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It's happening again. The low twang of Angelo Badalamenti's theme music accompanying the neon green titles, the images of a small town on a lake.
The opening sequence of the new series of Twin Peaks — the first four episodes released on streaming video this week — is an emphatic gesture of continuity.
Artistic continuity, that is. While David Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost have expanded their original creation with new ideas and pushed old characters in unexpected directions, the overarching vision remains coherent to Lynch's idiosyncratic sensibilities, perhaps even more so.
Lynch's focus on mood over plot, his refusal to explain ambiguity, his embrace of theatricality and his relish in lo-fi special effects are all elements of an artistic signature that's as intense and uncompromising as it's ever been.
It's also inspired a TV series that is deliriously, gloriously bent.
Picking up where it left off
In the first four hours, Lynch sets up a mesmerising array of plot threads with only a vague promise of reconciliation between them, transporting the action between the original town and far-flung places like Las Vegas and New York.
There are many new faces, as well as members of the original cast who return to play an older version of who they were 25 years ago. Or versions, in the case of Kyle MacLachlan.
MacLachlan plays at least two different FBI Special Agent Dale Coopers: the poised investigator in the neat black suit we remember from the 1990s, and a sinister alter ego who's gone rogue.
Bad Cooper is a totem of inscrutable evil — a gun-toting villain, dressed in leather with long hair. His eyes are like dull buttons, eerily devoid of any reflected light.
His vicious misogynist streak is reminiscent of Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. It's apparent that Good Cooper is on a collision course with him. But that's just one idea lurking in the misty narrative jungle.
From the way Lynch and Frost have constructed the show, it's like watching fragments of a paranormal detective movie missing large chunks of exposition.
There are blood-chilling murders, illicit affairs and a desert road trip — but there are also extended metaphysical forays, hallucinations and dream sequences.
As a long time practitioner of transcendental meditation, Lynch brings to the screen a conviction that the interior world — or even other dimensions such as astral planes — are just as vital as the tactile, material universe around us.
It's a view that's inflected with a very American, New Age pseudo-religiosity, but it also places him within cinema's rich surrealist and modernist traditions, from Věra Chytilová to Jacques Rivette.
How to enjoy Twin Peaks
Appreciating Twin Peaks is to forget about storytelling as an exercise in verisimilitude — a confronting challenge in the plot driven, character-focused world of most contemporary television — but Lynch sugars the dose with postmodern wit and a contagious sense of fun.
Not that anyone on screen is laughing: dead bodies litter the early episodes, most of them women. Twenty-five years after Laura Palmer's beautiful corpse turned up in plastic on the shores of the Twin Peaks lake (an event that has inspired countless Jane Does in television noir since) Lynch is focusing once again, it seems, on women as the ultimate victims of human corruption.
Photo:
Laura Palmer appears like an old friend you never expected to see again. (Supplied: Showtime)
His advocacy is faintly redolent of old timey male condescension, and extends to a soft porn appreciation of the female form. Nevertheless, it is imbued with genuine, sincere devotion.
He certainly transforms a brief reappearance of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) into an early highlight, placing her in a black dress inside the Red Room, with its velvet curtains and zig zag carpet. She's like an old friend you never expected to see again, and when she opens her mouth to speak in that backwards drawl of the show's other ghostly apparitions, it sends shivers.
Lynchian style rarely aped
Why so few TV dramas have tried to follow Lynch's lead into the American subconscious is worth pondering; arguably TV comedy has been much more experimental.
True Detective — and, to a lesser degree, Noah Hawley's Fargo — both show an influence, but neither are as formally audacious and unsettling as what Lynch has delivered here.
Maybe it's just that Lynch has avoided getting caught in Hollywood's straitjacket. By working primarily as a visual artist, he's managed a healthy creative distance. His filmmaking was, and remains, an unusual and original phenomenon on the American spectrum.
There's something to be said for someone who can remain true to an artistic vision this uncompromising and still gain access to a mainstream audience.
It's a credit to Lynch that he has not adapted his style to suit TV's more muted sensibilities (even in this Golden Age) but remained true to what he does best.
Four episodes in to the new Twin Peaks, he is still ahead of the pack.
Topics: television, arts-and-entertainment, united-states
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