Twin Peaks at 20

It’s been 20 years since the body of local homecoming queen Laura Palmer washed up on the shores of the bucolic logging town of Twin Peaks, setting in motion a surreal and intricate whodunit/whatthefuck mystery at the centre of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s two-season, 30 episode TV saga. A one-time contender for the highest TV ratings in the United States, Twin Peaks had almost everyone in the 18 to 40 demographic scratching their heads post-episode and excitedly ruminating on that all-important question: who killed Laura Palmer? Critically lauded as one of the most innovative - and for some, the greatest - TV series of all time, while raising the bar for TV writing and production, Twin Peaks changed the rules of American serial drama. As ‘Peaksmania’ receives a welcome birthday revival here in the UK starting with a marathon screening at Battersea arts centre this weekend, followed next month by the first UK Twin Peaks festival at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, now would seem like a good time to revisit this strange, enchanting and wildly popular phenomenon.

Perplexing, horrific and darkly funny, Twin Peaks was unprecedented in the sheer variety of its styles and tones. Crime thriller, soap opera, supernatural chiller, film noir and comedy came together as Kyle MacLachlan’s delightfully oddball FBI Agent Dale Cooper collaborated with the small-town police force to identify Laura’s killer, employing investigative methodologies involving Zen mysticism and dream analysis. The show’s unfurling network narrative of drug-dealing, corporate corruption, prostitution, familial breakdown, madness, clairvoyance and spiritual possession offered a smorgasbord of generic tidbits. Take the dark domestic melodrama of Laura’s parents dealing with their grief; the Chaplinesque pratfalls of dumb deputy Andy; the hallucinatory arthouse-horror appearances of giants and murderous spirits; the femme fatale wiles of Audrey Horne - all enveloped in the noirish strains of a skulking, finger-clicking jazz score from Lynch’s longtime musical collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Given the constrained stylings of contemporary serials - Law and Order, Northern Exposure, Beverly Hills 90210 and Cheers - Twin Peaks stood alone in its kaleidoscopic homage to sundry televisual and cinematic forms.

Twin Peaks boldly blurred the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, blazing a trail for The X-Files, Eerie Indiana, Lost, and True Blood. It juxtaposed the quotidian (the frequent partaking of “damn fine coffee”, cherry pie, donuts and fried breakfasts; suburban white picket fenced homes and traditional diners) with the downright bizarre (a parallel dimension populated by demons, doppelgangers and reverse-speaking dancing dwarves), and thereby offered a radical departure from the mundane concerns of popular serials broadcast during 1990 and 1991 (Dallas, Rosanne and Frazier, I’m looking at you). Indeed, Agent Cooper’s otherworldly visitations and dimension jumps positioned the show somewhere closer to the more offbeat specimens of cinema - Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Lynch’s own Eraserhead and Blue Velvet - than anything else on television. So not only was the TV rulebook decisively out of the window; it was on the street outside, flattened by a 44-tonne Lynchian juggernaut.  

Make no mistake: Twin Peaks had its flaws. Ratings plummeted midway through season two as the writing team revealed Laura’s killer early, apparently under network duress. Lynch then relinquished the creative reigns as plotlines involving UFOs and a literally deadly game of chess - absurd even by the show’s eccentric standards - wandered off as inconsequential MacGuffins. Toe-curling production quirks - a visualised thought bubble; a roaming point-of-view angle from a marauding pine weasel let loose at a fashion event - all indicated that the show was in weary decline. But the final episode, which saw the return of Frost behind the typewriter and Lynch in the director’s chair, provided the last hurrah and a piquant reminder of the show’s beguiling and terrifying strengths. Cooper’s dizzying confrontations with the destructive entities at the heart of Twin Peaks would roll towards an agonisingly unresolved cliffhanger. Unfortunately it was the show’s cancellation rather than its teasing narrative spirit that ended things this way.

