Tracing Gould - o17

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

The dialogue first emits from the mouth of a child, in Wild Palms, installment 3; and concludes the chapter as a button from the hapless protagonist and father of the same kid.

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

The child is running a fever when he says it.  The father is having a panic attack as his life collapses into weirdness.

Bruce Wagner is The Weirdest.  He's been an influence on my life longer than David Lynch, possibly, if one discounts Dune.  I first encountered Wild Palms in the back of Details magazine, reading it in the hair salon my aunt Edwina (remember her?) used to attend every Saturday.  I fell in love with the art immediately-- not least for its "adult" content.  There was a perverse thrill to reading about sex around all these adults spending most of their time pretending sex doesn't exist.  That Wild Palms had an absurdist, grotesque fascination with violence didn't hurt, either.

And then Twin Peaks happened, and Details didn't serialize Wild Palms with regularity, so I never got to finish it.  I remember there being a trade paperback on the shelves in bookstores at the mall, and I'd leaf through it, scrying for the slightest suggestion of fucking-- but I didn't read it.  I honestly knew more about the plot of Wild Palms from its teevee incarnation, than its origin as a comic book serial.

My teen PTSD was such that cause & effect kind of didn't exist in relation to one another.  Unless directly addressed, I couldn't make certain connections on my own.  I didn't recognize that the Wild Palms teevee miniseries 'Movie Event' was an adaptation.  I remember being excited that Ernie Hudson was in it, because the black Ghostbuster was my favourite.  I knew Jim Belushi from the movie 'Real Men'.  But as a comix-cultural moment, Wild Palms didn't register.  The cast was too insanely large and the plot was half-there as something a casual viewer could isolate & identify.  There was something about teevee tech, Cronenbergian vibes, and there were occult themes (an occult brotherhood, abductions, enigmatic tattoos) but as to what was HAPPENING, it was all over the place.

Which is why I couldn't really trace the comix incarnation in Details, honestly.  Because it ran in two-page instalments, and anyone who's ever been in a hairdresser's salon knows there aren't three consecutive months of *any* magazine in the house.  But that art, that art, that art...

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

"Down In Front!" - February 2o25

Twin Peaks: s1 e5-7 (1990) - directed by Tim Hunter, Lesli Linki Glatter, Caleb Descanel, & Mark Frost  [ you know what i think already.  i mean, i'm rewatching this stuff.  it's inexcusable, at my age, really.  but it's a fascinating bit of americana with a little 'a'.  i look at this and i think, yeah.  i know how we got here.  we trusted the fbi to take care of us.  and i think that's where lynch & frost were coming from, too.  to say so, on television, and to con an unsophisticated vast audience, purely by chance, during a writer's strike (i mean, isn't that why this hit the way it did?  because television SUCKED?) to con all those millions of viewers, for a little while, into being invested in solving a crime no-one really wanted solved--  least of all, lynch  --well.  like i said:  i think i know how we got here.  don't you? ]

Twin Peaks:  The Missing Pieces (1992) - dir. by David Lynch [ "Don't take the ring, Laura.  Don't. take. the. ring." ]

Twin Peaks: s2 e1 (1990) - dir. by David Lynch [ along with ronette, this cycle, i'm really watching andy.  circle brand indeed!  and madeline ferguson.  and bobby's relationship with his dad (& the white lodge: a dream, as distinct from a vision).  and audrey's unintentional playacting as laura palmer.  as well as donna's.  "I've told you: don't wear my STUFF!"  there's some real moving & shaking going on with the side cast, all touched by The Weirdness in subtle ways.  and while we're on the subject of moving & shaking, can i just say the dinner theatre at the hayward household gets more profoundly unbearable every time i watch it.  sarah palmer is crawling out of her skin in that scene in a way that prefigures her inevitable eruption as judy in s3.  best feature of the ep, of course, is gersten hayward wilding on piano in the credits.  finest closing jam you're liable to hear outside s3's roadhouse, buddy ]

