The Happy Generations (Season Two, Episode Two)

1.

Barbershop Quartets are an invention of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like many American musical inventions, they are a mixture of white and African-American musical traditions and, also like many American musical inventions, most African-American pioneers of the style have been written out of its history. Its most popular period can be traced from the late 1930s off and on up until the late 1950s. The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA) held its first meeting in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1938—home to the race massacre of “Black Wall Street” seventeen years earlier. The last massive interest in barbershop quartets might have come with the 1957 musical The Music Man. In the musical, the confidence man thwarts a number of school board members in seeking out his credentials. He teaches them to sing barbershop style to distract them, and, unwittingly, brings about social harmony between the men, who have been quarreling for decades. The lesson is: all anybody needs is a collective identity in which to submit and the confidence man can continue his grift unnoticed.

Season 2, Episode 2 begins with a barbershop quartet in the background, practicing in the dining room of the Great Northern hotel. Like so many details of the show (the taxidermy on the table on the police station in the pilot episode, the fish stuck in the percolator in episode 2 of season 1) we don’t know why they’re there and they’re never brought back again. But if I were to guess which era of the barbershop Lynch is evoking by having them in the background, I would bet it’s the 1950s iteration from the Music Man and their subsequent popularity.

A few years later the Simpsons aired an episode that revolved around Homer’s barbershop quartet. Ostensibly a Beatles allegory, it also becomes an allegory for Nirvana and grunge which had just broken a few years earlier. Barbershop quartets, it seems, based on these early 90s examples, carry with them a trace of the historical as a then contemporary allegory. Or, as Fredrick Jameson describes it through the concept of “historicity,” “Historicity […] can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history: that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.” This is perfectly illustrated in the Simpsons barbershop quartet episode: the ascent and marketing of the Beatles is just like the ascent and marketing of Nirvana and, if taken to its extreme—like making the musty and unhip barbershop quartet into a pop sensation—then we can see how these cycles repeat themselves and make geniuses out of even talentless barflies like Barney and Homer.

Because Lynch is not explicit as to why or how the barbershop quartet features in the episode, its historical function in the scene and the show remains more opaque than in the Simpsons. Since the barbershop quartet is only in the background harmonizing without words, its the dialog in the foreground that draws our attention:

“Cooper: Buddhist tradition first came to the land of snow in the 5th century A.D.
The first Tibetan king to be touched by the dharma was King Hathatha Rignamputsan.
He and succeeding kings were collectively known as the Happy Generations. Now, some historians place them in a Water Snake year, 213 A.D. Others in the year of a Water Ox, 173 A.D. Amazing, isn't it? The Happy Generations.”

It’s not the first time Tibet and Buddhism had been mentioned on the show. In Season 1, Episode 3 Cooper had discussed his interest in Tibet before starting his mind body deductive technique for finding Laura Palmer’s killer:

“Cooper: In 1950, Communist China invaded Tibet and, while leaving the Dalai Lama nominally in charge, they in fact seized control of the entire country. Following a Tibetan uprising against the Chinese in 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced to flee for his life to India and has lived in exile ever since.”

The quaint small-town America embodied by the barbershop quartet and its evocation of 1950s and the Music Man is properly historicized by Tibet, its 1959 invasion by the PRC’s forces and the eventual exile of the Dalai Lama. As Jameson writes: “[t]he sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality: that the existential may be absolutely distinct […] from the structural and social significance of a collective phenomenon […] Eisenhower wore a well-known smile for us but an equally well-known scowl for foreigners beyond our borders….” The barbershop quartet of the background becomes the history of buddhist Tibet, and its eventual invasion, in the foreground, both historical reflections of the 1950s.

2.

This scene is not alone in Lynch's work. If there is one decade and place that Lynch seems most interested in evoking, it is the United States in the 1950s. Twin Peaks is least immune to this: the diner, Audrey’s bobby socks, James Hurley’s biker image…all of these recall easily comprehended short-hand for the 50s. But it extends beyond the content: the formal mystery of Twin Peaks, the death of homecoming queen Laura Palmer and her many secrets, recalls the 1950’s popular culture’s revolt against (again Jameson, who also analyzes this aspect of Lynch’s work): “the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and non-deviant everyday life.”

There’s also another 1950s element of the show that’s less obvious: the notion that the boom economy reflected in the centrality of the sawmill and its profitability, as well as the manual labor needed to run it, could sustain Twin Peaks’ local economy indefinitely. An argument about whether or not to close the mill down out of respect to both Laura Palmer and Ronette Pulaski (her father works at the mill), versus the profits lost from such actions, is already a plot point in the pilot. By the time the show premiered in 1990, there had been a massive decline in employment within the lumber industry in the Pacific Northwest as more and more mills became automated. The third season opening shows the once operating mill (we see it still humming along in the second season opening credits, though it has already burned down) now as a burnt out shell, a ghost that haunts the doppelgängers, giants, dwarfs and other supernatural beings that already inhabit the town.

