JOIN USThe best news I’ve heard in this new year isn’t just that David Lynch’s Twin Peaks will return, but that every new episode is to be directed by Lynch himself! Fans of this cult 90s mystical mystery series will recall that the most stylish and enigmatic episodes were always the ones helmed by Lynch — from dancing dwarfs to solving puzzles using Buddhist meditation techniques to the joys of apple pie and black coffee.
Some of my most memorable days from that period in Bengaluru’s history of video cassette libraries are those daily trips to Sandons in Fraser Town to finish borrowing all 25 or so parts of Twin Peaks to find out who killed Laura Palmer.
And it has now been 25 years since this ground-breaking television aired its second and last (so we thought) season, which left us then with many unanswered questions. Who Killed Laura Palmer? may have been answered midway through that last season, but many more mysteries took its place in the series, with co-creator Mark Frost taking it in new directions. Twin Peaks was the show responsible for changing the quality of television shows, and if today much of what is on TV feels superior to mainstream cinema, it is the doing of Lynch and Frost and the talented team of writers, directors and actors who worked on that show some 25 years ago.
A year ago, Twin Peaks got a Blu-Ray release and now finally there is one for my favourite Lynch movie, Mulholland Drive. This tantalising movie combines the best of Lynch, that is Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks! Of all the celebrated ‘puzzle movies’ out there — Memento, Vanilla Sky, 12 Monkeys, The Usual Suspects. Lost Highway, Death and the Compass — Mulholland Drive is perhaps the most satisfying. (Memento is the most teasing). You can’t — or shouldn’t — trust the narrative in a puzzle movie. Because they don’t just skewer and shuffle the narrative, they trick you into trusting a narrative that could be…false.
To me, the solution (at any rate, one of the solutions) to the mystery that is at the heart of Mulholland Drive (and in a way Twin Peaks, too ) is fairly straightforward: three-fourths of the movie is the revenge fantasy of a failed, jilted actress — Naomi Watts as Diane pretending to be a successful, desirable actress called Betty. The next — which is also the last — half hour of the movie is after the heroine wakes up from her fantasy. Everything we have been seeing up to that point is her fantasy. A dream. At one level, the film’s appeal lies to an audience identifying with a heroine who uses fantasy to reinvent herself; to dream up a new life and extinguish her previous one where everything went wrong. Who among us is not in thrall to our fantasies? Who among us will not fall back on our dreams to cope with reality, to readjust it? Particularly when things (love, work, fame, for instance) don’t turn out in the precise fashion we want them to in real life.
The details, particulars and texture of each of our fantasies might vary, but their function is the same — to help us escape oppressive reality. At another level, Lynch presents us with a heroine who is also movie-mad. Her dreams are manufactured by the ultimate Dream Factory — Hollywood. And even if all of us aren’t aspiring to be actors or stars like her, there are enough of us in this world whose lives are hooked up to cinema.
Subconsciously and consciously, our notion of life — or what life ought to be or could be — and who we want to be, comes from the movies we love and the characters we identify with.
Lynch’s genius is that even after we discover Diane made it all up in her head, we realise that for her, Betty was real. Which is why, even when you watch it several times, you feel sucked into it all over again. Lynch believes it and he makes you believe it. In some ways, Diane’s fantasy is also Lynch’s fantasy. It is Lynch having fun as a filmmaker: the fantasy provides him a way to return to his pet theme — surrendering to cinema as you would surrender to dreams.
And now, in this all new season of Twin Peaks, Lynch will return to this theme: the blurring lines of cinema and dreams. We will hopefully have all our favourite characters return and find out what has happened to them over 25 years. Above all, I am looking forward to meeting maverick FBI agent Cooper (played so perfectly by Kyle MacLachlan) again, and his ways of playing detective using Jungian mystical methods of solving crimes through (in?) dreams and the subconscious. It’s time for us fans to once again say along with Mike and Bob, ‘Fire walk with me’.