In the Dark Reviews

On Jan. 16, David Lynch died, just four days shy of his 79th birthday, after a nearly 50-year career spent changing the face of film and television.

Lynch's output was absolutely not for everyone, and even those of us who regarded ourselves as ardent fans would admit that not all of what he did worked equally well.

What made Lynch's works worthwhile was not trying to suss out what they meant, but basking in the experience of how they made us feel, and what they inspired us to dream.

Lynch took detours into 19th century English history and fantastical futures. The 1980's "The Elephant Man" won critical acclaim for its biography of the physically deformed Joseph Merrick, while 1984's "Dune" was shunned by reviewers and the box office in attempting to adapt Frank Herbert's novel.

But the core of Lynch's canon was devoted to digging into the strangeness and underlying corruption of America's illusions of small-town tranquility and Hollywood glamor.

Before his family moved east, Lynch hopscotched from Missoula, Montana, to Sandpoint, Idaho, and even my former home city of Spokane, as a child. While his subsequent travels and education broadened his horizons, as seen in his gritty 1977 debut film "Eraserhead," he returned to the Pacific Northwest with "Twin Peaks" in 1990.

Lynch demonstrated no shortage of skill in scathingly (and metafictionally) satirizing the entertainment industry-driven culture of Los Angeles in 1997's "Lost Highway," 2001's "Mulholland Drive" and 2006's "Inland Empire." But it's in the three-seasons-and-a-movie of "Twin Peaks," which wound up spaced out over 27 years, where Lynch revealed perhaps his most profound insights and his most authentic feelings.

"Twin Peaks" was never supposed to exist. Lynch and Mark Frost, the show's co-creator, pitched it to ABC during the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, and the network executive who approved it left before it could meet its original premiere date of fall 1989. It only made it to air as an eight-episode midseason replacement in spring 1990.

"Twin Peaks" suckered viewers in by wearing the skin of primetime soap operas that had dominated the preceding decade, including "Dallas," "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest" (all of which ended between 1989-91), and within its fictional reality, many of the town's inhabitants were shown watching their own favorite soap opera, the intentionally cloying "Invitation to Love."

Likewise, the catchy hook of "Who killed Laura Palmer?" was always intended to segue into larger mysteries suffusing the idiosyncratic and ominous setting of Twin Peaks itself. Its seemingly impenetrable surrounding woodlands and cryptically quirky characters revolutionized the typically cityscape-bound conventions of noir murders and conspiracies.

I was in high school in New England when the first two seasons of "Twin Peaks" aired, and my classmates were captivated by what they saw as the exotic locales of Snoqualmie Falls (the setting of Benjamin Horne's Great Northern Hotel) and what's now Twede's Cafe in North Bend (the exterior of Norma Jennings' Double R Diner).

I was living in Everett when the third season of "Twin Peaks" shot its finale there, casting Mary Reber, the real-life inhabitant of Laura Palmer's home, as its owner in an altered timeline.

Decades of noir media have built up the oppressive urban atmosphere of grimy, dimly neon-lit, claustrophobic and labyrinthine back alleys, but "Twin Peaks" proved that even rural vistas that initially seem pristine, such as the fixtures of a Washington logging town, could hint at foreboding secrets.

In the town of Twin Peaks, outsiders were told the owls were not what they seemed, and simple shots of traffic lights swaying in the wind, in empty intersections at night, were treated as portents worth heeding.

And yet, Lynch and Frost also made Twin Peaks a place that viewers wished they could visit in real life, which accounts for the number of conventions celebrating the show that have been in Snoqualmie and North Bend over the years, attended by avid "Twin Peaks" fans seeking the promise of "damn fine" coffee, and a slice of cherry pie to give themselves as a present.

Lynch has shown audiences the traumatic effects of ordinary people getting swept up into things they can scarcely hope to comprehend, never mind recover from. And indeed, by the end of "Twin Peaks: The Return" in 2017, we see that the once-heroic Dale Cooper (played by Lynch's longtime muse, Kyle MacLachlan), has become, in the lyrics of Enya's "Evening Falls," close to home and yet so far away.

But the appeal of Twin Peaks, as a place people wish was real, is that the abuse and suffering that takes place out of sight also occurs in a community of ordinary compassion, where Harry Dean Stanton, as the owner of a trailer park, gives an elderly tenant a break on his rent so the poor man doesn't have to sell his blood to afford food.

As much as everything else he saw that so many others missed, David Lynch saw the enigmatic yet earnest heart of the Pacific Northwest, which he and Mark Frost made manifest in "Twin Peaks."

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]