The barbershop quartet isn’t the only musical cues from the 1950s that show up in the episode: in a brief scene, we see Shelly Johnson and Bobby Briggs enjoying a Ventures’ style guitar instrumental in a car, while discussing an insurance scam against her abusive husband that could have come straight out of a film noir. Two scenes later, devoid of any narrative context, James Hurley, Maddy Ferguson (Laura’s cousin) and Donny Hayward perform a song on the Hayward’s living room rug, with the cloyingly simple 1950s refrain “Just you/ and I/ together/ in love,” while an arpeggiating guitar figure flutters in the background. A drum keeping time comes in from somewhere, recalling those Elvis films where entire bands and orchestras would manifest themselves out of nowhere on the soundtracks.

At the time the episode aired, someone compared the song to the 1950s musical group the Fleetwoods, a group that, like our group here, contained two women and one man. Promotional pictures of the group at the time seemed to imply some kind of rivalry between the two women for the male singer’s affection, much like the scene in the show. I have a very distinct memory of my parents playing the Fleetwoods for me and strongly disliking it. Though I’m not a big fan, their two most famous songs, “Mr. Blue,” and “Come Softly to Me” are now two of my favorite songs from the 1950s. The former especially fits into Lynch’s obsession (see Roy Orbison) with popular music from this period that hides dark cosmic truths:

Our guardian star lost all his glow
The day that I lost you
He lost all his glitter the day you said "No"
And his silver turned to blue

What’s banally a song about a guy missing the girl who dumped him, turns into a star turning into a blue dwarf and dying away at the end of the universe.

Returning to the Hayward’s living room, the song itself falls apart as Donna notices James looking at Maddy longingly and runs away crying. And as one love triangle develops into another love triangle between Donna, James and now Harold Smith (so much melodrama!) We return to Maddy sitting on the living room floor.

What happens next is my favorite sequence of the second season and one of my favorites in the show overall. First thing you notice is that Maddy is looking from the floor into the kitchen with the kitchen framed by both the doorway and the furniture in the living room. The shot freezes on this framing for a few seconds before we notice BOB enter the shot looking directly at Maddy. Not only are we in Maddy’s point of view, but Lynch does this thing where the objects closest to us are out of focus, thus giving us the perspective of possibly hiding behind these objects out of BOB’s line of view. But he sees Maddy/us and, without pausing or diverting his gaze directly at Maddy/us, moves closer, manically smiling, crawling over whatever gets in his way, to get whatever is in/behind the camera. He comes so close that his face distorts and fills the entire frame until it becomes a black hole at the center of the screen until Maddy’s scream breaks the shot.

It’s frightening. And it’s frightening in a way that only Lynch can be: taking the most homely setting—the comforting coziness of white vocal groups, 1950s nostalgia, living rooms, carpet, kitchens—and turning them into the stuff of nightmares. And Lynch is a master at so many other things that make scenes like this terrifying: like the noontime lunch at Winkie’s in Mulholland Dr., with it’s terrible truths about the monsters which lurk in the corners of where we eat, the scene in Twin Peaks is brightly lit. The sound design, again, rumbles in the background for added anxiety. And Lynch purposely designs, as he does in all of his projects, the furniture himself. Here all of the furniture has had the legs shortened to give an almost German Expressionist disproportionality. Maddy and you, the viewer, are in a child-like perspective as Bob comes for you. The furniture is tinier, thus making it harder to hide behind. The only thing left to say about this scene is what has struck me upon watching it again: I had misremembered all of this taking place in the Palmer’s house but, like the “supper club” from our last episode, this monstrous scene of domesticity takes place in the far more idyllic Hayward household. The blood stains run deep in the carpets of small town America.

3.

It’s been 30 years since this episode aired and now we must historicize Twin Peaks itself. The second season of Twin Peaks runs parallel with the launch of Operation Desert Shield and the presidency of George W. Bush. The horrors that the series evokes in the Peyton Place-like mysteries of the unheimlich small town America it presents, can’t encompass the horrors that are occurring in the world at the time we were watching Twin Peaks. Even the horrors of small-town America are preferable to losing that very narrative of the small town we rely on to tell stories about ourselves here.  Lynch’s work has always had an uneasy relationship to this ideology—no one has ever been really able to deduce whether he critiques or idealizes the small town life that occupies his work, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the retreat into the horrors of small town living rooms straight out of 1950s Disneyland seems to me, from the historical perspective of 30 years, either (at best) a reflection of the horrors, or (at worst) a retreat from the horrors, broadcast on CNN every night at the same time.