Review: The New Twin Peaks is Strange and Not In a Good Way

Source: Time Magazine
Date:   May 22, 2017
Author: Daniel D'Addario
URL:    http://time.com/4787762/twin-peaks-premiere-new-season-review/


Review: The New Twin Peaks is Strange and Not In a Good Way
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'Something is missing,' intones Catherine Coulson's 'Log Lady' near the 
start of Sunday night's Twin Peaks season premiere on Showtime. 'And you 
have to find it.'

This insight (gleaned from the log that communicates with her) felt all 
too apt. The new season of Twin Peaks, the mystical soap opera whose 
fast-burning two-season run on ABC from 1990 to 1991 helped define what 
TV would become, shares, so far, precious little with what had come 
before. It's not just that the few returning characters we see are (with 
fitting surrealism) 26 years more wrinkled than when last we saw them. 
The show, which derived its power from the aftermath of trauma in a 
small community, has chosen to tell a story that's odder and bigger - so 
big, in fact, that it has so far choked off what made Twin Peaks work 
all along.

The original series, the brainchild of director David Lynch and writer 
Mark Frost, derived its narrative energy from the murder of beautiful 
and troubled high-schooler Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee); as the Pacific 
Northwest town of Twin Peaks metabolized the brutal act, citizens 
seemed, collectively and individually, to lose their grip on reality. 
Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), tasked with solving the 
crime, is as susceptible as anyone. Twin Peaks season 3 foregrounds the 
insanity but loses the resonance, with much of its story so far taking 
place outside the town entirely, in a plotline featuring Matthew Lillard 
as a man accused of murdering his lover.

Lillard's story has none of the charge of the killing of Laura Palmer; 
were it not airing under the Twin Peaks banner, I wouldn't keep watching 
that show. Earlier Twin Peaks episodes made excursions to the Black 
Lodge - the extradimensional location whereby Cooper has dreamy visions 
of Laura Palmer and other paranormal individuals - count. They were the 
peppery bits of true creative oddity in a show where the grounding came 
from characters trying to figure out how to live in the world. Cooper's 
remaining trapped there - a place where the tiled floor can tear apart 
and where a brain attached to a tree issues cryptic pronouncements - is 
fascinating. But other flights of fancy, like a Cooper lookalike running 
wild in the world as the embodiment of evil, or a glass box in New York 
City that kept under constant surveillance, landed with more of a thud.

All of this is not to say that Twin Peaks's new go-round isn't worthy of 
attention; its slow and languorous way of taking its time with scenes 
keeps one, mostly, attentive. But while it's safe to assume that Lynch, 
no one's idea of a conventional storyteller, knows where his story will 
end up, it's a bit wearying to think of getting there after a further 16 
hours of viewing. (The installment runs 18 hours in total.) The 
puzzle-box shows that Twin Peaks begat - most notably at this moment, 
The Leftovers, the best show currently airing - tend to be made with a 
certain confidence. Even if they don't answer every question the viewer 
may have (and they assuredly won't), their brio convinces you that the 
answers do exist. The new Twin Peaks is a bit more of a shrug, with the 
attitude of some of its first installment's bratty high schoolers. Why 
is the brain on a tree talking to Cooper? Well, why not?

That makes it a bit more challenging to handle the show's more violent 
impulses. The death of Laura Palmer was treated with as much gravity as 
could be imagined - after all, the whole show was about her fellow 
citizens mourning her. But the show's ultra-violence now feels but 
casually thought through, with graphic images of beaten and murdered 
women floating by. The show isn't reveling in the imagery, sure, but it 
doesn't seem to be treating it with much depth, either.

Lynch's impenetrability has grown greater in recent years - earlier 
films like Blue Velvet or even the first season of Twin Peaks feel 
uncomplicated by comparison. But inscrutability in and of itself is not 
necessarily a virtue; if a show is designed not to be understood, it 
also loses opportunities to connect. Twin Peaks's first go-round 
catalyzed fans by using the tools of surrealism to tell a fascinating, 
sometimes heartbreaking story. Twin Peaks now has made surrealism less 
of a tool and more of an objective.

But it's early days yet. And the show occasionally pushes to emotional 
heights through, not despite, the choking atmosphere of confusion. 
Sheryl Lee as the ghost of Laura Palmer, now a bit older but still 
radiant and - in a hopeful note for the Black Lodge - is practically 
angelic, appears to Cooper and delivers a brief monologue. 'I am dead, 
yet I live,' she says, then whispers at length to him before opening up 
her face and revealing a shining white light within. It's too bright to 
make out whether or not anything's actually behind her eyes, and yet 
it's odd and provocatively beautiful all the same. That the light may 
obscure only emptiness doesn't mean the image won't stick with you in a 
way little else on TV does.

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(c) 2017 Time Inc.


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Posted by: "Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks" <[email protected]>
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Through the darkness of future past....