Despite achieving lasting appeal and making its mark on popular culture (from a send-up on The Simpsons to self-parody on Saturday Night Live), it took a staggering 20 years for Twin Peaks to emerge in full on DVD in the UK. Taken with other ‘Peaks related celebrations emerging in the coming weeks, it is perhaps time to take another stroll through the mountainside firs and come back to that coffee and cherry pie. No doubt it will be worth the wait.

Kids – Leave the Adults Alone

Children are terrifying. Not yet having acquired any moral scruples, emotional self-understanding or capacity for grasping the perspectives of others, it’s only the threatened withdrawal of Fruit Shoots and Toy Story action figures that prevents them from driving a sharp-edged Tonka truck deep into the skull of whichever simpering, devoted family member they perceive to stand in the way of the fulfilment of their arbitrary desires. Say a friendly hello to one and it will respond by staring back at you with an expression so chillingly blank it would disconcert Jeffrey Dahmer. It will spend an hour hitting things with other things, motivated by forces beyond comprehension. It will stop and start crying with the eerie abruptness of a broken toy. And worst of all, there is an unspoken and insidious cinematic taboo against killing the little bastards off, albeit with the occasional perverse exception made for the relatively nice ones like Cher’s son in Mask. (Notable departures from this rule are described below.) Given all this, it’s natural that filmmakers so often turn to infants when they really want to shit us up. Here are the top ten most frighteningly dead-eyed, morally vacant kiddies in cinema. (Note: this list is of course determined according to a well-defined scientific formula and not arbitrary personal taste.)

10. Miranda, Paulie, Leah and Nicky from The Children

Infected with a strange virus during New Year’s Eve, four children from two excruciatingly middle-class families start acting up at the dinner table. Before long, there are bits of Dad Number One’s head scattered across the garden, Mum Number One’s eye has been stabbed with a crayon, Dad Number Two is buried in the snow and Mum Number Two’s shin bone is poking out of her leg. Could all this carnage have been prevented simply by enforcing rigid parental discipline at an early stage, rather than offering unconditional ‘love’ and ‘understanding’? Why, yes. Yes it could.

9. Tomas from The Orphanage

Tomas is a little boy who is dead, deformed, super-strong and implicated in the death of another kid, but despite his malevolence we are invited to feel sorry for him, because he was killed when some other children were bullying him. He also wears a sack on his head. Sounds exactly like Jason Voorhees from pre-hockey mask Friday the 13^th, doesn’t he? But he’s not like him at all, really, mainly because he’s not in a dogshit film.

8. Jeca from A Serbian Film

There’s something that’s just not cricket about a little girl cheerfully goading a porn actor into repeatedly punching her mum in the face before ejaculating on her. Jeca seems to be the only participant in deranged pornographer Vukmir’s arthouse snuff flick that isn’t a bit taken aback by what’s going on, and this marks her out as a super-unnerving bad-ass anti-heroine, as well as future fodder for social services. If this is what she’s like now, imagine what she’ll be like in her teens – my heartfelt sympathy goes out to her guardians.

7. The Omen

In a perpetual grump punctuated only by impetuous bouts of murderous, telekinetically articulated rage, little Damien is given to cold-bloodedly killing his doting family and friends as they beg for mercy; naturally, he goes on to become a hugely successful CEO. Damien doesn’t even have the saving grace of being in the least bit cute; it should be obvious just from looking at his scowling fat face that he is out to wreak hellish destruction on the whole of mankind. Again, the culprit is a trendy, open attitude to child-rearing. Damien was given the run of a massive stately home and the loving care of a devoted family, and as an adult he was a sociopath who came close to inducing Evil to envelope mankind. Reagan from The Exorcist was tied to her bed and tormented by religious fanatics, and went on merely to become mildly neurotic. Therein lies a lesson for all prospective parents.

