That Gum You Like

David Lynch will never go out of style

I started writing this post last summer, after binge-watching the first season of Twin Peaks, which I hadn’t seen since it was first broadcast, then put it aside. Now that David Lynch has left us, I turn this meditation on the show into my tribute to the contemporary film director who meant more to me, perhaps, than any other. RIP.

Last year I returned for a few weeks to Twin Peaks, the groundbreaking television series and neonoir mystical vibe that premiered on ABC on April 8, 1990 and has been fucking with viewers’ minds ever since. I was about the same age as the show’s high-school characters when it premiered, and like so many others I was immediately obsessed by the show’s stylish strangeness. I’ve always been a sucker for detective stories of the Raymond Chandler-Dashiell Hammett variety, and for innovative arrangements of the limited palette of noir tropes: the knight-like detective with his own moral code, the array of plausible suspects, the investigation of societal corruption that invariably goes all the way to the top (and down into the abyss), the femme fatale, the trenchcoats and cigarettes, all that stuff. Mysteries of the Agatha Christie locked-room variety have their appeal, but there’s something about the X-ray of the hardboiled “tough guy” built into American detective stories that speaks to me most deeply. When Poirot or whoever solves the case, society returns more or less to its even keel, order restored. In hardboiled detective stories, and especially in noir, the stone remains rolled away from the tomb, and the stench of corruption continues to leak out. The detective himself is saturated with it, the way Agent Smith—who dresses just like Dale Cooper—is saturated with the stink of the Matrix. No matter how wised-up or even enlightened the detective may be, he’s never quite wise enough. This seems fundamentally truthful to me, honest. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” wrote Chandler. But the armor of the noir hero is always tarnished and brittle—a lot like masculinity itself.

I was primed for appreciating Twin Peaks, and Lynch’s work generally, by Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, which I saw on PBS when it was broadcast in the States in late 1986, when I was still too young to watch Blue Velvet in the theater. It made an indelible impression with its postmodern riff on the psychosexual dimensions of your classic mystery. Michael Gambon is unforgettable as Philip Marlow (no E, as though he were a Georges Perec character), a mystery writer literally jumping out of his own skin. Marlow’s horrific bouts with psoriasis in an NHS ward are juxtaposed with scenes from his traumatic childhood in wartime England and scenes from the eponymous Marlow-penned novel about, yes, a singing detective. For me, what defines noir is not just the visual style or the array of tropes but the almost Freudian guilt of the detective himself, who invariably discovers that he is in some way complicit with the enveloping darkness he is trying to defeat. Healing, physical and emotional, can only come to Marlow when he lets his detective, and the fantasy of moral invulnerability that he represents, die.

David Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost made this sort of investigation almost mainstream with Twin Peaks. Come for the adorable quirks of characters like the Log Lady, stay for the deep dive into peculiarly American varieties of evil. From thirty years out, even without the benefit of Twin Peaks: The Return,¹ the show reads as an indictment of the make-America-great-again nostalgia behind Reaganism, which has returned to us in hideously debased form.² Created in the 1980s with an aesthetic indebted to the 1950s, Twin Peaks combines the tropes of the police procedural and the soap opera, just as The Singing Detective juxtaposes a sentimental 1940s songbook with pitch-black noir, so as to bring viewers into the heart of darkness represented by the Black Lodge. Rewatching the first season was a vertiginous experience. Inevitably I felt nostalgia for the show and the young man I was when I sat down to watch it on ABC every Sunday night, even as the show defamiliarizes the nostalgic Americana in which its characters are suspended, like fruit in a jello mold.

It wouldn’t work so well if that Americana weren’t so seductive! The audience surrogate is Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, who doesn’t arrive on the scene until a full half-hour of the pilot episode has gone by, after we have already been introduced to the central mystery, the murder of Laura Palmer. Cooper is a fascinating, even perverse mix of the innocent and the hardboiled, qualities that today make him appear to me like someone on the autism spectrum. He brings his own bubble with him, a bubble into which the viewer is invited by the device of Diane, the secretary to whom he constantly dictates notes and musings. (We never see Diane during the series’ original run—she’s belatedly embodied by Lynch regular Laura Dern in The Return—and as a result she functions purely as a device for externalizing Cooper’s thoughts, a diegetic version of the voice-over narration typical of classic noirs like Double Indemnity, The Third Man, etc.) Even though he’s been called to the little Pacific Northwest Twin Peaks to investigate a gruesome crime, Cooper seems completely taken in by the beauty and tranquility of the place, to the point of asking Diane to look into buying a retirement property there. “I’ve only been in Twin Peaks a short time,” Cooper tells the boorish pathologist Albert Rosenfield, “but I have seen decency, honor, and dignity. Life has meaning here.” Well, so does death. Cooper’s name rings two sides of one coin, one the show’s innumerable dualities: straight-shooting Gary Cooper to be sure, but also D.B. Cooper, the legendary hijacker who in 1971 bailed out of a Boeing jet with $200,000 over the Pacific Northwest (maybe right over Twin Peaks? maybe Major Briggs has been tracking him?), and has not been heard from since.

