Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

DAVID LYNCH – TWIN PEAKS – DEFINTIVE GOLD BOX EDITION – 2010

It all starts the way we remember the film, but we soon are going to be lost in translation, we are going to lose our memory and we are bound to loosen our minds into something that sounds like derangement. And we find out in the final “Lost and Found” that some lines were dropped along the way that would have made the surreal aspect even deeper, darker and bleaker.

A long bloody series of killings one after the other brings a federal Special Agent, a certain Dale Cooper, into the picture of this panoramic and flabbergasting mountain-scape from upland Wasington at the very border to Canada. And we wonder why a great film director decided to become the director – and creator – of a TV series. And we do not know, and we cannot know, and the concerned director could not even know himself. He felt the impulse, he needed some extra money, or he wanted to discover some new territory. But who cares anyway.

This series produced in 1990-1991 and followed by the film “Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me” in 1992 opened completely new territories and trails in TV art, because TV can be an art. First it completely dropped the autonomous episode syndrome and the whole series is but one story that cannot be considered as sliced up in episodes that would be autonomous one from the other. Each episode ends up with a strong at times melodramatic, most of the type pretty dramatic last touch that is supposed to create fear and to call for anxiety and expectation. And it is not simply what Stephen King recalls about the special teenage matinee films in the old days with one serial character, with one unified episode each week, and yet each one ending right in the most atrociously suspenseful event, like a cliffhanger just losing his grip two thousand feet over the firm ground at the foot of the cliff, but after concluding his business of the week just before.  

In the case of this series that suspenseful last touch is in fact opening a new can of worms that is an amplification of the very episode and yet forcing us to lose all our certainty about what has happened in this episode, hence throwing our minds into disbelief and doubt about the whole story line and what could come next. This suspense does not require us to suspend our disbelief. It creates in our consciousness absolute disbelief about any hypotheses or conclusion we might have come to.

And sure enough from a simple detective story, a banal crime story or even a lackluster serial killer story we move to a vengeance story, a ghost story, a supernatural story, a fantastic dark fantasy of a story that never stops going beyond the margin and limits of natural circumstances.

This series has had many descendants, many children and grandchildren, from “Lost” to “Supernatural” or all the mini series produced by Stephen King or other people in the same line. As such David Lynch has opened up a real can of real rodent bugs that are haunting us, gnawing at our guts and munching our vitals with teeth of steel.

The present Gold Box Edition is particularly welcome because the modern definition of our screens and the wide size of these screens being what they are, this product that was done for low definition and small screens becomes magical. The editor of the set goes as far as giving us, at the very end some small scenes that were deleted, supposedly lost and miraculously retrieved, precisely in the low definition of the time and we can remember the fuzziness of these pictures, though at the time it was less visible because the screens were so small that the pixels were nearly microscopic.

We thus can enjoy the rich setting slightly overcrowded with props and detail, the encumbered movements and actions that find all their power and force in today’s technical conditions, all for our best enjoyment.

But does it mean anything?

I am afraid not. I can’t really tell you the end, but let’s say it is becoming common today, especially after the last volume of the “Dark Tower” series by Stephen King in which the last page of the seventh and chronologically last volume is word for word the same as the first page of the very first volume. David Lynch is a lot more complex than just repeating the first scene of the first episode in the last scene of the last episode, but altogether it is the same pattern. Life is eternal because it repeats itself. Life is deadly, fatal, lethal, because it can start all over again just after death has struck.

The only deeper reflection you may get out of this series is that nature is beautiful, man, (and woman) is a dirty littering filthy polluting animal but deep deeper deepest in this world the polluter always gets it right bang in their faces. There is always a pine weasel that can bite your nose. Apart from that it is pure entertainment and story telling, even if at times the story telling is kind of twisted and farfetched.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU