Deathblog: Kenneth Anger (1926-2023)

“I’ve always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.” —Kenneth Anger, 2002

And so we say farewell to Kenneth Anger, a man whose influence runs through the underground of 20th century American culture like a particularly potent seam of viscous, glimmering oil.

Normally, it would be unusual to apply such superlatives to an artist whose core body of work over 50+ years essentially consists of one book and a couple of hours of film, but Anger’s key works - into which category I would place the trilogy of ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ (1954), ‘Scorpio Rising’ (1963) and ‘Invocation of the Demon Brother’ (1969), along with ‘Hollywood Babylon’ (published 1959) - are so densely packed, reflecting and refining so many parallel streams of culture, and setting off such explosive series of artistic/aesthetic chain reactions in their wake, that each of them feels monumental in stature.

And, that’s before we even factor in his presence as a central instigator/lightning rod for what we might broadly term Californian High Weirdness, and an observer/participant in many of the weirdest, wildest, scariest and (ultimately) most transformative moments in mid-century culture. More so than merely a guy with his finger on the pulse, he often seemed (in keeping with persona as a self-styled grand magus) as if he was the one setting, or at least quickening, that pulse (for better or for worse).

Indeed, what I find so remarkable (nay frightening) about the films I’ve listed above is that, more-so than just boiling down their respective cultural moments into a heady, psycho-active sludge, they seem to pre-empt (or, in keeping with Anger’s core belief that the act of viewing one of his films equates to participating in his magic(k)al practice, actively invoke) a psychic darkness lurking just over the horizon.

In ‘..Pleasuredome’ - so resonant of opium-soaked cocktail lounge exotica and the spirit of mystical/irrational/‘unAmerican’ weirdness germinating within the shadows of old Hollywood and the West Coast Military Industrial Complex during the 1950s that it might as well be soundtracked with theremins and spliced with footage from ‘Forbidden Planet’ - we can already see the drift toward decadence and narcissism which would wreak havoc on the lives of some of the film’s participants as the excesses of bohemian lifestyles took hold.

Then, a few years later in ‘Scorpio Rising’, we see the unstoppable juggernaut of American POP crushing all before it, revealed in its pure, pagan strangeness (and indeed queerness), filtered this time through a lens of MK Ultra LSD, casting Brando in ‘The Wild One’ and his retinue of clones as the quasi-futurist storm troopers of the flaming, maximalist, self-immolating culture to come, as U.S. consumer capitalism spread across the globe. It remains such an overwhelming experience that it’s oft-referenced role as a pivotal precursor to both gay fetish aesthetics and MTV-era video editing seem almost like side notes.

And in ‘..Demon Brother’, first screened in mid-1969 (exact dates seem to be disputed), we see the imminent black nightmare spirit of Manson and Atlamont practically conjured and made flesh before our eyes, as nameless rituals are conducted in what looks like the dankest basement in Haight Ashbury, where soon-to-be convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil holds court as Lucifer, intercut with footage of U.S. marines descending upon the Vietnamese jungle, as clouds of noxious hash smoke seep from a skull-shaped bong and Mick Jagger (warming up for ‘Performance’) wheezes out a horrendous, atonal din on his shiny new Moog; a film almost too evil to exist.

Which seems like an appropriate note to bring us on to the way that, as a personality, Anger almost seems to have functioned entirely outside the framework by which we might usually judge a person’s beliefs and behaviour. By any conventional standard, he proved himself over the years to be spiteful, mean, narcissistic, duplicitous, vengeful and borderline unhinged, instigating public feuds and outrages at seemingly every opportunity (his disruption of Curtis Harrington’s memorial service providing an especially unforgiveable example), and turning the majority of his friends and collaborators against him at one point or another. Yet, taken on his own terms, this all just seemed like part of the package - an essential component of a man who defined himself as existing beyond good and evil, and followed that philosophy through to the bitter end.

Almost by definition, the vast majority of magickal practitioners and edgelord types who embrace ‘The Left Hand Path’ are unspeakable arseholes whose lives end in justifiable misery, but Anger strikes me as an incredibly rare example of an individual who - more so even than his beloved Crowley - seemed to thrive on an atmosphere of lies, obfuscation and psychic aggression, as evidenced by his apparent ability to hold back the ravages of time, passing away earlier this month (sharp and well-preserved as ever, insofar as I can tell) at the age of 96.

Back in 2007-2008-ish (I don’t remember the exact date), I attended a public appearance by Anger, at the Imperial War Museum, of all places, where he was presenting some of his films and answering questions. To be honest, I remember very little of what he actually said that night, but I found his sheer presence mesmerising.

Aside from anything else, I was amazed that a man who made his first surviving film in 1947 could seem so young (faint Dorian Gray vibes), and I was surprised too that - contrary to his fiery, hex-throwing reputation - he seemed so humble, self-deprecating and soft-spoken. Above all though, he had a sense of presence about him - an ‘aura’ or ‘energy’ I might say, were I of a more hippie-ish persuasion - which is difficult to explain in words. I mean, perhaps I was just projecting here, based on his legendary life and exploits, but… it felt a bit like sharing a room with one of the denizens of ‘the other place’ from a David Lynch film, if that makes any sense? All cynicism aside, it made his boasts of magickal mastery seem eerily plausible.

As another latter-day memory, I’m reminded of a cover story the British music magazine The Wire ran on Anger in around the same period (and, the very fact they put a non-musician on their cover for what might well be the first and only time in their history tells you something vis-à-vis his underground stature I suppose). As I recall, the interviewer met Anger in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and hailed him… only to see him walk straight into a pond! The photographer caught him emerging from the mire, drenched head to foot in pond weed, looking like Swamp Thing, pulling an exaggerated military salute. Extraordinary stuff.

All in all, it feels incredibly banal to drop a mere “rest in peace” on a figure like Anger, but…. whatever idyll his Luciferian spirit is resting in (hopefully not pond weed), let’s hope it’s fiery, thrilling, awe-inspiring, frightening and strange.

It’s a real shame he didn’t make it to 100.

(In the spirit of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ by the way, I’ve not bothered fact-checking any of the above, but if any of it turns out to be grossly inaccurate -- all the better.) 

Monster Books # 2: Family Ghosts by Elliot O’Donnell (Consul, 1965)

In contrast to the horror/monster-related expectations raised by the eye-catching cover, Elliot O’Donnell’s subject here is, quite literally, ‘family ghosts’, and, without providing a contents page or index, he simply ploughs his way, Charles Fort style, through an interminable recitation of unsourced paranormal anecdotes, loosely categorised under such generic chapter headings as ‘Phantom Birds’, ‘White Ladies, ‘Scottish Family Ghosts’ and so forth.

Elsewhere in the text however, things do at least get pretty peculiar, which is good enough for me. One chapter for instance concerns ‘Haunted Welsh Bridges and Ghosts That Follow Families’, whilst, intriguingly, ‘Fish, Bat and Tree Ghosts’ are considered in Chapter II, beginning with the case of Nottinghamshire’s infamous(?) death-predicting sturgeon;

If this were an original work produced for Consul Books in 1965, I’d be inclined to suggest that O’Donnell had singularly failed to get with the programme re: producing a good ‘monster book’. Although Consul’s edition contains no record prior publication however, it is immediately obvious that ‘Family Ghosts’ was penned considerably prior to the swinging sixties. O’Donnell’s prose has a stodgy, Victorian feel to it, he speaks of receiving letters in 1910 clarifying points he had previously made in print, and in fact he rarely seems to mention anything subsequent to the First World War.