6. Eden Lake

Chavs. They’re young, they’re lower class, they’re… well, do you need more? Writer-director James Watkins plays expertly on his audience’s well-grounded fear of youths from the lower strata of society, pitting a nice, simple-minded couple drawn from the rapidly dwindling ranks of civilised English culture against a gang of tracksuit-wearing teenagers with a mangy dog and a ghetto blaster, who represent the gloomy future of this once great nation. Needless to say, things don’t go well for our protagonists. The moral of the story: kill obnoxious teenagers when you have the chance, preferably just before they actually have a chance to start being obnoxious.

5. The kids in Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy

Just look at them, the little shitpigs! With their remote controls they use sharp-toothed robotic dolls to attack the intrepid Jane Fonda’s legs as she attempts to negotiate her way through a galaxy populated by extra-terrestrial nymphomaniacs and mental defectives. Why this unprovoked attack?, you may well ask. But in the world of children there is no why. There are only colourful toys, giggling and a demented attraction towards evildoing, and preferably all three at once.

4. Don’t Look Now

Stop running around and stay where I can see you! A few well-chosen and firmly delivered words like these could have saved Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland a thoroughly depressing trip around Venice. But instead, having managed to drown their daughter, they pursue an apparition with a similar red cloak, meeting scary psychic women along the way. Mr Sutherland comes to understand that, absurd as they might seem to some, those leashes you can get for toddlers might not be such a bad idea after all; tragically, however, he is stabbed to death by a weird dwarf woman before he has a chance to make use of this newly acquired knowledge.

3. Reagan in the Exorcist

Reagan engages in attention-seeking behaviour, but does not seem to care whether she receives positive or negative attention. Like many children, she turns trivial concerns – like having an unusually limber neck – into a big deal, and apparently wants to control her mother’s life through studied psychological manipulation and high-powered puking. So, instead of designating a certain portion of the day ‘special time’, or trying to attend to good behaviour as much as to misbehaviour, or something pathetic like that, Mum ties Reagan to the bed and throws holy water in her face, with excellent results.

2. The children from Children of the Corn

If Stephen King has taught us anything, it is that we should at all costs strive to eliminate children with religious-sounding names and a sense of self-confidence. Children of the Corn’s opening sequence illustrates why: because, more likely than not, a creepy kid called Isaac is going to rise up against the over-18s and slaughter the lot of us, subsequently instituting a bizarre cult somehow involving corn fields and a mysterious devil-type figure to whom regular sacrifices must be made. Only Linda Hamilton can save us. As usual.

1. The Grady Twins in The Shining

“Come and play with us!” No.

Amputainment: An occasional column for people who enjoy bits being cut off other people - No. 9374 The eye

1. The Simpsons: Lard of the Dance

In this episode’s B-story, Homer and Bart embark on a get-rich-quick scheme involving the theft and sale of Groundskeeper Willie’s “retirement grease”. One suction-pump-related mishap later, Homer’s eyeball has been sucked halfway out of its socket, but, inured as he is to physical injury, he fails to notice. Bart, however, is visibly disconcerted at the grisly sight. Asked what the matter is, he compassionately replies: “Er – nothing.” Eye injuries are something of a staple in America’s finest cartoon series – see also Lenny and Moe’s eyes contused by razor-sharp springs in The Old Man and the C Student, Homer’s corneas crusting over in Last Tap Dance in Springfield, and the claw hammer calamity in the movie. The Simpsons now feature on health and safety posters about eye injuries.

2. Casino

Even Joe Pesci’s sociopathic mobster balks when, stonewalled by his errant detainee Tony Dogs, he is compelled to employ a last-ditch method of interrogation: putting Dogs’ head in a vice and squashing it until an eye pops out, splattering those present in sticky bits of face. “Don’t make me hafta do this, please, c’mon!” begs Pesci. The unwise reply: “Fuck you!” Cue a stomach-churning sequence which Scorsese reportedly inserted principally in order to distract the MPAA from the rest of the movie’s violence. Distressingly, this one is a true story, based on the fate of one Billy McCarthy, whose corpse is one eye down thanks to his commission of a crime in a protected Chicago suburb and subsequent “friendly chat” with vice/switchblade/testicle-icepick-wielding enforcer Tony Spilotro.

3. Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment

Satoru Ogura’s charming faux-snuff movie is fondly remembered among fans of video grossness principally for its climax, in which a sharp piece of metal is slowly inserted through the side of a barely-conscious girl’s face and out of her retina, while flashbacks of her earlier ordeal at the hands of anonymous sadists are intercut rapidly in disorientating fashion. It’s all very convincingly done, so much so that the Guinea Pig series was investigated by the FBI, who suspected that depictions of actual torture and murder were being distributed. Cool! A must-see for those keen to be sicked out and depressed by context-free ultra-violence.

4. Hostel

Our hero Paxton can’t bear to leave Cute Asian Girl trapped inside the torture/murder pleasure complex from which he has managed to escape, so he returns and guns down her tormentor. Sadly, it’s too late to rescue her right eyeball, which dangles forlornly out of its scorched and mangled socket. For some reason he decides to cut the eye clean off with a nearby pair of medical scissors, possibly so that it doesn’t snag on a door handle on their way out. This has the gruesome consequence that a great deal of viscous goo not dissimilar to Hellmann’s Dijonnaise oozes down her face. Ironically, the special effects masters at KNB have revealed that they improvised the dangling eye using a condom which was “lubed for easy insertion,” so Paxton really shouldn’t have had any trouble cramming it back in. Live and learn.

5. Un Chien Andalou

Surrealist pioneer Luis Buñuel stands on his balcony and gazes up at a full moon bisected by cloud, “like a razor blade slicing through an eye,” as he put it when recounting a dream to collaborator and outlandishly-moustachioed visionary Salvador Dali. We cut to the face of Simone Mareuil, and then to a close-up of her eye, which is swiftly and gooily sliced open with a razor. This is the only instance here of real-life ocular disfigurement, although the eye in question is that of a skilfully disguised donkey, not the lovely Mareuil. Those involved went on to great things: Luis Buñuel succeeded in becoming one of the most revered directors of all time, while Mareuil succeeded in going mental and burning herself to death in a public square.

6. Saw II

The moviegoing public’s favourite serial murderer, moral philosopher and creator of excessively clever devices for squashing people, John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer gets his first sequel off to a fine and bloody start by abducting and drugging a police informant, surgically implanting a key behind his eye, attaching an automated cranial iron maiden to his neck, locking him in a cell, showing him a video of a scary puppet that mumbles some exposition, and finally activating a timer that will set off the trap and kill him unless he extracts the key by cutting through his eyeball with a scalpel. Simple! The informant in question is understandably horrified by the dizzying implausibility of his situation, but nevertheless makes a good go of his assignment. In the end, though, Jigsaw’s stingy time constraint brings things to a hasty and predictable conclusion.

7. Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood

Having dispatched her semi-naked boyfriend to investigate a mysterious noise in a dark forest, arming him with a small plastic party noisemaker (“I’ll be right back!” he declares optimistically), hapless Kate nevertheless finds that she just can’t relax – was that the sound of a squirrel outside, or was it a human head being squashed? There’s only one way to find out! Heroically tiptoeing out into the darkness, she manages to cover a good few inches of ground before encountering Jason Voorhees, who promptly stabs her through the eye with said noisemaker, eliciting a completely hilarious honking noise.

8. The Terminator

The defining scene of James Cameron’s epochal tech noir is perfectly calibrated to showcase Arnie’s thespian abilities, as he succeeds in expressing no emotion whatsoever while inserting a rusty scalpel into his gore-filled eye socket. Things become even more shuddersome as he nonchalantly pulls the severed eyeball out of his head and plops it into the sink, happily necessitating those super-cool sunglasses. Evidently an enthusiast for eye-related fucked-upness, Cameron revisited the subject matter in the sequel, in which Lewis the blameless fatso security guard is stabbed through the eye by his doppelganger. All together now: “Fuck you, asshole!”

9. Evil Dead 2

Showcasing what is possibly the finest comedy-eye-popping visual gag ever committed to celluloid, Sam Raimi’s barmy splatterfest follow-up to The Evil Dead has frantically executed dismemberment aplenty. God among horror movie nerds Bruce Campbell reprises his role as chainsaw-armed, super-chinned action hero Ash, and his finest moment comes when stamping a trapdoor onto the head of a demon from the fruit cellar, sending its eye flying across the room. Raimi ingeniously gives us a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the eyeball as it careers through the air and deep into the shrieking mouth of one of the bit players. Eww.

10. The Beyond

If you’re going to build a hotel, it’s probably best not to pick one of the seven gates of Hell as your site. And if you absolutely insist on doing so, try not to let the guardian of said gate end up tortured to death by a gang of nutso religious types. And if for some reason you really feel inclined to throw caution to the wind with regard to these matters, make sure that the back of your head is well away from that large rusty nail jutting hazardously out of the wall (and serving no apparent function) when confronted with the inevitable zombie attack. Doomed servant Martha learns these lessons the hard way when an animated corpse rises out of the bath and runs such a nail through the back of her skull, pushing her eyeball cleanly and nauseatingly out of its socket, along with a few pints of rather unconvincing blood.

A Sight for Saw Eyes

The not-very-long-awaited Saw 3D is to appear in cinemas next week. Lionsgate Pictures will be hoping to recapture some of the audience they lost last year for the sixth and possibly best of the franchise so far, and if all goes to plan the prospect of severed body parts and impressively baroque instruments of torture flying out of the silver screen will be enough to galvanise gore-fatigued horror fans. It’s been a long seven years since Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) woke up to find himself in the inopportune position of being chained to a pipe in a disused public toilet shared with a bloody corpse, a tape recorder, a rusty hacksaw, a ticking clock counting off the seconds before his family are killed, and a mysterious, similarly confined man he’s never met. ‘Jigsaw’ is the deranged serial killing philosopher responsible for forcing Mr. Elwes and innumerable other B-listers into racing against the clock to make horrifying choices relating to their perceived moral failings (to a bitter, grieving father: ‘Forgive the man that ran over your son or watch his head get slowly twisted off!’ To a police informant: ‘Cut out your eye with a scalpel or spikes go through your face!’ To a drug addict: ‘Cut open a comatose junkie’s stomach or your jaw is ripped off!’, and so forth). He has in subsequent years been unmasked, re-unmasked, killed, multiplied, re-killed and re-multiplied, all without invoking supernatural forces, leaving enormous plot holes or breaking the rules of the original setup – quite an accomplishment, considering a new Saw movie has been rushed out every year since the 2004 original.

Despite its flaws – hammy acting, awkward lines of dialogue, occasionally confused presentation - the Saw franchise stands out among horror film series in having made a genuine effort to expand and explore the plot of its original instalment, while still offering up the grisly, visceral thrills craved by its fans. The extent to which the strands of each movie connect and interlink with those of the others makes the series feel like a unified whole, a single story told chapter by chapter. What’s the meaning of that weird puppet thing that appears to pass on Jigsaw’s cryptic instructions to his victims? Watch Saw IV and it’s all explained. How did Jigsaw stay completely motionless for hours on that bathroom floor? Saw III gives you the answer. The guy trapped in razor wire in the first one? We see how the infirm Jigsaw managed to abduct him in Saw V. Compare this approach to the Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13^th and Halloween sequels, which, despite being intermittently watchable, did almost nothing to augment the ideas of the originals and swiftly degraded into tedious disconnected variations within their respective formats, often introducing narrative contradictions in the process. Saw on the other hand has grown self-consciously into an impressively substantial assemblage of plot threads, delicately but decisively sown together. Each instalment demands more of its audience’s ability to bring it all together, rather like rising through the levels of a video game, though this is inevitably at the cost of excluding newcomers. Saw IV would be utterly incomprehensible to someone who hadn’t seen the three previous films, but this is a sign of the franchise’s strength, not its weakness: it has marked itself out as a series episodically depicting a single story, sidestepping the path to redundancy down which most horror sequels stagger.

