Skip to main content

I’m supposed to watch the box and see if anything appears inside.

Twin Peaks
3.1 & 3.2: The stars turn and a time presents itself.

(SPOILERS) Well, Lynch hasn’t lost it, that much is clear. Not his marbles, which he never had, of course, but his capacity for weirdness, hilarity, discord and the outright disturbing, all of which are brewing away potently in Season Three of Twin Peaks. What’s most striking, though, and something I’ve occasionally found a detraction from his work, is that the presence of Mark Frost ensures there’s a lucid narrative thread upon which to hang his strange fascinations. It means that, even when we go on a diversion into five minutes of plot-free surrealism, or one of Lynch’s trademark crawl-act comedies (which are sublime, as long as you’re willing to pace yourself), it won’t be long before (potentially remaining unanswered) mystery and intrigue will pull us back on track.


I’d read, not least from Lynch himself, that his prequel movie Fire Walk with Me would indicate the tone of Season Three, but that might be a touch misleading. If you took the first act, the non-Laura Palmer part, the fragmented but fascinating part (I know there’s a spirited defence of the picture from many quarters, first expounded by Kim Newman when it debuted, but as much as I admire parts of it – and Sheryl Lee’s performance is phenomenal – I still don’t think it really works as a movie, and I still don’t think it really justifies its prequel status; Lynch, after all, was never even going to reveal Laura’s murderer, so to then go and make a film filling in this background is suggestive of how inessential it was to join the dots. Even as an examination of horrific abuse, I tend to think more is less), you might have something.  But you’d be as well to draw attention to Lost Highway (alter-ego evil Cooper in biker jacket), Eraserhead (any of the cosmic weirdness on display), Wild at Heart (the various brain-spattered viscera, and particularly the upchuck – of whatever nature – on the carpet) and even On the Air (the batty special effects).


It would be difficult to label any of the first four episodes driven; indeed, they’re almost wilfully abstract and fragmented in places, unless you’re alert to the mystery of Coop as the glue that holds the various pieces of character and location together (rather than the more tangible mystery of the murder of a schoolgirl). Without network edicts, Lynch is free to be as tangential as he likes, which in a way makes it surprising the results are as compelling as they are.  Note: although this review concentrates on the first two episodes, I may reference the next two here as I watched them in one session, so as to hold the train of thought.


What’s instantly most evident about Peaks 3.0 is that it’s largely the new characters and scenarios that are the immediate winners, rather than those hearkening back to, or continuing, the old. In the case of Ben and Jerry Horne (Richard Beymer and David Patrick Kelly), their couple of scenes simply feel tired, Beymer particularly lacking the energy to give the same-old-brothers vibe anything (and Ashley Judd currently at least, appears superfluous). Russ Tamblyn’s Dr Jacoby’s role is so oblique (taking delivery of shovels and then spraying them gold in 3.3, the latter scene going on so long, it becomes almost hypnotic) as not to indicate anything either way.  The familiar shtick of Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) and Andy (Harry Goaz) has picked up where it was left off, while Carel Struycken has to fill in in the Red Room for his pint-sized, departed colleague (now he’s turned into a blob in a tree).


The Arm: He must come back in before you can go out.

There’s a familiarity, obviously intentional, when it comes to Laura Palmer’s repeated dialogue and the Black Lodge scenes generally, Cooper quizzing her about her identity and receiving evasive responses (“I am dead yet I live”) and further enigmatic information (“Is it future or is it past”) but it means that it isn’t until the appearance of the Arm, resembling some spawn of Eraserhead lodged in the branches of a dead tree, given to cryptic pronouncements (“I am the arm. And I sound like this... The evolution of the arm”) that we really feel like we’re going somewhere, that Lynch is really channelling his unfettered subconscious once more, and it’s mesmerising to behold.


Other characters are in a holding pattern (Grace Zabriskie’s Sarah Palmer watching lions tear apart bison on TV, accompanied by copious booze – Sarah, that is, not the lions and bison). Mädchen Amick’s Shelly is bigging up James Hurley (James Marshall), who obviously suffered somehow in a motorcycle accident: “James is still cool. He’s always been cool”. Well, maybe to anyone who wasn’t a viewer of the original show, but he’s actually more interesting, genuinely lost and tragic, in a scene here than he was in the previous run full stop.


The Log Lady: Something is missing and you have to find it.

Talking of which, the most welcome surprise is the amount of time devoted to Michael Horse’s Deputy Chief Hawk. In the original, he was given odd moments but never the chance to shine; here, he’s taking on the traditional intuitive Coop role, and in the next episode makes comedy gold out of over-used wise Native American tropes (“The way you will find it is something to do with your heritage”). It’s sad to see Catherine Coulson so fragile, but the Log Lady is used well, in both these openers, prodding and teasing the mystery as previously and reintroducing the figurative spectre of Cooper.


