Hammer House of Horror: Children of the Full Moon (Tom Clegg, 1980)

Up to this point in the series, the otherwise disparate episodes of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ have been united by their complete avoidance of the kind of gothic horror tropes with which the titular studio had become synonymous over the preceding decades.

True, we’ve had a witch episode, and a haunted house episode, but both have taken a rigorously quotidian approach to their subject matter, emphasising their present day settings and prioritising attention-grabbing narrative twists and the disruption of everyday life over the pulpy, escapist grandeur which defined Hammer’s glory days.

Like those episodes (and most others in the series, to be honest), ‘Children of the Full Moon’ centres around the travails of a recently married, contemporary British couple - in this case, smarmy young corporate solicitor Tom (Christopher Cazenove) and his wife Sarah (Celia Gregory), a possessor of no other immediately obvious character traits.

Whilst roaring around the West Country in their BMW in search of a holiday home belonging to Tom’s even-smarmier boss (the great Robert Urquhart, a veteran of ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ (1956), no less), the young lovers fall victims to a supernatural joy-riding incident which leaves their swanky motor wrapped around a tree in what is, evidently, the middle of bloody nowhere.

This time around however, the fateful misadventures which befall our characters as they stomp off into the forest in search of help bring us such easy pleasures as creaking wrought iron gates surrounded by banks of spot-lit ground fog, dim lights burning in the windows of an imposing gothic revival manor house (Hampden House in Buckinghamshire, location fans may wish to note), shadowy cinematography, ominous howls in the night, axe-wielding folkloric woodcutters, creepy pale-skinned children in Victorian garb, and - as the episode’s title so subtly implies - some honest to goodness werewolves.

All of which proves a hell of a lot of fun, needless to say, even as Murray Smith’s knocked-off-in-a-weekend script remains sloppily predictable throughout.

In particular, it’s an absolute delight to see Diana Dors popping up here as the homely matriarch of the lycanthrope brood, giving it her all as usual, gradually dialling up the glassy-eyed malevolence behind her ingratiating smile and ‘Archers’-worthy Somerset drawl as things become increasingly hairy (pun intended) for our not-especially-likeable yuppie protagonists, perhaps adding a touch of ‘city vs country’ social tension to the thin subject matter in the process.

Sadly, we don’t get to see Diana experiencing a full-on werewolf transformation, but her opposite number (played by Jacob Witkin) eventually does the honours instead, and, in view of the TV drama level production budget and notorious difficulty of achieving decent werewolf effects, I think it must be acknowledged that the make up team here did a fair job.

Nonetheless, regular series director Tom Clegg was probably wise to minimise screen time for the werewolf, keeping the stalking beast safely confined to the darkened woods until the finale, whilst meanwhile allowing the bulk of the episode’s creepitude to instead fall upon the shoulders of wolf-family’s brood of creepy, carnivorous children.

Given that one of them plays the flute, that they have ‘suspicious’ foreign names like Tibor and Eloise, and that they wear incongruous Victorian costumes, M.R. James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ (or more likely, Lawrence Gordon Clark’s 1973 ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’ adaptation thereof) would seem to be a prime influence here, which is certainly no bad thing.

As noted above, even casual horror fans will find very little to surprise them in the way this story pans out, but in a sense, the very predictability of Smith’s script serves to move the series away from the twist-heavy ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ type yarns which have tended to predominate in earlier episodes, and more towards something approaching good ol’, no nonsense gothic horror (albeit, a contemporary-set variation with a touch of ‘70s b-movie nastiness thrown in for good measure) - a change which I, for one, welcome with open arms.

In fact, if ‘Children of the Full Moon’ had been a segment of an Amicus anthology film from the preceding decade, it would have ranked as a pretty damn good one, which is high praise in this context. Definitely one of my favourite episodes so far in terms of pure entertainment value, even if its artistic merits may be questionable at best.

Horror Express: In The Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021)

Shot in a remarkable fourteen days during the summer of 2020, when such concerns must have still felt quite scary and new, Ben Wheatley’s most recent horror film begins by using the conventions of old school British post-apocalyptic SF to casually outline the parameters of a world in which a pandemic has progressed in a considerably worse direction than the one we've all been living with for the past few years.

Our protagonist Martin (Joel Fry) has just emerged from four months in isolation, and is met by staff in hazmat suits and subjected to extensive - if inconsistently applied - health and hygiene checks before being allowed to enter the ‘sterile area’ within a lodge on the outskirts of a national park. We soon learn that granulated coffee has become a rare and valued commodity, and there is grim speculation about families fleeing the city to camp out in the forest (“Bristol was hit very badly in the third wave..”).

This unsettling human background gradually fades in importance though once Martin and park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) set out on foot through an expanse of ‘old growth’ woodland, with the aim of reaching the remote camp where Martin's former colleague Dr Wendel (Hayley Squires) has been alone for some months, conducting research on the possibility of boosting crop yields through stimulation of the neural networks within plant roots, or somesuch.

(I need to break my plot synopsisin’ here to note that I’m not sure I quite buy the idea that there are still areas of forest of the west of England so dense and inaccessible that they can also be reached through several days solid hiking, especially given that, when we eventually reach it, the doctor’s set-up is kitted out with at least a lorry-load of specialist equipment… but never mind, let’s just go with it.)

Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that the gruelling and terrifying events which Martin and Alma experience during their journey through the forest contain strong trace elements of a modern horror film, incorporating such checklist ticking essentials as axe-wielding psychos, forced incarceration, desperate fights for survival and an uncomfortable preoccupation with gruesome injury detail. 

Beyond that though, it’s easy to see why many viewers were disappointed with and/or perplexed by this film upon release (and the fact it was marketed by Univeral as a straight genre piece probably didn’t help).

What Wheatley has actually gone and done here, y’see, is to funnel a modest studio budget into making another totally zonked out, bad trip ‘head movie’, following a wafer-thin structure which at times put me in mind of ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Stalker’, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and Saul Bass's ‘Phase IV’, but that in essence can probably be traced all the way back to the grail myths or ancient Sumerian scriptures or whatever else.

Which is to say: Quest > confrontation/catharsis > revelation, basically. You know the score, I’m sure. (As a pattern for storytelling, it’s curiously compatible with the Marxists’ beloved “thesis / antithesis / synthesis” equation, isn’t it? But, that’s a big pile of navel-gazing for another day, I realise.)