Indeed, a brief glance at Elliot O’Donnell’s Wikipedia page confirms that, born in 1872, he actually died in 1965. ‘Family Ghosts’ was first published in 1934.

Although best remembered for ghost books - of which he wrote dozens, beginning as early as 1908 - in turns out that O’Donnell was actually also an exponent of weird fiction, beginning his literary career with a thriller entitled ‘For Satan’s Sake’ in 1904 and following it up with ‘The Sorcery Club’ in 1912. He subsequently made the cover of ‘Weird Tales’ with ‘The Ghost Table’ in February 1928.

Given that Consul include no copyright notice at the front of this book, I can only assume the they simply dug up the printing plates for ‘Family Ghosts’ from god knows where and slapped them onto new pages to fill a hole in their release schedule, perhaps without even informing the recently deceased author’s estate. The cover illustration and tag line certainly seem more suggestive of an anthology of horror stories than a compendium of hoary old blather about spectral hounds and phantom fish… but who knows?

And speaking of the cover painting - it really is a corker isn’t it? I’ve got no idea who did it, but it’s absolutely great. I’d suggest it might have been better attached to a reprint of some of O’Donnell’s fiction, which I’d probably much rather read too to be honest, but so it goes.

October Horrors # 12: A Flipside Halloween with ‘Legend ofthe Witches’ (1970), ‘Secret Rites’ (1971) & More.

Back in the halcyon days of 2009-11ish, I was a regular attendee at the monthly ‘Flipside’ screenings which took place at the National Film Theatre / BFI Southbank here in London, organised in support of the BFI’s then flourishing DVD/Blu-Ray imprint of the same name. Bearing witness to the assorted oddities unearthed from the archives by curators Vic Pratt and William Fowler was always a joy and a privilege, to the extent that I pretty much bought my tickets blind, confident that whatever they came up with would prove both surprising and rewarding, even if it was something I would never have voluntarily signed up for in any other circumstances (a Q&A with the late Michael Winner springs to mind).

Naturally, I was sad to see the ‘Flipside’ slot gradually muscled out of the BFI’s schedule, presumably to make way for no-doubt-more-lucrative extra screenings of whichever restored Kubrick epic was currently doing the rounds (or, perhaps it was the decision, apropos of nothing, to screen the largely unheralded 1982 post-apocalyptic movie ‘Battle Truck’ with the director in attendance which proved the final straw for the accounts department, who knows).

The absolute highlight on the Flipside calendar of course was the programmes of shorts, TV episodes and documentaries which Pratt & Fowler used to pull together for Halloween (you can read my thoughts on the 2010 Halloween special here) and it has been a joy and a privilege this month to be able to relive the spirit of those strange evenings in my own home, as the Flipside label has risen from its slumber and produced a shiny new release which pretty much exemplifies the kind of thing which used to pop up at those October screenings.

Beginning with our feature presentation for the evening, Malcolm Leigh’s 1970 documentary Legend of the Witches opens in surprisingly meditative fashion, with a near ten minute sequence of uninterrupted nature footage. In what certainly seems like a boldly experimental gambit for a film which saw its only theatrical exhibition as a supporting feature for ‘Not Tonight, Darling’ aka ‘Sex in the Suburbs’ (Anthony Sloman, 1971), we see seaweed ebbing and flowing on the tide in a manner that I’d be tempted to tag as a tribute to Tarkovsky but for the fact that he had not actually made ‘Solaris’ yet at this point, reeds and branches swaying in the breeze, and a sunrise presented in real time.

(For some reason, Leigh and “lighting cameraman” Robert Webb seem to have had a particular yen for this kind of ambient / landscape footage, inserting seascapes, cliff faces and foliage throughout the film. Even when visiting a haunted house, the camera seems more concerned with the peacocks in the garden and the grain of wood on the staircase than the supposedly spooky goings-on.) (1)

Over this opening footage, our stentorian-yet-faintly-ironic narrator Guy Standeven intones what purports to be the “creation myth of the witches”, involving a tryst between the moon goddess Diana and Lucifer the light-bringer, representing a union between the feminine/lunar and masculine/solar ideals. (2)

Under the circumstances, this yarn does a pretty good job of sounding authentically old-as-the-hills, supporting the film’s contention that modern witchcraft has risen organically from the natural world and the impossibly ancient worship thereof. In reality however, this “creation myth” was likely knocked up from scratch by the film’s ostensible star, self-styled ‘King of the Witches’ Alex Sanders, and the references to the Greco-Roman Diana and the Christian figure of Lucifer will no doubt have already made the blood of any Wiccan purists in the audience start to boil.

We’re on safer ground though as we join Sanders’ skyclad coven (or at least, the younger and more photogenic members thereof, I suspect) as they circle their ceremonial fire in some suitably remote and inaccessible deep forest clearing, undertaking a series of elemental initiation rites for a new member.

Chances are, if you’re familiar with Sanders’ name, you probably know him in his capacity as a media / showbiz fixture, a relentless self-promoter and, arguably, an out-right charlatan. Here at least though, Leigh & Webb’s striking, high contrast black & white photography and solemn, naturalistic pacing succeeds in imbuing Sanders’ rites with a degree of dignity and gravitas, framing the coven’s matter-of-fact nudity in a way that often seems closer to Francis Bacon-style anatomical expressionism than yr common-or-garden exploitation.

After quite a lot of this, we veer into slightly more routine paranormal documentary territory, as Standeven essentially delivers a lecture on the early Christian church’s tendency to incorporate pagan tradition into their architecture and practice, and a sympathetic, Margaret Murray-ish take on the subsequent persecution of ‘the old religion’, all illustrated with visits to some churches and standing stones, medieval woodcuts, an examination of the weirder goings-on in the Bayeux Tapestry, and so forth.

This all leads up to a second staged ritual, which will no doubt have those hypothetical Wiccans spitting horse feathers, as Sanders and his wife Maxine are seen conducting a quote-unquote ‘black mass’, complete with full Xtian paraphernalia – looming crucifix, altar boys, sacred host and ecclesiastical music on the soundtrack. Presumably dreamed up in order to add a frisson of blasphemy to proceedings, this sequence ends like some Ken Russell wet dream, with Alex apparently instigating a menage-a-trois with two naked ladies inside the magic(k) circle. Good heavens.

Next up, we get an intriguing tour of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall. It’s still there today, and I have long wished to pay it a visit, although my failure to persuade anyone to drive me there has thus far stymied that ambition. I mean, I’m sure they must have changed things around a bit in the past half century, but on the basis of what we see here, it looks pretty amazing.

This transitions into another staged ritual, in which – extraordinarily, given that they were supposedly aiming to popularise and win respect for their beliefs – we see Sanders and his followers demonstrating the rites through which a coven might place a death curse on an enemy. This also incorporates a strong sexual element, as Alex and Maxine again put on a bit of a show for the camera, enacting the simulated conception and “birth” of the curse object.

Thus far, ‘Legend of the Witches’ has served up an odd mixture of sombre, moody atmospherics and increasingly questionable content, but happily, the film’s final stretch is by far the most entertaining, committing fully to the cause of wonderful, silly-ass nonsense.

