This is the water, and this is the well.

Twin Peaks

3.8: Gotta light?

(SPOILERS) Er…. Okay. An episode presumably conceived by Lynch and Frost entirely to stymie recap artists. Which is laudable in itself, I guess. It’s probably the closest the director has come to all-out Eraserhead weirdness since, only substituting fear of the bomb for fatherhood. Fortunately, unlike that movie – which I don’t really care for too much, even knowing that makes me a not-we when it comes to Lynchdom – I found Gotta light? mostly engrossing and only a little dull (these ratios are just about reversed with Eraserhead). It probably helps too that it’s a good 20 minutes shorter.

And this isn’t going to be too long either. Not because I think the episode is impenetrable – I suspect most people have roughly the same the gist as to what’s going on, give or take – but because there are so many times you can ejaculate “anti-Malick” as a description of what’s going on here, or hyperbolise that Lynch has just changed the face of television.

Evil Coop gets killed by Ray but is resurrected (and Ray, at any rate, believes he is on the phone to Phillip Jeffries, even if Coop didn’t think that was him a few episodes back), it seems, by a bunch of smelly tramps who were somehow unleashed – from the Black Lodge? – by an atom bomb test on July 16 1945, and have been milling about ever since (11 years later and now, most notably). Is Evil Coop still Bob-Coop, or now flying solo? I guess we’ll see.

It appears that the test has ripped space-time asunder, as a beautiful mushroom blossoms and bursts, accompanied by the discordant and disturbing Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki. Is Bob a child of the garm-bomb-zia, and Laura conceived as the counter (by the Giant and his cohabitee of… the White Lodge?) Or is the bomb merely an all-powerfully negative vessel propelling Bob’s force into the world? I had the impression he was around long before, both from the original series and The Secret History of Twin Peaks, so it may just attract his essential darkness (although, to counter that, there’s whatever the creature floating in space thing was birthing/puking up – more garmonbonzia? – containing his mugshot).

With regard to The Secret History, there’s no hint of Roswell aliens in either of these sequences (unless the aliens are, in fact, interdimensional beings), but one might, if one were so inclined, parallel Jack Parsons’ Babalon Working with the magickal activities of these entities breaking through into our reality. The sequence plays like an inverted 2001 stargate, the darktopia version, or Malick’s The Tree of Life fed upside down and backwards through a threshing machine.

And what the hell is that frog-insect thing, and why does it burrow down an innocent teenager’s throat? It has been suggested this is the essence of Laura and the girl is Sarah Palmer, but it seems strange then that this should occur when she’s just been lulled to sleep by the incantation of the dirty stalker, Mr Gotta Light (whose general apparel and absence of soap suggests brethren of the guy we saw in the background last week, behind Lieutenant Knox, and before that in the next cell from William Hastings).

As for his bloody modus operandi, it may not be quite as messy, but it nevertheless put me in mind of the thing that came out of the box in the opener (the aforementioned creature floating in space extruding a yard of snot also resembles the box being). This sequence is perhaps the closest the episode comes to a traditional cause-and-effect rhythm, as the words of the Woodsman (Robert Broski) elicit a decisively knockout effect on listeners:

This is the water, and this is the well
Drink full and descend

The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.

If I’m honest, using the Trinity tests as a spur to ultimate evil feels a little, well, obvious, and I definitely can’t excuse, however inimitable it may be, Lynch pulling a “chosen one” origins story on Laura Palmer. I’ve been slightly dubious about the keen visual continuity of Laura and Bob in the season so far; for all that Lynch may not have been overly keen on Windom Earle – I thought he was terrific – he represented the series moving on. This run is managing to go in very different places – locations, characters, concepts – but it is almost morbidly focussed on the same core, to the extent that it becomes Lynch’s equivalent of the prequel trilogy (but not, you know, actually bad with it).

Nevertheless, one can’t but admire how unrepentantly tangential Gotta light? is. It could only ever be the sort of thing someone with complete control could bring to a TV screen, and is at least partially brilliant. But it may be more interesting for what it represents (TV doing something no other TV is doing) than necessarily how “good” it is. Mostly this season, I’ve enjoyed Lynch avoiding cutting to the chase, but abstract Lynch runs the danger of spoiling us with over-familiarity; a diluted dose may have more persuasive effects. Oh, and NiN.

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

Comments

They'll think I've lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

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I never strangled a chicken in my life!

Rope (1948) (SPOILERS) Rope doesn’t initially appear to have been one of the most venerated of Hitchcocks, but it has gone through something of a rehabilitation over the years, certainly since it came back into circulation during the 80s. I’ve always rated it highly; yes, the seams of it being, essentially, a formal experiment on the director’s part, are evident, but it’s also an expert piece of writing that uses our immediate knowledge of the crime to create tension throughout; what we/the killers know is juxtaposed with the polite dinner party they’ve thrown in order to wallow in their superiority.

