Subject: 'TWIN PEAKS' AWAKENS MOVIE LOVER IN US ALL - Buffalo News FWWM Review
From: v075q5fr@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Scott J Gorcey)
Date: 1992-09-06, 14:31
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks
'TWIN PEAKS' AWAKENS MOVIE LOVER IN US ALL
by Jeff Simon
News Critic
So as we watch as the creativity of American movies sinks quickly into
the Pacific and leaves behind a continent-sized oil slick, it's time to
put some movies and some necesary superlatives into the lifeboat for
survival - "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," for one.
It's the most exciting American movie since the Cohen brothers "Barton
Fink" - a two-and-a-half hour long nightmare that is one of the most
stubbornly dreamlike commercial movies ever made in America. It is,
along with "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," and "Blue Velvet," (but NOT
"Wild at Heart," [guess he didn't like that one...]), confirmation that
David Lynch is exploring far-off oceans no one else in American commercial
movies has sailed before. He may yet turn them into Ports of Call.
You could have knocked me over with a Yule log.
When Lynch extended his marvelously weird TV miniseries [sic] (which
seemed at the time like "Blue Velvet Meets Peyton Place") past its original
six parts into something that resembled a decidedly eccentric series, it was
more than a bit depressing to watch Lynch and company flog a dead horse every
week (though, come to think of it, if he'd had it flogged IN the series itself,
it would have been eminently more Lynchian).
How then, could a movie "prequel" to the TV series be anything but
fileted chunks of the same beaten and dead horse clumped into a can
and fed to us as dog food? Here's one theory propounded by the family's
young theatrical philosopher [his 20-year old daughter]: "It wouldn't
surprise me if David Lynch did the TV series just so he could get an audience
for THIS."
Some of the actors are the same, some of the sets are the same, some of
Angelo Badalamente's [sic] brooding and beautiful music is the same. And
yet the film is entirely different. It isn't just the essential difference
in scale, either, although that figures enormously.
TV series happen between commercials inside a piece of living room
furniture that can be controlled at will by a 3-year-old. Movies happen in
the dark on a huge screen from which one's only escape is to leave on
foot.
A TV show is like a household pet. No matter how weirdly funny and
horrific it is, you think of it as if it is somehow miniaturized and cute -
hence the hailstorm of "Twin peaks" products and marketing engendered by
the show's cult audience (in modern America what may begin as art always -
ALWAYS - ends as packaging).
The TV show was created by Lynch and Mark Frost, a veteran of "Hill
Street Blues," versed in the fine art of TV beats (i.e., the placement of
emotional peaks within each twelve-minute segment). People talked about
the TV series as if it were a new kitten or Pomeranian that has joined
the house and entertained everyone with its antics.
A movie, on the other hand, is bigger than life. It swallows you up in
its dream logic, envelops you in voluptuous mystery and acquaints you
with the weirdness of your own unconsciousness.
Frost had nothing to do with TWIN PEAKS the movie. It isn't chopped
up in edgy little TV pieces [suggesting, wrongly, that this is the reason
Frost wasn't involved: in fact, it is because Frost was busy filming and
editing his feature-directorial debut, STORYVILLE]. It is all fluid and
dreamlike, flowing sensually from one dream sequence to the next -
bare-breasted orgies in fire-lit cabins, photos of empty rooms on walls in
which people suddenly appear and beckon Laura Palmer inside, crazed
drivers who pull up next to the Palmers at a traffic light and scream
incoherent imprecations at the top of their lungs.
The violence, when it comes, is horrifically sudden. All the dreamlike
watery flow of the plot suddenly cascades violently over a cataract into
a chasm. And then you're yanked up again.
END PART ONE OF THE REVIEW.
Scott Gorcey
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