For no particular reason, we ditch witchcraft for a while, and instead visit a haunted house (I’m currently unable to identify which one). Here, a mod-ishly dressed young lady is left alone to shiver in “the most haunted room” whilst – in a development guaranteed to produce rapturous excitement for those of us with a fetish for vintage audio equipment and/or The Stone Tape – a team of paranormal investigators begin hauling their elaborate electronic gear up the stairs!

I’m pretty sure this stuff was all staged for the film (the ‘psychic’ girl in the haunted room re-appears in later scenes, still wearing the same outfit), but it’s still great fun.

Rather than waiting for a conclusion to this paranormal stake-out, the film soon changes course again to take in psychic phenomena and, uh, electronically-induced hypnotism? Yes, there are whirring oscillators, “stroboscopes” and a big ol’ hypno-wheel on the wall, as we are invited to note the similarities between “traditional “and “modern” means of generating a trance state, leading us directly into the film’s big finale, in which all pretence of documentary realism is merrily discarded in favour of a wild, studio-bound happening (ostensibly the preparation for a scrying ritual) which feels like a cross between an early Velvet Underground photo-shoot, an outtake from ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and a Jess Franco night club scene.

Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in here, as we get a giant hypno-wheel projection, a guy wearing a goat mask, several naked girls, Alex Sanders (I think) turning up in an owl mask, ceremonial whipping and light bondage, clouds of incense, strobe lighting, and even a soundtrack of ragin’ sitar music (because there’s no better way to get your psychedelic witchcraft party started than with some totally random cultural misappropriation). Speaking with what I hope is the authority befitting a connoisseur of this sort of thing, I declare it to be absolutely amazing. Wow.

Moving on the Flipside disc’s second billed attraction, we find Secret Rites, a 50-minute item directed by sometime horror scriptwriter and notorious sexploitation maverick Derek Ford. Originally released as a supporting feature for Ford’s ‘Suburban Wives’ in 1972, we find ourselves presented here with a case study in how two films dealing with exactly the same topic, made at roughly the same time, with the same central participants, can be entirely different from each other.

Once again, Alex Sanders takes centre stage, but he and his coven seem to have left the neo-primitive rural environs depicted in ‘Legend of the Witches’ far behind, instead heading straight for the heart of London’s swingin’ scene and the urban sprawl of Notting Hill Gate. Their rituals are now a riot of tinfoil, black candles, theatrical make up, big moth-eaten goat heads and costumes from the psychedelic dressing up box, and are now staged in what looks like a cramped subterranean night club done up to resemble a faux-medieval dungeon, all captured by Ford’s camera in blazing, over-saturated faux-technicolor.

A queasy mixture of ‘fact’ and fiction, the flimsy narrative around which ‘Secret Rites’ is constructed concerns Penny Beecham, a real life model and actress who went on to become a regular on ‘70s TV, appearing in ‘dollybird’ roles in ‘Up Pompeii’ and ‘The Morecombe & Wise Show’. Confusingly, Beecham uses her real name in the film, despite the fact that she seems to be playing the role of a fictional trainee hairdresser who, having “always been fascinated by the occult,” has decided to get herself hitched up to the nearest witch cult.

(Note the poster for Harry Kumel’s ‘Daughters of Darkness’ visible on the tube station wall in the screen-grab above.)

Venturing into the patchouli-drenched bohemian hinterland of Notting Hill, Penny meets Alex and Maxine Sanders down the pub to discuss the possibility of her initiation into their order.

It’s the little details that can make a big impression in things like this, and, whilst Alex was droning on in his drowsy Mancunian tones about how much hard work it is learning to be a witch (lots of reading, lots of study, he keeps stressing, they don’t just spend all their time horsing around in the nude, he’ll have you know), I couldn’t help noticing that the couple both seem to have been enjoying half pints of a rather tasty-looking ale served in stemmed glasses, whilst Alex has his fags and his wallet set out on the table in front of him, like a seasoned man-about-town. Somehow, I found myself entranced by this curious mixture of pious new age esotericism and down to earth ‘70s masculinity (and Maxine’s paisley-patterned dress is a knock-out too).

After this, most of the rest of the film consists of kinky rites in the groovy day-glo cellar, in which the remnants of respectably sincere pagan practice (the ‘hand-fasting’ marriage ceremony for instance) find themselves napalmed by a retina-scorching aesthetic of fancy dress pop-porno psychedelic excess, culminating in the “rarely witnessed and never before photographed” Invocation of Ra, whose gold-foil bedecked explosion of high camp Egyptology must be seen to be believed.

Sanders, during his interminable invocations, even makes reference at one point to “the Terrible Domain of the Dread Lords of the Outer Spaces”, which seems pretty way out there, even by his standards. Perhaps some of those Ladbroke Grove Hawkwind/Moorcock type vibes had been rubbing off on him whilst he was down the pub?

Those in a position to know about such things have noted that Sanders’ “coven” seems to have had its numbers boosted on this occasion by at least some performers who also appeared in the harder sex films and illicit porno loops which Ford was producing during this period, and indeed, rumours persist that a ‘harder’ cut of ‘Secret Rites’ may have been prepared for the export market (perhaps explaining the awkward 50 minute running time of the version which made it into UK cinemas). No one involved in the BFI release seems to have been able to verify the truth of this however, so who knows.

Also of note in ‘Secret Rites’ is the soundtrack, which, perfectly in keeping with the film’s visuals, comprises a way-out smorgasbord of ominous, effects-drenched psychedelic jamming, credited to an otherwise unknown outfit identified as ‘The Spindle’. No one seems to have been able to ascertain the provenance of this music, or to identify any of the players involved, but writer Rob Young puts forward a pretty intriguing theory in the booklet accompanying the BFI disc.

And…. that’s about all I can think to say about ‘Secret Rites’, really. Suffice to say, it is essential viewing for… well, I mean, I hesitate to say everyone, but if you’re still reading this post by this point, then suffice to say, you’ve found a perfect little number to project onto the wall during your next occult-themed drug orgy, at the very least.

This being a Flipside release of course, the fun doesn’t end there, and my top pick from additional shorts included on this disc is – joy of joys – another episode of Out of Step, a series of short programmes which essentially seem to function as a more stridently judgemental 1950s version of a Louis Theroux type thing, in which presenter Dan Farson – yes, the same nephew of Bram Stoker and “charismatic Soho bon vivant” who later turned up in the wonderful BBC documentary The Dracula Business in 1974, no less! – tracks down some quote-unquote “oddballs” and basically bothers them about their unusual beliefs.

Farson’s witchcraft episode – broadcast in 1957 -may not achieve quite the same level of hilarity as his UFO one (which I briefly wrote about here), but he certainly managed to assemble an impressive line-up of interviewees, speaking first to the 92-year-old Dr Margaret Murray, whose 1921 book ‘The Witch-Cult in Western Europe’ played a pivotal role in establishing the more sympathetic narrative surrounding historical witchcraft which developed through the 20th century.

(Brilliantly, a note in the booklet accompanying this set reports that Farson had to re-shoot his ‘question shots’ for this segment of the programme in the studio, because he’d been involved in a drunken brawl the night before the Murray interview took place, and was nursing a black eye.)