What ‘In The Earth’ reminded me of more than anything though is Wheatley's own ‘A Field in England’ (2013). Indeed, it struck me that the core premise of both films is essentially the same; ie, a pair of innocents being coaxed into a fixed and inescapable rural space in which they are menaced and generally fucked with by a more-or-less insane practitioner of uncertain magickal arts, subjected to non-consensual drug experiences, forced to re-examine their conception of the laws which govern the universe, and at one point obliged to participate in a kind of supernatural tug of war.

Here though, that premise finds itself revisited and greatly expanded in a quasi-realistic contemporary setting, its impact amped up through the use of an extreme and confrontational cinematic aesthetic which basically seeks to replicate the textural & emotional experience of making multiple bad drug decisions at an experimental music festival (with added gory violence).

(In fact, seekers after an auteurist thread running through Wheatley’s work could even go further here, citing the fact that films as disparate as 2015’s ‘High Rise’ or 2017’s brilliant Free Fire also centre around the idea of a zero sum game of survival played out within a single, confined environment, in which characters gradually accumulate wounds and physical impairments as their determination to get out alive transmutes into a kind of despairing, entropic embrace of self-immolation.)

Thankfully though, the mere opportunity to crown Wheatley as the unwilling king of “closed environment injury movies” is pretty much the least interesting thing going on in ‘In The Earth’ - a film which, thematically-speaking, leaves all kinds of fascinating stuff floating around in the ether, just waiting to be plucked out by the critically engaged and/or stoned viewer.

In no particular order then, we’ve got: the nature of English identity and the malign/atavistic aspect of people’s connection to the land, the interplay of science, culture and ritual in understanding the natural environment, the fine line between learning from nature and being consumed by it, the unimaginable psychological impact of contact with non-human intelligence…. and probably a dozen other things besides.

Personally, I couldn’t help latching onto the fact that both of the ‘questers’ within the film are of mixed race / non-white ethnicity (and thus implicitly urban, as well as relatively young), whilst the two characters who have fully lost themselves to the atavistic forces stirred up within the the forest - dwelling within it and becoming at least somewhat crazed and dangerous as a result - are Anglo-Saxon, middle-aged, and recognisably middle class.

Filtering this through the dialectics currently in play within UK society, I couldn’t help but see this as some kind of exaggerated depiction of the underlying menace potentially experienced by bold young urbanites when (as they are want to do) they step out into the remoter depths of the countryside, perhaps seeking that uncanny frisson that comes from connection with the ancient, ancestral earth… only to find that, socially speaking, things have a tendency to get a bit weird, and not necessarily in a good way, as soon as they venture more than a few miles from the nearest train station.

I’m sure this was nowhere near the forefront of Wheatley’s mind when he was conceiving ‘In The Earth’, but, it’s definitely buried in there somewhere, waiting (if you’ll excuse the pun) to be unearthed. Indeed, quite what the film is trying to say about any of the stuff listed above remains nebulous and vague in the extreme; nothing is ever really unpacked or nailed down amid the onslaught of bloody forest mulch and editing room psychedelia.

In short then, it’s easy to see why so many people had such a negative reaction to this film. I appreciate that some viewers may find its style too emphatic and aggressive, or feel that its ideas are mixed up and under-developed to the point of being meaningless; and, they may have a point.

Likewise, Wheatley’s embrace of shop-soiled talismans of the ‘folk horror’ and ‘hauntology’ movements (cf: the film’s ‘Owl Service’ referencing standing stone, and the Julian House-styled faux-Penguin closing credits) may strike some as contrived and opportunistic, whilst the digital psychedelic freak-out effects which comprise much of the finale certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste (not least a few moments which throw caution to the wind and basically turn into a ‘90s new age / techno-pagan screensaver).

But, personally, none of these potential stumbling blocks bothered me. Hell, I enjoyed them! In fact, I got a lot out of the film on all levels. For my money, it’s arguably the most frightening, provocative and impactful film Wheatley has made to date. 

In the long run, I foresee it accumulating a more appreciative audience as the years go by, and in the short term, I imagine it will spend a long time lurking in the back of my mind, as the question of what it all “means” stews around in there, taking on new forms, drawing me to contemplate repeat viewings, in spite of the mild psychic trauma initiated by the first go-round.

Which is exactly what you’d expect of any good zonked out, bad trip ‘head movie’ really, isn't it?

October Horrors 2019 # 3: Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)

So, who’s up for a totally standard ‘90s werewolf movie?

I may not normally have been, but, as any readers who dutifully memorised my 2018 Best First Viewing list may recall, I was completely blown away by Eric Red’s directorial debut ‘Cohen & Tate’ (1988), so, the fact that that guy waded into the midst of American horror’s most boring decade for some lycanthropic hi-jinx certainly piqued my interest.

Ok, so, first off - ‘Bad Moon’, which was adapted for the screen by Red from Wayne Smith’s novel ‘Thor’, isn’t really big on werewolf mythology (cinematic or otherwise), but proably the most interesting thing it does in this regard is to entirely jettison the familiar lore laid down by Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolfman’, and to instead take its inspiration from Stuart Walker’s oft-overlooked Werewolf of London (1935).

Red signals this most obviously by featuring a clip of the latter movie, which is playing on TV in the background at one point (at breakfast time, no less – what kind of wild TV station is this?), but he also echoes Walker’s film by positing the idea of lycanthropy reaching the western world from ‘exotic’ eastern climes when a caucasian interloper has the misfortune to get himself bitten, and also by (briefly) exploring the idea that the victim may try to cure himself using science.

Unfortunately, he also replicates what most critics have deemed to be ‘Werewolf of London’s biggest flaw by short-circuiting the pathos generally expected of the werewolf narrative and instead making the cursed individual an inscrutable, misanthropic ass-hat… but, we’ll get onto that later.

For now, let it merely be noted that things do not exactly get off to a good start. During the pre-credits prologue, we are introduced to Ted (Michael Paré) and his girlfriend Marjorie (Johanna Marlowe), who appear to be intrepid gap year explorer types or something, leading an expedition comprising a bunch of heavily moustached, furry-hatted tracker/guide types who could have come straight from ‘30s Hollywood Central Casting through a back-lot recreation of what I assume to be some unspeakably remote place in Asia minor.

In the midst of a drearily non-explicit hard body sex scene which definitely did not come from ‘30s Hollywood, the couple find themselves interrupted by a bloody, hulking great yeti-like werewolf, which kills the furry-hatted men and rips through the side of their tent. Though Marjorie is torn to pieces in the ensuing melee, Ted, though severely wounded, manages to reach for a rifle and promptly blows the creature’s head off.

