Every Cell Screams, Season Two, Episode Four

1.

Episode Four begins with an explicit homage/reference to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in reverse: instead of the camera closing into the hole of the ear, we begin in blackness, only to emerge in the light of the police station, observing the booking and initial interview of Leland Palmer for the murder of Jacques Renault. Let Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of Blue Velvet’s opening stand in for this type of sequence in Lynch’s universe:

“Lynch’s entire ‘ontology’ is based upon the discordance or contrast between reality, observed from a safe distance, and the absolute proximity of the real. His elementary procedure consists in moving forward from an establishing shot of reality to a disturbing proximity which renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, the crawling and twinkling of indestructible life.”

From this sequence one can make any number of critical observations: the ideological underpinnings of the “reality” Lynch is portraying; symbolic meaning of said “disgusting substance of enjoyment;” the indestructible life which is represented churning underneath. Here the “black hole” conical figure isn’t the organic flesh of the human ear overtaken by ants, rather it is the artificial industrial tiling of the police station which houses the “absolute proximity of the real,” within our sense of reality. The reversal of the procedure, starting in the absolute void of “the real” and moving to the reality we encounter in everyday life (here the recognizable television conceit of the police station interrogation) suggests, opposite Zizek’s reading of the movement from reality into the real, we start in the void of the real into a more recognizable reality. Blue Velvet is about de-stabilization, while the opening scene of the episode is the stabilization of the viewer from a place of de-stabilization.

What connects the two scenes, besides the mirror camera movements, is the primordial sound heard within the void. Again, Zizek:

“Let us return to the opening sequence of Blue Velvet: its crucial feature is the uncanny noise that emerges when we approach the real. This noise is difficult to locate in reality. In order to determine its status, one is tempted to evoke contemporary cosmology which speaks of noises at the borders of the universe; these noises are not simply internal to the universe—-they are remainders or last echoes of the Big Bang that created the universe itself […] The primordial noise, the last remainder of the Big Bang, is on the contrary constitutive of space itself: it is not a noise ‘in’ space, but a noise that keeps space open as such [….] Along the same lines, the fundamental noise in Lynch’s films is not simply caused by objects that are part of reality; rather, it forms the ontological horizon or frame of reality itself, i.e., the texture that holds reality together. Were this noise to be eradicated, reality itself would collapse, from the “open” infinite universe of Cartesian-Newtonian physics, we are thus back to the pre-modern “closed” universe, encircled, bounded, by a fundamental ‘noise.’”

The sounds heard in the void of the police station’s paneling are not quite as abstract as those found within Blue Velvet’s severed ear. Moreover, it is the closed space of each perforated hole—which, taken together looks like a Cartesian grid—that creates the abstract noise by “capturing” the ambient noise of the room. The viewer hears pieces of muffled dialogue (it sounds like Waldo the bird saying either “Laura/Maddy/Daddy no!” All of which would have meaning within the narrative), Laura’s screams, the beeping of hospital monitors and the ever present ambient noise that Zizek describes above. There’s an added visual echoing of sound in the swirling holes in the tile which, before the reveal that it is a ceiling, look like a phone’s receiver (again, reminding viewers that this was a show shot in the early 90s when such things existed). Rather than purely abstract universal sound, the muffled sound at the beginning of the episode anticipates the reveal that it is Leland Palmer’s interrogation at the other end of the void.

 It’s worth noting that Lynch himself didn’t direct the episode, rather Todd Holland did. As Chion points out, it’s impossible to imagine Twin Peaks as an auteurist effort—this episode had four script writers!—and the interweaving of some thematic elements of Lynch’s larger work demonstrates the collective hive mind that went into shaping the series.

As a side note: I don’t think Ray Wise gets enough credit for the acting he does as Leland Palmer. And, fascinatingly, for a scene that ultimately won’t mean much to the overall series, Wise does some of his best, most affecting, acting in this scene. The murder of Renault will eventually be revealed as a way for Bob/Leland to have covered up the murder, but within the context of the scene we are never uncertain that this is a father’s rage at his daughter’s  death. It serves as a counterpoint to Leland’s behavior in the previous episodes of the season: absurd, alienating, menacing. There’s an added layer to the scene insofar as Leland, as a lawyer, is not only familiar with his Miranda rights, but looks foolish arguing that his reason for killing Jacques Renault was because he was arrested for the crime. In adding to the topsy-turvy tragedy of the scene, Leland, the lawyer, has mistaken the law of Wonderland (verdict first, then evidence) for the law of Twin Peaks.

