Commentary
Twin Peaks introduced a narrative metamorphosis
How many times have we had the privilege to be live witnesses to acts of aesthetic, creative terrorism aired on the flagship of commercial television? For once, Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution was being televised.
On Wednesday, January 9, 1991, Twin Peaks (translated as I segreti di Twin Peaks, “The Secrets of Twin Peaks”) premiered in Italy, in prime time on Canale 5, introduced by Mike Bongiorno. “Channel 5 had the honor of getting this new television series that everyone is saying is even better than Dallas!” Everyone was at the edge of their seats: Lynch making his debut on television!
When the notes of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack started playing, there was an indescribable sense of uncanniness: had the first episode already started or was this a bizarre intermission by Channel 5 to fuel the tension? Words inevitably fail to describe that moment which – to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan – was a literal earthquake in our collective unconscious and transformed our collective imagination at the deepest level.
What was happening in Twin Peaks? Who was Laura Palmer? What was this American province that looked just like an ad like many others we didn't like, but which, in Lynch’s staging, held us mesmerized? Co-written with Mark Frost, it quickly became clear that the whodunnit was just a strategy to allow Lynch to create a perverse celibate mechanism that gave the impression of spinning its wheels aimlessly, yielding (non)sense dross that undermined our reality principle and our individuation principle at the core.
How many times have we had the privilege to be live witnesses to acts of aesthetic, creative terrorism aired on the flagship of commercial television? All this was happening before our eyes: the man who had assured us that “in Heaven, everything is fine,” who had outraged our Gian Luigi Rondi with Blue Velvet, who had made us weep with Elephant Man and offered his take on a blockbuster with Dune, was now resetting everything and launching his most radical challenge by adopting the rhythms of a soap opera. It led to an endless flood of misunderstandings (which would only increase dramatically with the film version of Fire Walk with Me), but they contributed to the coalescing of a critical front that sided in those days (and ever since) with Lynch.
Today, in an age of writing that has completely absorbed the desire to rethink the form of storytelling using images, one struggles to understand the extraordinarily profound impact of Twin Peaks and why the memory of this beneficial, emancipatory trauma has remained so vivid in the imaginations and gaze of countless people.
For once, Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution was being televised. It all happened within the perimeter of that box placed in the kitchen or living room, in a time when we were all wrapped up in the “light of the small screen.”
Lynch adopted the strategy of the feuilleton to deconstruct the mechanism of narrative; to flesh out an “inland empire,” an “other space” of the mind, where the proliferation of signs created the possibility of rethinking connections and possibilities. Lynch, like Burroughs in The Western Lands, knew that “the fixed image” was the fundamental error of mortal human beings. Lynch eschewed winking knowingly at us, having already claimed our gaze, as if he were offering us an apple pie, just like “the Log Lady” might have made, and with that brought us the revolution inside our homes: the last great metamorphosis of the analog collective imagination, before the time of the digital “everything.”
With Twin Peaks, Lynch reminded us, with Baudrillard, that “the real has never interested anyone.” If anything, “what sometimes makes it fascinating [...] is the imaginary catastrophe behind it.” All this was happening on Wednesday, January 9, 1991, in prime time on Canale 5. After that, nothing would be the same as before. In Heaven, everything was fine.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/twin-peaks-una-metamorfosi-narrativa on 2025-01-17