What About BOB?

TV:
Twin Peaks - 1990-1991
Created by David Lynch



I hadn't seen Twin Peaks since it aired, over 20 years ago, before my recent foray back into the series.  The foremost question on my mind in returning to it was also voiced by others when I told them I was watching it again; "Does it hold up?"

The answer, I found, was "Yes, but..."

YES, it holds up.  Lynch's retro-iconic predilections give the show a look that doesn't age in the same way something more au currant from 1990 would look now.  Moments of big hair effectively keep it grounded in small town America, but Audrey Horne in saddle shoes, a pencil skirt and pearls will be a thing of beauty forever.  Characters are costumed, not simply dressed according to marketing arrangement.  As evolving tastes in drama go, Peaks sets itself apart again, employing a stylized form of melodrama.  Over-the-top performances remain internally consistent to the tenor of the show.

I'd venture to say that Twin Peaks was massively influential on the kind of televised dramas that would come after it.  It viewed its story in the long term, and was aware that it had a place to go.  This wasn't a case of thinking one episode at a time with cliffhangers for the sake of cliffhangers.  It built to each reveal.  I believe that Twin Peaks made shows like X-Files, Lost and even Desperate Housewives possible.  If it were made today, it would run 7 seasons on cable.

BUT it still suffers from the same ailments that troubled it the first time around.  I had hoped that the rough spots I remembered would be buffed out by my contracted viewing schedule.  While it did strengthen the narrative continuity, it still breaks down exactly where one expects it to.  The pleasant surprise is that it recovers, albeit too late to save it from cancellation.


Season One ran a mere seven episodes and created a sensation.  Director David Lynch brought his obsession with the unsavory underbelly of small town America to television, combining a supernatural mystery with a darkly satire of a soap opera filled with mood, coated in idiosyncrasy and dunked in a hot cup of the surreal.

It opens on the riverside discovery of a dead body; the local prom queen, Laura Palmer.  This is the event that brings the secret lives of the small northwestern logging town of Twin Peaks into the cold light of day.  It also brings FBI agent Dale Cooper to town.  His eccentricities fit into the town's peculiarities like a six-fingered hand in a six-fingered glove -- not just snugly, but with great unlikelihood.

The threads of the murder extend throughout the tapestry of the town, and each thread tugged upon creates new distortions in the image they have woven for themselves.  The threads pass through the high school (which no one seems to attend after the first 3 episodes), the Double-R Cafe, the Great Northern Hotel, the Packard Saw Mill, Horne's Department Store, One-Eyed Jack's (the brothel across the border), and assorted lives in between, including the local drug trade and the town's own police department.  Everyone has secrets, most of them are having affairs, and not one relationship will come through unaffected.

Now, it's not my intention to tell you the story nor to catalogue its characters.  If you've seen it, that would be redundant, and if you haven't, I'd be robbing you of the opportunity to discover them for yourself.

The first season builds up to some major cliffhanging.  Some of those mysteries aren't resolved until late in the next season.  The murder of Laura Palmer is solved -- sort of -- about a third of the way into the second season, and that's where things break down for a while.  If Laura Palmer's death was the cluster of threads tied to so many other lives, the closing of the case is like a cigarette hole burned into the tapestry. 

To build a grand mystery, the show had wrapped itself in a large and dense cast of characters.  Absent a central story, the characters were adrift.  The show gets caught up in subplots for several episodes; few of them compelling, and some downright annoying.  Out of some of these subplots, however, develop converging elements of a new mystery, itself tied into the lingering unresolved elements of Laura's murder.  Just as this is really kicking into gear, Season Two ends with another round of cliffhangers ...and the show wasn't renewed.

Which leads us to...

FILM:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - 1992
Written by David Lynch & Robert Engels
Directed by David Lynch



This prequel to the television series answers absolutely nothing.  It illuminates, but as it deals with events leading up to the discovery of Laura Palmer's plastic-wrapped body, it makes only the slightest nod to the mysteries of the series' end.