Indeed, critics have objected that with each new instalment, the story arc has become so labyrinthine and implausible that it is no longer possible to take it seriously - to which it can only be pointed out that the first film by itself was so labyrinthine and implausible that it was impossible to take seriously. That’s why it was so much fun. The sombre mood, gloomy set design and graphic depictions of suffering are just the dressing for what is essentially a delightfully tricksy whodunit/whydunit mystery, a jigsaw puzzle gradually pieced together through the mostly verbal interaction of its two shackled protagonists. The deceptive minimalism of its central setup suggests a stage play; from here numerous flashbacks and reveals spiral out in an intriguing if somewhat contrived fashion. (Images of jigsaw pieces, spirals and mazes recur throughout the series: cut out of bodies, painted on doors, embodied in buildings, built into the killing machines.) As the standalone brutal crime thriller it was originally intended to be, the original Saw is interesting in its construction and well enough made, but compares unfavourably to its two most obvious influences, Seven and The Silence of the Lambs, which had similarly ingenious and curiously moralistic psychopaths providing the inciting incident and inspiring morbid fascination, along with grim, bloody set-pieces (although for some reason these drew a great deal less flak from ‘torture porn!’-shrieking hysterics than did the Saw films). Notwithstanding the standard (and justified) opinion of sequels as generally furnishing diminishing returns, Saw actually came into its own with the annual appearance of fresh progeny. As it did so it adopted an approach more characteristic of clever television serials than of cinema by supplying as many questions as answers about what we have seen by the end of each movie - yet pains were evidently taken to make each solution sufficiently elegant to avoid inducing the frustration we know and hate from certain other exemplars of narrative hypercomplexity: Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Lost et al. The heart-poundingly tense reveals before the close of each movie, always accompanied by the final rising bars of Charlie Clouser’s score, are immensely satisfying even as you wonder how various strands are going to be picked up next time around.

And then there are the notoriously grotesque body-mangling machines. Given the puritanical frenzy that Saw along with Hostel and many lesser recent films has generated since growing in popularity, it hardly needs pointing out that it’s often nasty, sadistic and difficult to watch. But in the interests of balance (and of a pretentious digression), it’s worth remembering that its antagonist’s unpalatable conviction that meaning can be conferred onto life through bodily distress is hardly a filmmaker’s tasteless fantasy; it’s celebrated in the story of the crucifixion, for one thing, and is a recurring Christian theme (flagellation and hair shirts come to mind). The notion of ironic physical punishment also has precedents, not only in other horrors and thrillers but in more respectable sources, such as Franz Kafka’s brilliant short story In the Penal Colony, in which a condemned criminal is to be tortured by a machine that cuts a description of his sentence into his flesh, inducing a kind of religious awakening before it kills him. Other precedents are not hard to find in the history of legal punishment. Oddball French theorist Michel Foucault argued that in pre-revolutionary France the legal torture of suspected criminals embodied “the regulated mechanism of an ordeal”, was indeed a “game [in which] the victim was subjected to a series of trials… in which he succeeded if he ‘held out’”, a la Jigsaw’s nefarious contraptions. But the decisive justification for all of Saw’s carnage is that after decades of seeing mechanised walls slowly closing in and threatening to squash the heroes of Star Wars, Batman, Army of Darkness and the rest, only to have them escape in some tiresomely implausible fashion, we finally get to see a shrinking room built to a decent standard. Only a Saw movie has ever had the nuts to completely squash its doomed hero between a pair of moving walls, and for that the moviegoing public should be forever grateful.