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On David Lynch and Twin Peaks (America, Interrupted).

Writer's picture: glenndunksglenndunks

David Lynch in character as Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks whistling in a chair in front of a picture of a nuclear bomb.

Growing up, I was obsessed with movies and television. Hardly a surprise, I am sure. But I was.


I was enthralled (hypnotised, even) by just about anything I saw. In that funny sort of a way, even things about people living ordinary lives felt so much less ordinary than my own. Because they were somebody else’s. I was hardly an unhappy child, but there was just something about entering another world (to use the sort of language that David Lynch was a fan of). It struck me as so much more interesting than the world around me. Perhaps to my detriment.


Because of this, because of the sheer volume of it, I had an image of the United States in my mind that took a long time to vanquish (even living there didn’t quite do it; if anything it sent me back a few years). I had fantasies of living there. And then I did! Although I missed the window to be a kid of suburban America, which seemed so different and evolved but most certainly was not. What would it be like if I lived there? In one of those giant American sitcom houses and then a fashionably chic New York apartment when I was older after a party life at university. Would I have more friends and would I be more popular? Would I be less of a nerd who obsessed over other people’s lives that were written and performed?


As an aside, the apartment I would eventually live in in New York City from 2013–2015 was far closer to Chandler and Joey’s apartment than Monica and Rachel’s; to invoke Carrie Bradshaw would be laughable. Oh well. I can hardly complain, though. It was probably the greatest time of my life.


I even thought quite seriously about proposing to my parents that I do a student swap program. Despite Kylie Minogue having a hit song in 1990 (the same time Twin Peaks would have been airing, as a matter of fact) with the premise, I must not have really understood the phrase of ‘better the devil you do than the devil you don’t’. What I saw, even that in horror movies is sneakily observed and so on, didn’t detract me. I could have been Jonathan Taylor Thomas on Home Improvement! I wouldn’t, obviously, although my older brother did bear a striking resemblance at the time to Zachary Ty Bryan; if anything, I’d be the third brother than nobody remembers.


The twin peaks title card.

By the time I eventually got around to watching Twin Peaks on video tape circa 2001 (it had not yet been released on DVD, but luckily a co-worker of my mum had the VHS box set), my perception had changed a little. By that stage I was fully entrenched in my movie-watching habits and while I was experimenting more and more with the sort of things I would watch—things that were more artistically minded with Things To Say About The World—I still dreamed of America. In its funny sort of way, the television series about death, abuse, trauma and greed (among other things) only made it stronger as it winnowed away into my brain. It was a show unlike anything I had ever experienced and looked unlike anything I had seen in Australia. Even a full decade after it premiered, it had the power to arrest some random 16-year-old in Geelong who only had Mulholland Drive to go off of. I don’t remember how Twin Peaks was the one I learned about and needed to make my sophomore Lynch watch, but it was and I did. I even did a class presentation about it at school. My year 12 media studies project was a David Lynch zine, told back to front of course.

I fell for its peculiar beauty. All those warm hues, bulky sweaters and dreamy idyll invocations of an America that seemed so far removed from my life growing up in Australia. Pie, coffee, high school drama. It all seemed so… romantic, even. This was despite, of course, well, everything.


As another aside, I do remember being struck at least twice by a distinctly Lynchian sense of déjà vu. I had seen this before. Not the series, or even entire episodes, but moments. Had I dreamed them? Had I merely imagined them? Or, more likely, had I peered through the crack in the suburban French doors of my family home while it played on television and I was supposed to be in bed asleep? I always imagined that if I met David Lynch I would tell him this and he would tell me he implanted memories to alter my way of thinking.


Upon later rewatches its themes became more and more clear. George W. Bush was the first American president of my lifetime that I was actively aware of recognising as clearly, definably conservative and against many of the things that by that stage I knew about myself. And about the world. As I researched more, Ronald Reagan came into view and a lot of things became a lot clearer. Just like the images themselves as I upgraded from VHS to DVD and then Blu-ray. I was seeing things anew and figuring things out as much as I could at the time. I was getting a great education in how art can change and how it can be processed and can linger in ways that aren’t just “rewatching that a lot of times”. Wes Craven’s Scream had done something very similar years before, and there’s a reason I hold that one as tightly to my heart as Twin Peaks.


