Sunday Snaps
David Lynch's Twin Peaks and The Spring
Another Sunday Snaps late on a Monday (okay, early Tuesday)! So sorry about that, but as you probably read I had a few other posts to get out at the end of the week, so this one got pushed. Other than a few family matters, this January has been spent trying to get centered in the new year as well as trying to ignore the new government taking over. It’s been A LOT.
In all of this, there were the Los Angeles fires, which are truly mind-boggling in scale. There is a lot of SF vs LA “stuff” between our two cities, but wildfires are a California thing and no matter where you live you know them well. They are terrifying and increasing in frequency and intensity. My parents evacuated from the Atlas Peak Fire in Napa in 2017, and while their home remained, many of their nearest neighbors’ homes were reduced to rubble. The scent of smoke in the air still gives me anxiety. Climate change is real, and it’s just going to get worse and worse. I don’t have any solutions: recycling and composting and saving electricity clearly ain’t it — we need bigger change on a much bigger scale, but people still deny the science. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that denialism is going to go away any time soon either.
I was struck by the passing of David Lynch this month, and how he, as a long-time Angeleno who identified so strongly with the city, died just a few days after the fires. And, from emphysema after a lifetime of smoking. The connections write themselves. There have been many beautiful tributes already, but I wanted to share something about him here, which will be January’s post.
If I’m honest with you (and myself), I wouldn’t be writing The Spring if it weren’t for David Lynch. Specifically David Lynch’s Twin Peaks which came out on television when I was in 8th grade. I was too young to understand its quirky humor, but just old enough to be intrigued by its darkness. The suffocating murk of the misty, rainy skies punctuated by mysterious trees and the moaning Angelo Badalamenti music had me fixated on the screen from the drop.
My sister and I were obsessed with the show: gorgeous Sherilyn Fenn’s retro beauty and fashion in the bad-bratty-lost little rich girl character of Audrey Horne was an absolute favorite. The boys were the edgiest, handsomest high school boys I’d ever seen, with the “good” ones dangerous in their football jackets, and the “bad” ones sweet in their leather jackets. I wanted them all, but didn’t know who to root for. Joan Chen, Peggy Lipton, and Piper Laurie were fabulous too — in fact, the entire cast was pitch-perfect. It felt taboo to watch it in a way — our parents had no interest or idea in what we were sneaking on-screen in their bedroom while we were supposed to be finishing up homework or getting to bed. (The first season ran on Thursday nights which was — other than the weekend — the only night of the week we were allowed to watch any TV. Heretofore it had been parent-approved The Cosby Show and Family Ties, maybe a glimpse of Cheers, but Twin Peaks was a whole new world.) This indecipherable world of strange people, adultery, secrets, drugs, greed, mental illness, illegal goings-on, and all kinds of supernatural things (giants, owls, ESP, log ladies) was just approachable enough to be addictive, but it also scared me. Those high school kids were only a few years older than me.
At one point, everyone in my class was talking about the show. Someone even brought in The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer which we passed around like a copy of Flowers in the Attic. The whole culture was talking about it too: every sitcom, pundit, late-night host, or soap opera of the era worked in the question of '“who killed Laura Palmer?” all the time.
In college at UC Davis, I saw Dr Strangelove for the first time in a film theory class and finally understood dark humor. I still find myself laughing out loud whenever I watch Dr Strangelove — it’s so dark, silly, terrifying, and brilliant. Wanting to be with my friends, I stayed on during the summer semesters to work and go to classes. If you’ve ever been to Davis, CA in the summer, you know that the outside temperature runs in the low 100 degrees most days; in the late 1990s, this was compounded by the small university town reality of not a whole lot happening. Enter a hot case of boredom. At one point, my friend Jen rented (yes, rented) the VHS tapes (yes, tapes) of the Twin Peaks episodes and we (Jen and her gaggle of housemates) made our way through 2 or 3 every afternoon-evening with a lot of home-grown weed and Sierra Nevada. Suddenly, Twin Peaks was a lot funnier. It was a lot scarier too: I’ve never been so scared as when Bob crawls over the sofa and snarls right into the camera. To this day I can hardly watch it.
All of us agreed how the episode quality fell WAY off after the first season, but the show really became un-watchable once they solved the murder. Apparently, David Lynch’s concept was to start the story with the body of a dead girl, have a lengthy investigation go on, only to end the series with the crime unsolved and unresolved. Turns out, Lynch’s surrealist idea of leaving it “unresolved” is bad for business; we (the audience) wanted justice. The network execs at ABC had a hit show on its hands so wanted the series to go on, which is why they forced a resolution in the middle of the second season, when Laura Palmer’s killer is finally revealed. Apparently Lynch had little to do with the series after this, so the show no longer did much justice to his creative vision, especially as the show went on for another 13 episodes. Does anyone even remember them?
What I remember most about Twin Peaks are its idiosyncratic details, the swings from the safety of pie and coffee to the dangers of evil — real and imagined(?). The style, the visuals, the colors…stacks of donuts on the sheriff’s conference room table one day, a stag’s head the next. Lynch plays with his viewers as he plays with his characters. He’s laughing at his demons and dreams while he processes them all right in front of our eyes.
