That’s (not) entertainment!
EXPECTATIONS SHOULD BE MUTED FOR LYNCH’S RETURN TO TELEVISION
Here is an incomplete list of work David Lynch has produced in the 15 years since the release of Mulholland Drive, his last studio picture of any real commercial merit: He drew and animated a crude series of short cartoons called DumbLand about a whitetrash family- man in rural America. He shot an eightminute short on l ow- res miniDV in downtown Tokyo called Darkened Room, in which a Japanese woman speaks obliquely about bananas. He recorded an experimental blues album, Crazy Clown Time, and contributed to a Danger Mouse record that was packaged with a book of his photographs. He directed a handful of music videos, a radical black- andwhite documentary about French lithography, and made INLAND EMPIRE, perhaps the strangest feature to ever open theatrically in wide release in North America. And for about five years he filmed himself reporting on the weather and uploaded the videos every morning online.
This is not the oeuvre of a mainstream artist, needless to say. This is not even the oeuvre of an artist much inclined to entertain an audience, which may have seemed true of Lynch at a time when he was working in more conventional forms; a time when he was still intent to write and direct at least nominally accessible motion pictures that could be produced and distributed in multiplexes across the world.
It should be apparent to anyone who has kept abreast of his creative output of late that some time over the last 15 years David Lynch lost whatever residual interest he might’ve had in traditional feature filmmaking and resolved instead to pursue a more personal idiom. He abandoned the practice that had endeared him to the movie-going public in order to read the weather and lay down guitar-reverb tracks and preach Transcendental Meditation — as if at a certain point he liberated himself the market and determined to simply do whatever he wanted to do.
David Lynch today, in short, is not David Lynch circa 1990. His sensibility is less commercial, his technique is more eccentric, and his interests, crucially, are more in thrall to his whims. It is not clear how widely this distinction is understood. This weekend arrived the premiere of the newly resuscitated Twin Peaks: the long- awaited return, 25 years in the making, of the hugely influential two- season television series Lynch co- created ( and midway through left behind) with Mark Frost for ABC. The Return, as it has been unceremoniously dubbed, will span 18 hour- long episodes, each of them written and directed by Lynch. That’s 18 hours of new Lynch work — a colossal windfall. At present the director’s entire corpus end-to-end runs a little over 20 hours long.
Twin Peaks, in its original incarnation, was and still is beloved to an almost ludicrous degree; it impressed itself so indelibly on the popular imagination that its mark endures to this day. But what exactly are we expecting a new Twin Peaks to look like in 2017? And much can we reasonably hope it to resemble what we’re familiar with from before?
Showtime, the network that is the revival’s unlikely benefactor, has so far remained scrupulously tightlipped about what the new season will actually l ook and sound like, a few brief and appropriately obscure excerpts and stills notwithstanding. Cast and crew interviews tend toward the rather arcane. Any assumptions we have made about the Return — and to judge from the TV- recap literati’s predictably unimaginative hypotheses online, a galaxy of assumptions abound — are derived from a cast list and some of Lynch’s cryptic remarks. This I expect can tell us as much about the show as one could glean about I NLAND EMPIRE from Lynch’s pre- release description of it as having to do with “a woman in trouble.”
It would be foolish of course to speculate about the direction Lynch has taken this new Twin Peaks. But if we can guess anything safely about it, based on the evidence of his late career, it’s that it will have remarkably little to do with the original Twin Peaks — or in the very least that it will resemble the experimental idiom Lynch has honed over the last 15 years far more than the network-TV language he spoke back then. How could it be otherwise?
Lynch, in truth, has always had a deep affinity for the avant-garde: that’s his nature, one repressed when tasked to produce a mainstream television series or direct a commercial feature film. What his recent output proves is that he is definitively done with repression. He is incapable, I suspect, of making anything remotely as accessible as the original Twin Peaks in 2017. And given the latitude he’s been afforded here — Showtime has insisted they gave Lynch carte blanche from the beginning — how could the Return be anything other than frustratingly, defiantly strange?
Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema. — David Lynch