Notes on Twin Peaks

The dream of a film is to become multiple, to expand beyond its frame rather than close down. It is to become double, triple, quadruple, multiplying endlessly... We see this in Apichatpong, in Hong, and also in Lynch. This doubling can take place on the level of people (as in Hitchcock's Vertigo), on the level of structure/framing (as in Apichatpong's Tropical Malady), or on the level of the psyche (as in most, if not all, of Hong's films).

We see all these levels in Twin Peaks, which is not strictly a Lynch film. Lynch left the series to the writers in the second season, when the series arguably got better, when it was left to expand on its own. Lynch himself divides into two (Mark Frost) and multiplies into the various writers - Robert Engels, Harley Peyton etc - and directors - Duwayne Dunham, Caleb Deschanel, Uli Edel, and most remarkably, Diane Keaton. Curiously, it is Keaton's episode that best captures the philosophy of the show. Perhaps because she's a woman directing a male-heavy crew, perhaps because she is the most formal of all the directors.

The best direction provides an opening into the material, a window, a frame, a point-of-view into the world (an idea that has been lost in contemporary cinema, where direction = creation). There is hardly anything special about the story arcs in Keaton's episode (a strong point of the show is its frequent banality) - plot points are extended, characters move around in their troubles 'animated from outside,' as Daney have pointed out. But Keaton seizes on the doubling, multiplication - her closeups of fingernails (long, red, painted fingernails) on Evelyn as well as Josie immediately pairs the two together; the swinging door as Cooper talks to Pete emphasizes their coupling; the closeup two-shots (sometimes framed by a door window, sometimes completely naked) divide as well as unite at the same time. In her episode, and henceforth the series, shot-reverse shots do not establish difference, but rather similarity - in the scene at the bar, Donna transforms into Evelyn, and vice versa.

Nothing has changed in the series, only the point of view. And so we see the huge transfiguration of souls in the series - people becoming other people, as if identity is an amorphous cloud hovering over each character, possessing them as easily as it leaves them. Lynch's films have been fixated on potential - the potential to beauty just as easily transforms into the potential to violence. This potentiality finds its physical manifestation in Twin Peaks - the town and its people (which is why Lynch started with a town, instead of a story; in a story, identities point toward a finality; in a town, people are not yet even identities). In the town, everybody is latent. There is a great potentiality to become another, to become not-oneself. If only we could recognize this in our society as well...

But then perhaps it's wrong of me to talk of one philosophy. There are multiple philosophies in the series - multiple creators, multiple points of view. Its beauty is that it is hardly unified; it is always shapeshifting, always expanding to include more - democracy of voices, constantly dividing itself into finer and finer threads.