Notes on Twin Peaks, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Commercial Art
by Dave Gunton
1.
I recently watched
Twin Peaks for the first time, binge-watching the 30 episodes over the course
of a month on Netflix. The thought I had
5-10 times each episode was: this was on network television in 1990? The series is so weird, gory, fanciful,
disturbing. An apparently familiar
murder mystery narrative dissolves into a supernatural fantasia, and the show
ends, depending upon interpretation, with the image of our hero--our unwavering
companion for 29 plus episodes--in the maniacal possession of a demon, as
discouraging an ending as I’ve experienced in narrative art. (Although that ending was only supposed to be
a season finale. When ABC declined to
pick up Twin Peaks for a third season, it became the series finale.) Mostly I felt disbelief that Twin Peaks ever
was made and then broadcast. The highest
rated show in the 1990-1991 television season was Cheers. The next season it was 60 Minutes.
2.
Twin Peaks is a
parade of quintessentially American themes and archetypes. The town sheriff, Harry S. Truman (great),
wears a cowboy hat and recalls countless lawmen who strive to bring order to
chaos in American Westerns. Donna,
Audrey, and the late Laura Palmer are all femme fatales, good girls on the
outside who lure men astray. It is 1990
in the show, but Audrey wears hoop skirts and saddle shoes like it is
1955. In fact it still seems to be the
1950’s--America’s favorite decade to romanticize--throughout much of Twin
Peaks. The Double R Diner, where the
waitresses wear turquoise dresses, is the town meeting place, and James, riding
a motorcycle in his black leather jacket, is Marlon Brando, the scarred boy
rebel with the heart of gold. Meanwhile
our hero Agent Cooper is the reformed, born again man who now adheres to a
strict moral code, part Eliot Ness, part Tom Joad. True to their a story about the dark
undercurrents of life, the show’s creators, Mark Frost and David Lynch,
reference a decade when America’s mainstream was perhaps most triumphant and
those undercurrents were most in the shadows.
3.
Twin Peaks recalls
the 1950s but it also recalls the 1850s, or at least the work of a man who was
writing at that time. I am not the first (or the second) to make the connection, but the
show’s references to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular “Young
Goodman Brown” are striking. In that
story the title character, a virtuous young man in a Puritan village who is
soon to be married, wanders into the adjacent woods one night to find all of
his fellow citizens engaged in devil worship.
He is even presented with his bride-to-be, Faith, so they may be
indoctrinated into the dark cult together.
The town is the place of order and virtue, and the woods are the place
of disorder, moral transgression, and evil.
Likewise in Twin
Peaks the characters continually meet with violence and horror in the
woods. Laura Palmer retreats to the
woods for a wild night of sex and drug use, and she does not live to the see
the morning. Her friend Ronette barely
makes it out alive. The Log Lady lives
in the woods and prophesies the spirits that lurk there. One Eyed Jack’s is a casino in the forest
over the Canadian border where you can drink, gamble, and pay for sex. The serial killer Windom Earl sets up shop in
a log cabin. Major Briggs is abducted by
some mysterious force in the forest.
There is an evil that lives in these woods, Sheriff Truman says in an
early episode. And ultimately the characters
discover The Black Lodge, what may be interpreted as a portal in the woods to a
netherworld of horrors, with Agent Cooper and his beloved Annie standing in for
Young Goodman Brown and Faith.
4.
I wonder though
whether this dichotomy of town/forest, order/disorder, resonates in our
contemporary culture. The more common
experience today seems to be to retreat to the woods as a place of calm and
escape the frenzied stimulus overload of the city. Or perhaps these dichotomies look different
from the vantage point of New York City, versus the vantage point of rural
Washington.
5.
I read about Twin
Peaks after I finished I watching it.