It backtracks to a murder only mentioned in the series; that of Theresa Banks, a girl looking much like Laura, from another Washington small town much like Twin Peaks, murdered just as Laura will be soon after.  It then shifts to Palmer herself and the situations that send her spiraling toward her own doom, finally culminating in her grisly murder and dumping in the river.  This is no spoiler.  It bleeds right into the beginning of the series, and the details are largely covered therein.

Fire Walk With Me takes advantage of its cinematic format to indulge in peculiarity even more.  It's a couple notches darker than the series and wanders even deeper into the grim and bizarre supernatural mythos of Lynch's world.  I'm not sure this is to its advantage.


I highly recommend the series.  It's rich with stories and characters one won't have seen anywhere else before.  Despite its meandering period and uncertain ending, it's still faithful to its own storytelling and adds up to more than, say (my go-to less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts series), Lost.  It's not just a show; it's an experience.

It's natural that one will want to watch the movie after the series, but one needn't feel obligated.  It repaints familiar scenery with some powerful emotional colors, but it doesn't answer the mysteries that remain, and it over-answers a mystery already solved.

Why Can't I Be You?

TELEVISION: Dollhouse
Created by Joss Whedon
Fox Television 2009-2010
IMDB


Dollhouse is sort of the unloved child in the Whedon family of entertainments.  Which is not to say that Whedon himself didn't love it, but amongst Whedon's fans, it seems to be the most unappreciated.  Joss Whedon, for those fingers not quite so on the pulse of modern media culture, is the writer and director behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and a little arthouse number called The Avengers.  The first four tend to be referred to in proximity to the term "cult favorites" while the latter often comes paired with "blockbuster."  Dollhouse carries neither of these descriptors, though it shares "ill-fated" with Firefly.  Unlike Firefly, however, it actually gets where it's going.  This isn't a dig at Firefly (although it might be a dig at Firefly's overly abbreviated cinematic follow-up, Serenity) but a credit to Whedon for having open eyes when dealing with Fox again. 

The concept of Dollhouse can be a little complicated to explain, but once you've had it explained then witness it in action, it all makes sense.  You can tell someone what it's about, but like Wheedon's other shows, the greatness is in the execution ("It's about a high school girl that fights vampires!"  "It's a western in space!"  "Uh, those sound dumb, dude."  "No, you have to SEE it!")

The Dollhouse is a super secret company for ultra-rich clients.  They take the young and beautiful and wipe their minds clean, so that they can be imprinted with any identity their clients desire.  A "doll" or "active" may be a dream lover one day, a super spy the next, and a dead spouse the day after that.  While they're in the Dollhouse, however, they are essentially blank slates; docile children.  Part of the fun of the show is seeing how they come up with ways to use the dolls that don't amount to an endless stream of prostitution gigs.  That's the premise, but that's not what the show is about.  The pattern is established right off the bat, but that pattern begins to change.  Things don't always work the way they're supposed to, but there's also a lot more going on under the surface, both of the characters and the plot.

The central character is Echo, a doll played by Eliza Dushku (Buffy's Faith).  She does a more than serviceable job in the role, although her characters tend to end up being versions of herself, so we get all-business Boston girls, super-excited Boston girls, quiet or scared Boston girls, brash and sassy Boston girls -- you get the picture.  For me, the real scene stealer of the show is another doll, Victor, played by Enver Gjokaj.  The fact that he has no other star credits for me to explain to you where you've seen him is a dead shame.  He plays each personality as a whole new character -- Russian mobster, suave British ladykiller, US Marine, other cast members -- each with absolute conviction, so much so that I was left with no idea who the actor really was.  He perfectly embodied the premise of the dolls.  I can only assume that the reason casting directors aren't calling him more is that they don't know how to say his name.