All of which, I’ll admit, sounds like a lot of fun on paper, but something about the execution here is just *off*. The film cuts choppily around the werewolf as if worried that the effects simply weren’t up to scratch, and, though the setting and situation is goofy and exploitative in the extreme, it all seems to have been realised in a spirit of mundane, soap opera earnestness. To be frank, for a filmmaker whose earlier work as both a writer and director relied on tightly-wound, hard-boiled drama and careful attention to detail, this is some sloppy, trashy shit right here.

We cut directly to the good old U.S. of A – somewhere in the Great Lakes area I’m assuming, in view of the stirring, National Park scenery and references to nearby Chicago. Janet (Mariel Hemingway) is a high-flying lawyer and single parent, who has recently given up her big city practice, and now lives in an isolated house on the edge of the forest with her young son Brett (Mason Gamble) and the family’s beloved dog, a German Shepherd named Thor.

Shortly after we are introduced to this family unit, Janet receives a call from her estranged brother, who is back in the area after some time away and would like to re-establish contact. It’s Ted from the prologue, of course, and he is now living in a pleasingly retro Airstream trailer parked in a picturesque lakeside beauty spot. When Janet & co visit him, he confesses to his sister that his girlfriend is “gone”, and that he’s “not doing so good”.

Thor, needless to say, doesn’t like Ted one bit, and Brett, whilst snooping around in his trailer, discovers a bunch of mysterious test tubes and lab equipment and…. a big old book about werewolves! (This being a movie of course, he naturally finds this to be frightening and suspicious, rather than just thinking, wow, what a cool book, my Uncle’s into some interesting stuff.)

Before long, the police are cordoning off the area around Ted’s trailer, investigating a spate of mysterious hiker murders apparently involving wild animals, and Ted is once again on the phone to Janet, who invites him to park his trailer out behind her house and come spend some more time with the family.

And thus, the stage is set for an epic territorial battle between Ted’s lupine alter-ego and the protective Thor, who of course is the only family member to initially grasp the nature of Ted’s affliction. Indeed, as the film goes on, Thor increasingly takes on the role of protagonist, with the dog who plays him in close-ups and character scenes (credited as ‘Primo’) delivering a loveable and emotive performance that should have swept the board at the Doggie Oscars, if only they existed.

Not that it is exactly difficult for Primo to overshadow the human cast here, it must be said. Gamble is pretty much yr average Hollywood child actor, but neither Hemingway nor Paré really seem to be able to make anything of the characters they’re playing, or to connect with us in any tangible fashion – which is an issue, given that they’re basically the only human adults in this story.

Paré does his best I suppose, but the inconsistencies in the way his character is written are maddening. In classic Paul Naschy fashion, Ted manfully attempts to keep his wolfen self in check by spending his nights handcuffed to a giant tree, but he also seems pretty careless about ensuring that he actually achieves this before nightfall, and seems dismissive of the accidental carnage which results.

Ted claims that he has moved in with his sister in the hope that, with all else having failed, good old fashioned familial love may cure him of his affliction (and he writes this in his private diary, so we know he means it). But, we never see him reaching out to his sister and nephew or showing any warmth toward them. Instead he remains sullen and withdrawn, and, in the film’s final act, he inexplicably begins acting like a full-on villainous asshole, deceiving and threatening his relatives, goading their dog into attacking him, and triumphantly pissing in the poor mutt’s dog-house to assert his territorial dominance after Thor has been taken away by the police dog handlers.

Why does he do this? Is his “wolf side” affecting his day-time, human behaviour too? Or has he always basically just been a horrible person? Despite being treated to voluminous extracts from his diary, we basically never get into this guy’s head or get a handle on what he’s up to, making it difficult for us to answer these questions, or even to gauge whether he is still fighting, or merely enabling, his own lycanthropy.

As such, it is impossible for us to empathise with him in his plight, as the script – reliant on decades of werewolf tradition – seems to demand. (Actually, Paré’s performance could have worked a lot better if the film had explored the idea that his character may just be a common-or-garden human psychopath, but with the reality of the werewolf always front and centre, thins never really go in that direction.)

In other respects meanwhile, ‘Bad Moon’ seems content to proceed upon what I can only describe as a defiantly unrealistic basis. This is, after all, a film in which an average joe who wants to find out about werewolves in 1996 is forced to resort to a massive, leather-bound grimoire, and in which a local sheriff responds to a case in which a family’s dog is alleged to have torn a man to pieces just outside their driveway not by examining the dog or seeking to gather any forensic evidence, but instead by merely having a quiet word with the owner, suggesting she “might want to think about getting a new hound”. (Small town policing at its finest.)

As if not content with this kind of silliness meanwhile, Red later also gives us a world in which a ten-year-old boy with a pair of wire-cutters can cycle to the local dog pound – whose security arrangements consist solely of a chain-link fence which can be easily scaled by a large dog – and liberate his pet in a matter of minutes.

Of course, such Argento-esque mutations of real world cause-and-effect wouldn’t bother me in the slightest in the context of an exciting, fantastical horror film, but sadly ‘Bad Moon’ struggles too in this regard, and ultimately offers little to distract our attention from its assorted inconsistencies.

Perhaps reflective of its big studio status (the film was backed, and presumably carefully overseen, by Morgan Creek, the production house whose biggest hits included ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ amongst others), ‘Bad Moon’ keeps it slow and steady, carefully adhering to the middle of the road. Photography remains bright and clear, framing and lighting are conventional, and colours are muted. No hint of atmosphere or otherworldliness is allowed to accrue, despite the promise offered by the rural locations.

Likewise, Red’s script is largely devoid of the kind of symbolism or psychological / metaphysical thematics which could bring a story like this to life, and the film’s take on werewolf lore remains just as sketchy and ill-defined as the deeply unsatisfactory character relationships. (Despite Ted telling us that his transformations are not limited to full moons and basically occur every night for instance, we’re still treated to regular stock shots of the moon, which, I’m duty-bound to report, remains full for about six consecutive nights or something. Again, we’re in goofy b-movie territory here, however much the film might strive to achieve a tone of earnest, dramatic sobriety.)

Although I’m not familiar with Smith’s source novel, I can well imagine that, in the grand tradition of post-Stephen King horror doorstops, it must surely have been full of digressions and sub-plots and such, which I can in turn suppose must have been ruthlessly excised by Red in order to ensure the story adheres to his trademark narrative minimalism.

