From uwvax!uwm.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cunixf.cc.columbia.edu!brennan Thu Mar 21 19:49:54 CST 1991
Article: 12221 of alt.tv.twin-peaks
Path: uwvax!uwm.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!cunixf.cc.columbia.edu!brennan
From: brennan@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Joseph Brennan)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks
Subject: Reformatted--Analogy with feuilletons
Message-ID: <1991Mar20.183448.27457@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 91 18:34:48 GMT
References: <59940076@hpopd.pwd.hp.com> <59940078@hpopd.pwd.hp.com>
Reply-To: brennan@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Joseph Brennan)
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 128

[Finally, in a format you can stand to read, an interesting article...]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original post:
From: richardh@hpopd.pwd.hp.com (Richard Hancock)
Date: 18 Mar 91 13:05:35 GMT

[Finally, the full text.]

A chaste hero fixated on doughnuts and tripping on loose ends is nothing
new, says Biancamaria Fontana.  He has been around for at least a century.

			      KIN PEAKS

   Is Twin Peaks a truly post-modern work, as some critics have
argued? An interesting experiment maybe but one which exploits
conventional rather than literary and visual strategies. The director
has in fact (deliberately or unwittingly) translated into the language
of cinema and of the television soap a traditional genre which
flourished within European literary culture up to the beginning of our
century: the feuilleton.

   The analogy is not immediately apparent because we tend to
associate feuilletons-- interminable sagas published in weekly
instalments by the popular press-- with a "period", generally 19th
century, Parisian slums and aristocratic mansions, pirate ships and
buried treasures, babies swapped in paupers' hospitals, poisoned
drinks, gipsies and so on. Diners, sheriffs and the FBI seem out of
place. But that's just historical distortion.

   Originally the writer of feuilletons was someone who would use
absolutely anything she could think of to tantalise her readers, search-
ing for the modern, the eccentric and the exotic without feeling, tied
to any particular background.

   The basic plot of Twin Peaks is a simple and rather conventional one: a
hero attempts to unmask a crime, punish its authors and vindicate their
innocent victims.  David Lynch's hero is Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle
MacLachlan) dispatched to investigate the horrific murder of a local
girl. Agent Cooper is a knight sans peur et sans reproche, immaculate from
his metal shinpads and bullet-proof vest to the top of his brilliantined
hair with an exagerated respect for his duties and Federal regulations.
He is innocent, brave, honest, generous, loyal, punctillious, pedantic,
priggish and is moreover guided in his quest for truth by the assistance
of superior forces.

   He takes an obsessive interest in trivial practical details and his
untimely remarks on black coffee and cherry pie, uttered at the moments
of greater dramatic tension, are probably the single most famous feature of
the serial (this obsessive interest he shares in fact with Dumas's Edmond
Dantes, who in the pages of the Count of Monte Cristo engages in tiresome
comparisons between French and Turkish, strong and weak, hot and
not-so-hot coffee).  Predicatbly, Cooper is chaste and his notion of
pleasure runs to a comfortable bed and a generous supply of doughnuts.

   In Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris (probably the most famous of all
19th-century popular narratives) the hero, Rodolphe Prince of Gerolstein,
fights a private war against crime; he is superhumanly clever, rich and
powerful, and secretly manipulates the othe characters. American
democratic sensibility would not allow this and the fedral agent's
relations to his assistants and to his enemies remain rigorously
egalitarian.

   The object of Cooper's quest, the murder victim, Laura Palmer (Sheryl
Lee), is an "innocent" girl who (like America) has been led by ex-
istential restlessness and sexual curiosity into corruption. That sexual
corruption for a woman is a terminal sin is one of the established truths
of the genre: in the Mysteres de Paris, Gerolstein finally recognises in
the child prostitute FleurMarie his own lost daughter.  She is restored
to her princely status, but since she has been "tainted", is sentenced to
a premature death.

   Blonde, soft, sensual, smiling vacantly from the picture on her
parents' mantelpiece, the ambiguous Laura forms a sharp contrast with
Cooper's sleek stiffness and self-contented moralism.

   Laura is a girl "full of secrets" and secrets, Cooper warns us, are
dangerous. The existence of mysteries and their progressive unveiling was a
major source of surprise and gratification for the reader of the 18th and
19th century popular narratives.  In the world of the feuilleton, goodness
is equivalent to transparency: everywhere deceit and secrecy serve the
cause of evil.

   In Twin Peaks mysteries take generally the form of cryptic and ambiguous
phrases, and Cooper's investigation consists largely in decodig verbal
clues, in solving a series of "riddles" ("The owls are not what they seem"
he murmurs, struck by a sudden illumination, as D'Artagnan cries "C'est
lui!, Lui, cet homme!" every time he recognises in a passing stranger the
Cardinal's spy Rochefort). Reviewers have remarked on the unusual length to
which Lynch carries his intrigue, and have suggested that the endlessly
delayed solution of the murder, and the breaking down of the story into
innumerable sub-plots illustrate the post-modern experience of an
ever-vanishing narrative.

   Yet Lynch's approach would have hardly surprised the writers of the last
century, who produced their novels week by week and resorted to all kinds
of tricks to stimulate or lull indefinitely their readers' attention,
especially when the formula proved successful.

   Television and cinema have accustomed us to short narratives and a short
span of attention. They also seem to endorse a fairly rigid distinction
of genres; social comedy, thriller, historical drama, science fiction, hor-
ror, fantasy.

   Above all Lynch has revived a taste for the eccentric and the bizarre.
In a rather hysterical but determined attempt to break through the
legions of beautiful, young, fit, smiling bodies which populate the
television screen, Lynch (who made his international debut directing The
Elephant Man) has resorted to dwarfs, giants, women with a patch on one
eye, men with one arm, talking birds, people whose hair turns white over-
night. These images would have been perfectly at home in many respectable
18th and 19th century works, where raving insanity, disfigurements and
mutilations were a matter of course.

   Inside the television screen there is a television screen.  Throughout
the story, the inhabitants of Twin Peaks are shown watching the episode
of a series called Invitation To Love. When the Sheriff walks into his
office and asks his secretary whay has happened she replies by updating
him on the plot of the soap oblivious to a series of "real" dramatic events
which have occurred in his absence.

   Lynch's trick, if not original is amusing: but the joke is on us. The
dream of postmodernist critics, the evervaishing-plot, had already
seduced our great-grandmothers. There is no way out of the feuilleton: we
are still trapped inside it and likely to remain there for a long, long
time.

[The Guardian, March 1991]