Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University
HITCHED OR LYNCHED: WHO DIRECTED TWIN
PEAKS?
i
Lynch is like Hitchcock pushed to the
Nth degree.
Dr. Harvey Greenberg
I. Hitched
Twin Peaks compels us to re -create Oscar Wilde's famous
remark about the long-standing critical debate over the reality of
Hamlet's personality disorder. Wilde, our earliest reader -response
critic, had suggested that it was not Hamlet that was the issue.
Instead, Wilde asked `“Are the critics of Hamlet mad, or are they
merely pretending to be mad?”
Are the critics of auteurism mad or are they merely
pretending to be mad? The concept of attributing the strengths
and weakness of a particular film to a director's style or
aggrandizing its potential impact solely on the basis of the
director’s other work has gone in and out of fashion ever since
the British magazine Movie and Andrew Sarris’ “Notes on the
Auteur Theory in 1962" successfully exploited the French
reverence for the auteur in the previous decade. What filmmaker
François Truffaut called “la politique des auteurs" ("the issue of
authors"), Sarris usually called "the auteur theory." Today
alternative models compete: studio -ists, spectatorists (almost but
not exclusively feminists), collaborationists —all explicitly or
implicitly deny the concept of the director as sole creative
authority in filmmaking. Only one major Hollywood director in
virtually every auteurist’s pantheon is at the center of this
contention: Hitchcock. Even when critics (such as Modleski)
“challenge and dece nter director authority” by considering
Hitchcock's work as the expression of cultural attitudes and
practices “existing to some extent outside the artist's control," it
is nonetheless Hitchcock who remains the primary focus.
Initial attempts to apply aute urist analysis to women
directors ran into a problem: there were only two major American
women directors. Before the 1980’s women who directed tended
to be foreign or they worked in documentary film. Lina Wertmuller
from Italy, Mai Zetterling from Sweden, Gillian Armstrong from
Australia, Agnes Varda from France, and Margarethe von Trotta
from Germany represent the international range of women
directors with major reputations before 1980.
In the United States from 1950 to 1980, according to a
committee from the Directors Guild of America, women directed
only fourteen feature films out of the 7,332 films released (about
two-tenths of one percent). During this same reference period,
about the same low percentage held for the number of national TV
hours directed by women, with 115 hours out of 65,500 hours.
Ida Lupino, actress turned director, accounted for a third of
those 115 TV hours and almost half of the feature films. Lupino
and Dorothy Arzner, from the two decades before the reference
period, are really t he only women directors with a significant
body of work that would make them suitable for auteur studies.
Neither of them would have been considered in the auteurists' all male pantheon of directors. Lupino, nonetheless, accomplished an
impressive body of work in a relatively short period (1949 -1953)
when she directed films for her own independent production
company. She consistently sought out tough and daring and even
feminist themes.
Outrage (1950), unfortunately not available on video
cassette, foregrounds not rape but the victim's reliving of the
horror. In the two films that are available, The Bigamist and The
Hitchhiker (both 1953), her social realism explores what are
potentially outré subjects in ways that make the experiences
almost too close for c omfort for the average viewer.
Arzner, on the other hand, has attracted more explicitly
feminist attention as an early provocative critic of female
identity. All three of Arzner's films currently available in video
cassette consistently challenge the idea of an individuallyconstructed female identity: in Christopher Strong an aviator's
career becomes a powerful aphrodisiac both to herself and a
married man, but it tragically cannot replace marriage; in Craig's
Wife, a woman establishes her home as an obses sive space that
excludes virtually all human contact; and in Dance, Girl, Dance, a
stooge for a burlesque show turns on the mostly male audience
and exposes their escapist voyeurism. After a few pioneering
efforts in the 1970s by Elaine May and Joan Micklin Silver in
feature films and Barbara Kopple in documentaries, numerous
women directors (Joyce Chopra, Susan Seidelman, Donna Deitch,
to name just three) established critical reputations in the 1980s.
The directorial assignments of Twin Peaks episode s follow
this trend. Three of the fifteen directors of the episodes of Twin
Peaks were women: Lesli Linka Glatter (four episodes), Tina
Rathborne (two), and Diane Keaton (one). They accounted for a
little more than twenty -percent of the series' screen time . All
three had already directed feature films.
Given the presence of major women directors in classical
Hollywood filmmaking in general (two, as I have noted) and in
auteurists' pantheons specifically (none) and given that Twin
Peaks itself is a potential ly revealing intersection of feature
filmmaking and TV production, the series presents a rare
opportunity to foreground recurring problems in auteurism and
even question its vitality as theory. Other questions intrude: Are
women directors auteurs? When is a TV film a feature film? One
of the most significant precedents for the transformation of a
Hollywood feature film director into the director of a major TV
series turns out to be . . . Hitchcock, once more. While
comparisons between Hitchcock and Lynch co ntinue to be made
primarily on the basis of filmmaking audacity and cult following,
their television careers are twin -like.
Both directors made shocking and controversial feature films
before and during their television work. Both had their TV efforts
hyped as natural extensions of their on -going creative visions: it
was Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later The Alfred Hitchcock Hour )
and David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Both men included themselves in
the filmed text: Hitchcock as host and supernumerary (his
introductions were often staged as if his persona had somehow
escaped from the script) and Lynch as Agent Cooper's near -deaf
and Mister Magoo -like supervisor, Gordon Cole. Although
advertising and format insisted on their presence, paradoxically
neither Hitchcock nor Lynch directed any more than a fraction of
the series' shows that bear their names. In Hitchcock's case, it is
a tiny fraction: he directed only twenty of the 365 "Hitchcock"
shows; Lynch directed only six of the thirty episodes —
proportionally higher bu t still representing only a significant
minority.
Hitchcock's TV production was an extension of his developing
control over every major aspect of feature film production during
his great decade of 1950 to 1960 (actually through 1964, if you
include The Birds and Marnie). He controlled both pre production—the purchase of literary properties and the
development of the script —and post-production—through a limited
supply of footage shot and musical scoring (especially by
repeatedly employing composer Bernard He rrmann).
For his TV production company, Shamley Productions, in the
following decade, he imposed a similar framework, although he
absented himself from direction in the main. He turned to
professional colleagues like Joan Harrison (who became his
executive producer) and Norman Lloyd (who became the associate
producer and occasionally a show’s director), assuming, quite
accurately, that they would mirror his obsessions faithfully.
Working under his overall (mainly script) supervision, his
production company established a consistent narrative pattern
using many different directors. They adapted mostly single -idea
stories by genteel gothic writers like Roald Dahl, often with
O'Henry-like surprise endings, and presented them with black
humor or within an absurdi st framework, sometimes with more
than a touch of the paranormal, but trying whenever possible to
combine the funny and the horrific.
Serving as host for every show, Hitchcock achieved a
controlling presence with his bewildered innocence: I'm not really
sure I understand what's going on here, he seemed to be saying,
but let's see what they are up to tonight. Hitchcock also used this
persona in the trailers for his theatrical films in which he also
appeared as host —lecturing on the destruction of "man's
feathered friends" for The Birds, for example, or reluctantly lifting
a toilet bowl seat in a tour of the Psycho set. The cameo
appearances in his feature films share this out -of-jointedness: he
has trouble getting his double (a bass fiddle) on a train in
Strangers on a Train , for example, or a bus slams its doors in his
face in North by Northwest .
Although the comparisons with Hitchcock's career are
inevitable, there were no women directors in Hitchcock's
immediate orbit. Alma Reville, his wife, worked on nume rous
projects as both screenwriter and informal sounding -board. Her
collaborator and then eventually her replacement was Joan
Harrison, who eventually moved from the position as Hitchcock's
screenwriter and personal assistant to become an independent
producer. She worked on a number of Hitchcock -like projects in
the 1940s and 1950s thrillers and film noirs about obsessive,
destructive relationships, of which Phantom Lady (1944), directed
by Robert Siodmak, was the most successful. Eventually she came
back to Hitchcock as his TV producer throughout the run of the
series. If there is such a thing as an auteur producer, she no
doubt would qualify, but her style might not be ultimately
distinguished from her mentor's.
II. Three Women
Tina Rathborne had directed two feature -length films before
doing two episodes for Twin Peaks. Both of these features, like
Twin Peaks, involve child abuse in general and among the upper
classes specifically. Rathborne adapted (and expanded
significantly) Kate Chopin's (very short) short story, “The Story of
an Hour” into The Joy that Kills (1984). In both story and film
"the joy that kills" results from the surprise return of a husband
whose wife believes (and is comforted by the thought) that her
husband is dead. In the film the wife desires to travel, despite a
weak heart. When it appears as if her health is improving, her
husband remains overprotective and —in gradually developing
flashbacks throughout the film —we are led to conclude that his
behavior reminds her of her drunken, possibly incestuous, and
certainly abusive father.
Her second feature, Zelly and Me (1988), based on
Rathborne’s original screenplay, portrays an abusive and
increasingly sadistic grandmother who has become the guardian
of Phoebe (the "me" of the title) at her parents' accidental death.
Phoebe is protected somewhat by Zelly —her nanny, played by
Isabella Rosellini —who in turn has a relationship with Willie, a
man she has mistakenly assumed to be a rich neighbor. Willie is
played by David Lynch in his acting debut.
Besides Rosellini, a key actor from Lynch's "repertory
company" (not to mention himself), the film uses Lynchian space
in a number of ways. Zelly and Willie meet often at a diner, a
trade-mark Lynchian time machine in both H ollywood and the
world of Twin Peaks . Both Willie and Lynch use retro -speech:
"Holy Smokes!" is the common idiom.
Lesli Linka Glatter had directed (for HBO) only one feature length film, Into the Homeland (1987), although she had directed
episodes for two TV series, Amazing Stories and Vietnam War
Story. The title of her first feature is bitterly ironic: the
homeland, rural Wyoming, like the Twin Peaks region, is hardly
benign. The film offers the great Wes t with all its natural beauty
as a screen for its dirty secret, specifically a white supremacist
cult.
Of the three, Diane Keaton's artistic work has the greatest
stylistic and thematic affinities with Lynch. But it is not Diane
Keaton as Annie Hall or Mic hael Corleone's wife that brought her
to Twin Peaks but Diane Keaton as photographer and director.
Keaton published two books of photographs in the early
1980s: Reservations consisted entirely of her own photographs of
hotel lobbies and ballrooms, presente d in a black and white
frozen stillness, utterly without human characters. Each
photograph captures a room that looks as if everyone has left
that room forever. The red -curtained rooms of the Black Lodge in
Episode 2022 of Twin Peaks resemble the overstuff ed lobby of
once distinguished Miami Beach hotels, and that is the look that
Keaton captures in a number of her photos.
Keaton edited (with Marvin Heiferman) a second collection,
Still Life, but these were not her own photographs. They were
instead stills printed from color transparencies from the publicity
departments of Hollywood studios in the 1950s. These included
production stills with actors “in their roles,” as well as posed
shots of the stars (sometimes on movie sets, sometimes with
props unrelated to any particular film). Keaton saw in the stills
the experience “like entering a very real town in the twilight
zone.” There is an air of unreality about the tableaux that she
also compares to both taxidermy and “the strangely beautiful
dioramas at the Mu seum of Natural History.” The images are
“extremely jarring; nothing at all like anything remotely
resembling life.”
One of the most striking images of the volume is that of the
young actress Ann Blyth, who could only be called the avatar of
Audrey Horne (or Sherilyn Fenn), a Miss Twin Peaks of the late
1940s, whose biggest role was as Joan Crawford’s very bad
daughter in Mildred Pierce, who has a (technically) incestuous
relationship with her step -father. Blyth’s body is shot at a
provocative angle, her up per torso bent over so that she about to
bite a shiny red apple suspended in space. Surrounding her, also
hanging in mid-air, are numerous brightly lit jack -o-lanterns—
huge and grinning.
Keaton’s only feature -length film was her documentary
Heaven, released in 1987. Her inspiration in making Heaven was
in part Still Life: “For some reason,” she said, “when you take
people out of real life and photograph them in an artificial
situation, what you get is a sense that people are truly
undefineable.” In Heaven Keaton placed numerous characters
gathered from screening interviews done on the streets of Los
Angeles, and shot their responses to her questions about heaven
in front of mostly white, very minimal studio sets. The effect is a
postmodern surrealistic comed y of manners. When teenagers were
asked if there was sex in heaven, one young man countered with
a question of his own: “You make little dead people?” Her mise en
scene is taken from the future as portrayed by the art -deco
science-fiction films of the 1930 s. Marlaine Glicksman suggested
that the film is a motion -picture advance from the books of still
photographs, with sets that look like the lobbies in Reservations
and people who have stepped out of the pages of Still Life.
III. Lynched
The production set-up of Lynch-Frost encouraged a house
style that gave the series an overall Lynch -look. Caleb Deschanel,
who directed three episodes (1006, 2008, 2012), believed that
most of the directors “had a lot of the same style” as Lynch. “In a
way,” he argued, “it felt like a real long movie,” in which
directors “would kind of come in and take turns.” Graeme Clifford,
who directed only one episode (2005), interpreted the situation in
a slightly different way: “A series should look like it’s all been
directed by the same person and if you don’t want it that way you
shouldn’t accept the job.”
Lesli Linka Glatter attributed the strong position of the
directors in the series to the fact that both Lynch and Frost were
directors themselves. Their primary innovation in epis odic
television was the inclusion of the director in the post -production
process, in which the original shoot is edited by adding and
deleting scenes. Usual TV production entails a limited number of
shooting days, after which control of the footage shot is turned
over to the editor who works most closely with the producer.
Todd Holland, who directed two episodes (2004 and 2013),
stated that directing Twin Peaks is satisfying for feature
[directors] because [Lynch and Frost] want a director who’s
willing to put in the time to bring his own vision to it and stick
with it to the bitter end.”
Glatter illustrated the director’s control of the material in
her direction of Episode 1005 in which the Mynah bird Waldo is
found in Jacques Renault’s cabin. Coop, Truman, Hawk, and Dr.
Hayward approach the mysterious cabin in the woods. In one
particularly striking shot, all four enter the frame from screen
left, one by one and in close -up, so that the effect is of a frieze of
anxious faces. The Julee Cruise song, “Into th e Night,” heard over
the soundtrack, turns out to be actual sound from a record player
inside the cabin. Glatter explained her function as director in this
way:
What happened with that whole sequence is I put that
together and put the music onto it. It was not something
that was scripted nor was the raven looking over them when
they’re approaching the cabin. That came out in the editing
process. I wanted a sense of an omen watching them..
You’re given a lot of leeway to go where you want. Basically
what was written in the script during the dance sequence in
that episode was Catherine starts to dance with Leland and I
choreographed this totally queer movement and got to play
with it. (Altman 39)
Her use of the raven re -doubles the impact of Waldo the mynah
bird and the owl of Ghostwood. Leland’s antic finger -antler dance
in this episode is also a comic reprise of his feeble attempt to
dance in Episode 1003, directed by Rathborne, or the dwarf’s
dance in Coop’s dream in Episode 1002, directed by Lynch.
Ultimately Leland is always returning, although he may not
consciously know it, to the ultimate dance of death he must have
done (but we of course did not see) with Laura, whose horrifying
equivalent we do see him do with Maddy in Episode 2007, also
directed by Lynch.
Glatter also explained how one director within a series can
contribute to another director’s work (and indirectly explained
how the European theatrical version —discussed below—of the
pilot came about). A scene shot for one episode but cut in post production can be used in another episode. Tim Hunter, who
directed three episodes (1004, 2009, 2021), had shot for Episode
1004 the story of James’ mother, but he did not use the footage.
She is a mysterious woman who figures into a number of James'
mumbling speeches. Glatter at first had decided to resurrect the
sequence for either Episode 2003 or 2006 in the second season,
but she "had to drop it because of time." "It also didn't make any
sense," she added, “because too much had happened on the show
since it was shot." It is alluded to, however briefly, in James’
conversation with Maddy in Episode 2003.