In the process of hacking the novel into shape for a ninety minute three-hander though, he seems to have lost the thread of whatever this story was actually supposed to be about, leaving its human characters feeling empty and opaque, and draining the on-screen events of any wider resonance.

In fact, a minimal amount of research reveals that the novel is actually written from the point of view of the dog, which immediately invites a far more interesting set of conflicts than is presented in the film, and also helps explain why Thor is the only character here who actually manages to establish an emotional connection with the audience. (Did I mention that the scene in which he is taken away by the dog-handlers is more harrowing than all the werewolf stuff put together?)

On the plus side, Red’s insistence on using practical effects to realise the werewolf should be commended (it must have been a hard sell in ’96), even if the transformation scenes are marred by some very dated CGI ‘warping’ effects. The film’s finale meanwhile is staged in impressively brutal and uncompromising fashion, delivering on the promise of a German Shepherd vs. werewolf vs. gun-toting mother showdown in a blood-drenched, bone-crunching manner that many studio filmmakers would have understandably bottled on (I mean, just imagine the complexities of throwing actors, animals, animatronic monsters, gore, guns and stunt-work all into the same shot, and actually making it work), reminding us, for a minute or two at least, of ‘Cohen & Tate’s similarly crazed final act.

But, it’s too little too late. Overall, ‘Bad Moon’ just doesn’t work, in spite what I assume must have been Herculean efforts on the part of its crew and director. Admittedly, it does at least make for a pretty great dog movie, and Primo is an f-ing star, so if you’re, say, a big fan of the Lassie movies who wishes they could have been a bit more edgy and hardcore, well, you’re in luck! If you’re looking for a werewolf movie (or indeed a human movie) though, this one is a bit of a bust I’m afraid.

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!"

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(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.

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

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(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?’)

Some thoughts on… The Witch(Robert Eggers, 2016)

Arriving in my household this December on the back of a veritable avalanche of critical adulation (a major studio distributed horror film won “best director” at Sundance? Really?), Robert Eggers’ directorial debut proved… heavy going, to be honest.

Rendered in the dour, near-monochromatic style that so often seems to predominate in 21st century films that aspire toward “seriousness” (don’t get me wrong, I know life for the 17th century Pilgrim Fathers wasn’t exactly a riot of Technicolor extravagance, but I’d at least like to think they at least encountered the occasional dash of blue or green amid the grey, and managed to look at each other without frowning every now and again), ‘The Witch’ is nonetheless refreshingly unequivocal about its identify as a hackle-raising, scare-yr-pants-off horror film.

Indeed, in purely utilitarian terms, it succeeds extremely well in this area. Despite its overtures toward what I suppose we’re obliged to call in shorthand the “arthouse crowd”, I’ll readily admit that ‘The Witch’ was the most viscerally frightening film I’ve seen in years. Full-on sneaking-glimpses-of-the-screen-through-my-fingers terrifying in places in fact. So, yes - if you are the sort of person who is inclined to judge horror films based primarily on their capacity to be “scary”, you can anticipate a right doozy with this one, irrespective of its somber tone and subject matter.

Whilst I was busy being reduced to a quivering wreck by the film’s overpowering aura of dread and persistent threat of imminent, soul-wreaking violence however, I was also uncomfortably aware of the fact that the techniques Eggers was employing to generate these responses from me were just as cynically manipulative as those found in the most base of jump-scare filled slasher flicks.

From the slow, steady-cam crawls through unfamiliar locations to the nerve-shatteringly loud Penderecki-via-Hermann score, the rapid movements erupting from still life-esque quietude, semi-hidden tableaus of alarming Goya-esque beastliness and aggressive soundscapes of rumbling earthquake drone and chittering demonic feeding - every trick in the Hideo Nakata-via-David Lynch playbook for scaring the bejeezus out of your audience whilst still remaining artistically credible is exhaustively exploited here, whilst the more basic conceit of constantly imperiling children and other innocents simultaneously delivers the can’t-fail coup de grace to our ailing nerves.

Though it is confident in its execution and ruthlessly efficient in its effect, I couldn’t help but feel that this heavy-handed approach to the “scary stuff” was to some extent counter-productive, detracting our attention from the very elements that do actually make ‘The Witch’ a rewarding and genuinely disturbing piece of work – namely, those arising not from the heavy-handed direction but from the film’s writing and performances, which are both extremely good.

As the story initially got underway, I was surprised and rather impressed by the extent to which the script takes the strict puritan beliefs of its characters – a mind-set that is so alien to us in the 21st century West that it is almost impossible to approach it without implicit or explicit criticism – and presents them entirely at face value.

The “witch”, we initially feel, is an external force of parasitic evil whose wrath can be avoided only through a regime of prayer, obedience and enforced purity of thought. The soul of a child who dies prior to baptism meanwhile is headed straight to hell, and that is no laughing matter – especially as regards the burden of guilt which must subsequently be borne by the already grieving parents whose modest lapses in duty are seen as having allowed such a circumstance. Needless to say, it is in this invisible realm of Christian cosmology that the film’s real horror lies.(1)

As the story develops and we delve deeper into the internal lives of the film’s characters though, and as the situation facing them becomes increasingly desperate, ‘The Witch’s moral universe gradually shifts upon its axis in an extremely interesting fashion. Though the change is almost too subtle for us to even notice at first amid all the horror movie nerve-jangling, what eventually begins to emerge is a uniquely involving method of retelling an old, old story.

Though the notion that a seemingly external threat actually grows from within has been a given in haunted house and exorcism type narratives for decades (or indeed centuries, if we fall back on the gothic tradition), I have rarely seen this theme elucidated in quite such a compassionate and compelling manner as it is here, as, taking a page or two from the none-more-obvious reference point of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, ‘The Witch’ essentially becomes a tale about the way in which the seemingly unbreakable bonds of love and trust within a close-knit family unit can be strained, twisted and eventually destroyed in the face of stressful and traumatic circumstances.

