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1/x When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me came out in 92, much of the (male-dominated) critical community somehow managed to entirely leave out its central dynamic—Laura’s struggle to cope w/ [SPOILER] being sexually abused by her dad (the film’s driving force!)—from their reviews
![1/x When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me came out in 92, much of the (male-dominated) critical community somehow managed to entirely leave out its central dynamic—Laura’s struggle to cope w/ [SPOILER] being sexually abused by her dad (the film’s driving force!)—from their reviews](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DeUylyBW4AA_d_M.jpg "1/x When Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me came out in 92, much of the (male-dominated) critical community somehow managed to entirely leave out its central dynamic—Laura’s struggle to cope w/ [SPOILER] being sexually abused by her dad (the film’s driving force!)—from their reviews")
(To be clear, this was not a matter of them trying to avoid spoilers. They were perfectly happy to mention that Laura is murdered at its end - indeed, they called it a cynical cash grab because it supposedly didn’t trod any new ground, as TV viewers already knew all about that)
A glib, ugly pan by the NYT’s Vincent Canby was typical: it’s “not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be”; its 24y/o star “looks to be approaching her mid-30's”; it shows the “increasing hysteria” of “[p]oor cocaine-sniffing Laura [who] never learned how to just say no.”
Reading those contemporaneous reviews today, it‘s striking how rare it is to see the words “incest,” “rape,” “abuse,” or “trauma” appear at all, much less to find a modicum of critical engagement with how such subjects might affect one’s understanding of the film’s construction
Since then, more attention has been paid to the interplay between Laura’s sexual abuse and the rest of the narrative (see, e.g., Diane Stevenson, Bainbridge/Delaney, Asibong/Eaton); filmmakers as diverse as Lynn Ramsay, Bong Joon-Ho, and James Gray have named the film a favorite
As Gray has said of it: “I’ve never seen a movie in the last 30 years . . . which so asks us to understand and be in the shoes of a person suffering so profoundly . . . . It has such an understanding of a person dealing with incest.”
Recently, Jennifer Fox’s film The Tale has received some crit. acclaim (if not pop recognition) for, in the words of Anna Silman, being a rare story to “dwell in the interiority of these women & girls who have lived through these horrors” of child sexual abuse (albeit not incest)
That is exactly what FWWM did 25 years ago. And it is the context in which the rest of Twin Peaks—constantly reminding us of Laura’s place at the center of its world—deserves to be viewed. While TP aims to be about life generally, its medium remains that of a trauma narrative.
Yet 25 years later, while Twin Peaks: The Return has been critically received much more warmly than FWWM ever was, one still is hard-pressed to find much critical engagement with the relationship between trauma and the rest of the narrative.
This is despite incest-survivor (of sorts) Laura being framed as its key; despite lead characters surviving rape by Laura’s detective; despite its brutalized children, its PTSD veterans, its characters self-numbing w/ drugs, its dissociating figures, its hordes of toxic men
Instead, critics seem more interested in a host of formal, inside-baseball issues, like what it has to say about TV reboots, what it has to say about pop culture nostalgia, what it has to say about the dividing line b/w TV & film, what it has to say about aging filmmakers, etc.
Part of the problem is that, for all the talk of TV having “caught up” with Twin Peaks in the last 25 yrs, still no other series comes remotely close to being more like a straight-up allegory in the very under-appreciated sense laid out by Laura Miller: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/05/an_allegory_is_not_the_same_as_a_metaphor_in_praise_of_the_medieval_literary.html
Thanks to TP’s allegorical streak, it in some cases (to use Miller’s terms) “lack[s] the ‘round’ fictional characters . . . whose believability resides at least partly in their internal conflicts,” instead having the heightened, flatter characters of allegory
As she stresses of allegory generally, this is largely an unfamiliar, alien approach today, where “these people, the objects they handle, and the spaces they occupy all represent aspects of the self,” rather than traditional characters—although TP often tries to have it both ways
E.g., even in the case of TP’s simple characters, there are still hints of depth, as w/ Candie pleading like a type of abuse survivor, “how can you ever love me after what I did?” and the TV in the scene’s background talking about what it means to be conceived of as a “victim”
Another issue is the fact that TP is commonly understood as an unfiltered outlet of Lynch’s subconscious, a move that both ignores co-creator Mark Frost’s role and often insults Lynch himself as a kind of idiot savant (when it’s not deifying him as some sort of mystical oracle).
Lynch’s quotes about his creative process are cherry-picked to support assumptions that looking for substantive meaning in his work is a fool’s errand. Such engagement is instead seemingly thought of as the domain of misguided fans who just aren’t savvy enough to know any better
(Of course, the fan community—which is by no means monolithic—is sometimes not much better at dealing with these issues, on occasion treating Laura’s dead body as a type of cuddly mascot, and often viewing the story more as a sci-fi adventure than a tale with real human stakes.)
I had reason to think of much of this recently when I saw possibly my favorite TV critic working today, @emilynussbaum , objecting to The Return’s treatment of women. https://twitter.com/emilynussbaum/status/1000215753256259584?s=21
Interestingly, whereas Canby's use of the historically-loaded (& gendered) term "hysteria" to describe the complicated Laura only reveals his own problematic preconceptions, Nussbaum uses "hysterical" to describe Candie so as to attribute problematic preconceptions to Lynch/Frost
She also tweets “YES I KNOW NOIR NOIR NOIR NOIR CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT.” While I don’t find noir especially relevant here, I do think context is critical (and am confused by the hint that there’s some pre-contextual way of viewing the show, a sort of “view from nowhere”)
Shortly after tweeting that, Nussbaum retweeted a review of Fox’s The Tale, and a day later she acknowledged that she’s never seen Fire Walk With Me. Which raises the most important context for TP’s depictions of its characters, and for The Return generally:
The Return is the continuation of a story that “dwell[ed] in the interiority of these women & girls who have lived through these horrors,” and the fact that this was roundly overlooked by an earlier generation of largely male critics has set the context in which TP is now viewed
As a survivor recently wrote of TP, “FWWM was famously rejected by audiences and critics alike, Laura's dead body has been made into toys.... Laura Palmer was never taken seriously, and by extension it feels like my own past trauma wasn't either.” http://curtsiesandhandgrenades.blogspot.com/2018/05/northern-star-on-twin-peaks-sheryl-lee.html
Lynch himself has stressed the importance of a familiarity with FWWM (which itself was influenced by Jennifer Lynch’s fictional incest memoir, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer) to watching The Return. It is absolutely essential context.
(To be fair to Emily, these are just casual tweets, she’s said she plans to watch FWWM this week, she’s been complimentary of the show in other ways, and her writing about historically underexamined issues in TV generally is usually terrific)
(And to be fair to the fan and critical communities, some have been writing about some of these issues, and TP is broad enough in its interests and approaches that, outside of general reviews of the show, it is often obviously reasonable to focus on other aspects of the show)
There is a great deal more that can be said about how TP’s allegorical aspect intersects with its trauma narrative, but Twitter is ill-suited for such a detailed discussion. (I’ll have more to say about this all in other forums eventually)
To conclude, a quote that seems relevant to TP’s reception:
“The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level.”
Judith Lewis Herman
“The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level.”
Judith Lewis Herman
