TIMEOUT, August 22-29 1990, p.16-17

PEAK VIEWING

BY STEVE GRANT

The notion of David Lynch making a TV soap is almost as surreal as the finished product, 'Twin Peaks'. This extraordinary excercise in grim humour, haunting inconsequence and mounting horror will obsess British viewers just as much as it did 35 million Americans.

There is no such thing as a well-kept media secret anymore, certainly not when the secret concerns TV soap and David Lynch. Since 'Twin Peaks', the ABC TV series co-scripted and directed by Lynch, opened in the States this spring with an initial viewing figure of 35 million, everyone from highbrow hacks to hooked punters have been hyperventilating about its eerie charms. Comparisons may be odious but they have ranged from Cocteau, Dali, Fellini and Kafka to Thornton Wilder, John Updike and Garrison Keillor. 'TV will never be the same again,' grown critics have screamed in a country where 'quality TV' is more suitable for the locked attic of public service broadcasting than the frantic fields of the ratings war.

Comparisons aside, 'Twin Peaks' is very much David Lynch, although most of the script is actually the work of 'Hill Street Blues' veteran Mark Frost. So far there have been eight episodes totalling nine hours, with a second series presently in preparation. Though it won´t be shown here until October, the Yanks have already had 'Twin Peaks' parties, T-shirts, imitations, the 'Twin Peaks' holiday trek which has turned the small Washington lumber town in which the series is set into a couch-potato mecca not seen since the tacky Southfork ranch outside Dallas. 'Who killed Laura Palmer?' is the question on everyone´s lips and so far, despite a host of variously eccentric and exotic suspects, the answer remains well and truly hidden.

It was ABC entertainments president Robert Iger who, faced with growing competition from cable, satellite and home video as well as the other two networks, decided to go ahead with this unprecedented mix of quality and quirkiness. It´s not hard to see why: the worlds of 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty' have long grown old; plots have been dafter, Pam Ewing has died more times than English cricket and 'Dynasty' looks like some horrible version of 'The Student Prince' costumed from Rodeo Drive and shot on location in Hell.

Though 'Twin Peaks' is naturally restrained by comparison with 'Wild at Heart' and 'Blue Velvet', it still bears all their hallmarks: a bruised conflagration of evil and innocence, a bizarre and often charming sense of humour both verbal and visual, an extraordinarily honest and unsettling way with pain and grief and a belief little different from the Jacobean playwright Webster that chaos is only a pork chop away from the barbecue. 'A dead man´s skull beneath a root of flowers', wrote Webster, so 'Twin Peaks' begins with the songbirds that ended 'Blue Velvet', cascading waterfalls, stunning verdant scenery and a girl´s dead body, blue and cold and forever gone.

Mark Frost admits that the character of FBI agent Dale Cooper (played by Blue Velveteer Kyle MacLachlan) is very much a portrayal of Lynch himself. Cooper is a cheerful obsessive no less driven by the facts of the case than by the quality of the local cherry pie or the names of the indigenous flora. He´s given to Gnomic homilies and almost Tibetan detection methods, constantly dictating into a micro-recorder and trailing a long list of one-liners behind him of which 'This must be where pies go when they die' and 'Damn good coffee - and hot!' seem the most likely to become mantras for modern America.

Lynch has said that everyone likes detectives and secrets, but in 'Twin Peaks' one never finds the solutions as interesting as the questions. While the occasional hard-boiled critic has complained of Lynch´s langurous 'art-house' style, 'Twin Peaks' is actually brimming with characters and situations: there are wife-beaters, biker thugs, football stars and a mill owner played by Joan Chen, the Oriental beauty from 'The Last Emperor', who is having an affair with a local sheriff called Harry S. Truman. There´s a stoical strongman in storeowner Big Ed whose wife wears an eye patch and, as a possible satirical footnote to the evils that lurk behind the drapes, has a mounting obsession with inventing the silent curtain rail!

There´s also a clutch of vamps, the most notorious of whom is Sherilyn Fenn´s Audrey, a girl who later on lands a job in a local brothel by tying a knot in a cherry stalk with her tongue; a cop who weeps buckets every time he sees a dead body; a dizzy bundle of provincial succour, Lucy, the sheriff´s secretary; and the hard-boiled Catherine Martell (another TV veteran, Piper Laurie) fighting for control of the mill not only with Chen´s Josie Packard bit also with some Norwegians (in 'Dallas' it would have been Japanese) who want to buy up the town.

It´s often easy to see where Lynch´s obsessions come from: Laura Palmer is the ultimate cheerleading prom-queen type but we see another side of her as the narrative progresses; a side that touches on satanism, hard drugs, hard porn, ritual murder. Remember that the small town of Snoqualmie in Washington State (where 'Peaks' was filmed) is the same part of the world that hosted notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and the still unapprehended Green River Killer, both of whom specialised in murder, rape and dumping of young women. Moreover, Kenneth Bianchi, one half of the infamous Los Angeles Lakeside Stranglers, was only apprehended after committing a solo double-strangling in Bellingham, just north of Seattle, Washington.

Percolated Goldfish

Much is made of Lynch´s wild untamed imaginings but there is equally a lot that is rooted in dangerous fact: in 'Twin Peaks' daughters and sons don´t know their parents and couples don´t know their children or each other. It´s all falling apart, Lynch seems to say, but in an almost hauntinglyattractive way; not only does he have stunning locations and performances, but Angelo Badalamenti´s music can haunt one well into sleep. With all this it seems natural that one local resident will be known as the 'log lady', because she silently clutches a chunk of Ponderosa pinewood; or that diners will be advised against the local coffee because it has a goldfish floating in the percolator. Such flashes of humour are Lynch signatures, just as the name Laura Palmer happens to come from a 1944 Gene Tierney film called 'Laura', but certainly in the first moments of 'Twin Peaks' such foibles only add to the intensity and savagery of much that is shown. In 'Twin Peaks' young men howl like wild animals and grown men cry like babies over the bodies of their children; girls and women rage and whimper as suffering overwhelms them.

Lynch is known to despise the easy violence of American television and film, its bang-bang-you´re-dead associations; no brains hit the ground in this series but by lingering on pain, by choreographing hideous noise out of stillness and order, Lynch and Frost not only show us a world always on the edge of splitting asunder but make us shift nervously in our seats as if intruding at the funeral of a stranger. In one already famous scene in which MacLachlan´s Cooper searches lengthily for a scraping under Laura´s fingernails, the effect is almost nauseating. Is this really mass-market American TV, you wonder; would any other director have such a remorseless approach to what is now a routine screen situation: the body on the slab.

There may well be counter-reactions: Lynch already has his detractors who deplore his exploitative methods, his fascination with the dark side, his general weirdness-for-weirdness. But Lynch and Frost have triumphed over the constraints of commercials-clogged American TV. Though British viewers may notice the break-points, the action is framed cleverly by them and has a neat visual symmetry.

I confidently predict that 'Twin Peaks' mania will hit Britain when the nights grow dark in October, even given the silly decision to transmit it on 'cults only' BBC2 along with all our best imports, best writers, best comedians and the darts. It´s sad simply because those people who´ve never seen 'Blue Velvet' or 'Eraserhead' and who can´t see 'Wild at Heart' for reasons of age or opportunity or squeamishness, should be allowed to see what can be done with a once bankrupted form in a tired medium.

'Twin Peaks' is being shown on BBC2 this October. A two-hour video of the first extended episode is available on Warner Bros.