Oh, you got me right in the pantaloons, partner.

The Party (1968) (SPOILERS) Blake Edwards’ semi-improvisational reunion with Peter Sellers is now probably best known for – I was going to use an elephant-in-the-room gag, but at least one person already went there – Sellers’ “brown face”. And it isn’t a decision one can really defend, even by citing The Party ’s influence on Bollywood. Satyajit Ray had also reportedly been considering working with Sellers… and then he saw the film. One can only assume he’d missed similar performances in The Millionairess and The Road to Hong Kong ; in the latter case, entirely understandable, if not advisable. Nevertheless, for all the flagrant stereotyping, Sellers’ bungling Hrundi V Bakshi is a very likeable character, and indeed, it’s the piece’s good-natured, soft centre – his fledgling romance with Claudine Longet’s Michele – that sees The Party through in spite of its patchy, hit-and-miss quality.

I'm an old ruin, but she certainly brings my pulse up a beat or two.

The Paradine Case (1947) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock wasn’t very positive about The Paradine Case , his second collaboration with Gregory Peck, but I think he’s a little harsh on a picture that, if it doesn’t quite come together dramatically, nevertheless maintains interest on the basis of its skewed take on the courtroom drama. Peck’s defence counsel falls for his client, Alida Valli’s accused (of murder), while wife Ann Todd wilts dependably and masochistically on the side-lines.

You must have hopes, wishes, dreams.

Brazil (1985) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam didn’t consider Brazil the embodiment of a totalitarian nightmare it is often labelled as. His 1984½ (one of the film’s Fellini-riffing working titles) was “ the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984 ”, in contrast to Michael Anderson’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1948. This despite Gilliam famously boasting never to have read the Orwell’s novel: “ The thing that intrigues me about certain books is that you know them even though you’ve never read them. I guess the images are archetypal ”. Or as Pauline Kael observed, Brazil is to Nineteen Eighty-Four as “ if you’d just heard about it over the years and it had seeped into your visual imagination ”. Gilliam’s suffocating system isn’t unflinchingly cruel and malevolently intolerant of individuality; it is, in his vision of a nightmare “future”, one of evils spawned by the mechanisms of an out-of-control behemoth: a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. And yet, that is not really, despite how indulgently and glee

Miss Livingstone, I presume.

Stage Fright (1950) (SPOILERS) This one has traditionally taken a bit of a bruising, for committing a cardinal crime – lying to the audience. More specifically, lying via a flashback, through which it is implicitly assumed the truth is always relayed. As Richard Schickel commented, though, the egregiousness of the action depends largely on whether you see it as a flaw or a brilliant act of daring: an innovation. I don’t think it’s quite that – not in Stage Fright ’s case anyway; the plot is too ordinary – but I do think it’s a picture that rewards revisiting knowing the twist, since there’s much else to enjoy it for besides.

A herbal enema should fix you up.

Never Say Never Again (1983) (SPOILERS) There are plenty of sub-par Bond s in the official (Eon) franchise, several of them even weaker than this opportunistic remake of Thunderball , but they do still feel like Bond movies. Never Say Never Again , despite – or possibly because he’s part of it – featuring the much-vaunted, title-referencing return of the Sean Connery to the lead role, only ever feels like a cheap imitation. And yet, reputedly, it cost more than the same year’s Rog outing Octopussy .

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you ripped the fronts off houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (SPOILERS) I’m not sure you could really classify Shadow of a Doubt as underrated, as some have. Not when it’s widely reported as Hitchcock’s favourite of his films. Underseen might be a more apt sobriquet, since it rarely trips off the lips in the manner of his best-known pictures. Regardless of the best way to categorise it, it’s very easy to see why the director should have been so quick to recognise Shadow of a Doubt 's qualities, even if some of those qualities are somewhat atypical.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019) (SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

I think you’re some kind of deviated prevert.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) (SPOILERS) Kubrick’s masterpiece satire of mutually-assured destruction. Or is it? Not the masterpiece bit, because that’s a given. Rather, is all it’s really about the threat of nuclear holocaust? While that’s obviously quite sufficient, all the director’s films are suggested to have, in popular alt-readings, something else going on under the hood, be it exposing the ways of Elite paedophilia ( Lolita , Eyes Wide Shut ), MKUltra programming ( A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket ), transhumanism and the threat of imminent AI overlords ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), and most of the aforementioned and more besides (the all-purpose smorgasbord that is The Shining ). Even Barry Lyndon has been posited to exist in a post-reset-history world. Could Kubrick be talking about something else as well in Dr. Strangelove ?

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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