The Strange Cases of David Lynch

4 the strange cases of david lynch is there an art television? In any comparison of the aesthetic traits of film and television, the name David Lynch will most likely spring to mind. During his ca- reer, Lynch has swung between experimental projects and more mainstream work. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks marked a period of about five years in which he established his reputation as a direc- tor of “weird” tales that drew considerable attention from the public and the press. The two works contain enough similarities to make comparison relatively easy. Both are mysteries set in small lumbering towns, and their two protagonists share some traits and are played by the same actor, Kyle MacLachlan. He has recalled, “Someone said to me that they thought Dale Cooper was Jeffrey Beaumont grown up.”1 One might easily get that impression, though Cooper’s in- telligence distinctly outstrips Jeffrey’s. The similarities between the two works have given rise to a considerable body of writ- ing, primarily thematic interpretations of them as quintessentially the strange cases of david lynch 107 Lynchian. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are widely assumed to be his best works, and this is a plausible appraisal. What more can we learn from such a comparison? I have long been fascinated by the issue of how avant-garde works occasionally emerge within a purely commercial context. Shortly after the end of World War I, the German film industry produced The Cab- inet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and a whole series of Expressionist films. Similarly, Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925) and Carl Dreyer’s La Pas- sion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) were made by profit-oriented companies in the 1920s. Following World War II, often with the help of government subsidies, an art cinema emerged, initially in Eu- rope and Asia, that has remained as an alternative to mainstream Hollywood-style filmmaking ever since. Here I am using “art” in a much more narrow and conventional sense than in the first chapter, where I referred to fictional television programs as “art,” whether good or bad. We all have a general sense of what “art films” are. They are usually small-scale productions that appeal primarily to an edu- cated audience, often outside their country of origin. They are usually made and exhibited within a set of institutions separate from those of mainstream commercial films. In Britain the lottery now helps support them; in France a tax on cinema tickets funds them. There are special “art cinemas” devoted to them in cities and university towns. An international film-festival circuit has burgeoned in recent decades, meaning that Iranian or Japanese films can be seen in dozens of countries without ever playing in an actual theater. Certain video companies specialize in art films, for example, Artificial Eye and the British Film Institute in the U.K., and New Yorker and Kino International in the U.S. Art films form a sort of middle ground between mainstream 108 storytelling in film and television commercial films and pure experimental cinema—the latter being the kind of personal, often non-narrative films that screen mainly in museums and filmmaking cooperatives. Some art films are dar- ing enough that they approach experimental work—say, some of Jean-Luc Godard’s films of the late 1960s and early 1970s or the films of Vertov and Eisenstein in the USSR during the 1920s. At the other end of the art-film spectrum lie films that are subtitled or in other ways “arty” but that nevertheless manage to find a larger audience, something Life Is Beautiful (1997) did a few years ago and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is currently doing.2 Such films draw in art-cinema lovers, but also a share of the mainstream market as well. Can the same phenomenon occur in television? Can there be “art TV” that airs on the mainstream networks? Certainly there is no clearcut set of alternative institutions within the television es- tablishment. Government-supported systems like the BBC have a mandate of sorts to create quality television, but that might just mean the sorts of prestigious miniseries exported to fill the sched- ules of the public broadcasting system in the U.S.—adaptations of Dickens or Austen, for example, which are comparable to the “prestige” literary adaptations of Hollywood’s studio era (as with MGM’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet and its 1940 Pride and Prejudice). That is not the sort of television I am referring to as “art television.” What I mean is a sort of television comparable to art films. Given the current widespread application of the term “postmodern” to television, I should specify that what I am calling “art television” is not synonymous with “postmodern television.” There are two main ways in which television is argued to be postmodern. Some claim that a postmodernist quality arises from the overall flow of programming, which juxtaposes disparate items: fiction the strange cases of david lynch 109 next to nonfiction, comedy next to drama, commercials next to programs. Thus the format of TV scheduling creates the jumble that has a postmodern effect of reflexivity, irony, and so on. If this is the case, individual programs are not the source of this postmodern effect, and hence they would still be subject to isolation from their place in a schedule and to formal analysis of the type I have been proposing. A second approach holds that certain individual series are instances of postmodernism, which is then presumably only inter- mittent across all of TV. In that case, one could sort out which programs are postmodern and which are not. Interestingly, the programs sometimes cited as postmodern—Late Night with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, music videos, commercials—are often not narrative programs. Nevertheless, if any narrative program could be claimed to be postmodern, it would certainly be Twin Peaks, which has influ- enced other eccentric series like Northern Exposure and The X- Files. Twin Peaks has an imbedded soap opera, Invitation to Love, which roughly parallels its own events. For example, when Hank shoots Leo Johnson in the first-season finale, Leo lies bleeding and watches a thug get shot on Invitation to Love. Reflexivity and irony are working full throttle here. If postmodernism is to be found in individual programs, then these programs are presumably also isolable from the scheduling flow and available for analysis. (Indeed, how could one differenti- ate postmodern from non-postmodern programs without at least cursory analysis?) I have no objection to analysts looking for postmodern television in this way, but my interest here is different. “Art cinema” is a term in wide public usage, and it implies spe- cific and well-established conventions. I wish to examine whether some of those same conventions occasionally appear in commer- 110 storytelling in film and television cial television. This would seem to be a more limited issue than whether television as a whole or some television programs in par- ticular are postmodern. “Art television” might well be considered by some a subcategory of postmodern television. That is, postmodern conventions may now be so pervasive as to constitute a new set of popular norms long since assimilated by many viewers, but art television might have ambiguities and other challenging techniques that stretch or break those conventions. At any rate, for now I am dealing with only how we might define “art television,” postmodern or not. Before tackling my main subject, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, I would like to define more specifically what I mean by “art films” and give you a brief, clear-cut example of how that definition could be applied to television. Several traits of art films were laid out by David Bordwell in his 1979 article “The Art Cin- ema as a Mode of Film Practice.” I shall apply his outline of traits not to a film, but to a classic of British television, the 1986 BBC miniseries The Singing Detective. If there have been any instances of art television in the Anglophone history of the medium, this one definitely figures high among them. the singing detective as art television Bordwell discusses five major traits as typical of the art-cinema mode: a loosening of causality, a greater emphasis on psychologi- cal or anecdotal realism, violations of classical clarity of space and time, explicit authorial comment, and ambiguity.3 The Singing Detective certainly eschews the linear cause-and-effect chain typical of classical narratives. It moves freely among three basic levels. The “real” situation has the protagonist, Philip Marlow, suffering from a painful skin disease and confined to a the strange cases of david lynch 111 hospital. He is also suffering mental problems, as we learn in part from scenes of his imagined reworking of his published potboiler, The Singing Detective. On a third level, flashbacks from his child- hood, also revised by his imagination, display reasons for his adult problems.4 The fantasy elements that run so strongly through the series would seem to preclude realism. Yet The Singing Detective also fo- cuses on the painful details of Marlow’s skin disease and its treat- ment, the illnesses and deaths of his fellow patients, and ulti- mately on his emergence from fantasy into health and a departure from the hospital. Moreover, the narrative appeals to the art cinema’s deeper form of realism, character psychology. Few film or television narratives have spent so much time probing the fanta- sies, delusions, and traumas of a protagonist. Bordwell’s discus- sion of art cinema suggests that the typical hero procedes through an itinerary: a journey, a search, the making of a film.

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