TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040990/0409250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.5 KB | 188 lines

                ¿₧                                                            VIDEO, Page 96

Like Nothing On Earth


David Lynch's Twin Peaks may be the most original show on TV

BY RICHARD ZOGLIN -- Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles


    The body of a high school girl, wrapped in plastic, washes
up on the lakeshore near a small town in the Pacific Northwest.
An FBI agent teams up with the local sheriff to investigate.
The victim, they discover, has been leading a secret life. So,
it seems, is nearly everyone else in town.

    In outline, ABC's heralded new series Twin Peaks sounds like
an amalgam of familiar TV genres. A touch of true-crime
docudrama, a dash of Columbo, a jot of Knots Landing. But in
the darkly idiosyncratic world of director David Lynch, terms
like murder mystery and soap opera don't begin to tell the
tale. Twin Peaks, which debuts Sunday as a two-hour movie, is
like nothing you've seen in prime time -- or on God's earth.
It may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for
American TV.

    It is also something of a miracle. Imagine: one of the
world's most perversely offbeat movie directors persuades ABC
to let him try a prime-time series. He shoots a pilot with
virtually no interference. The network bigwigs look at the
result, realize that it will probably befuddle many viewers,
then decide to air it anyway. The programmers even consider --
horrors! -- showing the two-hour pilot without commercials.
(Cooler heads prevail; the show will have ads, though fewer than
usual.) It's enough to restore one's faith in television.

    The surpassing strangeness of Twin Peaks is not easy to
pinpoint. Despite a few grisly touches, the show has little to
offend in terms of sex or violence. Its distinctiveness is
almost purely a matter of style. The pace is slow and hypnotic,
the atmosphere suffused with creepy foreboding, the emotions
eerily heightened. The news of Laura Palmer's murder inspires
spasms of grief in everyone from the girl's mother to the
crew-cut school principal, who bursts into tears after
announcing her death over the p.a. system. In other hands, this
might be melodramatic; in Lynch's, it has the scalding intensity
of a nightmare.

    Then there are the Lynchian touches of off-kilter characters
and sideshow weirdness. A woman with an eyepatch has an
obsession with drapes. Visitors to a bank vault find a stuffed
deer head lying on the table. "It fell down," notes a bank
officer blandly. The boyish FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan)
dictates every detail of his day into a cassette recorder and
gets misty-eyed over Douglas firs and snowshoe rabbits. "Know
why I'm whittling?" he says to the sheriff at one point.
"Because that's what you do in a town where a yellow light
still means slow down, not speed up."

    Twin Peaks spins out a whodunit that may or may not be
solved by the end of the show's seven-week run. (For a European
video version of the pilot, Lynch shot an alternate ending that
seems to solve the crime. In it, the actors walk and speak
their lines backward, and the film is reversed.) But the
two-hour movie, which spans the 24-hour period after discovery
of the body, stands superbly on its own. More than a dozen
characters are introduced -- all of them connected, each
dwelling in a private world -- from the widowed owner of the
town sawmill (Joan Chen) to the dead girl's hopped-up boyfriend
(Dana  Ashbrook) to the serene sheriff (Michael Ontkean), whose
name, for no particular reason, is Harry S. Truman.

    Whether Twin Peaks will work as a continuing series remains
to be seen. The second episode (co-written by Lynch but
directed by Duwayne Dunham) shifts into more conventional gear
as the murder investigation begins to unfold. At worst, Twin
Peaks could turn into an aesthete's version of "Who Shot J.R.?"
At best, it will be mesmerizing.

    Few filmmakers would seem less likely candidates for TV than
Lynch. His first feature, Eraserhead, was a dreamlike horror
story about a couple taking care of a monstrous mutant baby.
Blue Velvet, his bizarre 1986 black comedy, started with a
severed ear and descended into sadomasochistic horror. Trained
as a painter, Lynch has written song lyrics and directed a
performance piece, Industrial Symphony No. 1, featuring a
midget sawing wood and dozens of baby dolls lowered from the
ceiling.

    At 44, Lynch has a Boy Scout's cherubic face and nice
manners. His conversation is filled with wholesome jargon like
"thrilling" and "cool." But eccentricities lurk just beneath
the surface. He always keeps his shirt collar buttoned to the
top because "I have this thing about my neck. It's just an
eerie kind of feeling about my collarbone." For seven years he
drank milkshakes every day at a Bob's Big Boy in Los Angeles.
"I'd have coffee, sometimes six cups, along with the shake, and
I'd have sugar in my coffee," he says. "By then I would be
pretty jazzed up, and I'd start writing down ideas. Many, many
things came out of Bob's."

    Lynch, who has been divorced twice and is now involved with
actress Isabella Rossellini, was born in Missoula, Mont. His
father, a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture,
moved the family several times around the Pacific Northwest
before settling in Washington, D.C. Lynch found high school
"worthless" but put up with it, then went to art school in
Boston. After a brief sojourn in Austria, he moved to
Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts.

    "Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me," says
Lynch. "It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden
city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I
felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic
at the same time." He lived across the street from the city
morgue, where he was fascinated by the empty body bags hung on
pegs. "The bags had a big zipper, and they'd open the zipper
and shoot water into the bags with big hoses. With the zipper
open and the bags sagging on the pegs, it looked like these big
smiles. I called them the smiling bags of death."

    He tried filmmaking as an extension of his painting. Lynch's
first work was a "film sculpture," a one-minute animated loop
in which six people get sick over and over while their heads
catch on fire. A painter who saw it commissioned Lynch to make
another animated film. Lynch bought a camera and spent two
months shooting before he realized the camera was broken. "It
was one long piece of blurred film," he says. "But it was the
weirdest thing; I wasn't one bit depressed."

    Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and spent five years
making Eraserhead. The film became a cult hit and led to his
first mainstream film, The Elephant Man. Lynch's next proj ect,
the big-budget sci-fi movie Dune, was a critical and commercial
disaster, but Blue Velvet brought him widespread critical
acclaim. A couple of aborted projects later (including a script
for Steve Martin called One Saliva Bubble), Lynch is finishing
a new film, Wild at Heart, starring Nicolas Cage and Laura
Dern.

    Lynch and his partner, former Hill Street Blues writer Mark
Frost, developed Twin Peaks by drawing a map of the fictional
town. "We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide
what mood each place had, and what could happen there," says
Lynch. "Then the characters just introduced themselves to us
and walked into the story." The pilot was written in only nine
days and shot in 23. Lynch was apprehensive about the
restrictions of TV but found the experience satisfying. "I
didn't feel we compromised, and I felt good."

    Will TV audiences feel just as good about the mutant soap
opera he has concocted? Frost hopes the series will reach "a
coalition of people who may have been fans of Hill Street, St.
Elsewhere and Moonlighting, along with people who enjoyed the
nighttime soaps." ABC Entertainment chief Robert Iger admits
the show will be a hard sell (especially in the time slot
opposite Cheers on Thursday nights). Says he: "A lot of people
have said Twin Peaks is the critic's dream. But is it the
viewer's nightmare? I would hope that the answer is that it
isn't."

    Lynch seems confident that viewers will catch on. "These
shows should cast a spell," he says. "It's sort of a nutty
thing, but I feel a lot of enjoyment watching the show. It
pulls me into this other world that I don't know about." Well,
if he doesn't know about it, what are we outsiders to do?
Nothing but sit back and succumb to the spell.