Apparently it was never the intention of Frost and Lynch to reveal the
identity of Laura Palmer’s killer. They
only did so in season two in response to pressure from ABC, which was concerned
about sagging ratings, and believed that the audience needed resolution. A developing love interest between Agent
Cooper and Audrey ends rather abruptly in season two, and apparently the cause
was the objections of Lara Flynn Boyle, the actress who played Donna, and who
off-screen was romantically involved at the time with Kyle MacLachlan, the
actor who played Agent Cooper. Ms. Boyle
did not care to see Mr. MacLachlan involved with Sherilyn Fenn, the actress who
played Audrey, on screen. Enter then,
rather suddenly in season two, the actors Billy Zane and Heather Graham, whose
characters become the love interests of Audrey and Agent Cooper,
respectively. And of course the show’s
creators did not intend to end the show with season two, with their hero in the
throes of a demon, but that was simply the last episode that was made.
6.
How, then, are we to
accept something like Twin Peaks as a work of art, when the artists are not
calling all the shots? We are reminded
that television shows are fundamentally products, vehicles to sell advertising,
and but for that commercial purpose they would not exist. (In 1990 they were used to sell advertising;
now they may be used to sell subscriptions instead, but they are always selling
something.) So of course in the case of
a television show, the network can have a heavy hand in deciding what the show
looks like, from plot, to casting, to direction. We as viewers want to think of Twin Peaks as
Mark Frost and David Lynch’s pure artistic vision, and interpret it on those grounds. But it is not. It, like many shows, and many works of art,
was shaped in part by countless commercial interests.
7.
Is it then still a
work of art at all? It is tempting to
say that once commercial considerations shape in part a work of art, it is no
longer art at all, it is merely product.
That seems harsh though. The
dream sequence in season one, episode three of Twin Peaks, in the red room with
Laura Palmer and The Man From Another Place, one of the most enduring images
from the series: nobody at ABC dialed that up, I’m sure. That is pure Frost / Lynch madness. You can’t take that away from us. So what are we talking about here? Was the show 75% art and 25% commerce, and we
will just focus our interpretive interest on the artistic part? How can we, when the commercial part had such
a profound effect as to force the revelation of the killer, when that was not
the creators’ intent (and what Mr. Lynch calls one of his biggest professional regrets).
8.
And these issues are
not confined to television shows but surely are present in nearly every
artistic form, certainly every popular form.
Every book, album, or movie that is distributed by a major publisher,
label, or studio is shaped by commercial considerations, to a greater or lesser
extent.
9.
No doubt Nathaniel
Hawthorne thought about commercial considerations as well. He anonymously self-published his first
novel, Fanshawe, and it did not sell at all.
The Scarlet Letter has never struck me as a work of marketing, but I imagine
Hawthorne gave some thought as to the kind of book readers might like to
buy. Hawthorne’s contemporary, Charles
Dickens, may not have technically been paid by the word, but he was paid by installment, receiving payment
for each 32 pages of text he provided for serialized novels like David
Copperfield and Bleak House. Was he
selling novels or toasters?
10.
It seems unforgiving
to say that art that bears any commercial influence is no longer art. I enjoy many such works of art, like Twin
Peaks, finding them not only entertaining but deeply thoughtful and
meaningful. Still I find myself
increasingly drawn to art forms that are free(r) from commercial
influence. Paintings. Early 20th century western swing music: the
only consideration there seemed to be what would make people dance (itself a
kind of commercial consideration).
Low-budget movies. I used to
think that criticizing something as “corporate” was just a tired cliche. Now I find anything anti-corporate,
anti-commercial to be inherently attractive.
David Lynch for CK
David Lynch for CK
David Lynch for CK
David Lynch for YSL
David Lynch for Armani
David Lynch for Playstation (post twin peaks)
David Lynch PSA (pre twin peaks)
David Lynch for Dior (post)
Dave Gunton lives with his wife and two daughters in Athens, GA. You can find him on Twitter at @DavGun10 and on Tumblr at davgun10.tumblr.com.
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