Twin Peaks: s2 e2 (1990) - dir. by David Lynch [ with the introduction of the tremond/chalfonts, coop's trangic past, and the introduction of elder briggs to margaret lanterman, all the major pieces are in place.  "Just you / And I / Together / Forever."  i've always been a vibes guy on lynch.  i'm not into it for the plot logic of these things, or even the dream logic: but that stuff's totally there, if you do what the creator is asking of you, and dig for yourself.  and what twin peaks was doing from the very beginning was ripples.  little crests & troughs, ominous pitches of signal & noise, doppling  ]

Twin Peaks: s2 e3 (1990) - dir. by Lesli Linki Glatter [ peaks giveth, & taketh away.  lesli does her best to emulate lynch.  engels does his best to imitate frost.  we're gonna lose both for a while, after the harold arc ends.  so savoring the flavor while i can... ]

Twin Peaks: s2 e4 (1990) - dir. by Todd Holland [ royal dano!  ROYAL DANO!!!  you cannot convince me lynch didn't love 'messiah of evil', man... ]

notes toward a place where there's always music in the air

My husband has not seen all of Twin Peaks.  So we're doing that.  Not as a vigil viewing so we can have a big weepy over a favorite dead white artist.  Just, y'know, catching up.  Him, catching up with a thing that doesn't really speak to him or his generation, and me, catching up with the fact that I've been watching this show longer than should be considered healthy.

Like, seriously, if you have Peaks fans in your life, scrutinize that shit.  Why does someone religiously watch a show about a town where every inhabitant's feelings regarding gender & consent are, at a minimum, fraught?

If they tell you, "Because Peaks is cozy" maybe you should think about a pocket-sized can of mace.

Like, One-Eyed Jack's is not cute.  Ben & Jerry Horne are not cute.  Hank Jennings & Leo Johnson & Bobby "Definitely Fuckable" Briggs are not cute.  Dale Cooper, when he picks up a copy of Flesh World and, noting a page is marked, smiles?  Not cute.

Anyway.  I've been watching Peaks since it was originally broadcast.  I didn't know what that ad in TV Guide about "Who Killed Laura Palmer" was about, any more than I knew 'Wild Palms' would be a inchoate disaster of a telefilm.  These were the things we watched because that's what television was, back when I was a zygote in Dogwater, Alabama.  Television was a potential disappointment you tuned into, week after week, because Bush Senior was in office and we were recording Iraq War footage off CNN...

Now I'm looking at Twin Peaks on the largest television I've ever owned, marveling at how, in 35 years, I never noticed the wallpaper next to the back door in Shelley & Leo Johnson's horrible half-finished house.

The wallpaper is torn.  Beneath the floral print, right beside the back door, are rows upon rows of cartoon chickens in cartoon chicken coops.

If it weren't for the future I wouldn't be able to look so closely at the past.

Which is another way of saying:  this order of viewing has been... asynchronous.

We did the pilot, 'Northwest Passage', first.  Then, because my husband has never seen the European VHS edit, I showed him the genesis of the infamous Red Room.  Then we watched episodes 1-3.  Then, Fire Walk With Me.

 

For no real reason other than it seemed right.  I wanted to get us past the dream, and Cooper's curious recitation of the events from the VHS ending.  That gets you through Cooper's first 24 hours in Peaks.  Which seemed like the place to stop & introduce Laura formally, and her final days.

 

It certainly lent a horrible colour to episode 5, tonight, when Cooper & co. burst into Jacques cabin and found all the evidence of Laura's last night there.  Like, the last time we saw anybody in that shitty little place there were four people sharing a coke mirror on a disreputable-looking mattress.  Leo was having a hard time managing pants and Jacques was bleeding from a broken bottle to the head.  It was, to coin a phrase, a grim scene.

 

Grimmer, when one considers that only one person on that mattress made it to the series cliffhanger.