As hardship and anxiety increases, minor vanities and personal failings that could be indulged and forgiven under more comfortable circumstances widen into fatal flaws, allowing nagging seeds of doubt to flower into full blown paranoia, which in turn becomes entwined with the family’s rigidly inflexible belief system, legitimising increasingly unhinged and dangerous patterns of behavior that move the story toward a far more nuanced and thought-provoking condemnation of religious extremism and its social & psychological consequences than we horror fans are usually asked to process via one-sided diatribes of the ‘Witchfinder General’ variety.(2)

Played out by a gifted cast with all the weighty intensity they can muster (I’d normally single out some names at this point, but frankly it’s just easier if I just refer to the IMDB cast list, as each member of the film’s central family is equally outstanding, the child actors in particular), it is this theme which serves to elevate ‘The Witch’ to a level of dramatic legitimacy that I confess makes all the Luciferian goats and monster-clawed hags that Eggers throws at us seem rather silly in comparison.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘The Witch’ might even have worked better as a naturalistic, real world drama rather than as a horror film. This may seem a stretch, but the more I think about it, the easier it is to imagine the essential structure of the script being transferred wholesale to, say, the travails of the family trying to survive in a contemporary Middle East combat zone, without altering the beats of the story in any significant fashion. Just exchange the “the witch” for “the war”, and everything pretty much falls straight into place, with a result that would likely remain just as emotionally coherent, and even more harrowing.

(Of course, THAT film could probably never make it to the screen in quite the way I imagine it, even via the neo-realist film traditions currently prevalent in countries like Iran, simply because it would be near unbearable to sit through. After all, the perverse webs of escapism and thematic metaphor that inform our enjoyment of fictional narratives here in the First World dictate that it is a lot easier to contemplate a baby spirited away by a witch’s familiar than a baby blown to pieces by a cluster bomb, even as the latter continues to be tolerated and enabled every day by the same global power structures that allow us the comfort in which to enjoy tales of the former…. but, I digress.)

One thing that would probably not work in the kind of substitution I have described above however is the ending of ‘The Witch’, which I hope I can briefly discuss without straying into the realm of out-right spoilers.

In essence, there is something fairly extraordinary about the way in which Eggers dovetails ninety minutes of relentless terror and misery with a few giddy, closing moments of what feels almost like a post-annihilation/ego-death liberation of sorts – a kind of ‘flip the script’ alchemical rebirth that leaves us feeling unmoored and light-headed, as the lingering fear we’ve become accustomed to falls away into acceptance. It’s a great ending.

As my wife insightfully observed, by the end of the movie, the mysterious witch cult that we have been living in mortal terror of thus far begins to seem very much like the coven of female convicts in Shunya Ito’s ‘Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41’ (1972) – a society of outcast women transformed into predatory savages because the authoritarian society that has rejected them allows them literally no other options for continued existence. And if I tell you that the ending of Eggers’ film succeeds in capturing even a fraction of the transformative spirit of Ito’s, readers familiar with the latter will know that they can take that as a pretty strong recommendation.

In my more pompous moments, I’ve been known to declare that the only kind of fictional narrative that can be considered in any way relevant to an understanding of the human condition is one that features no clearly delineated ‘villains’, but instead posits a variety of ultimately sympathetic characters who provoke conflict through their contradictory or misguided actions. As such, it could perhaps be said that Robert Eggers’ greatest achievement in ‘The Witch’ lies in his finding a way to combine this principle with a tale of shrieking, inhuman terror that leaves just about everyone dead and eternally damned, and to somehow make it work.

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(1) As a wanton digression that doesn’t easily fit anywhere else in this review, I should note that, purely in terms of supernatural horror, it was this earlier section of the film that I found to be by far the most frightening. Given that the family portrayed in the film (and indeed, the wider community from which they have separated themselves) seems to exist upon the edge of a wilderness largely untouched by humanity, I kept thinking, well, what the hell *is* this ‘witch’? Where did it come from? I mean, an old-fashioned witch cult existing as an off-shoot of an established Christian society – that’s something I can deal with. But the possibility of that *unknown other*…? Remember that quote (was it William Burroughs?) about how, before the white man came to America, and before the red man came, there was already something evil there, some lurking at its heart…? Now THAT’S a scary thought when you’re stuck in an isolated homestead surrounded by impenetrable forest. Though ‘The Witch’ doesn’t ultimately go in that direction, it hovers around it for long enough and convincingly enough in its first half to put the wind up me.

 (2) For wanton digression # 2, it behoves me to point out the similarities between ‘The Witch’ and what is quite possibly my all-time favourite horror film, Piers Haggard’s ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’ (1972). Not only are they amongst the only horror films I’m aware of that create and sustain a believable 17th century setting, complete with period appropriate dialogue, they are also the only two films in my experience of the genre to operate on the basis of a period-appropriate puritan Christian belief system without foregrounding a contemporary critique of said belief system. 

Whilst that may sound like an odd thing to celebrate on one level, it is this straight-faced portrayal of the characters’ beliefs that I think gives both films some of their unique power. Add a number of more nebulous similarities – the association of nature and “the woods” with untamed, pagan nastiness, the corruption of children by an insidious evil, the quasi-political implications of a coven of young/female/sexually active outsiders attacking a repressive patriarchal society – and one wonders how closely Haggard’s film might have played into the development of ‘The Witch’, despite the vastly different tone of the two projects.

Thoughts on… Revisiting Twin Peaks.

Although it dominated my thoughts on cinema through my late teens and early twenties, my David Lynch obsession has (mercifully for the readers of this blog) lain largely dormant since shortly after the release of his last film to date, ‘Inland Empire’, (god-was-it-really) almost a decade ago.

Following the announcement last year that ‘Twin Peaks’ is due for a 25-years-later return in 2016 however, I became conscious of the fact that my recollection of the original series had faded into a mass of distant, fragmented images and half-forgotten characters buried deep in some forgotten archive in my long-term memory. Thus, I decided that I would quite like to revisit the series prior to this ‘revival’ (the nature & wisdom of which remains decidedly uncertain at the time of writing). As it turned out, my wife had never watched the series at all, so what further excuse did we need to break out the old DVDs?

And, in short, refamiliarising myself with ‘Twin Peaks - reliving its terror, mystery, absurdity and catharsis as if for the first time via my wife’s reactions - has proved an immensely enjoyable experience.

Rather than finding the show grating and insincere, as I feared I might when reassessing it from a more detached, ‘grown up’ point of view, returning to ‘Twin Peaks’ has in fact only served to deepen my appreciation for what David Lynch and Mark Frost managed to achieve through this production.

What follows therefore is merely a collection of tangents and observations that occurred to me whilst re-watching the original episodes of the series, arranged in no particular order and leading up to no particular conclusion, but hopefully perhaps providing a few new avenues for fans of the show to ponder as they nervously anticipate the forthcoming quarter century reunion.