2. 

The only other plot point of any significance in this otherwise pretty insignificant episode of Twin Peaks is the ongoing saga of Laura Palmer’s secret diary and the involvement of the reclusive Harold Smith. It is astounding to me how anyone can see the scene between Harold and Donna as anything but highly disturbing: Harold, an adult male, is drinking wine with a high school student, while reading her recently deceased best friend’s soft-core diary. The whole thing is shot with the same type of nighttime soap opera aesthetic that could have been found on ABC any other night of the week. What he reads is also disturbing, introducing the passage with a creepy, half-laughed “seems appropriate!”:

"But still I'm afraid to tell her of my fantasies and my nightmares; sometimes she's good at understanding, other times she just giggles, and I don't have the nerve to ask why things like that are funny to her. So I feel badly again and shut up about it for a long time. I love Donna very much, but sometimes I worry that she wouldn't be around me at all if she knew what my insides were like. Black and dark, and soaked with dreams of big, big men and different ways they might hold me and take me into their control …”

The passage itself comes from The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a tie-in book published in-between seasons one and two. I’ve never read it—though written by Jennifer Lynch, David Lynch’s daughter, it seemed even in my fandom too crassly commercial to be taken seriously—but the following quotation from a Guardian article seems to be a fair assessment:

“‘It is a confident book,’ says Dr Kirsty Fairclough, a senior lecturer in film and media at Salford University. ‘But it is highly problematic.’ For Fairclough, one of the most unsettling things about the book is how it was marketed to and read primarily by teenage girls. ‘I was a kid when I read this,’ she says. ‘It was a status symbol, a sort of rebellion. I totally connected with Laura Palmer. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer fills in the blanks in a way that can feel exploitative. It’s deeply disturbing.’”

Turning Laura’s abuse and rape into a product tie-in for a television show on the ABC network is going to seem exploitative no matter how sensitively the material is dealt with. I’ve watched Twin Peaks with victims of sexual abuse and many of the details a non-abused viewer might pass over they noticed with both positive and negative reactions. Overall, and I will have more to say about this as I continue writing, I think that Lynch and Frost generally understand the horror of the underlying story. I think that Ray Wise does a good job of making Leland Palmer both a monster and a sympathetic character. Whether or not you believe Leland is possessed by BOB and turned into a child rapist, or that BOB is a metaphor for the incomprehensible horror of what he is doing, the ability of Ray Wise to move between watery eyed grieving father to show tune singing serial killer makes Leland one of the more fascinating early gray characters on television.  

Likewise, Sheryl Lee is very good as Laura Palmer/Maddy. By the time we get to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the viewer is able to see Laura’s actions and reactions to her father’s abuse, she isn’t a mere cadaver onto which the detective/viewer can project his/her fantasies/fears/sympathies. Gobble gobble. But at this point in the show, with ABC willing to milk the “who shot Laura Palmer” campaign for all it’s worth, the diary tie-in has a different feel and cheapens the very real sexual horror at the heart of her murder. On the level of plot, the idea of a secret diary seems lazy (“oh you thought you saw the diary…well, here’s a SECRET diary”) even though I’m sure, returning to the beginning of this essay, I can probably concoct a Lacanian reading of the second diary. 

So on the surface of things, the episode named after Laura’s secret diary seems to be stacked against the original owner of the diary: her rapist father is proudly defending his daughter’s honor by killing the man he wants the police to believe he believes is his daughter’s killer. Her former agoraphobic lover is reading dirty passages in her secret diary to bed her best friend Donna (“she wouldn’t be around me if she knew what my insides are like”). Yet, while acknowledging the tricky relationship between Lynch’s world, women and the violence done to them, this constant de-centering of the dead female for the benefit of the men who did violence to her (all the way up to and including Cooper) will be repeated again and again throughout the story.