David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4 hours of the 18-hour series he has just cowritten and directed for Showtime—Twin Peaks: The Return—make that clear. There are scenes here, moments here, flashes here, alternately shocking and dazzling and terrifying and repulsive and compelling, that you will remember for the rest of your life.
But these first four hours also make it sadly apparent that Lynch remains stubbornly determined to place his visions at the center of his work to the exclusion of all else. This determination lost him the mass audience he won for himself in the 1980s when he chose to leash his unique sensibility—a combination of surrealism and lurid psychosexual melodrama straight out of the most disturbing drugstore-paperback pulp—to conventional storytelling tropes. His commercially successful work was also his most artistically successful for precisely this reason. Alas, Lynch clearly resents that fact and has spent the last 25 years resisting it. And never more so, and never more pointedly, than in the new Twin Peaks.
Its nightmares and dreams and surreal sequences astonish, but they do not tell a story. If you are unfamiliar with the Twin Peaks series and movie Lynch made between 1990 and 1992, you may find watching this update like reading a book in Latin when you have little Latin. If you are familiar, it will more closely resemble reading a novel in pig Latin. And the parts that do involve telling a story—the story of what has happened to the hearty, soulful, mystical FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in the 25 years since the events in the original Twin Peaks—are so wooden and uninvolving they suggest that Lynch is deliberately testing our patience with the goal of encouraging us to switch the thing off.
That goal makes a certain amount of sense if you consider Lynch’s origins as a filmmaker. He began as an art student who made a hand-stitched nightmare of an art house movie called Eraserhead (a portrait of extreme parental anxiety), shown at midnight in the 1970s. Eraserhead is brilliant and profoundly punishing. The latter is par for the course for avant-garde work, which abjures the very idea of audience; the former far less so, given how lousy most avant-garde crap is. Shockingly, Lynch then transmuted himself into an Oscar-nominated A-list director with 1980’s The Elephant Man and 1986’s Blue Velvet. The Elephant Man is rooted in the prestige Masterpiece Theatre form, while Blue Velvet is built on the framework of a small-town film noir. Both are extraordinary, disturbing, and enduringly sad. And both feature Lynch giving full rein to his darkest imaginings while leading the us through a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
In 1990, Lynch’s work as the primary creative force behind the original Twin Peaks series on ABC marked him as the unlikeliest impresario of addictive water-cooler TV ever to emerge in Hollywood. Its portrait of a small northwestern town coping with the murder of a high school Madonna/whore named Laura Palmer had both gut-wrenching emotional power and a surprising depth of humanity. Even more than its predecessors, the show leashed Lynch’s astounding visual sense and hypnotic narrative storytelling both to the classic demands of a whodunit and the classic form of a TV cop buddy show, and the results were initially spectacular. The show’s two-hour pilot, directed by Lynch, remains the high-water mark of network drama until the advent of the HBO era.
But the vertiginous rise of Twin Peaks in the national consciousness was followed, after the first season, by the show’s stark creative and cultural collapse. Lynch blames the demand by the network that he and co-creator Mark Frost reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer in the second season. It was, he said, “a question we never really wanted to answer.” Lynch felt that he had compromised too much with the demands of narrative, and thereafter he committed himself to filmmaking that would not require him to offer any answers.
With one exception, Lynch spent the following 15 years making a series of increasingly incomprehensible but indelibly evocative melodramas in which characters swap identities or literally transform into different people with no explanation. The best of these movies, 2001’s Mulholland Dr., is a berserk stunner that provides us absolutely no directorial assistance in figuring out that, for most of its running time, we are watching the desperately happy fantasy of a suicidal lesbian actress who has hired someone to murder the movie star who was once her beloved. The point is that there’s no dismissing David Lynch: He’s too remarkable, even when he drives you mad.
That open channel to his gorgeously purple right brain, and that stubborn commitment to his corkscrew vision of the world, marks Lynch as one of the few filmmakers who genuinely deserves to be called an “artist.” The fact that Lynch got somewhere north of $100 million to make Twin Peaks: The Return exactly as he wished is some kind of divine reward for sticking to his guns, even though I’m pretty sure it would have been better for American culture itself if he had continued to work at finding the sweet spot between his internal obsessions and his audience’s need to be told a tale.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
