether it was the allegorical aspects of the liver fluke man or the self-parody Jose Chung's From Outer Space weren't accidents, the show for most of its nine season run maintained a strong atmosphere and developed an intriguing relationship between its leads (not just Scully and Mulder but the later Reyes and Doggett as well) and maintained a healthy connection to the zeitgeist. Favourite ep: Oubliette. Scully and Mulder investigate an abduction but find the victim of an old case with the same MO doesn't want to help. Finding out why leads to a gutwrenching answer. Really really powerful forty plus minutes of tv.

Dr. Who: Hard to leave this one off but also hard to include it as we're talking about several decades of mostly impressive imaginative fiction. Though the more recent series have been light action sequences and cuteness that without the bloated orchestral scoring wouldn't be half as exciting but with it just feel overdone the majority of this character's long run has been distinguished by ideas and suspense that benefited from slower and deeper exercise of fantastical thinking. There were many stories that borrowed heavily from other sci fi, the fx and acting of the earliest episodes might be offputting to the new contemporary viewer but a little relaxation will allow the ideas through and all shall be well. And that theme tune, originally created with basic technology and giant minds will get you every time.

Les Revenants: The title is often translated to mean ghosts in English but the folk who walk back into their hometown years after their deaths are substantial enough. They walk and talk, eat normal food and remember everything except their own deaths. Variously welcomed, rejected or guarded against, they try to catch up with life that does not quite know how to deal with them. They appear one by one until the secret of their existance can no longer be kept by which time there is a horde of them shuffling into town. Other events that I won't spoil converge with this to create one of the eeriest final scenes in any tv show I've seen since Twin Peaks. If it's parent company can allow it to unfold at its own pace it will outstrip US cable fare like True Blood with ease. The score by Scottish post-rockers Mogwai is superb. If SBS shows it this year, do yourself a favour.
Favourite ep: La Horde, the finale of season 1 there's just no way of getting there until it happens in front of you.

VR.5: This is a dimming memory but the concept was a pace ahead of its time (if the tech was a pace behind). Lori Singer plays the young brains 'n' beauty Sydney Bloom, daughter of virtual reality pioneer Dr Joseph Bloom who disappeared while she was still a lassie. She has continued her own work in the field as a hobby but it's good enough to come to the attention of the mysterious Committee who recruits her to advance her work. This leads to some fine trippy invasions of other people's brains through the phone lines and while the episodes can be hit and miss this is one case where the complicated arc is actually interesting. Made at a time when the term cyberpunk crossed from hip to mainstream but shows with too much conceptual scaffolding didn't get past their first seasons (they weren't all good @AmericanGothic) and fanatically loved by a small fanbase who tried to petition its makers into continuing it or at least turning it into a movie. That continued to fail and it's one of those titles that seem destined never to appear in public again. Pity. It probably just looks hokey and silly now ... but pity.
Favourite ep: Had to go into an antique episode guide for this but I'll say Simon's Choice is one I recall having a strong effect at the time.