Back in the 1980s, my brother and I tried to watch a David Lynch film called Blue Velvet. It had had weird scenography that was supposedly erotic, or just plain weird, and surrealist, but in a way that made no sense at all of any kind of plot line we could follow. I studiously avoided seeing anything else the man made and specifically avoided the Twin peaks series that started in 1990.
For whatever reason, I started to sort of watch it hoping it might bore me to sleep when I suffer from insomnia. Well… I’m about half way through the second (and last) series which means I am about two-thirds of the way through the whole things; and… I won’t be sure if it’s because of my age at the time of Blue Velvet compared to now, at least, I won’t be sure unless I try and watch Blue Velvet again, which I really don’t think I care to do, but based on Twin Peaks alone so far, I am coming to the very unexpected conclusion that David Lynch may well have been a genius after all.
The mixture of the absurd, the ridiculous, the studied theathricity of both his sets as well as the acting, the slow-pace with its unexpected twists, peppered with random quotes and occasional timeless wisdom, and the music, which somehow ties this whole apparently discordant melange together, somehow, works.
And it works in a way that might well be a truer form of narration of real life, precisely because of the surreal-absurdist elements.
It really is quite a unique style. I see now why people used to rave about him throughout the 1990s. And unless I sit through Blue Velvet again, I am not sure I’ll know if I thought quite the opposite for nearly 40 years because Blue Velvet is just a crappy film, or if it’s because I was too young to perceive certain aspects.
Here is the thing though… I have high expectations for how Twin Peaks might play out. And if it fulfils those expectations, then I will not want to risk watching Blue Velvet. Somehow, if it turns out it was bad, it would somewhat ruin Twin Peaks for me.
And as anyone who has done this as much as I have, often, it is best to leave the reality of the artist in our imagination, rather than meet him or study him too closely, and thus remove any doubt that he too is flawed in the same human ways that reduce us all to mere twisted little goblins.
In any case, so far, I really am enjoying Twin Peaks.