Still an alert and engaging speaker at her advanced age, Dr Murray’s responses to Farson’s demand to know whether witches “actually have special powers” are non-committal, but he gets a far firmer statement of belief from Gerald Gardner, the man who essentially established modern Wiccan practice in the UK during the 1950s.

Definitely a card-carrying oddball, Gardner was living at the time in an abandoned mill in Castletown on the Isle of Man, surrounded by crudely carved magical effigies. Worryingly, he regales Farson with a tale about how he and his fellow witches successfully placed a curse on an unscrupulous property developer, and he also begins cackling devilishly when Farson broaches the subject of nudity. Let’s just say that I’d advise any residents of the Isle of Man who happen to be reading in the 1950s to keep their daughters well away from that there old mill.

Farson’s final guest meanwhile is Louis Wilkinson, an intimate friend and literary executor of Aleister Crowley. Unhelpfully from the point of view of a witchcraft documentary, Wilkinson claims that he was chiefly interested in Crowley’s talents as a wit and raconteur, and largely ignored all that magickal hoo-doo he got up to (which strikes me as being rather like claiming that you were friends with Joseph Goebbels because you liked his cooking and his singing voice, but never really paid attention to all that political stuff - but whatever).

Nonetheless, Wilkinson comes through with some great anecdotes about the control Crowley exercised over his disciples, and about the conduct of his followers during his memorial service – and, as with just about all stories concerning Crowley’s extraordinary life and conduct, it’s interesting stuff to say the least.

Next up, I turned my attention to another of the disc’s extras - Getting it Straight in Notting Hill Gate, a rather hap-hazard but still fascinating short film which takes a look at the same West London counter-cultural milieu from which ‘Secret Rites’ arose, presumably shot and directed by some proud denizens thereof.

I’ll skip over this one quickly, as it’s a bit off-message re: our Halloween/horror theme, but it should certainly prove enthralling viewing for anyone familiar with the Notting Hill area, as rambling, handheld street footage takes us through the Portobello / Ladbroke Grove area in all its post-psychedelic squalor and post-windrush finery, wringing a few moments of “Oh, it’s THAT place” type excitement even from me, and I barely ever visit that part of town.

Highlights include Caroline Coon of the influential legal rights organisation ‘Release’ interviewed (next door to the offices of Oz magazine, no less) by a young hipster going by the unlikely handle of Felix Scorpio, a visit to the flat of psychedelic artist Larry Smart (whose work looks genuinely mind-blowing – definitely worthy of further investigation), and a lengthy jam session from the band Quintessence, who we see laying down some seriously funky flute and guitar-led gear in their practice space in All Saints Church, improvising around the local anthem which gave this film it’s name. Oh, and there’s a bloke playing a sitar on a rooftop too. Top stuff.

All that, and this Flipside release still has more to offer; there’s a cine-poetic tribute to William Blake based around footage of contemporary London, directed by Robert Wynne Simmons, who wrote the script for ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’, and a 1924 silent short entitled ‘The Witch’s Fiddle’, produced by the Cambridge University Kinema Club and utilising the talents of a bunch of keen young chaps who seemingly all went on to live lives which sound like the plots of Eric Ambler novels.

I haven’t even had a chance to watch those at the time of writing…. too much, man. Needless to say, we’re looking here at a wonderfully researched, beautifully restored and incredibly generous package of tantalising glimpses into the stranger and more marginal corners of British cinema, fascinating cross-cultural connections sparking off each of them like some out-of-control generator. Fantastic work from all concerned, and here’s hoping it opens the metaphorical floodgates for more collections of shorts, documentaries and suchlike under the Flipside banner.

---

(1) Unfortunately, IMDB credits for the Robert Webb who worked on ‘Legend of the Witches’ seem to have been garbled with those of the American director of the same name, but I’m assuming THIS Robert Webb was probably the one who worked on music hall documentary ‘A Little of What You Fancy’ (1968) – co-directing with Michael Winner, funnily enough – and directed a short film entitled ‘Dancing Shoes’ (1969), before dropping out of sight..?

(2)Though it seems he rarely had the chance to give his voice much of a work out on-screen, Guy Standeven is notable for appearing uncredited in the background in just about every film ever made. Nice work if you can get it!

Concluding thoughts on... Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

(Poster by Cristiano Siqueira.)

Note to readers:
Having now completed my viewing of 2017’s ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, this is a follow up to my earlier post from January, in which I pre-emptively offered up my thoughts on the first nine episodes of the series.

In contrast to my earlier post, SPOILERS WILL BE RIFE this time around, so please proceed with caution.


1.
So, my prospective death-of-the-American-dream / evils-of-science / nuclear apocalypse angle didn’t really pan out… but I’d still like to think it’s in there somewhere, lurking in the background, particular in and around the ‘Got a Light?’ episode, ready to be picked out of the series’ televisual tarot deck [see below].


2.
In my earlier post, I reflected on fact that the trauma/abuse narrative at the core of the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ seemed to be entirely absent in the first half of the 2017 reiteration. At that point, I saw no indication that Frost and Lynch wished to reconnect with this, given their apparent preference for taking a straight supernatural/science fictional angle on the series’ mysterious happenings, rather than engaging with the subjective perspectives and/or internal life of their characters.

Well, count me dead wrong on this score too, as I was surprised - and impressed – by the way that the final stretch of ‘The Return’ brings these themes back with a vengeance, throwing shadow and suggestion over much of what we’ve previously seen in the process.

In this respect, the final hotel room confrontation between Laura Dern’s Diane and Gordon Cole’s FBI team effectively serves to realign the orbit of the entire sprawling epic we’ve been watching over the preceding weeks – arguably the most jaw-dropping and emotional shattering scene the series has to offer, it is an unquestionable dramatic highlight – the moment when, suddenly, all this shit starts to fall into place on a human level.

In essence, all of Lynch’s cinematic work subsequent to the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’ [well, except ‘The Straight Story’, obviously] has dealt with the idea of people’s identity and perception of reality becoming fragmented and destabilised as a result of trauma too terrible to face. The director explored this notion for perhaps the first time through the characters of Laura and Leland Palmer in 1990-91, and, as such, it is entirely appropriate that ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ eventually resolves itself into an especially bleak and indigestible meditation on this theme.

As will no doubt have already been noted by hundreds of fans and speculators, it eventually becomes clear that the assorted female characters Cooper encounters during his peregrinations through The Lodge in the early part of the series (prior to his ‘rebirth’ as Dougie Jones) in fact represent aspects of the earth-bound women who have been damaged / abused / possessed by the roving spirit of Bob (whether within the skin of his “Bad Cooper” avatar, or his earlier vessel, whose identity will not be clearly stated here JUST IN CASE some lunatic who has not watched the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’ is reading this).

The buxom, opera singer-ish lady, the skeletal elderly woman – these characters may not be played by the same actresses as their potential earth-bound analogues, and there may be no cryptic clues thrown in to help us nail down their origins… but, there is enough of a vague, archetypical similarity for us to make the necessary connections [paging Dr Jung].

The subtlety with which Lynch & Frost suggest (whilst never explicitly spelling out) these links and connections between different fragmented personas, in different worlds, is admirable.