SPOILER WARNING: Whilst I have avoided giving away the story’s Big Reveal in the post that follows, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to avoid hinting at it pretty strongly in places. As such: readers who have not watched ‘Twin Peaks’ in its entirety and intend to do so at some point in their life are STRONGLY ADVISED to skip the remainder of this post until said viewing has been completed. (I’m not usually too bothered about such things, but as those ‘in the know’ will understand in this case, prior knowledge would tend to ruin one’s full appreciation of the show to a significant extent.)

1. Twin Peaks is a rigidly moral universe.

Like many viewers I suspect, I recalled ‘Twin Peaks’ largely as a series of rambling digressions and jarring tonal shifts – but in actual fact, the feature length pilot and seven subsequent episodes that form the first series are as tight as a drum in terms of their construction: painstakingly assembled packages of soap opera-via-horror movie emotional manipulation, centred around an elemental ‘good vs evil’ dichotomy as strictly enforced as that of a Christian morality play (even as organised religion plays almost no role in the show whatsoever).

If we examine the series in terms of its most basic conflicts in fact, we find a universe that is closer in essence to the romantic fantasy of something like ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ that it is to the morally ambiguous, reality-based fiction that it at first appears to be, in spite of the myriad complications that are thrown in to put us off the scent.

When contemplating the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’, one could easily draw a diagram incorporating every single character, their positions defined within a fixed moral framework. (If I had any talent whatsoever for capturing facial likenesses in sketches, there is a chance I might have actually, literally drawn this diagram as some kind of insane work of outsider art, so… let’s all be thankful that I don’t.)

On the right hand side of the diagram, we can envisage the forces of ‘good’, clustered around Agent Cooper and the micro-community within the Sheriff’s office, also incorporating Big Ed (still my favourite character after all these years) and the protective spirit of The Bookhouse Boys, Dr Hayward, Major Briggs, Norma at the diner, and the equally steadfast presence of Pete Martell at The Mill.

These are strong characters, their moral integrity and inner peace keeping them safe from corruption or ‘attack’ by the dark terrors that swirl around the town. Whatever day-to-day perils they might face on the physical plain, on a spiritual/psychic level, they collectively constitute an unassailable fortress.

Branching off slightly from the fortress toward the centre of the diagram, we find James, Donna and Maddy – the ‘good kids’ who remain under the nominal protection of their elders, even as their Nancy Drew-like investigations frequently put them in danger of succumbing to ‘the dark’ – their youth making them susceptible to the deadly combination of personal weakness and metaphysical assault that, even whilst never given name or form within the show, adds an eerie, walking-on-eggshells quality to their scenes throughout the first series.

Far away on the other (left hand) side of the diagram meanwhile lurk the dark, dark woods, and the Evil – terrible, unknowable, unnameable, soul-destroying. In its human aspect: Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault (traditional Bad Men, their spirits so degraded they can tread close to the heart of darkness without even knowing it – literally so, on the night of Laura’s death). In its non-human aspect: the nightmare world of Killer Bob and One Armed Mike, which I will freely admit remains utterly terrifying to me to this day (because no one, but no one, in the field of popular culture pulls off that utter-fucking-terror thing like David Lynch, however old hat his tricks may seem when examined after the fact).

Skirting the line between the ‘evil’ realm and the diagram’s central no-mans-land, we have a little boat captained by Benjamin Horne (also housing Jerry, Blackie of One-Eyed Jacks, and Catherine Martell): figures whose greed and moral turpitude places them far within the influence of the dark, but not so much so that they couldn’t escape it, should they choose to try.

And in the very centre of this diagram of course: Laura Palmer. The empty space around whom everyone else in this system must define themselves from the moment the show begins. Strongly subject to the pull of both good and evil – succumbing to both, repelling both – the central area around her becomes a whirlpool of opposing forces.

Scattered in this maelstrom are the show’s ‘lost souls’ – weaker characters, many of them close to Laura, drawn to the light but damaged by the darkness, without the inner strength to know what is happening to them or to determine their own fate. Bobby Briggs, Dr. Jacoby, Audrey Horne, Josie Packard. And, closest to the centre of the whirlpool of course, the poor, tragic spirits of Leland and Sarah Palmer.

Having laid all that out, I hope I won’t sound too crazy when I state that absolutely everything in series # 1 of ‘Twin Peaks’ fits into this scheme completely. Once you have the form of this diagram in mind, there are very few loose ends, very few threads left hanging.

(One remaining anomaly of course is The Log Lady, who, based on a number of hints quietly dropped in the second series, I think might best be defined as a former victim of the town’s ‘evil’, who, as a result of the resulting trauma, has built up psychic walls to protect herself from it. She lives near the whatever-it-is, intercepts messages from it, but is no longer under threat from it.)

2. The Mike / Bobby thing is worth a mention.

One interesting red herring / unexplored avenue / random headfuck [delete as applicable] in the early episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’ is the implied relationship between the town’s “real life” Mike and Bobby – dumb teenage punks stumbling toward a life of low-level criminality (and thus into the realm of the show’s ‘evil’) – and the supernatural ‘Mike’ and ‘Bob’ whom Cooper and the other characters encounter in dreams and visions.

From the garbled and dream-mangled impressions we receive of these entities, we might initially envisage them as a pair of middle-aged criminals or sadists of some kind, who, lurking in the minds of their victims, have somehow become transfigured into fearful disembodied figures in the psychic realm, pitched somewhere between demons, malevolent magicians and elemental avatars of negative human emotion.

Given that Cooper pointedly states that his dream takes place twenty five years after the present, the logical implication here is that One-Armed Mike and Killer Bob represent the terrible beings that the real life Mike and Bobby will become a quarter century hence, should they continue to pursue their callous and destructive path through life. (Eerily, the vague similarities between the two pairs of actors are just close enough to make this seem plausible, in some dream-logic type fashion.)

Whilst this angle is understandably dropped from the storyline once One-Armed Mike becomes a real-world presence in the form of Mr. Gerard, and the circumstances surrounding Laura’s life and death begin to become clearer, it is nonetheless a queasy and potent notion that sticks in the mind longer than it has any right to. (It might make an interesting springboard for a potential 25-five-years-later storyline, perhaps..?)