Victor eventually begins to develop feelings for another doll, Sierra; something they are not supposed to be able to do.  Therein lies much of the fabric later in the series.  The show isn't about the Dollhouse, but about being human in the environment of the Dollhouse.  Beyond the dolls, which don't (or aren't supposed to) have personalities of their own, there is the supporting staff.  Another strong performance comes from Olivia Williams as Adele DeWitt, the director of the house.  She, in her very professional way, has completely skipped over moral compromise to convince herself that the Dollhouse does good things.  She delivers some real pressure-cooker moments.  The scientist in charge of the lab that programs and deprograms the dolls is an unsurprisingly spazzed-out young geek who comes to develop more dimensions through the course of events he considers himself removed from -- literally above it all in his glass-fronted lab above the house's living environment.

We are introduced to much of the Dollhouse's operations through the eyes of Echo's new "handler" who is responsible for her well-being when she's away from the house.  Rounding out the core staff is the ruthless head of security, Mr. Dominic.  The fly in the ointment is FBI agent Paul Ballard.  After a divorce and the loss of a partner, Ballard has become obsessed with a dead-end, probably-just-an-urban-myth case; the Dollhouse.  Mysterious information has sent him in pursuit of a missing college student named Caroline, whom he believes to be trapped there.  This character, while deeply important to developing the plot, is one of the weakest.  His obsession doesn't seem to be as well explained or supported as it should be for such a pivotal character.  I'm not altogether sure whether this is due to poor development on the writing end, or if he's just not that interestingly played by Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Galactica).  The character seems like a trainwreck, and not the appealing kind.  I have to assume it's intentional, since characters in the show actually comment on the weirdness of it.  Nevertheless, a lot of the most interesting story beats depend on him.

As an informant tells Ballard, "That's what the Dollhouse does, but that is not its purpose," and indeed, what the show is ultimately about is what happens, not what it is.  Developing its plot in similar territory as X-Files and Lost, Dollhouse is a big birthday cake of conspiracy and double-cross.  Unlike those other shows, however, Dollhouse knows what its conspiracy is from the very beginning and sees it through to the end.  Upon rewatching, there were elements in the very first episode that would only make sense in the context of the finished product.  Lasting only 2 half seasons, there was no need to overstuff the series with meaningless sidetracks and dead-ends (yes I mean YOU, Lost).

Virtually every character surprises us at one point and/or another.  There are double and triple-crosses and distinct arcs of personal growth for everyone in what becomes a very, very screwed up sort of family.  All of Whedon's series deal with themes of family, but Dollhouse is probably the most mature and dysfunctional of the lot.  Characters start at-odds but grow together out of respect or understanding, expedience or love.  They discover not simply who each other are, but who they are themselves, and what that means.  Among all the changing directions in character, the last and most surprising is also the hardest to swallow.  This seems to have been the biggest single concession to fitting everything in before time runs out, or simply an afterthought, because a repeated viewing yields no signs that [character in question] has been anything other than [character in question] had appeared to be, even in [character in question]'s private moments.  Ironically, [character in question] is the first one who really sees their group as a family.

The critic Roger Ebert, in reviews of Wings of Desire and the "Up" documentaries, discusses, as the "central meaning of life" the questions "Why am I me and not you?"  Amid all the action and melodrama, Dollhouse considers this question as well.  Not merely "Why am I me and not you?" but "Am I still me when I'm not longer me?" and "Who am I when I'm you?"

Speaking of Ebert, in the Ebert & Roeper review of one of the Hellboy films, he raised the question of what would really happen if the bad guys won, if the great threat came to be.  Time and again in films there's the moment where characters discuss the unimaginable consequences should the good guys fail.  Joss Whedon must have been paying attention too.  There are two episodes set years after the main body of the series that show the aftermath of the conspiracy come to fruition (yes, I'm being deliberately vague).  As is Whedon's way, there is penance and redemption to go around, as well as love hard-earned.