the black lodge / some lynch links
After viewing David Lynch’s Inland Empire earlier this summer, and then revisiting the fractured narrative of Fred Madison in Lost Highway, I recently decided the time was right to return to Twin Peaks. For the uninitiated, Twin Peaks was Lynch’s 29-episode foray into television drama on ABC in 1990 and 1991. I can’t exactly imagine the circumstances through which television executives would let David Lynch on prime time, but the medium is better off for it. Twin Peaks perfected and serialized the picket-fence surrealism of Blue Velvet and contained some of Lynch’s most endearing characters and puzzle box plots.
The series utilized the murder of a troubled teen, Laura Palmer, as a MacGuffin to draw viewers into orbit around an eccentric community in Washington state. The central protagonist of the show was Special Agent Dale Cooper, an FBI investigator who would gradually become entangled in a sinister local mythology at the root of his murder investigation.
Attempts to appease a television audience with a “solution” to a Lynchian universe is what drove viewers, and even David Lynch away from the series. The show ended on a brilliant note and Lynch folded the plot back on itself with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the 1992 film that served as a prequel to the series. Fire walk with Me delves into the back-story of the final days of Laura Palmer and provides some alternate views into the Black Lodge, the setting of the climax of the Twin Peaks story arc.
[image: dale cooper savouring a damn fine cup of coffee]
Since I invested thirty hours into the show and film, I inevitably began to poke around online for some more information and I found some interesting projects and commentary worth sharing. The first of which is The Black Lodge, an ambitious piece of interactive fiction by French web designer Emmanuel Papillon. The site is a sidebar to Lynch’s work and it collapses the narratives of several projects into an explorable space. The Red Room (pictured above) is my favourite as it is especially immersive and compelling. I spent a half hour last night aimlessly wandering around the photo-montage labyrinth trying to glean information from doppelgängers. If you get lost make sure to heed Papillon’s advice from the Black Lodge FAQ: “…remember that going in circles isn’t really being stuck - something *will* eventually happen.” Spoken like a true David Lynch fan!
My next find was a post on Intertwingled, a great blog I’ve been reading for the last several month. The piece, entitled Audiovisual illusion: Lacan and Zizek, highlights several instances of David Lynch laying bare the illusionary nature of audio visual synthesis in his work (think Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive). This concise post raises numerous questions about media and art and has inspired me to dig back into Zizek on film. It also reminded me of Laughter in the Dark, one of my favourite Nabokov novels, which conducts an exhaustive interrogation of the conventions of the novel and cinema.
Not all of my finds were so immersive and intellectual. Apparently David Lynch webcasts the Los Angeles weather report every day and if you are interested, check out this very strange log of Twin Peaks statistics. According to this resource seventeen cups and seven pots of coffee were consumed in the first episode and it was all downhill from there.
I also discovered the production technique of the signature garble-speak from the show. According to Wikipedia, characters would record their lines, play back the recordings in reverse and record attempts to emulate the reversed original. This reverse speak would be played back backwards yielding the distinct cadence and accentuation we all know and love.
