chapter 1 - violations
Fellas, don't drink that coffee! You'd never guess. There was a fish in the percolator! Sorry.
Pete Martell, Twin Peaks
Pete Martell, Twin Peaks
Anne Jerslev notes that “Lynch’s Americana of violence and uncanniness is constructed in terms of a false idyllic appearance that hides an essential truth underneath.” (‘Beyond Boundaries’, 2004 p. 156). This chapter will explore the concept of the uncanny as an aesthetic device in order to disturb the viewer experience in seasons one and two of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. It is my intention to not only outline my own nuanced variant of the uncanny (what I term, ‘Violation’) but to demonstrate that Lynch employs it as an explicit aesthetic device within the series that further reinforces the already haunted seasons one and two (and three, but that will be omitted from this particular ‘reading’) of his series, Twin Peaks. I will show that the occurrence of the violations uphold pre-existing repressed and returning anxieties and discuss how they manifest throughout. As throughout this paper, I will concentrate specifically on the viewer-effect of the techniques used by Lynch and Frost, rather than use the occurrences to analyse the puzzles in the plot. My rationale for specifically concentrating only on seasons one and two in this chapter is my belief that the both the film and the later series better profit from analysis of other errant aesthetics. To commence this study of the earlier seasons, this chapter will begin with an exploration of Sigmund Freud’s semi-aesthetic theory of The Uncanny (1919) though, from this, I will attempt to assemble a comprehensive working definition rather than become entangled in any etymological exploration.
The Uncanny // Violations
Though the concept of the uncanny precedes Sigmund Freud, generally our current working definition relies upon his 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’. Though Freud’s piece specifically references literature as the medium, it is advantageous to attend to his piece with consideration for Lynch’s cinematic style;
|
It is my position that Lynch’s films and television series’ do contain, cinematically, that which Freud proposes ‘cannot be found in real life’. As well as the ‘violations’ that I discuss in this chapter, Lynch, throughout his oeuvre uses other filmic devices to visually portray ‘something more besides’ and these will be discussed in relation to his other works in the later chapters of this paper. In his oft-quoted definition of the uncanny, Freud proposes that the uncanny is ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is old and long familiar’ (p. 245). Whilst this is too narrow a definition to talk about the uncanny as a whole phenomenon, it does provide a good articulation of where one can start with an aesthetic exploration of a cultural artefact. Freud, throughout, posits that this is the consequence of two separate obstacles: one is the humanistic inability to conquer and sophisticate our animistic compliance and the second our preoccupied and repressed infantile neurosis. While Twin Peaks contains a host of elements that would be considered quintessentially ‘uncanny’, such as doubling, repression, doppelgängers and dreamscapes, I will discuss, rather, the often unseen ‘violations’ that occur within the universe of Twin Peaks but are not witnessed by the spectator. Also here (and later in this paper in more detail) I will outline the cinematic effects that Lynch employs, technically, beyond the frame as they occur outside of the Twin Peaks universe and inside of the production room. It is necessary to acknowledge the anti-climax of Freud’s piece where no conclusion takes place, offers the reader no resolution and ultimately, reads as a document of Freud’s own struggle with the concept. It is my understanding that the uncanny falls short of any rigid definition and cannot, as it stands in Freud’s piece, be applied definitively to literature or textual artefacts without some input of one’s own interpretation. Fortunately, more recent theories attempting to define the ‘undefinable’ uncanny have materialised throughout the decades since Freud published his text which are, arguably, more conducive to employing the uncanny as a tool for criticism. Nicholas Royle in his 2003 text, The Uncanny defines the aesthetic phenomena as a; "moment of embroilment in the experience of something at once strange and familiar" (Royle, 2003, p.7). It is the influence of this definition proposed by Royle that I propose that what Freud ultimately surmises as the uncanny is related to (but not limited to) ambiguity within a narrative. As such, I will put forth that the uncanny traverses literature or even merely aesthetics and, actually, appears in an array of disciplines (not only academic) and analyses.
