...A couple of nights ago I watched the entire first season of Twin Peaks...in one night...the next day my eyes were burning, but it was worth it. Twin Peaks is funny, sad, terrifying, exciting, addictive and sometimes moving. It is a high-point in television history, paving the way for shows like The X-Files, and more than that, it managed to integrate wild surrealism into popular culture and made great auteur David Lynch a household name. By keeping strong surrealist style in balance with great story and character, Lynch managed to suck people into a world television had never harbored before. Critic David Thomson said in his entry for Luis Bunuel in the Biographical Dictionary of Film that surrealism is best suited to a mainstream audience, as it is both highly escapist and highly relatable. Twin Peaks may just be evidence of his claim, although the films of Luis Bunuel and David Lynch have never found a mainstream audience...but enough focus on the cultural impact of it, let's take a look at the show itself...
The Pilot episode - This is where it all started. Directed by David Lynch and created by Mark Frost and Lynch, this first episode is tight and dark, keeping the black humour and wild surrealism restrained (they had to convince studio people that this would be accessible). After the hypnotic opening credits (the robin a reference to his earlier Blue Velvet; thematically similar), we are see the somber face of an Asian woman, humming quietly to herself as if sensing that something isn't right. Then we meet Pete (played by Lynch favourite Jack Nance), a decent but hen-pecked man and his bitter wife. He goes out fishing, and this is where everything kicks into place, with the discovery of a body wrapped in plastic on the beach. Sheriff Harry Truman (shouldn't be too hard to remember) is alerted and arrives with his emotionally frail and endearingly simple deputy Andy and forensics man Will Hayward. They then discover her identity; Laura Palmer, local prom-queen, known by everyone and loved by mostly everyone. Shocked and appalled, they then decide to contact her parents. Then there are two particularly gut-wrenching scenes, the first in which her mother searches the house for her and calls around asking for her to no avail, the second in which her father, having been interrupted from a business meeting with Norwegian tourism folk, speaks to the distraught mother on the phone, only to be interrupted by the Sheriff, who informs him. The phone drops, and he and his wife break down emotionally. Then we are introduced to Bobby Briggs, Captain of the high-school football time and supposed "girlfriend" of Laura, who is making out with ditsy waitress Shelley Johnston in his car. A police car rushes past them and at the sight of a metal truck parked outside Shelley's Bobby freezes in fear. Then it takes us to Twin Peaks high-school, where the register is being called out in Laura's class. Bobby arrives late and is called into the office, while deputy Andy arrives at Laura's class asking for him, also informing the teacher of what has happened. In a harrowing sequence, Laura's best friend Donna Hayward (daughter of Will Hayward, the forensics man), senses something at the arrival of the deputy and the reaction on the teacher's face when told the news. Then inexplicably, a girl is seen out the window, running and screaming. Donna, her eyes widening, glances round at James Hurley; secret boyfriend of Laura and biker. Then she looks at the empty chair beside her and burst into tears. Meanwhile, Bobby is being interviewed by Deputy Tommy "Hawk" Hill and Andy, oblivious to what has happened. Upon hearing the news, he reacts aggressively, declaring some kind of phoney love for her. Then he is taken away. The principle, also emotionally distraught, makes the announcement to the school and lets everyone leave for the day. James rides away on his bike after seeing his uncle, "Big Ed" Hurley. Then another teenage girl is seen wandering across a bridge, tortured, raped and severely truamatised. And then finally we are introduced to the series' main character; Special Agent Dale Cooper, an eccentric hypomaniac who talks to an invisible entity known as "Diane" through a recorder. We first see him driving into Twin Peaks, admiring of the Douglas Firs and ecstatic about a slice of cherry pie he recently had. He then joins forces with the sheriff, and the adventures that follow this brilliant pilot are hilarious, tragic and mysterious...
(Feeling excited now? Look it out!)
But what makes this show work so well, even to this day? Well first of all, it has a great setting; a beautiful, autumnal town high up near the mountains, where the air is fresh but tainted with corruption. Secondly, it features a great cast playing great, compelling characters. The standouts include Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet) as the hilarious, sharp, trustworthy FBI man, Michael Ontkean as the headstrong sheriff, Sherilyn Fenn as the bratty and manipulative but charming and seductive Audrey Horne, Lara Flynn Boyle as the sweet Donna Hayward, and James Marshall as the confused biker outcast James Hurley. We follow these characters through a story filled with love, loss and mystery. While Cooper, the Sheriff and his deputies investigate intensively and (mostly) professionally, the kids pursue their own line of enquiry into the death of their beloved Laura, learning hurtful and sad things about her. Laura. Laura Palmer, the dark, corrupt core of Twin Peaks, a symbol of the false sense of happiness and stability in Twin Peaks, a face as pure as water but tainted with sadness and desperation. Who was Laura Palmer, really? Will we ever know? Will the sight of her pale green face lying on the beach haunt us forever, eating at us like the worms inside her corpse? The mystery that is Laura Palmer is only seen in flashbacks and movies, her hair a golden blonde, her smile white and pure, her bright blue eyes flashing. Who couldn't love her and protect her, no matter her corrupt and lost soul? Sherilyn Fenn looks right for the part, and overplays it perfectly, as Laura only exists in memories and photos...
