The crucial difference between Twin Peaks and simple trash was not beauty. Rather it had to do with parody, irony, laughter. We laughed at the punchline, forgetting the premise. Ironic humor was sufficiently embedded in the text that the whole country treated the matter of sexual murder with light, airy, morbid fascination and with openly misogynistic humor [insert gallows jokes from Esquire's coverage and its editor.] The joke builds on an unspeakable violence toward women, even toward children in the form of adolescent girls trussed up as sexually cynical adults.
But perhaps we were laughing in the wrong place? Or perhaps we were only supposed to be deeply moved by the plight of the victims of whacked out psychopaths? Against the possibility of a reading that would point to subversive purposes (such as deconstructing sexist responses on the part of viewers,) I will take a close look at the men and women of Twin Peaks [season1.]
Among the male characters are surely many bad guys (Ben and Jerry, Leo, Jacques, sometimes Bobby et al). But the series is chock full of good guys, who even when they are comic or relatively powerless are trustworthy, acted decently and command viewer respect as well as affection.
Now the women. First we have the victims or murder and/or rape and mutilation, Laura and Ronnette, high school kids on crack with jaded perspectives and promiscuous sex lives. Laura actively participates in her own corruption and is the cause of fall in others. Leading the bordello is Blackie.. Catherine is a grasping bitch about to go bad in the teeth. Audrey is sexually advanced, 18 going on 40.
Among the girls in white hats one could include the dubious Audrey, but only to a limited extent. Two of the women are physically maimed or handicapped, Nadina and Donna's mother. Nadine is bonkers as well as missing an eye... Margaret the Log Lady is a gifted prophetess but she is also out to lunch. We are treated to vivid suggestive scenes of Shelley's beatings and bondage. All Laura's mother does is cry. Audrey's mother begins cold and hysterical and then disappears. Lucy is wonderful but she is confined to comic relief. Who does this leave among the women. Is anyone out there vaguely in charge of herself, not a victim, not crazy and not corrupt?
There is Maddie, Laura's cousin/double, the parodical innocent who helps the series up the sexual ante by becoming another murder victim. At first there is Josie, who could do double duty for affirmative action as a minority, but she becomes involved in murder and blackmail and later shoots Coop, the crazy bitch. So who does this leave? Donna? Sweet but hardly in charge and underdeveloped as a character. Is it Peggy Lipton's Norma who finally bears the burden of being the only adult woman in the series who remains strong, nobody's fool and maybe only one man's victim?
It's the Blue Velvet ambience exponentially increased littered with Lynch's fetish for victimized women. In a society as riddled with domestic violence as ours, it's risky business to feed a mass audience the idea that the girl next door might be a whore, that the seductive adolescent perhaps wants a real man to hurt her. The end of the first season tightens the noose with necrophilia and incest. Two men mount the corpse in the missionary position... [Ben gets the S1 final word mentioning dreams...]
If Twin Peaks helps us identify [repressed] urges, name them and see them for what they are even distorted in the funhouse mirror [it does have something intelligent to say.] If it exposes us to just how our deeply our urges are misshaped by repression, aggression and misogyny, then it had a value in a domain I would unabashedly call ethical... Would the second season live up to the major flaw by refraining from the predictible dichotimization of women into splits of unimaginable variety? A male friend growing suspicious of the show's growing misogyny still believed something of worth would emerge, some subversive intent would clarify itself.
[Between seasons Lynch gave his famous quote about people assuming "if Dorothy was "Everywoman...it's completely false and they'd be right to be upset"] Multiplied in Lynch's bad dreams, she is the dark whore half of Everywoman, whose Other is the innocent madonna. This is the major source of doubling in Twin Peaks. It breaks women in half... Wild at Heart... more of the same exaggerated to the point of parody... Twin Peaks engaged in such splitting in a farcical hurry [Donna's befuddling transformation.]
When parody parodies itself, its subversive value is probably negated [and Lynch dodged defining it with talk of dreams and abstractions] Whatever the series creators did or did not know, could or could not articulate about their intentions, is finally irrelevant; surely Lynch and Frost know that we are all affected by our own unconscious mental lives, to which we often have little direct access. We reach into the unconscious with dream images, and Twin Peaks reached into ours..employed and exploited our lethal links to sexuality and death, whether those links are formed by nature or culture.
[Another reading has Twin Peaks as a moral tale/or one with indentifiable ethos using the medium not cynically but subversively] to interrogate our collective mental mutilation? ... Randi Davenport in Twin Peaks Culture Feminism and Family Violence claims a feminist stance whose primary purpose is to point out the sexual victimization of women [and father-daughter abuse] and clears the show of charges of intent to titillate... displaces and dismantles 'the pornographic trope of the Seductive Daughter' [victim.] If I a feminist, well-informed on these issues so severely missed the point, then what chance does the mass viewership with high stake in repressing truths about family life, and massive unconscious misogyny, will understand [its] feminist intent? ...
[BOB as supernatural figure doesn't hold Leland and his repressed desires , men who rape and kill, responsible and is a transparent and disappointing cop-out] Even Coop in the end can't resist the cosmic forces represented and embodied by BOB. The "evil" does not reside in normal, troubled, tragic human lives but in helplessly possessed male victims who do not know what they're doing and cannot be held responsible... BOB represents the internal violence that is enacted in a patriarchy almost exclusively by males... a force beyond human tendencies [is to her] less interesting and less valuable as a commentary on human nature under the pressure of culture. The bad guys do get theirs in the end. Thus we are instructed how to situate our sympathies and our experience of justice. [But this is also simplistic] Lascivious misogyny is presented in loving detail punished by an equally thinly disguised notion of patriarchal law and order, scapegoating...the guilt that belongs to the entire cultural order. It goes free... it gets validated.
Is it a coincidence that in the show's second season fall off the viewer polls revealed that the majority of loyal watchers was almost entirely young males?...the same population that supplied [the statistical response that over half of the men in a survey said they'd rape a woman if they could get away with it.] ... Deep harm is done by perpetuating the myth of the Seductive Daughter... reinforcing onscreen rather than refuting the myth's cultural inscription in the show's viewers... If Twin Peaks does stake any claim to the high ground on this issues, it's at the level of television exposes masquerading as serious documentaries. ... It's all got the intellectual depth of an artichoke...
