Dugin`s Expertise: The mystery of Twin Peaks

BEHIND THE SURREALISM OF DAVID LYNCH'S MOVIES

08.06.2020

I recently took part in a programme dedicated to David Lynch for the ‘Decameron project’, where various figures talked to each other online, telling different stories and discussing different films. The program was entitled the Guide to Kulchur. I was invited to discuss David Lynch. The host and I had a very interesting conversation. I will tell you a few of the main details.

Although Lynch is considered a postmodernist, a director popular among hipsters and liberals, the organizer of the project Guide to Kulchur, a right-wing conservative (Fróði Midjord) said that he likes Lynch (thus likely putting himself in opposition most of his own supporters). I said I am a Russian conservative, but I like Lynch as well.

My colleague noticed that in Twin Peaks all the action takes place in an American small town with no stock exchanges or migration, where ordinary, classic Americans live, and everything that happens to them has the charm of tradition in the eyes of modern Americans. Twin Peaks is a kind of conservative utopia. People walk slowly, everyone knows each other, they are familiar with each other’s peculiarities; even if the relationship is sometimes exotic and surreal, these are human relations. They are not part of the urban machine. This is an American rural utopia.

I hadn't thought about Twin Peaks from that perspective, but I was happy to support it. Perhaps for Americans with their specific culture, Twin Peaks is deep American, a vision of America defended by those who disagree with globalization, left-wing liberalism, civil society, Soros, Obama, Clinton... In a way, the Trump electorate, or ordinary people.

It is interesting that when Lynch shows the residents of Twin Peaks as extremely strange people living on the verge of insanity, involved in the deepest perversions and standing on the threshold of the beyond (which from time to time invades their lives) - it is still an ideal, pastoral and positive world compared to the nightmare that the big American cities represent - urban landscapes, American Art Nouveau, the opposite of the backwoods.

If the surreal schizophrenia of a small American town is a positive antithesis (in the eyes of some conservatives) of urban America, Wall Street and large corporations, it says a lot about American society. It never occurred to me to see Twin Peaks as Macondo at Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude "... As some ideal world, an utopia. And for Americans, perhaps a possible perspective...

Then we talked about true America being small towns like Twin Peaks. I noted how Lynch subtly reconstructs the three-tier structure of the traditional world picture. With irony, ironic twists... But in fact, the strange thing about the Twin Peaks is that the action takes place on three levels at once.

Strange as it may seem, this is a traditional feature of classical theatre, where along with actions in the middle world, two additional dimensions are implied. In Twin Peaks it's Black Lodge and White Lodge. They are in contact with the Twin Peaks world - we hear almost nothing about the White Lodge, but a lot about the Black Lodge. The Black Lodge's invasion of the measured life of Twin Peaks creates vortices, distortions of spatial and existential life that are the essence of the Lynch narrative.

In fact, Lynch actually reconstructs a three-dimensional ontology, which is a classic tradition of Christianity, Indo-European mythologies, non-Christian traditions, Greek...

We live in one of the dimensions, which is conditionally in the center, and above us and under us there are other worlds. Lynch's Black Lodge corresponds to classical mythology, being made up of dwarves or giants. Both are borderline post-anthropological types, between which we find the human. Giants and dwarfs represent necessary limitrophe figures reminding man about the relativity of his positions. Similarly, the presence of Black and White Lodge emphasize the boundaries of human competence. Where the sphere of influence of Black Lodge begins, there the border of human competence explodes. In particular, Twin Peaks is about the invasion of Bob from the lower world, invading Leland, the murderer and then Dale Cooper himself. And then the three-dimensional view of the structure of the world completely changes its accent: then Lynch's surrealism ceases to be meaningless as it may seem at first sight.

Lynch himself told us that his manner of making a movie is not a ready-made script, but rather, a script that is shot and created while it is being filmed. They know only about where they are going - they draw their narrative as they develop. And because they are sensitive to the influence of parallel dimensions (especially the lower one), they are able to brilliantly reproduce the atmosphere of suspense, expectations. Not only are the viewers surprised by the plot twists, Lynch himself does not know about them ahead of time. He presents opportunity, and the film shoots itself. This attention to additional dimensions (which Lynch himself often talks about) is the secret to the credibility of his film. And Lynch himself is humble - he says that there is no exact answer. Who killed Laura Palmer? He generally did not want the audience to discuss who killed her, but banal American consciousness demanded a happy ending, and the financiers were forced to accuse Laura Palmer's father of an irrational crime. This despite that in season three, Lynch brought Laura Palmer back to life, as if to say - you thought you understood everything? You didn't understand anything. You don't understand anything in Twin Peaks. To understand the Twin Peaks, you have to live in the Twin Peaks, you have to enter this world, you have to move behind the oscillations of strange invasions, which by an incomprehensible logic, without the usual algorithm are found in the life of the population, citizens of the Twin Peaks, of which one speaks with his own foot, the other - with a log...

But gradually in the conversation with his foot, we find a reference to the philosophy of the parliament of the organs in the post-modern, the conversation of a woman with the log - object-oriented ontology, when the log is a certain subject, or even a radical object that removes the complexity and intensity of human presence in the world. Lynch's periodic visits to the Black Lodge (there is less talk of White Lodge - it is also somewhere, but the influence is insensible, especially in modern world) is getting brighter and brighter, and in a sense you can take Lynch's creation as a chronicle of infernal invasion, as intracorporeal entities enter our world, begin to actively influence it. But even if it encounters some resistance, even traditional American life is unable to build a real fortress in the face of Black Lodge, which is becoming more and more confident, capturing different carriers, and gradually we move into the realm of black miracles.

The third season, in my opinion, is much darker than the previous ones - something has changed in the ontology of the Americans itself, or maybe all of us. Laura Palmer's resurrection and her last cry (when she died and then it turns out she didn't) is like the black miracle of the Antichrist - it is like the miracle of the resurrection, but it has no sequel. Black means not the fact of black, but a complete lack of meaning. For Laura Palmer, this black resurrection without the help of light forces is a fundamental parody of recent times.

And in this sense, Lynch paints a picture of the global invasion of what is beneath the bottom line of human reality. In this sense, his work can be seen as valuable evidence. It can be interpreted as postmodern, but Lynch's lack of meaning is not exploitation. This is an important point, a hypothesis that I made during that conversation. Lynch is at an equal distance from those who do not understand what is happening in the modern world; he may like, inspire or frighten them, attract them, but he is not one of them.

What distinguishes him from the masters of falsification and coding in Hollywood is that he does not exploit the idiocy of the masses (he does not free the masses from idiocy, but he does not exploit them either). It is exactly halfway between the revolutionaries (the art house movies, which will become cult cinema, revealing the whole life and depth of fall) and the masses (although he does not exploit the tastes of the crowd). In this, I think, he is closer to Tarantino, because he is on the edge. He doesn't make a step neither towards the masses, nor towards taking them out of this dream.

This ambiguity, the duality of Lynch's cinematic statement creates irony. In Greek, "irony" means saying one thing, meaning another. It is the meaning of a rhetoric based on the curvature of a direct, logical statement.

Lynch's language and art twist reality so that someone can see one thing in a statement at the same time, implying the other. But that's not quite how it works in Lynch's case. I would love to see people try to interpret Lynch when he says something. He says "A" - we understand that he means something ironic, another letter, a letter no one knows. However, the interesting thing is, Lynch doesn't know it either. That's the duality and deep metaphysical irony of his films.

Russian version