There is a pitch black poetry to the way that Diane (invisible to us for so long in the earlier series) becomes a woman with no eyes, rescued naked from the dark woods by the baffled but dutiful Twin Peaks cops, just like one of the wayward girls Bob’s spirit used to pray upon prior to his embodiment within the Bad Cooper.

Likewise, we are never told in as many words (nor will casual viewers even care to know) that Audrey Horne has seemingly lost her mind and been reduced to a state of Alzheimer’s-like confusion as a result of being raped in hospital by Bob’s Bad Cooper aspect and subsequently giving birth to his demonic child, Richard. But there are enough crumbs of information scattered through the series for us to pick up the pieces and make a whole cookie, if you get my drift, lending purpose and pathos (and a terrible sadness) to the otherwise rather infuriating, audience-baiting scenes between Audrey and her long-suffering present day husband in the process.

Although Lynch’s portrayal of split personalities and mental illness in his work has been legitimately criticised as naïve bordering on offensive in the past (not least by frequent commentator on this blog Gregor), I feel that this idea of a single consciousness/identity being split across different bodies in different dimensions/time zones like a pack of cards proves both emotionally resonant and conceptually fascinating in ‘The Return’, providing the new series with a welcome infusion of the mystery and haunting power that it initially seemed to be lacking.

Admittedly, the rich thematic potential of all this is somewhat undermined by the rather wonky, more overtly science fictional doppelganger/homunculus type business that seems to inform the interplay between the two Coopers and their alternate Dougie Jones aspect, and indeed the Lodge’s peculiar ‘one-in, one-out’ policy [which is perhaps suggestive of some sort of matter vs anti-matter / exchange of energies kind of deal – whatdayathink, hard SF fans?]… but never mind. As I’ve observed before in these pages, offering multiple paradigms through which the same events can be interpreted has always been one of the great strengths of ‘Twin Peaks’, and of Lynch’s work in general.


3.
We need, I think, to talk about the ending. A mercilessly rushed, inconclusive way of concluding nearly eighteen hours of narrative television, there is something horribly, mundanely depressing about the way the indefatigable Agent Cooper’s last minute rush to bring justice (solace?) to Laura Palmer’s restless spirit plays out. Despite presumably being written and discussed by Lynch & Frost far in advance, this conclusion initially feels as arbitrary and unresolved as the unplanned, studio-enforced ending of Season # 2.

But at the same time, it also feels as final as final can be. Needless to say, anyone who was hoping a series of ‘Twin Peaks’ was going to tie itself up into a nice little bow in the final episode was doomed to disappointment from the outset. Of course it was going to totally blindside us with SOMETHING. Why not a last minute descent into the unsettling mysteries of Alice Tremond and Mrs Chalfont (last touched upon in the opening half hour of ‘Fire Walk With Me’, all those years ago)?

(As far as series mythology goes, I had always pegged these marginal characters as people warped or maddened by their close proximity to the dread “room above a convenience store” in which “magicians” Bob and one-armed Mike conducted their original, unseen depredations whilst still in their pre-Lodge earth-bound forms… implications here are potent and nebulous given the circumstance in which they pop up in the final episode of ‘The Return’, but perhaps that’s a digression best left for another day.)

Was I satisfied with the ending? I don’t know. To be honest, I was as flummoxed and faintly upset by it as I’m imagine much of the rest of the viewing public were, but… as with just about every other aspect of ‘The Return’, it’s the kind of thing that, like a painting in the corner of some darkened gallery, we must leave open to subjective interpretation and individual gut reaction.

By way of an example, I will defer here to this article by Samm Deighan, writing at Diabolique magazine, who came away with a far clearer angle on things than I did.


4.
Still though, for all these grasps at wider significance, the sheer quantity of time-wasting and narrative dead-ends scattered throughout ‘..The Return’ remains mind-boggling. The free hand accorded to Lynch and Frost in developing the series may have allowed them to get away with wild flights of fancy and graphic, disturbing content to an extent unprecedented in the televisual medium, but honestly – even with the best will in the world, we could have lived without some of this stuff.

Admittedly, some of these loose ends – such as the brief intervention of Balthazar Getty’s singularly weird crime boss (“Red”) might serve to feed our imagination, prompting us to fill in some more intriguing gaps ourselves, and, even the dead-end conversations between assorted young women at The Roadhouse (which serve to book-end many episodes with discussion of people and events of which we have no knowledge whatsoever) help lend a certain depth to our picture of the 21st century Twin Peaks, suggesting a whole underlying network of fragmented lives, damaged minds and dangerous possibilities existing in close proximity to the threat of The Lodge.(1)

Likewise, it becomes increasingly obvious at the series goes on that certain narrative elements could well be intended as deliberate Brechtian spanners in the works – unnatural, unbelievable or interminably tedious series of events designed to frustrate or reshape viewers’ expectations of a contemporary TV drama.

The failure of any of the many people Dougie Jones encounters to realise - across something like ten hours of screen time and several weeks of fictional life – that he is clearly in a near catatonic state and probably needs some professional help, is very much the prime example of this. Perhaps there is a certain amount of absurdist satirical intent here, some suggestion that man’s agency has diminished to such an extent in the modern world that the best way to get ahead is to do and say absolutely nothing..? If so, it’s perhaps expressed somewhat clumsily, but either way – what’s clear is that each viewer’s enjoyment of Dougie’s story will be directly proportionate to their ability to stop shouting “when the hell is anyone going to NOTICE?!” at the screen, and just accept it on it’s own strange terms.

But, nonetheless - when it comes to stuff like the travails of Chad the Bad Cop, or the time we spend with Shelly and Bobby’s daughter and her stereotypical no good boyfriend, or Jerry Horne indulging in some painfully un-amusing stoner humour whilst lost in the woods, I think we can legitimately ask: what the hell was the point of all that?

In narrative terms, these are total dead-ends, and, whilst many such non-sequiturs in the series can be written off as concessions to Lynch’s wayward aesthetic vision – his love of just filming stuff that he has a ‘feeling’ for – it’s not as if all those workaday scenes of Chad faffing about the place being mildly unpleasant were exactly exploding with cinematic inspiration, y’know what I mean?

The scene in which a passing dog-walker sees No Good Boyfriend apparently shoot himself in the woods whilst is (unnamed?) new girlfriend looks on is meanwhile staged by Lynch like the ominous crescendo of some unravelling mystery… but it is never subsequently followed up, or lent any significance. It’s a well executed Lynchian scene, but, devoid of either wider context or resolution, its potential as such is wasted.

Basically, for all of ‘..The Return’s eventual strengths, there are still long stretches here that are difficult to interpret in any way other than as time-wasting filler, or as fragments of ditched/developed story ideas that somehow remained in the final cut, flapping pointlessly in the breeze.

And, whilst I’m on the subject, perhaps it’s just me, but some of the celebrity cameos are absolutely cringe-worthy too. Monica Bellucci dream? That famous kid who looks like Beck popping up as Andy and Lucy’s son? Gimme a break. Smugly indulgent, middle-brow alterna-Hollywood bullshit of the highest order, these sequences gave me flashbacks to Jim Jarmusch’s unspeakable ‘Coffee & Cigarettes’ – an incidence of cosmic horror I really could have done without.

(I also could have done without all those Pitchfork-y careerist indie bands trying desperately to look cool in each episode’s musical interlude, although it was nice to see Julee Cruise making a brief return, and, to my great surprise, Nine Inch Nails certainly played a blinder in ‘Got a Light?’.)