That 1-2-3 punch (in reverse) of Mulholland Drive (released as a part of my local Reading Cinema’s arthouse program in late 2001), Twin Peaks and then Blue Velvet in my later years of high school, coupled with a greater viewership of greater art in general, really began to change my perceptions. Changed how I watched things. Probably to the disfunction of others, but I craved more things like it that were hard to come by and in short supply. I soon realised that David Lynch was not one of many, but a singular voice who spoke a language I recognised.


Bare with me here, sorry.


But it wasn’t until 2016 when the words “Make America Great Again” entered vocabulary that it really felt like there were simple, clear, definable words for the sensation of what David Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost were speaking to. Here was a show about the United States that plumbed the iconography of American patriotism. A time of homecoming queens and family values, but which said you cannot go back. Before there was even a pop culture phrase for it, Lynch and Frost knew that it was not only foolish to cling to a previous era, but that everything we knew about it was wrong. It was and had always been tainted. Poisoned from the roots up. It’s hardly surprising that David Lynch was inspired by the likes of Douglas Sirk and Frank Capra.


There’s usually a moment in every Lynch project where the mirror cracks and can’t be repaired. The moment where reality if not splinters then certainly alters. November of 2016 felt a bit like that. It was the first day since I had returned from living in America that I said, “I am glad I’m here and not there.” The rose-coloured image I had grown up with turned an acidic, urinous yellow. Every rewatch of the series is revelatory, but the one in the lead up to its long-awaited third season was maybe its most profound.


In some paradoxical way, I understood why people would want to “make America great again”. Apple pie, dive bars, boy scouts and classic automobiles. But in electing Donald Trump they had proven Lynch and Frost right, and shown why it could never be done. How could it? He was a disease that had infected the system. He had taken possession of a soul and wouldn’t relinquish it without tearing his host apart. He had tainted the well while insisting we needed water. He was Bob.


That Lynch would return just one year after the election with “The Return” (an unofficial title that has nonetheless been adopted) was not coincidental. The America that Lynch had so viciously poked at with both Twin Peaks and especially Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992, the Reagan-era America that had also birthed the just-beneath-the-surface-of-white-picket-fence suburbia of Blue Velvet of 1986, had come back 25 years later. He knew it would. Like the gum Agent Cooper likes. This time, however, Lynch had no such warm-touched imagery and symbolism to cover up his ideas (although there was still plenty of the latter). This time, there was no such nostalgia to cover up the cold, hard truth of our world a quarter-century later. Even if he had written that 500-page third season script before “President Donald Trump”, it spoke to the moment in stark clarity. This was America and it’s not great. Even as he let the series speak to themes of love and spirituality and was able to make moments of heart-exploding happiness, it also speaks to a callous society full of mean, selfish people. The sort that he had been making art about for many years. He just happened to so perfectly bookend a quarter-century of American conservativeness with visceral, beautiful deconstructions of it what it has done to America. Nobody else can quite claim that.


A woman screaming.

As Trump ascends to power once again (is there a better word for this than ‘ascend’?) and begins a raft of executive orders aimed at transgender people for one thing (“fix your hearts or die”, says Lynch’s own Agent Gordon Cole, but they have no such desire), it’s hard not to want to revisit Twin Peaks. I still get warm and fuzzy watching Twin Peaks. In its strange way, it’s comforting. I will probably always get that from Twin Peaks and its associated ephemera like soundtracks and books and weird little Japanese travel-videos. That certain feeling deep inside in my guts. A home away from home where, despite everything, life is easier in the town of Twin Peaks, Washington. But part of the greatness of Twin Peaks is knowing that even nearly four decades ago, Lynch and Frost knew there was no such America to go back to. American greatness was all a façade. The contradiction is the point. The point is the message. The message is undeniable. Laura is the key. "What year is this", Kyle McLachlan's Agent Dale Cooper (or is it?) asks late in the series' third season after having seemingly offered the world a happy ending only to get cut short (or did it?). Defeat from the jaws of... something. It's hard to not to ask the same question, honestly.


To end, I will miss David Lynch more than words can ever really say. Lord knows I guess I've tried. Even if it doesn't make much sense. Which seems rather fitting, come to think of it.

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