3. To fight Great Evil, it takes Great Good.

If you boil down David Lynch’s feature filmography down to its basic essence, what you tend to find are stories of lonely, drifting or otherwise emotionally troubled individuals who are drawn into contact with some spirit of ‘evil’ that, whether interpreted in supernatural or psychological terms, is almost too malignant and frightening for the human mind to bear, and subsequently find themselves tranformed or destroyed by it.

Whilst ‘Twin Peaks’ contains some of the most upsetting outbreaks of this ‘evil’ ever realised by Lynch, it is also the only entry in his canon to set up an equally strong force for ‘good’ alongside the horror. Rather than being characterised as doomed victims, riding a noir-ish whirlpool to their inevitable destruction (as per so many of Lynch’s feature films), the people of Twin Peaks at least have a fighting chance.

This innovation could well be attributed to Mark Frost (whom it is all too easy to see as the Derleth to Lynch’s Lovecraft in this particular partnership), but nonetheless, in the first series at least, it is explored in purely Lynchian terms. ‘Good’, for Lynch, is represented by feelings of comfort, compassion and familiarity, and, at times, these virtues are rendered just as powerfully in ‘Twin Peaks’ as the stark terror and threat of the nameless ‘evil’.

Through the shared appreciation of “damn good coffee” and the lunch-time slice of pie, the rituals of ‘good’ are asserted, and the atmosphere cleansed. The scenes early in the series, in which Agent Cooper is initiated into the ways of The Bookhouse Boys, and in which he and the sheriff’s deputies bond on the shooting range (when Hawk memorably recites the poem he wrote for his girlfriend), convey such a spirit of acceptance and belonging that it is almost overwhelming. As long as guys like this are on the case, the viewer is invited to think, the nameless shadow that hangs over the town can never triumph.

Whilst it is all too easy for less insightful fictions to quantify ‘heroism’ in terms of intelligence and physical strength, ‘Twin Peaks’ is generally careful to side-step this misapprehension, demonstrating in its best moments that the our heroes’ ‘strength’ – that which makes them impervious to the evil into which they delve - exists primarily on a spiritual and moral level. This is expressed through their honesty and selflessness, their acceptance of ‘difference’ within their community (whether it be Cooper’s magickal detective work, the ways of The Log Lady or David Duchovny in drag) and their willingness to help others through difficult times; their love for the people around them, basically.

(As an aside, the mythos of The Bookhouse Boys is to my mind one of the most interesting and under-utilised ideas in ‘Twin Peaks’. The notion of a group of entirely conventional, down-to-earth guys feeling drawn together to organise and guard against a threat so vague and nebulous that none of them can even speak about it out loud or express what it is, is one that greatly appeals to me, and that I would very much like to see further explored in any new iteration of the series. [Whilst on the subject: why the ‘bookhouse’? What is this ‘bookhouse’? What are the nature of the books in it, and who put them there? Has no one ever summoned up the courage to say, “guys, I think the word we’re looking for here is ‘library’”? – all these are questions long overdue an answer.] )

4. Authoritarian Mysticism.

Something else about ‘Twin Peaks’ that had never really occurred to me until I started considering it in terms of the ‘good vs evil’ framework outlined above is how thoroughly conservative the assignment of roles within the show is (on the surface level, at least).

Whilst most of the show’s human villains are very traditional ‘bad guy’ types – drifters, petty criminals, pimps and corrupt businessmen, mostly identified as working class -‘Twin Peaks’ conversely paints an extraordinarily positive picture of traditional authority figures.

Police officers, federal agents, even an Air Force Major (and in one episode, a judge and a District Attorney) – these characters are presented, not only as our main protagonists and moral anchors, but as noble, complex and idiosyncratic individuals – warriors, sages and seekers-into-the-mystery, all navigating their own strange paths to enlightenment.

Of course, American popular culture is not exactly lacking in stories that glorify the exploits of unconventional law enforcement officials, but, coming from a counter-culture aligned representative of the ‘baby boomer’ generation like David Lynch – the enfant terrible director of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’, no less – such portrayals swing so far from what we might expect that they become almost transgressive. Especially so given that, as outlined in point # 2 above, the authority figures of ‘Twin Peaks’ are about as far removed from the violent rule-breakers of the John Wayne/’Dirty Harry’ tradition as it is possible to get

Instead, the show’s cops and agents all embrace the civic duty and regimental conformity of their office with almost comical solemnity, whilst simultaneously embodying a set of values that American culture more commonly assigns to lone mystics, saintly humanitarian figures, or, less charitably, just plain hippies.

By so pointedly overturning the clichés of the doltish small town cop, the hard-headed FBI agent and the bullying military dad, Lynch & Frost repeatedly create fresh, interesting and unpredictable characters for us to identify with, and perhaps even to a certain extent succeed in opening the minds of those of us who grew up images of Rodney King beatings and Vietnam massacres to a different, more measured understanding of the human beings behind this kind of civic authority, and the positive force they can exert. And in a certain sense, what could possibly be more subversive than that?

5. When quality drops, it drops hard.

Back when I first viewed ‘Twin Peaks’, the much vaunted drop in quality between the first and second series never struck me as that much of an issue, but, returning to it again with my critical faculties more carefully attuned, what can I say but - ouch.

As I suppose will be obvious to fans, all of my fine words above and below relate primary to the ‘core’ of the series – that being, the first season, and the portions of the second season directly related the mystery surrounding Laura’s murder. Outside of that, the speed with which the carefully wrought atmosphere and universe of the show’s first series falls apart in season # 2 is staggering.

Whilst the business with Major Briggs and the Black and White Lodges remains diverting, any sense of real gravitas is long gone (it’s as if a Zulawski or Herzog film suddenly turned into an episode of ‘The X Files’, effectively), and by the time the central mystery of Laura’s death is concluded, it is only the fine characterisations previously established by actors like Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Nance, Don S. Davis, Everett McGill and Sherilyn Fenn that even keep things watchable. In terms of writing and direction, we’re running on fumes from thereon in.

Whilst there is no point dwelling unduly on the negative, there are a couple of characters in particular who are very poorly served by this quality drop. In particular, it is the younger characters who seem to get their personal story arcs most cruelly bashed out of shape by the second series, and this irks me to the extent that I’d quite like to tell you about it.

Having started out as a not-terribly-likeable caricature of a swaggering teen delinquent, Bobby Briggs seemed to have turned a corner and become a potentially interesting character by the end of season #1. Breaking down under questioning from Dr Jacoby, he tearfully admits that it was Laura who convinced him to start pushing drugs and getting involved with bad guys, and, with her corrupting influence removed, we start to see a picture of the goofy, innocent teenager beneath emerging. When his father subsequently reveals his dream of his son’s future happiness, we see Bobby genuinely touched, and, perhaps boosted by his initially very positively portrayed relationship with Shelly, we start to feel that he has perhaps been ‘saved’, under the terms of the show’s moral schema.