5.
And so, in conclusion….? Well, who knows. Perhaps ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ was ahead of its time, and perhaps, more likely, it simply stands outside of time. It is certainly quite a thing - that’s about all we can say for certain at this point.

Given David Lynch’s apparent disinclination for another bout with the Hollywood machine as he enters old age, ‘..The Return’ could well end up becoming the epic final statement of this unique cinematic artist, and, in that context, it’s certainly not a text his fans are going to stop talking about or thinking about any time soon.

With critical faculties engaged, ‘..The Return’ is a curate’s egg, essentially. Some aspects of it work very well, others do not. (That's the line I've tended to fall back on when people have put me on the spot and asked "WHAT DID YA THINK OF IT?", anyway.) It’s just getting anyone to agree on which bits are which that’s liable to pose a problem. With the sheer plethora of images, ideas and stimuli it throws at us, often sans context, it’s as much a televisual Rorschach test as anything else. (Drink full, and descend.)

Like much of Lynch’s more extreme works in the past though – from ‘Eraserhead’ through to ‘Inland Empire’ – ‘..The Return’ is an achievement so unbeholden to cultural convention that to some extent  it transcends/bypasses the aforementioned critical faculties entirely, jamming our mental fuseboxes with indulgent/errant content until sparks fly and all certainty is shorted out. All we’re left with in the ensuing stumble through the darkness is the hope that some visceral, entirely subjective emotional reaction will blaze up for each of us and light the way. Personally, I got a few of these sparks from time to time; others (such as Deighan, linked above) evidently got a hell of a lot more of them.

Commenting on my previous post, reader Patrick made the point that the aesthetics of ‘..The Return’ draw significantly from Lynch’s perspective as a visual artist, and in this respect the series can feel more like a visit to a contemporary art exhibition than a narrative entertainment; you go in cold, you look around, you hope something’s going to hit you and light you up. Maybe it does, but if not, well, hey, that person over there in the corner is really freaking out over it, so what do I know?

A massive, half-digested - perhaps undigestable - mass of audio / visual spaghetti for the ages, ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ may not always entirely hit the spot for us informed and well-fed 2017-18 viewers, but it could yet find its niche as some kind of degraded video scripture / i-ching oracle utilised by children of some pollution-warped future generation as yet unborn. As Lynch himself quipped recently in response to an entirely unconnected query, "watch this space!"

-------

(1)Here’s a bit of wild TP speculation for you: given that Getty’s sole scene involves his character – who seems a rather time/space bending sort of intense fellow – subduing Richard Horne with magic tricks of a distinctly menacing nature, I couldn’t help but recall Mrs Chalfont’s grandson – a medium/avatar of The Lodge seen in the second series and ‘Fire Walk With Me’ who also, you’ll recall, “does magic tricks”. In linear terms, the age gap perhaps doesn’t quite add up, but just thought I’d throw that out there. Of course, the recurring references to magic tricks and “magicians”, cards, dice, coins and gambling throughout all three series of ‘Twin Peaks’ could probably be thesis material in and of itself, but….

Half Time Report: Twin Peaks: The Return(2017)

PLEASE NOTE: For the avoidance of confusion, I’ve chosen to refer to the third series of Twin Peaks aired in 2017 as “Twin Peaks: The Return”, or “Twin Peaks 2017”. The blu-ray box set sitting next to my TV may herald it as “A Limited  Series Event”, but that makes it sound like promo for a range of aftershave or something, so I’ll avoid it and just stick to shorter suffix if nobody minds.

ALSO: As a side effect of my decision to stick to general impressions rather than being drawn into the discussion of individual plot points or story elements in the text below, this post remains largely free of spoilers, so – readers who are even later than me in catching up with the new ‘Twin Peaks’ are advised to read on and fear not.

Given that I posted my reflections on revisiting the original 1990-91 run of ‘Twin Peaks’ almost exactly two years ago, I suppose there may conceivably be some readers wondering what I made of the series’ much heralded 2017 reiteration. So, eight months late (which in fairness beats the 40+ years of lateness that apply to most of my posts here), it’s time for me to come down from the mountain and present my thoughts on the first 50% of this project’s epic eighteen episode run, which I have been watching for the first time this month.

At some point in the near future, I will aim to follow this up with another post, in order to assess how these half-digested impressions, opinions and hypotheses hold up once I have completed by viewing of the series.


1. Running on Empty: Episodes #1 - #6

Though episode # 1 sailed by nicely on the excitement and anticipation of being back in this world and meeting these familiar characters again, I’m afraid I can’t avoid the fact that episodes #2 to #6 proved a real drag. My experience of watching them was in fact characterised by a slow realisation that ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 was shaping up to be a considerable disappointment – either an entirely cynical venture on the part of David Lynch & Mark Frost, or else a colossal artistic miscalculation.

It’s not that the footage and ideas of which the seemingly endless, disjointed narrative strands that comprise these episodes are objectively bad, or boring, or offensive or anything, but… how can I best put this?

The core episodes of the original 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ (which I would define as including everything up to and including the unmasking of Laura Palmer’s killer) were alternately mysterious, terrifying, funny and charming.

That’s not just a random list of subjective hyperbole either – it’s a very specific one. It is difficult for a piece of narrative film to maintain any of those feelings over an extended period of time, yet ‘Twin Peaks’ succeeded in delivering a intoxicating mixture of all of them, in over-powering quantities, week-on-week. That – more than any of the cultish Lynchian weirdness that people immediately associate with the show – is the reason why it made such an impression on viewers, and why it has acquired such legendary status.

This achievement is thrown into stark relief by the fact that the initial batch of episodes of the 2017 ‘Twin Peaks’ – as master-minded by a pair of creators now gifted with total freedom and seemingly unlimited resources – initially fail to deliver on any of these qualities.

Somewhat uniquely in my experience of watching film and television, they furthermore beg our indulgence in asking us to sit through an expanse of footage longer than some directors’ entire filmographies, before any equivalent redeeming qualities may or may not eventually begin to coalesce.

Should I wish to, I could prattle on for thousands of words about the myriad things that annoyed me through the arid expanse of episodes #2 to #6, but in retrospect, it occurs to me that what really irked me about them was basically the way that – just like show’s original run – ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 taps into the aesthetic of its era.

Just as the unique qualities of the ‘Twin Peaks’ 1990-’91 grew from the mutated framework of an ‘80s-‘90s daytime soap opera – complete with fuzzy, over-saturated colour, pungent promises of romance and melodrama, luxuriantly appointed sets and lush, overbearing musical cues – so ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 correspondingly anchors itself in the aesthetics of a 21st century HBO-style high-brow TV show.

Specifically, this equates to a visual tone of almost oppressively crystal clear, HD faux-reality – the cinematic equivalent of a modern office’s remorseless overhead strip-lights. The ‘relatable’/everyday qualities of the people who inhabit this environment meanwhile are heavily sign-posted at every turn, and we are repeatedly invited to join characters who are barely more than ciphers (despite reams of expositional back story) as they seemingly wallow dewy-eyed in the emptiness and alienation of their lives (in between exchanges of on-message wise-cracks and gratuitous displays of solipsistic decadence, that is).