John Leonard’s contemporaneous article in New York magazine (it must have come out just after the third episode, the one everyone knows even if they’ve never seen the show—the red curtains, the dancing dwarf, etc.) fascinates for its depiction of how early Nineties intellectual types reacted to the show. Leonard betrays a bit of skepticism:

Wittgenstein had a philosophy, and Pynchon has some politics. Lynch is merely moody, more of a Warhol. Though beautiful to look at, there isn’t much of anything inside his soft labyrinth except an unimportant secret. Unlike, say, The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan, or The Edge of Darkness, the brilliant British eco­thriller that Channel 13 refuses to run, or The Singing Detective, which Lynch says he’s never seen, Twin Peaks has nothing at all in its pretty little head except the desire to please. In this, and only in this, it resembles almost everything else on television. But beautiful is better. Must we, like the Deconstructionists, moisten everything with meaning?

The comparison with The Prisoner—my favorite TV show of all time—is tantalizing: both shows depict idyllic small towns that conceal dark secrets, and both feature inscrutable government agents who look good in black as their protagonists. The ending of the second season of Twin Peaks mirrors to a degree the notoriously perplexing final episode of The Prisoner, “Fall/Out,” in which the eponymous Prisoner discovers, as we might have known all along, that he is his own jailer. Even without factoring in the extraordinarily bleak Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me or (too scary!) The Return, I think we can say that Leonard was wrong, and that Twin Peaks has quite a lot on its mind about the evil that men do. I’m wholly persuaded by Frank Guan’s suggestion that the blinding whiteness of Lynch’s cinematic world is actually a critique of whiteness: for Guan, Lynch “has converted, by force if necessary, white America’s simplistic, innocent vision of itself into a complex and incendiary demonology.” The brutal duality is reflected in Laura’s killer, who is revealed to be the supernatural entity BOB, but is also, tragically and all to believably, her own father.

Much has been made of David Lynch’s gee-whiz Eagle Scout niceness, and the stark contrast between his personal affect and the nightmare realms he put on film. But isn’t that just you, me, anyone willing to be a little honest about their own desires, failings, susceptibilities? It was Lynch’s strangeness, his giddy perversity, that hooked me and intensified my desire to create something reflective of my own strangeness—to value strangeness as an aesthetic, even an ethical value. As others have noted, Lynch’s goodness is as bizarre and affecting as his horror—witness the forgiveness that enfolds the embittered protagonist of The Straight Story, or Major Briggs’ astonishing speech narrating his dream to his hateful son Bobby, momentarily transfiguring them both with the power of love. The only thing strange about Lynch’s duality is that we refuse to recognize it in ourselves. Now that so many of us are devoted to curating our personas for the parasocial delectation of others, augmenting one aspect of our personality and suppressing all the others, it seems much less likely that an artist of Lynch’s stature can emerge. At least not while achieving, as Lynch amazingly managed to do, genuine popularity. I find his success as a pop artist inspiring and moving. Somehow, in the distracted, deluded American multitude he found an appetite for visionary truth.

Incidentally, if you like cinematic noir and Lynchian weirdness, you might like this:

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

Joshua Corey’s Beautiful Soul offers a swirling, shadowy cosmos lit by intelligence, urgency, and heart. Its swirl is cinematic—“estranged and operatic”—but never at the expense of the body, be it the bitten nipple, or the “bloody middle” of history. I especially admire Corey’s conjuring of Ruth: fulcrum of readerly empathy, inheritor of mysterious and difficult histories, navigator of the present’s strata, honorary “new reader.” Go on her journey with her; “the book is waiting.”
—Maggie Nelson

1. I watched the first three episodes of The Return and was too freaked out to continue; I’ll get back to it eventually, but man! Is there any American filmmaker whose images are more legitimately unsettling, more genuinely terrifying?

2. Have a squint at the monster behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive and tell me he doesn’t remind you of Donald Trump.