Evil Cooper: Tomorrow, I’m supposed to get pulled back into what they call the Black Lodge. But I’m not going. I’ve got a plan for that one.

The other returnee of note is, of course, Kyle McLachlan himself, making great capital of Bob/evil Coop. So much is suggestive in Lynch’s plots that it’s probably asking for trouble to speculate over whether they will lead anywhere, although some answers have been provided already (his “plan for that one”). I had rather expected him to assume the most of the opportunity to wreak havoc posing as Cooper at the FBI, but it appears he dropped off the radar and took up a life of more standard-issue crime, one that is coming back on him (“How much do they want me dead?”).


Although, he seems well-equipped to deal with any threats, killing Jack (Steve Baker) by massaging his jaw and revealing a trademark method of dispatch by a gunshot to the head in a particularly tense and nasty seen with Darya (Nicole LaLiberte) (“Are you going to kill me?”: “Yes, Darya”). It seems evil Cooper still has his double’s tape recorder, which is nice. Perhaps the most intriguing scene finds him take a call from not-Phillip Jeffries (David Bowie in Fire Walk with Me; here, we don’t know, yet), and learn that he met with Major Garland Briggs (but that was 24 years ago, so presumably not the body in the bed) and he is told, “You’re going back in tomorrow, and I will be with Bob again”.


Ben: I’m supposed to watch the box and see if anything appears inside.

But, as noted, the most impactful scenes here are with all-new characters. Those between Ben (Sam Colby) and Tracy (“You’re a bad girl” – Madeline Zima certainly was in Californication) are classic Lynch and therefore entirely distinctive. We wonder if she hasn’t been put up to checking out whatever Ben is doing, and when we find out what he is doing, for an elusive millionaire, we’re none the wiser (“We’re not supposed to say anything about this place, or that glass box”). 


Even less so when a freaky apparition, one that outdoes Bob in the primal fear stakes, is drawn into the room (by their having sex, or is it connected with this being the same moment Cooper drops into the box – is he, unbeknownst to himself, somehow responsible?) turning the lovebirds to bloody gloop, like they’ve been set upon by a threshing machine.


Then there are the scenes with Bill Hastings (Matthew Lillard), another scenario where you start out second guessing and the reveals indicate otherwise. The respected school principal, bedrock of the community, arrested for murder seems like textbook Bob-style possession, particularly when he tells wife Phyllis (Cornelia Guest), “I wasn’t there, but I had a dream that night, that I was in her apartment”. Except, it seems that this was Evil Coop’s set up, for reasons as yet unclear, and that he’s also setting up Dale’s lawyer George (Neil Dickson), whom Phyllis is having an affair with. The downward progression of the relationship between Dale and Phyllis, more of a plunge towards on abyss, as masks are torn away and they descend into a screaming match in his cell, is expertly done. Her initial, very-Lynchian, obliviousness to the severity of Dale’s situation (“But the Morgans are coming to dinner!”) is revealed as part of her own cold agenda (“You’re going down. Life in prison, Bill. Life in prison”), and then part of Evil Cooper’s (“This is George’s gun” before shooting her in, yes, the head).


Marjorie Green: It was a funny thing. I couldn’t remember my address when I called you on the phone.

I don’t have much to say about the Vegas scene between Mr Todd and Roger, except that I presume – hope – it will become clear(er). The one with Marjorie Green (Melissa Jo Bailey) calling the police because of the terrible smell in her neighbour’s apartment is hilariously inert comedy of strained miscommunication, with attempts to get the keys leading to further misunderstandings (“Am I free to go?” asks Max Perlich’s paranoid handyman, so concerned about being arrested for whatever he feels guilty about that he ignores the officers’ requests for assistance) before Marjorie announces she has her neighbour’s key after all.


We also have Balthazar Getty being a cock (don’t fall for him, Shelly; he’s another Leo!), Jennifer Jason Leigh (more, please), two Sheriff Trumans (“One is sick and the other is fishing”) and a generally air of undinted oddness that is utterly transfixing. I’d say this is undiluted lynch, but to reiterate, I think that, unlike some of the mystified mainstream critics’ responses, Frost’s influence ensures Twin Peaks’ return remains accessible. Although, neither of the creators are really doing any favours to anyone who knows nothing about the show. It has that much in common with Fire Walk With Me, at least.



Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.
Read more

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.
Read more

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?
Read more

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.
Read more

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.
Read more

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless  Heat  rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but  Den of Thieves  is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.
Read more

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.
Read more

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.
Read more

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.
Read more

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.
Read more