So what's it like to live in the world we have lost, a mimetic world when things had spirit-copies, and nature could thus look back and speak to one through dreams and omens, nature not being something to be dominated but something yielded to or magically out-performed, and people were born mimics?
-Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity
Recently I've been rewatching David Lynch/Mark Frost's Twin Peaks with someone who has not seen it before (if you haven't seen it but plan to, you should probably stop reading). I remember watching bits and pieces of it when it was first on, but not really comprehending what was going on, and later in college watching the whole thing, one episode a day for a month (a friend had all of it on VHS at the time). I'm about fifteen episodes in, right after Bob leaves his host, and this is where I'd like to stop, given the compromised and incomplete nature of the rest of the show.
There are many quite obvious interpretive entry points to the show. It's immediate appeal I think can be found in its quirky and often very funny characters, it's surrealist elements, and the pervasive sense of atmospheric dread. This last element owes its strength to the eerie soundtrack as well as to the omnipresent symbolism: fire, trees, owls, the color red, and spinning circles (the last being the most subtle and my favorite; how many scenes begin with an ominous, panning camera, moving in a circle).
Maybe because he's working in television, Lynch builds a symbolist Lego set - it's all too easy and fun to make associative connections between, say, Ben Horne's greedy (and conflagrative) destruction of natural resources with the rape and destruction of Laura Palmer by one who likes to 'play with fire' (by the way, one aspect of TP that I'm not sold on is the poetry...). And then there's Laura herself, who neatly plays the structuralist role of referent, that which everything in the show depends on and revolves around but who is dead: she appears only as a beloved if elusive memory whose 'truth' engenders (so to speak) both mourning and a play of signification that far exceeds her. She is the absent, deferred secret that allows for the presence of the drama and comedy of the show.
The part that intrigues me now, though, is perhaps my interpretive crutch for most late 20th century art, which is the issue of cliche. In considering this, I'd like to respond to what I think is a misreading of the show by Jonathan Rosenbaum in his essay Bad Ideas: The Art and Politics of Twin Peaks. Rosenbaum accuses Lynch of a "nostalgic regression...to the worst aspects of the Eisenhower era," namely an obsession with 50s small town America and a puritan view of sexual ethics (why shouldn't already sexualized perfume saleswomen get paid for this very same sexualization, one might ask).
It is certainly true that Twin Peaks plays a Norman Rockwell hand: James (Dean?) and his motorcycle, the diner, the small town conviviality, the prom queen and the football captain (Laura and Bobby), Harry S. Truman as sheriff, the best coffee and cherry pie. Not only that, but there is a heavy dose of conventional Christian ethics and aesthetics: the white and black lodges, red as a scarlet symbol of danger, the goodness of an ideal, pure Laura and the wickedness of her sexual exploiters, Leo et al included.
But what Rosenbaum misses that is that all of this does not imply the reality of small town America, but is rather a (quite overdone) representation of an idea of 50s small town America, one that Lynch uses only to critique via a surrealist apparatus. Here, James the innocent bookhouse boy motorcycle rebel is no more 'real' than the absurd yet prophetic Log Lady; both exist at the mimetic level of caricature, representations of a representation, mimesis of mimesis, or, in other words, kitsch. They are cliches, the same imaginative cliches that Orinn Hatch and co. have used since the 80s to justify a reactionary moral(ist) politics.
Lynch, on the other hand, uses these cliches only to undo them in true surrealist style. Lynch does not attempt to (only) expose the reality 'behind' these reactionary cliches. Rather, he demonstrates their arbitrary and melodramatic character by both showing the hypocrisy of their construction (the same as that shown by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford, Jon Ensign, Newt Gingrich, and many others) while also convincingly pairing them with a menagerie of surreal characters and situations that expose the psychic and imaginative conditions of possibility for these cliches in the first place.
And yet despite the obvious arbitrary, "constructed" nature of this world, we, like the characters, find ourselves continually drawn to it, wanting to believe in its better parts despite ourselves. If Lynch creates moments of unexpected True Love, cues the saccharine music, and yet still draws us in, it is because we too live in this world, a world of mimetic representations that are not our own and that we yet desire. Like Warhol, Lynch does not attempt a radically alter critique of the sovereign representations of modernity; rather, he makes representations of these representations - kitsch - in order to both undo them and explore our desire for them. In exploring the 'secrets' of Laura Palmer, what Lynch ends up exploring is what Michael Taussig calls the "public secret" that sutures the real to the really made up, the "facticity of social fact."
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