However, the show is not perfect. It drags sometimes, particularly with the story of the Horne brothers and their exploits. Lynch was away promoting Wild At Heart sometime into season 1, so he can't be blamed for the odd misfiring plot strand...
But so many episodes are simply impeccable. They bear his trademark style; bold and frightening dream sequences, brilliant use of sound and image to create mood, visual and aural beauty and humour as black as midnight on a moonless night. The story unfolds with effortless precision, and the broken and disturbed characters are filmed with the same stark nakedness and soft tenderness that suffused his masterpiece Blue Velvet...
Highly recommended, even if you're not a Lynch fan...bewarned though, it is addictive...
The result was Gummo, an epic collage of life in a place called Xenia, Ohio in the aftermath of a tornado. It was shot in and around Nashville, in authentic squalor, with a huge cast of mostly non-professionals. The film is a startling masterpiece, about a forgotten people and culture lying in the sub-conscious of America. It is energetic, audacious, tender and human. There are sequences of hypnotic beauty and power, as when a frail kid in bunny ears kicks at the fencing separating him from the busy flow of traffic in a bridgeway over a motorway, or when a blonde teenager lies on a sofa staring up at us in a sexually inviting way, her eyes filled with longing and desperation, set to the distorted sound of children singing Buddy Holly's "Everyday." The caused a storm of controversy for it's depictions of depravity; cat-killing, the suggested sex between a teenage boy and a down-syndrome prostitute, etc. Yet these allegations are unfounded, as most scenes are entirely suggestive; the film is not exploitative in any way. It also gained acclaim and derision critically; Janet Maslin of the New York Times calling it "the worst film of the year," and on the other end Bernardo Bertolluci calling it "the one revolutionary film of the 90s." Both these comments may be compliments to Korine's purpose as a filmmaker. So after making one of the great debuts of cinema, what came next for Korine? 
His next project came fast, something deeply personal to Korine; based on the life of his Uncle, a schizophrenic. It was made under the tight restrictions of the dogme95 manifesto, shot entirely on handheld and with threadbare production design. In some ways, Julien Donkey-Boy was a huge departure from Gummo, using a minimal cast and muted tone, yet with it's improvisatory quality and theme of isolation it is in the same way. It seems far more technical than Gummo, and sometimes this is distracting. Yet it is also highly inventive and perhaps contains more emotional gravity than Gummo by focusing more tightly on character and story. It is beautifully acted, with a cast comprised of both non-actors (a blind ice-skating girl and a black rapping albino), and actors (Ewen Bremner, whom Korine admired in Mike Leigh's Naked, Chloe Sevigny, his then-muse who had large parts in KIDS and Gummo, and Werner Herzog, a huge admirer of Korine and his Gummo). It is much harder to watch than Gummo, yet had a strong emotional pull on me. It switches from calm, to shocking, to frustrating, to sad, sometimes in the same scene. It has a kind-of cold, icy beauty to it, relying on a visual palette of blues and greys, ranging from somber to luminous, from Julien stooping over the body of a child he just murdered, to his lover/sister practicing ballet in her room. What's most interesting in this film is the way the family functions. Korine used hidden spy-cameras to film the reactions of bystanders to the behaviour of Julien and his family. To those looking in from outside, this family is odd, freakish, and dysfunctional, but Korine takes us inside, and asks us what's so freakish and odd about these people. They function outside the realm of social order, yet ultimately function as a family, only in a way we're not used to. This bears much thematic similarity to Gummo, which is very much about a community that functioned this way...
Two such fascinating and affecting films in such a short time bespeak a huge creative talent. With his films Korine gave a voice to the forgotten and abandoned realms of society. And then something got to him, and he stayed away from the medium for a number of years, apparently travelling alone around Europe. But then a new film went into production, about celebrity impersonators living in a commune in the Highlands, and skydiving nuns. The idea of a commune of unappreciated and perhaps rejected people is reminiscent of the family in Julien Donkey-Boy, or the backwater town in Gummo. That Korine can approach the same highly personal subject matter repeatedly, but each time in a completely original way, is testament to his creativity and feeling for the rejected and isolated. Having personally been a fan for quite some time, I'm still not quite sure what to make of him or his films...and maybe that's the way Korine likes it...