 

I've been thinking a great deal about Ronette Pulaski,* this go-round.  The girl who survived.  And how Twin Peaks refuses to be her story.  This isn't to dunk on Lynch & Frost (though, perhaps, we should) but to note that Fire Walk With Me is very deliberately puzzling, if not willfully obtuse, regarding Ronette's survival.  One moment she's bound & praying to god.  Then... she (or Laura?) sees an angel.  Maybe she only seems to see an angel; perhaps she's only praying, and Laura's the one imagining it.  Whatever the case, suddenly her hands aren't tied anymore.  Suddenly Leland is punching her and throwing her out of the train car, to be MIKE's share of the harvested pain & sorrow.  MIKE, maybe he doesn't swing that way anymore, since ditching The Arm, or maybe he could care less.

* Not for nothing, I suspect Lynch had some... feelings regarding Roman Polanski.

However one views it, Ronette is the one left behind.  So a day later she struggles home, following the railroad tracks.  Upon returning to Peaks she lapses into a coma & only rouses herself to forward the plot.  We probably spend more time with Ronette's parents than we do with Ronette, conscious.  She makes a cameo in the final episode, and that's the last anybody sees of Ronette, for twenty-five years.

The next time you, I, or Cooper see Ronette, it's The Return (or, as you infidels call it, season 3, blech)  in the hidden quarters of The Fireman's House, and she's helping Cooper realize what time it is, and that he needs to hustle the fuck up and scram, because "My Mother's coming...!"

I'll probably return to this post, in a quarter century or less.

[ later:  weak, full of pizza, straining from the floor to reach the microcassette recorder ] 

on lynch

Twin Peaks meant the world to me when I was trapped out in the woods halfway up a hill in a geodesic dome with stone floors and a handmade spiral staircase and my mother was kinda spooky, like Sarah Palmer, and I was a closeted gay kid getting outed in high school and I was afraid for my life because my father was my abuser, and we had a doppleganger thing going with our resemblance.  So, y'know.  I felt the whole Laura Palmer thing.  I felt it hard.  I felt all the dumb highschool strung-out highjinx where you're out at night trying to cope with the first real deaths & tragedies you are going to come to know in a long line of them.  I felt like Twin Peaks described my small backwater where daughters were being molested by their fathers right next door, and everybody at church knew about it, and the cops let the daughter leave town with a suitcase after the family turned up shotgunned in the early morning.  I watched Twin Peaks religiously, like the rest of america, and I felt like it was talking about the forces that pulled a trigger and woke me in the absolute dark to gawp out the window at the little sallow house on the corner, listening to a wild agonized shriek fading fast.  I looked at Leland Palmer and I didn't see a man even remotely like my father, and knew the violence between us was wholly dissimilar from what happened to Laura, but I identified nonetheless because teenage kids everywhere live in terror of violence in the home.  I saw Lynch talking about america with a little a.

 

I bought the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, of course, and when I finally ran away from home, it was snug in my backpack, right alongside Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, and my microcassette recorder.

David Lynch is not the kindest or most elegant artist to attempt to describe the emotional violence of such circumstances.  His productions are not always what you would desire in terms of representation or sensitivity, and the male gaze is inescapable.  But he understood how deeply awful and weird and inexplicable human beings are.  His contributions to pop culture television trash & the metaphysics of soap opera existence aside, he's meant a whole hell of a lot to me creatively.  He understood music and sound in a way that spoke profoundly to me.  He made beautiful and terrifying melodrama with the soul of a painter.  He made the artistic life & the artistic process seem accessible & even desirable, as a form of self-expression, healing & therapy.  And he made some funny comix, too.  I liked his drawings especially, his use of black and white, his minimalist fixations in design.  He was a pleasure to watch creating art, or furniture, or sculptural paintings for installation; a delight to spy on, on set, in creative on-the-fly modifications to a shoot.  He inspired me throughout my life, and some of my forever favourite film experiences came from sticking with him:  Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE, Wild At Heart.  I love that he got to perfect some of his favourite shots & compositions & concepts from Dune and he snuck 'em into season 3 episode 8.  Even at the end he was hail mary-ing ways to express his vision with fine-tuned control & zero compromise.  He pulled off every stunt.

The man had a particular vision, and did his damnedest every time.  I will miss you, man I never met.