WELCOME TO TWIN PEAKS

Serious Soap

Text DAVID TOOP

SHERILYN FENN photographed by Gene Lemuel

... where the cherry pie is good and the scenery is beautiful, but where there´s an occult evil in the woods, a brothel across the river, and a drug cartel operating from the local roadhouse. Everyone in this American smalltown has something to hide - a retarded son, a secret society, a violent husband, an adulterous affair, a drug habit or a business intrigue. But when the body of a schoolgirl is found on the lakeshore, the deceptions start to unravel. A marriage of two Blues - Hill Street and Velvet - the first series of this radical soap had 35 million Americans glued to their screens and ended with a cliffhanger more tense than the shooting of J.R. Ewing...

... Now it´s your time to watch

"I feel a little bit strange," says David Lynch. The beginning of a sentence, not a particularly strange sentence in itself, but it captures the moment.

We are sitting in a large, L-shaped room. One wall, vast as a drive-in movie screen, is glass; behind it lies the vegetal mystery and darkness of the Hollywood hills at night. Lynch lost his dog to this darkness - eaten by coyotes, he maintains. The room echoes with voices and explosive snaps from a log fire, spearing the cold air, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. Three items of Fifties furniture occupy the broad expense of the floor, megalithic in their hapless, solitary engagement. Lynch may well have deliberately placed these few chairs at shouting distance from each other in order to make relaxation and intimacy as difficult as possible.

"I don´t do too many things deliberately," he says, slopping around his disquieting home on a Sunday night wearing baggy trousers and soft shoes. "That´s strange in a way," he continue. "I sort of know how things should be, for myself. I´m also the victim of many happy accidents. Freddie Francis used to call me Lucky Lynch."

It was a happy accident that led him to a collaboration with writer Mark Frost on a television soap called Twin Peaks. The waves of excitement, profligate praise, dismay and skepticism that greete first the content of the series and then its US audience ratings, have been rippling across the Atlantic since the first cherry pie, doughnuts and coffee cult began to emerge.

Lynch met Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost through a packaging project - initiated by the agency they both share. The project - a story about Marilyn Monroe - came to nothing, but Lynch and Frost clicked. "Although this thing about Marilyn Monroe was not a comedy," says Lynch, "I sensed that he had a kind of comic side. I had an idea for this thing called One Saliva Bubble and asked him if he wanted to write it. We put that together and we had a blast doing it. It´s a wacko comedy. It didn´t get made either."

Despite this sequence of non-events, their agent, Tony Krantz, pestered them to work on something for television. "Then one day," says Lynch, "we started getting these ideas fro this thing that later became Twin Peaks. It started drawing us in. Then it didn´t matter what it was for. We just wanted to do it. At first, I liked the story and I also liked the idea that it would continue and that it could be like a thing where you could explore this world and keep it going. But at the same time I didn´t really think that it would continue. But every single time we turned around we were getting a green light."

Initially, the response to Twin Peaks from ABC-TV, the commissioning network, was cautious but enthusiastic. "They don´t trust themselves," says Lynch. "In TV you can´t trust anything and they learn that the hard way." The pilot of Twin Peaks directed by Lynch, has been available on video since last December, and the series will begin transmission on BBC2 in October.

In true Blue Velvet style, it is a story of festering, perplexing, resolutely secret secrets set in small-town America. FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, arrives in the rural logging town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. To most of the 51,201 residents of Twin Peaks, the killing makes no sense, but clues begin to emerge which suggest pornography, drugs, dark rituals, torture and serial murder. Agent Cooper operates with an unsettling blend of robotic charm, Tibetan mysticism and social brutalism; his attention is divided equally between appreciation of "damn fine coffee", the native cherry pie and wildlife, or his talent for inspired, perhaps psychic deduction. "You know why I´m whittling?" agent Cooper asks local sheriff Harry S. Truman as they sit together on a stakeout. "Cos that´s what you do in a town where a yellow light means slow down and not speed up."

"I love a small town," says Lynch. "It has to be a certain size small town. It can´t be too small. It has to be big enough so that you don´t know everybody and yet there´s these pleasant places and then strange secrets and sickness there as well." Growing up in Montana, Idaho and Washington, Lynch found his occasional childhood trips to Brooklyn had a disturbing, contradictory effect. "It was like plugging yourself into the electricity outlet. I couldn´t believe what I was feeling and what I was seeing and it kinda got worse and worse... more fearful and more violence and the air. Now, it´s just thick in the air. It was a very powerful, fearful thing. It was not pleasant but sort of thrilling. I wanted to know about it, but at a safe distance."

Did you feel that the places you grew up in were innocent?

"Not really," he says. "I know there was just the same sickness. The proportions were the same but the numbers were smaller."

As soaps go, Twin Peaks is less bizarre, less remote, than Dallas, Dynasty, or any of their cheaper derivates, yet it is more self-consciously skewed and disturbing. Lynch ahs received the lion´s share of the credit for this, but Mark Frost´s contribution is evident if we remember the original impact of Hill Street Blues, with its interwoven, open-ended narratives, eccentric characters and moods that veered sharply between pathos and bathos.

Some critics have suggested that the whole exercise is a cynical intellectual jibe at popular television. Perhaps it is more to the point to say that Twin Peaks is an elaborate form of pop art which takes the soap opera genre as a subject, rather than the more basic stimuli of early Sixties pop art - comic strip frames, hamburgers, newspaper small ads. "I really like soap operas," says Lynch. "I got hooked when I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with was just completely addicted to two particular soap operas - Another World and The Edge Of Night - so I got hooked as well. I dug them. The frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest torments out forever. It works, but it´s frustrating. It think ours will be a hair less frustrating. We´ll see. We may fall into the same thing."

Six other directors have worked on the first series of Twin Peaks, with Frost as the constant factor to keep the original idea on the rails. Lynch´s two-hour pilot, the episode that kicks off the series, has already been released here on home video, though the otherworldly `red curtain´ ending is lopped off for the TV version and reappears later in the series as a dream sequence. In this scene, agent Cooper appears to be in communion with alien beings or embodied spirits. Lynch filmed the whole episode in reverse, with two of the actors speaking their lines backwards and running through their moves from back to front. The mood is as convincingly dissociated from human experience as anything Lynch, or anybody else, has ever shot.

Moods are important to Lynch, and he treasures them. "In a day you experience so many little different bits of moods," he says. "I guess what´s kind of strange is that it may just be just a half a second but you get a very strong mood and it makes a big impression on you. You remember it. It´s sort of the way ideas are to me. They hit you, but very quickly. They don´t last long, but they hit you, very hard. If you can remember those moods and stay true to them, you can share those moods with others."

Are there specific moods you remember and attempt to reproduce? "I don´t do it specifially," he says. "In Blue Velvet I remember I always was thinking about like a ... not necessarily summer night - it coud have been a fall or winter night. A certain kind of neighborhood and a certain kind of thing where you could maybe just a little bit hear what was going on inside of some houses. I just kept seeing this woman with red lips. Then I kinda put that together with Bobby Vinton´s song and something started happening. I didn´t exactly have tht night in my past, but somewhere the mood cam about from the past. Little pieces here and there had all got together and there was something in my head."

Are you interested in dreams, then`?

"Not really. I´m interested in some of the strange moods that they instil in me. I´ve had some strange feelings in dreams."

Speaking of strange feelings, some of the strangest in a David Lynch creation come from his capacity to generate a sense of dread. It is surprising how rare, almost obsolete, a quality dread has become in contemporary film and television. Dread is not the same emotion or reaction as horror, fright, shock, cardiac arrest, nausea, hypertension or deafness, all of which are adequately catered for by current cinema (though none of them by the ever-diminishing emotional spectrum of TV). Dread is a feeling of real fear that begins in the pit of your stomach and spreads to your bones, your skin, your hair.