The uncanny, as I (not wholly Freud) interpret it is explicitly exhibited in Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe and, for the purposes of clarity, I will refer to this, my own definition of the uncanny as a ‘violation’. The violation represents, like the uncanny, a strange familiarity but, further, contains the uncanny within a physical space. For example, in episode 2 (‘Traces to Nowhere’, 1990) of Twin Peaks season 1, Pete Martell (Jack Nance) declares to Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman “Fellas, don't drink that coffee! You'd never guess. There was a fish in the percolator! Sorry.” [00:27:17]. While the fish represents familiarity to Pete (he is on his way to go fishing when he discovers Laura Palmer’s body) and the coffee represents familiarity to Dale (this is a well-used meme to fans of the show), together they are strange and the uncanny combination is contained within a physical space (the percolator) – this is what I signal as a violation, of which there are many throughout the franchise.
miach1977. 2012. Twin Peaks - A fish in the percolator. [Video online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSxNP-1VpjE [Accessed on 8th August 2017].
My own past research and, of course, other writings on the subject of the uncanny have somewhat determined that the uncanny and the problematized space is an aesthetic that is susceptible to profitable theorisation. Anthony Vidler’s observation in his 1992 text The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely closely parallels my own understanding of the violation of spaces in Twin Peaks;
the house [has] provided an especially favoured site for ‘uncanny’ disturbances: its apparent domesticity its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by the terror of invasion (Vidler, 1992, p. 17)
|
Specifically, as posited by Vidler, this chapter supposes that it is predominantly the home space which is problematic as it acts as host for many of the occurrences of violation in the homes of the Twin Peaks residents and, as Nicolas Royle acknowledges in the introduction to his text The Uncanny, “[the uncanny] can consist in a sense of homeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home.” (2003, p.1).
Before I commence on an in-depth exploration of the violations that haunt the universe of Twin Peaks, it is imperative that I outline the uncanny which occurs immediately within the medium of television. Television (and cinema) capitalises on what Freud understands to be the uncanny. In the first instance, it is compelled to represent the familiar and to depict to its viewer what it deems to be ‘accurate’. Secondly, it is restrained by cinematic temporality of which it cannot escape and is rendered unfamiliar by its existence of not ‘existing’ in the ‘real-world’. What is interesting in Twin Peaks, is how Lynch, rather than attempt to produce a true-to-life depiction, further ‘makes-weird’ his universe and this affect exists both within and outside of the actual television series. This creates, simultaneously, the effect of distance between screen depiction and viewer and, conversely, blurs the boundaries of fantasy and reality. Not only is this akin to what Royle defines as the uncanny but is a direct violation of the viewer experience (even if it is one that the viewer accepts and actively seeks).
Twin Peaks: Seasons 1 & 2
The pilot episode of Twin Peaks commences with local resident Pete Martell discovering the raped and murdered body of a local teenage girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), washed up on the shore (‘Pilot’, 00:03:40, 1990). Whilst not particularly shocking for a television series that is presented as a mystery, the body on the beach is an explicitly unfamiliar object violating an otherwise serene and familiar space (to Pete Martell). The corpse not only violates a space one would ordinarily identify as a serene space but, as is later revealed, invites further violations to the seemingly quiet town. Inserted between the discovery of the body and Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) being informed of his daughter’s death, the viewer is thrust into the Palmer residence which, at first, is presented as a familiar and homely morning scene. However, this scene is quickly made weird when the low-angle shot focuses on Laura’s Mother, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie), running up the dark staircase that is dominated by the ominous ceiling fan (00:08:16). Using dramatic irony to welcome the viewer for the first time into the Palmer residence, David Lynch eliminates any semblance that the home is a place of comfort; the viewer is aware that her daughter is dead (wrapped in plastic) and Sarah scours her home attempting to locate her daughter to a soundtrack of low but foreboding incidental music (‘Laura’s Theme’, Badalamenti,1990). From this point, the Palmer home is established as source of unseen anxiety (revealed in FWWM) despite its familiarity as a middle-class, American home. If we deem this particular space as a space of violation then, as Royle posits in his lengthy text, “The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already haunted.” (2003, p. 1). As it transpires, the home is already haunted. It is a problematized space that is haunted by BOB (Frank Silva), an evil spirit who has possessed Laura’s father, Leland. It is in this homely, familiar space that Leland (possessed) rapes, mentally violates, and eventually kills his daughter, Laura. Whilst the reoccurring rapes of Laura Palmer are not images that haunt the original series’, it is a driving circumstance of the wider plot and is violation made flesh (I will explore this further in Chapter Two of this paper). What Lynch does use throughout the film is the young, female body as an aesthetic device. However, it is my opinion that, rather than use the female form to entice the ‘male gaze’, the young female form is a fitting host for the uncanny; the young female exists in a state of unknown, she is neither fully formed but nor is she impervious to being looked upon as a sexual object. As such, many of the violations and uncanny occurrences happen in the presence of the young female characters. In season one, episode 7, Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), a young and beautiful high school student, is working as a prostitute when she makes the horrific discovery that the client imminently approaching is her father, Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer). As her father approaches the bed (and without knowing who the girl is), he says “Close your eyes, this is such stuff as dreams are made of” (00:043:05). Here, the father enters into a room knowing he is about to engage in a sexual act with a young, beautiful woman and is compelled to close his eyes, to ‘make-strange’ the act of sex with a girl he is consciously aware will be young and beautiful, just like his daughter (and it so happens, is his daughter) – Audrey is merely a double of other young women in the town set to be used by the older, dominant male.
|
|
AdrienneMiele. 2001. Laura Palmer's Theme - Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks OST). [video online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khMlcTE7lw8
|
Roland S. 2017. Twin Peaks - Audrey Horne gets ready for her first client. [video online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq5lbZTQtro
|
Tania Modleski puts forth that this ‘doubling’ associated with the uncanny is a popular gothic trope that is, generally, passed from female to female;
…the heroine has the uncanny sensation that the past is repeating itself through her. Usually, she feels a strong identification with a woman from either the remote or the very recent past, a woman who in almost every case has died a mysterious and perhaps violent or gruesome death. (‘The Female Uncanny’, 2008, p. 61)
|
Audrey is recasting herself as Laura Palmer, a one-time sexual conquest of Benjamin Horne and mirroring the horrific rape of Laura by her own father, Audrey narrowly avoids the same incestuous fate. These instances of uncanny, incestuous rape (or near-rape) scenes are explicit instances of violation. The uncanny viewing experience occurs (or almost occurs), in both instances in a young girls bedroom (or a bedroom set up to look that way in the case of Audrey at One-Eyed Jacks), by a father figure who attempts to return to the homeliest home of all, the womb. Consequently, and arguably the drive for the entire plot, the violation of the vagina becomes the most problematised space.
This chapter has examined seasons 1 and 2 of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as a peak example of uncanny, or further, violated, aesthetic of filmic art. While mapping the aesthetic theories that relate to the uncanny, I have introduced what I believe to be a term which describes the specific ‘contained uncanny occurrences’; violation. In 1975, Roland Barthes explained this type of deconstructive analysis
Text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue – this texture – the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web. Were we are fond of neologisms, we might define the theory of the text as a hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web). (1980, p. 64)
|
David Lynch, for the most part, refuses to provide accessible or concrete meaning and, in fact, the viewer’s estranged experience forms part of the overall narrative which only augments the daydream-like aesthetic. In this way, Barthes interpretation posits that what we experience, as subjects, is an incessant convulsing between our experiences of cultural artefacts and our existence and experience in the real, physical world which Lynch actively prevents either through violating the familiar or removing the viewer’s familiarity with a scene altogether. Essentially, this outline and analysis aims to encourage an objective and deconstructive process of ‘reading’ the episodes with the explicit intention of isolating the errant cinematic devices used by Lynch within the Twin Peaks franchise. Such a strict approach, additionally, allows us to affirm the contingent intertwining element of the filmic experience without being perplexed by the art as a whole and gives way to an aggregate method of analysis. Using this method I have concluded, throughout this chapter, that, in the Twin Peaks universe there is no original homeliness that is not haunted by acts of violation and, as such, the viewer experiences multiple and frequent assaults on what are assumed ‘familiar’ spaces and thus, the experience becomes uncanny.