As you will have gathered, this is not really an aesthetic I favour, and as such I found these early episodes a frustrating experience.

There are wonderful moments scattered through these episodes, of course. (Seeing Harry Dean Stanton, still full of spark and strength in one of his last ever screen appearances, is a particular highlight, even if the trailer park he manages seems to have been mysteriously teleported to Twin Peaks from the entirely different town in which it was located in ‘Fire Walk With Me’.)

The overall feeling though is one of blandness, with the bulk of the discursive plot strands subsisting purely on the level of somewhat diverting, mildly entertaining filler – somewhat akin to spending an afternoon watching random videos of people doing odd things on Youtube.

But, it is very much worth pointing out at this stage that the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ also took its sweet time to fully emerge from its soap opera / murder mystery cocoon. It was only with the revelation of Agent Cooper’s unconventional investigative methods, and his first vision of The Man From The Other Place (which must have been absolutely mind-boggling to unsuspecting viewers on first broadcast) that it became clear we weren’t in Kansas anymore, whilst further moments of capital letter Weirdness were doled out very sparingly thereafter.

By contrast, ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 inevitably showcases it’s dedication to the cause of High Weirdness right from the outset – indeed, it ostensibly piles it on in quantities hitherto unknown on broadcast TV. But, in retrospect I feel that the early episodes I’m discussing here were nonetheless operating on a similar ‘slow-build’ principle to the original series. Whether or not ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 will eventually succeed in blowing minds or upsetting expectations to an extent comparable to the 1990-91 run remains an open question at this point in my viewing (although it seems unlikely, given that a relentless tirade of trademark Lynchian hoo-hah have basically reduced our expectations to “literally anything could happen next”). But, for the moment, I can give them the benefit of the doubt.


2. Paradigm Ambulance?

As I outlined in my previous ‘Twin Peaks’ post, I feel that the success of the series – and indeed the success of the trilogy of L.A. based quasi-horror films that Lynch has subsequently completed – relies to a significant extent upon the non-dogmatic interplay between psychological/expressionistic and overtly supernatural explanations of the on-screen events. (1)

To put this as simply as I can: in the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’, what is the nature of the dark, evil thing – a thing too frightful for them to even mention it out loud, let alone assigning a name to it - that The Book House Boys and the other virtuous characters stand in opposition to?

Is it the gateway to another order of being, occupied by a malign power so alien in nature that – in classic Lovecraftian tradition – human sensory organs can only comprehend it in a garbled, fragmentary manner?

Or, is it the equally unspeakable truth of a network of child abuse and sexual exploitation that has existed beneath the surface of the town’s public life for so long that it has touched the lives of just about everybody?

The answer is of course that it is both – they are one and the same, and it is the frisson between these two paradigms that provides the series with much of its indelible power.

By disregarding this precarious balance, ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 is in danger of ultimately coming up empty, its events signifying little beyond their surface level function as an extended horror/science fiction potboiler.

Whilst the human drama of the new series is too diffuse and fragmentary for us to really dig into any of our characters emotional lives beyond their involvement in the Frost/Lynch mind-maze, likewise The Black Lodge / Other Place – so terrifying and inexplicable in the past – becomes merely banal in its 2017 reiteration. Stripped of the dense layers of fear and obfuscation that shadowed its existence in the original series, it is treated here simply as a routine (if admirably surrealistic) SF conceit.

To my great surprise in fact, the thing that is most sorely missed in ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 thus far is the sense of palpable fear and cosmic dread that has been a trademark of David Lynch’s work ever since ‘Eraserhead’.

As soon as those deep, dark drones start rumbling, the light fittings start flickering and the camera starts slowly edging around the next corner, anyone familiar with the director’s work will know the time has come to brace themselves accordingly. It may be have become a cliché by this point, and Lynch’s apparent desire to move on from it is perhaps understandable, but his failure to replace his ‘old faithful’ with any new ways to terrify us here is pretty dispiriting.

Although ostensibly upsetting and berserkly violent things happen with great frequency in the new ‘Twin Peaks’, few of them succeed in making any real impact. It’s as if, somehow, the man who once managed to make shots of ceiling fans and traffic lights resonate with soul-withering malevolence has here decided to rush through depictions of spectral hobos tearing people’s faces off and psychotic dwarfs murdering women with ice-picks as if he was just getting from A to B on a routine sit-com assignment.

Minor plot points and gnomic coded messages may still be dangled before the us as if they were tantalising hints of some ungraspable mystery, but, once we’ve become accustomed to the existence of the Lodge and basically accepted it as some sort of alternate dimension from which weird people, some good and some bad, occasionally emerge to fuck with us… well, beyond that, what mystery is left to uncover, really?

With the personal/‘psychological’ interpretation of events entirely off the table, are the precise details of what these beings are up to really all that important, or even interesting?

With the ‘supernatural’ plot-line thus rendered as innocuous as a surprisingly psychedelic episode of ‘The X Files’, the new ‘Twin Peaks’ often feels not just bland, but empty, hollowed out – chronically lacking in the thematic resonance and murky emotional depths that characterised the original series.

Moreso that the aesthetic/storytelling lapses I’ve griped about earlier in this post, I feel this will be a difficult obstacle for Frost & Lynch to overcome in subsequent episodes, but…. perhaps my constant comparisons to the original series are unhelpful here. Fingers crossed our writers are just re-setting the table here for some entirely different kind of thematic significance, as yet unguessed at by myself.


3. Picking up steam: Episodes #7 – #9

Although I think it’s best to retain my extended griping above, just in order to capture a range of arguments and observations that I hope will prove interesting on some level, I’m cautiously going to declare that my belief that, from episode # 7 onwards, the new ‘Twin Peaks’ has really been picking up steam, moving – albeit with painstakingly leisure – toward territory that has the potential to engage and fascinate us anew, and to pull us in directions that will hopefully render my desire to constantly reference back to the achievements of the original series happily unnecessary.

The new and not-so-new characters are finally starting to get their hooks into me, and the infuriating narrative non-sequiturs are finally starting to coalesce into something that suggests they may all actually be going somewhere meaningful, rather than just padding out the run-time with endless shaggy dog stories.

Still early days yet – even after nine hours! – but sparks of that old Lynch magic are finally starting to fly; in slo-mo, the match is being struck, throwing shadow on the rambling, inconsequential world we’ve been occupying for the past six/seven hours.

Particularly of note here of course is Episode # 8 (‘Got a Light?’), a sure-to-be-preceded-by-‘infamous’ benchmark of televisual headfuckery, which seemingly aims – with the same grandiose avoidance of subtlety that has characterised all of David Lynch’s 21st century work – to elicit the same dropped jaws and baffled expressions of disbelief from viewers that the original ‘Man From The Other Place’ sequence must have inspired back in 1990.

Essentially, this episode represents a self-contained, stand-alone David Lynch short film; but, unlike the similarly disjointed sequences that have also given this impression during the preceding episodes, ‘Got a Light?’ is an extremely distinctive and powerful David Lynch short film, harking directly back to the grotesquery and abstraction of ‘Eraserhead’ and early shorts like 1970’s ‘The Grandmother’, amped up to proportions the younger Lynch could only dream of by means of studio production values and the possibilities allowed by the (perhaps somewhat excessive) application of CGI effects.