There are moments in Twin Peaks when dread permeates the banality and oddness: the animal howls of humans in emotional torment; the depiction of a serial murder´s paraphernalia - the evocation of what Lynch calls the tradtion and intelligence of evil; the eidetic mental image of an intruder, dredged from its surpressed place in memory. There are the small, chilling stabs of ice that have more in common with television of the Fifties than the present. Lynch describes his own episodes as "a hair more fearful, and a little bit stranger" than others, and agrees that television has lost its desire for fear. "Some shows were much closer to movies," he says, "and there were things that they did that were very fearful, especially to kids. They´ve stopped doing it now. It´s all kinda plastic and strange. I don´t know. You can get killed on TV. There´s just hundreds of murders on television, but they´re completely bloodless and painless and I don´t know what this kind of thing does to people."

The powerfully ambiguous moods that Lynch is so skilled at deploying were at the root of his musical collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti. During the filming of Blue Velvet, producer Fred Caruso suggested Badalamenti (a musician who has written songs for Nancy Wilson, George Benson, country star Jerry Wallace and, more recently, orchestrated for the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield) as an arranger and vocal coach for Isabella Rossellini. Lynch also wanted Caruso to clear the rights to a song. "Fred was having a horrible time getting this song so he came to me with this wacko idea," says Lynch. "He said, `David, you´re always writing these strange things down on paper. Why don´t you call them lyrics and send some to Angelo? Tell him the feeling that you want and he´ll write the song.` I said, `Look, Fred, quit trying to save money, Angelo´s not a magician. He´s a musician.` And Fred said, `I´m gonna get you the song that you want but in the meantime, do yourself a favor. Give it a try.`

Lynch claims he sent Badalamenti a column of 40 words, written on an envelope. Badalamenti recalls this incident during a telephone conversation some months after my meeting with Lynch: "He sent me a lyric called `Mysteries Of Love`. It was like six lines of poetry. I called him and asked him, `What do you want me to do with this? What kind of music?`He said, `Make it like the waves in the ocean. Make the music like a beautiful wind and like the song chanting through time. And cosmic.`So I said, `Oh, I´m glad you told me.`"

Lynch asked Badalamenti to find him a singer with an angelic voice. Julee Cruise was singing in the chorus of an off-Broadway country musical. Despite being a `belter` with a show voice, she took on the required angelic characteristics. Following this, the curious partnership came up with 40 songs and co-produced the remarkable score for Twin Peaks, "Floating Into The Night", which is, like the score for Twin Peaks, an eerie mix of cool jazz, ice-cream chords, brooding drones and the heavy twang of a "hair more fearful" bass on guitar. If Nino Rota had orchestrated "Pipeline" by the Chantays on opium then it might have come out sounding like this.

Badalamenti describes the collaboration with Lynch as "an unbelievable marriage, my second best in the world. We just tune in to each other." Since Twin Peaks and "Floating Into The Night" they have worked together on Wild at Heart, a performance piece entitled "Industrial Symphony #1" and perfume commercials for Calvin Klein and Yves St. Laurent.

In David Lynch´s house, another log from the fire goes off like a grenade. Lynch has to rise early in the morning to shoot. "Cinema is a thing where you have to use youre reasoned mind a lot," he says. "But you also have to go into intuition and the subconscious mind too, because cinema can work with those things so nicely." Earlier in the evening he justified the so-called sickness of his work: "The uncomfortable, stranger or sicker aspects should be done in a way that is cinematically thrilling. Then I think that people can see it as a cinematic, magical thing and enjoy all the different elements of the film. If it was just sick for sickness´ sake it wouldn´t be right."

The cover image of the Julee Cruise album is a pink doll, maybe a baby or an inflatable sex doll, floating in blackness. Cover designer Tom Recchion recalls having been given the doll by Lynch, who had mutilated it into something quite horrible. As I wait for a cab to take me back into West Hollywood, Lynch says, "You should have a chickenshit." He hands me a poster he has designed. Late at night I unwrap it. It is a photograph of a chicken, a spineless chicken, moulded from chicken shit. "This is a real spineless chicken shit," the poster reads, "moving sullenly through its own desolate environment." I grow a hair less fearful.