It’s Not Just You. TV Has Hit Peak WTF
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Note: This story contains spoilers for the current seasons of Twin Peaks: The Return and American Gods.
Diane, I’m lost: For the last week and a half, I’ve been been wrapped in the spastic world of Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return, the new 18-hour series from gleeful zig-zagger and noted nightmare sommelier David Lynch. Though only four hours in, The Return is already my favorite new series of the year, full of exquisite terrors, concussion-quick humor, and lovingly reintroduced old faces (surely I’m not the only fan who gets near-weepy whenever a Peaks pal like Bobby or the Log Lady wanders back into view after all these years). Here’s a show in which Kyle MacLachlan gets to apply his parched comedic skills to, at last count, three different iterations of Dale Cooper; in which an akimbo-limbed tree speaks via a fleshy, bobbing brain-maw-thingee; and in which Michael Cera lisps his way through an impression of a Wild One-era Marlon Brando. Each episode of the new Twin Peaks is a dark hoot of the highest order, and I feel like Mr. Jackpots just for being able to watch them.
I should also mention that, for the most part, I have no idea what is going on. There are a few plot outlines you can pick up with each installment—like all of Lynch’s work, The Return has a forward momentum, even if it’s not always discernible—but every new sequence in Twin Peaks sires at least a half-dozen questions: What was the space-floating metal contraption that Cooper visited? Who was the oil-slicked, ghost-like figure sitting in that South Dakota jail cell? Will we ever gaze upon Sam and Tracey’s mysterious glass box again? (Speaking of which: Rest in Peaks, Sam and Tracey! Unless, of course, you’re somehow still alive, which I suppose is very possible at this point!)
These are the kind of queries that might normally send one to the internet, where an ever-teeming team of culture experts—re-cappers, explainers, best-guessers—stand by every Sunday night at 10:01 pm, ready to tell you What Just Happened. In some ways, this kind of forensics-first approach can be traced back directly to Twin Peaks. In the early ’90s, when the first series debuted on ABC, it was an instructive bit of deconstructionism: A network television series that was made to be discussed and scrutinized, with Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost inspiring questions about not only the show’s narrative (Who killed Laura Palmer?) and the medium itself (If you can tell an hour-long drama with flashbacks and dream sequences, then what else can you get away with?). The modern web didn’t exist when Twin Peaks premiered, but those sorts of thoughtful, affectionate debates and investigations both predicted and informed the way we’d eventually talk about TV online.
Twitter and Facebook have made it possible for us to lob our opinions as soon the closing credits roll, but they’ve also made it tough to become giddily, utterly caught in the grasp of an immersive piece of art.
But in the case of Twin Peaks: The Return, such well-intentioned hunches feel pointless—and, at least for me, totally joyless. Twitter and Facebook have made it possible for us to lob our opinions as soon the closing credits roll, but they’ve also made it tough to become giddily, utterly caught in the grasp of an immersive piece of art—especially when it comes to television, where storylines can be broken up by weeks, if not years. Twin Peaks: The Return has that sort of lingering hold, in part because the episodes never come to any sort of definitive conclusion. Instead, they simply float away on the back of a Chromatics synth or some Cactus Brothers harmonies, then remain lodged in your subconscious while you await the next Return. Asking “Wait, what’s really going on here?” in the middle of this of ever-rare reverie feels like the exact opposite of curiosity. After all, the more you know what’s going to appear in the big glass box—my lazy box-as-TV analogy, not Lynch’s—the less face-chewed you’ll be by the results.
Such let’s-just-see-where-this-goes immersion is also one of the pleasures of the other current Sunday-night TV fun house: Starz’s American Gods. Unlike Twin Peaks, Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s Gods—which depicts a planet-threatening power-struggle between its titular titans—is theoretically knowable, having been adapted from the 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman. For anyone who, like me, is confounded by the show’s expansive cast, metaphysics-bending laws of nature, and pop-culture riffage, there are countless primers and decoders available online.
Yet it’s hard to imagine why anyone would even want to figure out everything that’s going on in this gorgeous brain-poker of a show. On Gods, heroes and villains are introduced without hand-holding or hand-wringing; they simply show up and plunge into the action, their greater motivations sometimes not made clear for weeks, if at all. The world of Gods is less surreal than the world of Peaks, but it’s just as ravishingly cuckoo: There’s a bar-brawling leprechaun and a literally firey-eyed taxi driver; a morph-happy god, played by Gillian Anderson, who inhabits the form of Lucille Ball, Marilyn Monroe, and Aladdin Sane-era Bowie; and a roof-dwelling watcher who, at one point, plucks the moon out of an impossibly perfect nighttime sky. To get an idea of just how strange this show is, consider that one of American Gods’ most relatively normal characters is played by Crispin Glover.
And, like Twin Peaks, the stunning-looking Gods casts a small-screen spell that’s best left unexamined—so that it can remain unbroken. The show has a hard-to-pin rhythm—some characters appear only in brief vignettes; others, like Ricky Whittles’ Shadow Moon, can take over entire episodes—that allows Green and Fuller to make each episode as narratively elastic as possible. And every scene in Gods is saturated in a daring, beyond-garish visual palette that makes its most out-there moments (like a nighttime desert-sex scene between two fire-consumed, liquid-skinned men) all the more grandly hypnotic. To stray too far away from this version of Gods by wiki-seeking every still-undisclosed detail would be like pinching yourself awake during an especially dazzling dream. For now, the best way to enjoy both Twin Peaks: The Return and American Gods might be to surrender to their utter weirdness, maybe even try to savor it—ideally, with a piece of pie and some damn good coffee.
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May 31, 2017 at 07:30AM
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