All this goes straight out of the window in season # 2 though, as he’s immediately back to being a two-dimensional teen hood straight of a second rate sit-com – an easier sell for both actor and writers, no doubt, but a shameful betrayal of the character who was just beginning to emerge at the end of season # 1.

Even more redundant are James and Donna, who, I’d imagine I won’t be the first to observe, are a complete waste of space in season # 2. Whilst their ambiguous moral position, and the trauma of their proximity to Laura’s murder and the dark deeds of her killer, fuels the drama of their scenes very effectively in season # 1, season #2 drops the ball horrendously.

In terms of season # 1’s strict moral scheme, the mess their little gang gets into with the unfortunate Harold Smith should see them advancing further down the path of danger and corruption – ignoring their moral culpability for his death whilst they increasingly let their own self-pity and melodramatic emotional hang-ups define their actions, at the expense of those around them. If the menace of the earlier episodes was still hanging in the air, this is the point at which the show’s ‘evil’, feeding on such weakness, would make its presence felt and draw them in.

The writers and directors of season # 2 dodge this necessary judgement call entirely however, apparently expecting us to indulge and even sympathise with these solipsistic wet blankets, and, as a result, their respective plotlines drivel off into sub-soap opera tedium and irrelevance. (And, if there’s one thing worse than a daytime soap, it’s daytime soap material that thinks it is being better and cooler than a daytime soap, whilst failing to actually offer up anything at all to critique or transcend the form.)

Whilst on a roll, I could also lament the way that the entire Jean Renault / One-Eyed Jacks storyline, having been so painstakingly built up, fizzles out in an ‘action set-piece’ so flat and half-hearted it leaves no impression on the wider narrative whatsoever, and could rue the day that some script editor decided that the pantomime villainy of Windom Earle made an appropriate replacement for the genuine horror of the forces tied up with Laura’s death, but… well, you get the idea – I think we’ve dwelt on this long enough.

6. ‘Twin Peaks’ is a great work of art.

Above and beyond all of the irony, surrealism and affected quirk that ‘Twin Peaks’ wears like a cloak, the central story of Laura Palmer’s life and death remains a tragedy that no remotely sensitive viewer can remain untouched by, whilst the far-reaching implications and coded, hidden worlds that are uncovered in the course of the investigation of her death can’t help but echo those of similar, undocumented stories – cruel, painful and endlessly circular – that unfold in every city in the world, every day.

By establishing a framework that allows every single facet of one such ‘case’ to be absorbed in the form of popular entertainment – crucially keeping the audience ‘in the dark’ until it is far too late for them to withdraw their emotional investment – Lynch and Frost achieve something uniquely powerful.

Although both creators have repeatedly insisted that they never intended to reveal the identity of Laura’s killer (the lore around the show claiming that this was a decision dictated by the broadcaster ABC), I find such a dismissal difficult to believe, given how beautifully the ‘big reveal’ is eventually handled, and how thoroughly the light of the resulting knowledge retrospectively casts a dark shadow over everything we have seen up to that point – a shadow that, ultimately, defines the meaning of the entire series.

Characteristic of David Lynch’s directorial work, the scenes surrounding the ‘reveal’ operate on a level of psychic/emotional ‘truth’ that at times becomes entirely disconnected from the logic real world cause & effect. In particular, take the way that the murderer’s third killing (the moment at which the penny drops for the audience) is intercut with an almost otherworldly gathering of souls at The Roadhouse (where Julee Cruise’s band plays, and the giant appears to inform Cooper that “IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN”).

Various characters, all of them close to Laura, have gathered there for no reason that is ever made explicitly clear. As they sit separately around the room whilst Cruise and Badalamenti’s upbeat yet strangely harrowing dream-pop music plays and Coop mulls over the realisation that he has failed to anticipate or prevent another killing, a shared feeling of realisation seems to creep over all of the characters similtaneously, even though, in story terms, they do not yet know the literal truth. Why could we not see what was happening? Why did we let it continue? Somewhere deep in their souls, they – and by extension, the whole town – knew the answer. They just couldn't admit it to themselves until now. They did nothing, but what could they do, against a secret so closely guarded? We can place no blame upon them.

Without needing to utter a word out loud, the scene overwhelms us with a combination of sadness, resignation, forgiveness and horror, as the characters see that same shadow stretching back across all they’ve experienced up to this point, just as we feel it falling across the memory of this intriguing and entertaining TV show we’ve been watching over the past however many weeks.

As mentioned earlier in this piece, Lynch’s mysteries can always be approached in either supernatural or psychological/symbolic terms – but crucial to their power is the fact that neither interpretation cancels out the other. Like the work of any magician, it exists on both plains simultaneously.

Put it this way, perhaps: Lynch & Frost could easily have made a grim, real life drama about the events in the Palmer household. It might have been harrowing and compelling, with committed performances and inspired direction. But few would have had the stomach to watch it, let alone fully engage with it, and I certainly wouldn’t be talking about it today.

By drawing us instead into the dark mysteries of The Other Place, the dwarf and the giant, the occult fragments and obtuse clues that lead to the terrifying realm of Killer Bob, they have us hooked before we even know what we’re hooked with.

When Bob makes his attacks – revved up using all the tricks in the Lynch playbook, like the elemental father of every horror movie boogeyman – we feel a genuine sliver of the kind of raw terror experienced daily by victims and perpetrators alike in real life situations that mirror that of Laura's. As we don’t initially know the root of what we’re seeing and feeling, our armour is not in place, and it goes straight in like a knife.

Then, when we’ve been through the worst of it together, when Laura’s murderer eventually leaves this world at peace, the remaining part of his heart that loved her duly forgiven, and the other characters come to terms with the unpalatable truth that is now out in the clear light of day, we feel a kind of ‘closure’ that is difficult to put into words.

I should conclude here by saying that I’m speaking here as someone who has never been at all affected by any of the, uh, ‘issues’ involved in this storyline, but its resolution still left me flattened. I can’t even imagine the effect that viewing ‘Twin Peaks’ might have on someone for whom such issues did have personal significance, but, I believe that effect would ultimately be positive, and indeed, I hope it was.