Tuesday, August 11, 2009

An Invitation to Love




I started watching the second season of Twin Peaks again a couple days ago.  As far as I understand, David Lynch stopped being directly involved after a few episodes into the season (I tried to check out exactly how involved he was but it was difficult to tell just from IMDb listings), and needless to say it's inferior in a lot of ways to the first one--the writing and directing just aren't as good, and it lacks the same tightness and overall aura of hidden Real significance in every look and word.  Still, I love the second season almost as much, you just have to accept it as a totally separate thing.  It's more like Invitation to Love, Twin Peaks' most popular soap opera.  It's still good and weird, you just can't get upset when sometimes it's not incredible.

Anyway, so I've been thinking about why the show is so good.  I read this awful review of Wild at Heart once that Roger Ebert wrote.  While I understood where he was coming from, and he's entitled to his own opinion and everything, he completely missed the point.  (Here's a link to it.)  He thinks that David Lynch is joking around, but he IS NOT.  (I'm getting off-topic, but it will help me articulate why I like Lynch's stuff.)  Ebert says, "The movie is lurid melodrama, soap opera, exploitation, put-on and self-satire. It deals in several scenes of particularly offensive violence, and tries to excuse them by juvenile humor: It's all a joke, you see, and so if the violence offends you, you didn't get the joke."  This is where he's obviously not getting it, not because he's not in on some joke, but because he's willfully misunderstanding Lynch's intent, especially in the last sentence, when he IMAGINES Lynch telling him that the violence is "all a joke."  There are parts of Wild at Heart that I really fucking hate (Johnnie Farragut's death scene is pretty much the grossest, most disturbing scene in movie history), but it's still probably my favorite movie.  There are things about real life that are just as ugly, and people like Bobby Peru really exist.  I'm not saying that I necessarily like those aspects of the movie, and I don't think Lynch is saying anyone should.  They just ARE.  It's also disingenuous to say that because the movie is a melodrama and a soap opera, that everything about it is just a snarky joke or a "comment" on the stupidity of mainstream Hollywood films.  During sappy love scenes between Lula and Sailor (not talking about the graphic sex ones), Lynch isn't trying to get you to laugh--he really genuinely wants you to Feel Something (I think).

And this brings me to what I originally set out to say.  Twin Peaks is very different from Wild at Heart, but the same principles apply.  I don't know about you, but I get really "touched" by some of the scenes in Twin Peaks.  Sure, a lot of it is funny and it's supposed to be, but I also find it to be extremely moving.  That's what's so great about it, I think.  It's definitely satire an self-parody, but it's also so unmistakably genuine and EARNEST.  It's Invitation to Love, a soap opera where the emotions are heightened to almost comical proportions but also really grip you a lot of the time.  Again, Twin Peaks is a lot more earnest (and tame in terms of sex and violence) than Wild at Heart, but how could you miss that?  Wild at Heart is such a beautiful love story...

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