The movement of sequences among directors in the TV series
was also typical of the "compromise" version of the TV pilot
(Episode 1000) that became a theatrica l film with its own
distinctive ending. Many made -for-TV movies are of course
routinely released in video cassette, but they are almost never
shown theatrically.
Furthermore, although theatrical films have been released in
sometimes significantly different versions, it has been with added
or deleted scenes (or even certain racy scenes shortened or
extended). The number of released films with truly alternative
endings is quite small. Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, for example, was released in 1 956 with a studio imposed frame story; in 1979 Siegel re -released the film with the
four minutes of the frame story deleted, forcing the viewer to
confront Kevin McCarthy's warnings about the coming of the
aliens without benefit of rescue from the FBI (who had been
tucked into the ending of the frame story). In current video and
theatrical distribution, however, the original studio release of the
film has prevailed.
A 112-minute version of Episode 1000 of Twin Peaks was
released theatrically in Europe the m onth before (March, 1990)
the pilot was aired in the United States. The European release
followed the pilot closely with a few major exceptions: Sarah
Palmer's vision of Bob is "borrowed" from the second TV episode,
directed by Duwayne Dunham, for example, and precedes the
resolution of the plot. The One -Armed Man, whose name is Philip
Gerard but whose "inhabiting spirit" is called Mike, recognizes the
police drawing of Bob as a "killer -mystic." "Mike" has been
searching for Bob and thinks he may be living in the hospital
basement. Coop and Truman do discover Bob there, and he
confesses that he has in fact been using the letters under his
victims' nails to spell out his full name, Robert. Mike, whose
derangement at this point is obvious, suddenly appears and
shoots Bob. In Tina Rathborne’s Episode 1003, Coop had told
Audrey about one of his dreams in which precisely this "ending"
happens: Mike couldn’t stand the killing any more, Coop explains,
and Mike vowed to stop Bob.
At this point in the European release , Coop's dream,
complete with Laura and the dancing dwarf from Episode 1002,
directed by Lynch himself, unfolds as a coda. This double ending —
Bob's death and Coop's dream —cannot really be reconciled with
the ending—if that is what it will be —of Episode 2022 of the
American broadcast series, also directed by Lynch, in which Coop
has returned from the Black Lodge (with its reprise of his Episode
1002 dream) and becomes the host of a still hideous, still active
Bob. This may, of course, only be a tentative end ing, as—at the
very least—we wonder, "How's Annie?" (She has been kidnapped
or worse by Windom Earle, we presume.)
Whether a director has been Hitched or Lynched may simply
mean that his or her style is capable of being absorbed into the
master-director’s vision. Whether this is support or undermining
for autuerism remains moot: it suggests a dominant male
director's overall control, but it suggests that the other directors
have at least achieved a style nonetheless.
If Hitchcock has been a test case for de bates about auteurs
in the 1970s and 1980s, then Lynch and his associates may well
do for the 1990s. Perhaps there are too many factors —Lynch as
writer, collaborating with Frost or the cross -fertilization of a TV
genre like soap opera with Lynch postmodern gothic theatrical
releases—to answer definitively auteurists' (or even the
auteuristes') puzzle.
The writers, for example, used elaborate and specific outline
of numerous episodes in advance: this is standard TV soap -opera
drill. Producer Harley Peyton em phasized this approach: "If
there's a change you wanted to try you could try it but there's a
pretty detailed blueprint to follow. There has to be so your
teleplay fits in with all the other puzzle pieces.” Perhaps Lynch's
handling of ads marks him as a di rector of the 1990s. Lynch, in
his advertising work for Calvin Klein's Obsession fragrance, uses
Donna and James (Lara Flynn Boyle and James Marshall in mini dramas from classic pieces of Western literature, scored by Peaks
composer Angelo Badalamenti). Th ese postmodern ads go beyond
Hitchcock’s tendency to needle advertisers in his introductions to
his shows. We are close to a totality of mediated artistic vision
here, and it would be very difficult for collaborating directors to
avoid being Lynched.
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This essay originally appeared in Studies in Popular Culture
17 (1994): 55-64.