So audacious in fact is this fifty minute diversion from all televisual norms that I’m almost inclined to believe Lynch simply grabbed a credit card from the production office, hired a bunch of visual effects artists and just started making the damn thing without seeking anyone’s approval, leaving somebody (Frost presumably) to desperately justify its existence by crow-baring in some tenuous connections to the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe.

Ironically, these forced and rather silly series references serve to rather spoil the overall effect of what is otherwise a perfectly unsettling surrealist tour de force on Lynch’s part – one that, for all that it may initially seem entirely disconnected from the rest of ‘Twin Peaks’, nonetheless succeeds in tearing open a whole new can of potential thematic concerns, through which the comparatively mundane episodes that surround it can perhaps be re-evaluated.


4. New patterns emerge?

In ‘Got a Light?’, Lynch seems to be introducing us to the notion that, at the point of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, some dark spirit entered the USA. Moving forward eleven years from there – and using a set of imagery highly reminiscent of atomic-era American monster movies – he portrays some beings apparently spawned from this event literally emerging from the New Mexico soil and infiltrating and/or violently destroying various symbols of the dream-like innocence that the director has always assigned to the beloved, electrified 1950s of his childhood.

In view of this, it is worth noting that allusions to American nationhood and the faintly melancholic reflections on “American dream”/national heritage type imagery that seems to pop up with peculiar persistence throughout the opening half of ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’.

Alongside the expected celebration of the FBI as a great, inclusive national institution and general force for good in the world (once again, ‘Twin Peaks’ surely provides the Feds with the best PR they’ve received at any point in their existence), we have Gordon Cole – his desk backed by a giant blow up of a mushroom cloud – gazing longingly at the flag, and earnestly contemplating the photograph of Mt. Rushmore that Albert hands him at the start of their sojourn in South Dakota (“FACES OF STONE”).

In Las Vegas meanwhile, Dougie Jones (our sleeping hero) gazes blankly at the statue of a gesticulating cowboy that stands in the centre of the disconcertingly clean public square fronting the bland, new-build office complex that houses the insurance company for which he works. In a later scene, we find Dougie and Janey-E in the waiting area of a similarly anti-sceptic police station. As the cynical, self-absorbed Vegas cops waste their time, Dougie finds himself staring at the forlorn, loosely rolled American flag that sits in the corner of the room, as a warped, Caretaker-ised version of ‘America the Brave’ plays distantly on the soundtrack, and, of course, an electrical socket crackles ominously.

This reminds me in turn of one of The Log Lady’s cryptic messages to Deputy Hawk, in which – you’ll forgive me for not checking back to get an exact quote – she speaks of electricity being everywhere, crackling through the air, over the water and the woods, putting me in mind of the expressions of elation inspired by the electrification of the plains and the spread of electric lights to remote parts of the USA during the early 20th century. (I’m particularly reminded of Richard Brautigan’s beautiful I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone from ‘Revenge of the Lawn’.) The Log Lady goes on however to note that the power of which she speaks is getting dimmer, and harder to find – she says there’s not so much of it around, these days.

Could Lynch be moving here toward some kind of elegiac reflection on the slow death of America? Is he encouraging us to cross-reference these moments of patriotic nostalgia with the depression, violence and confusion that seems to characterise the air-conditioned lives of the show’s 21st century characters? Well, it’s just a thought. (2)

This all coincides of course with Lynch’s continued fascination with the sinister properties of electricity – a long-running trope within his work that reaches new heights in ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’. Rather than simply sign-posting the inter-connections between different orders of being (or, warning of the proximity of evil) as they have in past works, the fizzing sockets, crackling bulbs, humming power lines and so on seem at times here to be reaching a kind of continuous, rolling crescendo, drawing an inevitable comparison with the language of fire and light frequently employed by the denizens of the Lodge and their earthly intermediaries, and taking us, by implication, straight back to that ultimate holy fire - the nightmare of nuclear incineration depicted so vividly in ‘Got a Light?’

That episode title – uttered by the black-faced “woodsmen” creatures as they mechanically thrust unlit cigarettes in the face of prospective victims – speaks for itself in this context (as above, so below), as does Hawk’s unravelling of his ancient Native American map of the Twin Peaks area, with its ominous warning of the “black fire”.

The ‘blue rose’ (the code name for Gordon Cole’s covert unit within the FBI) is of course often used as an example something that does not occur within nature. Opponents of nuclear power have likewise often characterised atomic science as “unnatural”, raising spectres of a warning against “meddling in forces beyond our understanding” common to both Frankensteinian mad science narratives and also to the kind of occult/black magickal dabbling that – reflecting the fearful warnings of The Log Lady – could easily lead ill-prepared humans into communion with the denizens of the Lodge.

In view of the clear science fictional slant evidenced in ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, I’m sure you’ll all recall Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-quoted “sufficiently advanced science indistinguishable from magic” jive.

Given that ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ seems keen on going far more deeply into the origins of Cole’s “Blue Rose” investigations and their thoroughly X Files-y background in the US Army’s ‘Project Blue Book’, could we be looking at a ‘Twin Peaks’ that ends – in the ultimate example of bombastic narrative one-upmanship – with some supernaturally mandated countdown to Armageddon..? (Or, here’s hoping, something a little more original and thought-provoking, drawn from these same themes.) Fire Walk With Me, indeed.

---

That’s all for now – TO BE CONTINUED once I’ve been able to gather my thoughts after watching episodes #10 - #18.

---

(1) I won’t clog up space by going into it here, but I’d actually contest that ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Inland Empire’ can all easily be read as taking place within the same “world” as ‘Twin Peaks’ – an idea that is lent further weight by the parallels with those films’ plot lines that creep into the 2017 series. In essence, all three of these films concern characters who are victimised by dark, evil powers from another order of being, manipulated by them into carrying out assassinations and other acts for reasons unknown, then abandoned to states of madness, fragmentation of identity and/or death. The flickering of electricity that heralds manifestations from beyond, the garbled messages of unclear significance delivered by its messengers, and the weird, unheimlich human forms they assume – none of this will be new to viewers of ‘Twin Peaks’, and no further evidence should be needed I feel to establish all of these works as part of the same shared universe.

(2) Through much of his work, Lynch seems to have been positing an “innocence corrupted” narrative of American society, presenting his shimmering, guilt-free suburban ideal of the 1950s – with a particular emphasis on the hope and excitement that that decade’s technology and engineered seemed to represent – and contrasting it with a creeping tide of cynicism, uncertainly, psychosis and moral turpitude that he seems to imply has weakened and eventually destroyed this ideal through subsequent decades. In ‘Blue Velvet’, we can see this latter strain portrayed as a kind of “worm in the apple” corrupting suburbia from within, and this interpretation can also obviously be placed upon the overriding narrative of the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’.

Subsequent to this I think, it is notable that Lynch’s trilogy of L.A.-set films take place in a world that is already thoroughly corrupt, sinking deep into a noir-ish abyss and impossible for the kind of honest, avuncular characters that Lynch often champions to negotiate without finding their personalities shattered into pieces. It’s as if he is admitting that the battle has already been lost, that the America he knew as a child has already fallen, torn apart by the loss of innocence that was the second half of the 20th century. (This, essentially, is the story he gives us in miniature through the oddball science fictional imagery of ‘Got a Light?’)