Liz Goldwyn devoted a beautiful post to David Lynch two weeks ago, talking about her friendship with him in Los Angeles over the years. (In fact, her Substack is awesome!) In an old interview she re-published in the post, she asked him about his transcendental meditation practice, as well as his dreams and he said that he while he’d never really gotten ideas from night dreams, he found daydreams productive. This led to Goldwyn asking him about Fellini, another filmmaker who expressed his dreams on camera (and one of my personal favorites). This led to further stories about Lynch’s friendship with Fellini, and let’s just say, it’s all perfect. (And before you look, The Book of Dreams by Fellini is out of print and copies go for over $450 dollars. But someday it will be mine…)
Dana Thomas — one of my fashion writing heroes — also wrote a post about Lynch, discussing both his film and painting. I loved this quote:
“You have to be true to the ideas,” he said. “It’s something like abstract painting. In the film, you could have like a painting that’s part realistic, part abstract. Some people turn off to abstract painting. But the machinery exists in all people to understand abstract painting and that’s kind of critical to getting through to life, let alone a film.”
Lynch, who famously loved “strange worlds”, created his own in every film he ever made. The abstractions of Twin Peaks live within a very specific, manufactured world that is both old-fashioned and contemporary, safe and homey as well as labyrinthine. It’s all cute and totally disconnected. The airy nightmares flow freely in spaces that are grounded and earthy, even if the predominant wood textures are sometimes plastic-coated formica panels. The famous red room serves as a space between worlds, dominated by the the red velvet curtain: one of Lynch’s favorite tropes.
“I don't know where it came from, but I love curtains. There is something so incredibly cosmically magical about curtains opening and revealing a new world. It resonates on a deep level with people.” -David Lynch
My friend Emily who creates the fabulous Instagram account Chimes at Midnight, posted a theory about Twin Peaks last week that tied the show to two other of my favorite films: Otto Preminger’s Laura from 1944, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Not only are the main characters (Laura, Laura, & Madeline) beautiful dead young women, but in some way, all of the men investigating their untimely ends (Det. Mark MacPherson in Laura, Det. Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo, and Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks) fall in love with them. While Gene Tierney’s Laura comes back to life in a case of mistaken identity, Laura Palmer comes back to life in the guise of her cousin Madeline Ferguson - note the naming - (also played by Sheryl Lee). This gets interesting in Vertigo, where Madeline comes back to life in the form of Judy, who was always Madeline to begin with — played by Kim Novak in both roles, like Lee in Twin Peaks. Necrophilia aside, the identity play is a classic surrealist trope. Even the red room of Agent Cooper’s dream hints at something from Cocteau — possibly Orpheus passing through the mirror into hell? Mirrors, reflections, duality, alternate timelines…more Easter eggs than a Taylor Swift album.
Emily went on to draw other parallels: Jacoby is the artist who paints Laura’s famous portrait in Laura, but in Twin Peaks, Dr. Jacoby is Laura Palmer’s psychiatrist. In Laura, the character of Waldo Lydecker is a smooth-talking pundit who seems to know who Laura’s killer is, but in Twin Peaks, Waldo is a myna bird that witnessed Laura’s murder and keeps talking…until he’s shot in his birdcage.
You can imagine how this theory involving three of my favorite works hit me over the head. I still cannot stop thinking about it.
The Spring came together in a lot of ways and none of it can be pin-pointed to one influence or idea. Mostly it was because I’d always wanted to see a Masterpiece Mystery style procedural set in San Francisco, specifically The Presidio — a wild space with a deep history. Some days, with the trees and damp fog, it can be very reminiscent of Twin Peaks. When I imagined Alexa Thomas’ body being found in El Polin Spring, I think on some unconscious level I had the image of a water-logged Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic. When I started to think of my investigators, I cooked up a hard, by-the-book FBI agent who loved coffee, and a Native American officer of the US Park Police. It wasn’t until months later that I realized these were my own versions of Agent Cooper and Deputy Hawk. I suppose in a round-about way, Jeannie represents Cooper’s innocence with Audrey Horne’s eager spice.
Alexa Thomas is mysterious and intriguing, and everyone in her life adored her: much like Laura Palmer. And like Laura Palmer she has her own secrets: her own love life no one knows about, and her own plan of action. Will an Alexa Thomas look-alike be appearing any time soon? I don’t have any plans for that, but there are still a few surprises left in the story.
To finish, I want to thank everyone again for reading The Spring. I went to my choir rehearsal tonight and a new friend who has been reading it gave me the best compliment. She told me she loved it so much that she binged all the chapters and is fully caught up. This was so lovely to hear as these last few months have been a bit discouraging. I’ve had unexpected time crunches come up almost every week, and I’m seeing plenty of other Substacks gaining readership and subscribers hand over fist while mine feels like it’s at a trickle. I always believe in the work and I have faith in its success, but I definitely feel like I’m shouting into the void most of the time. It’s just nice to hear that people are out there and they are enjoying it. I do know you’re out there, but I also know I need to hear it.
Thank you!