David Lynch – Bitch Flicks

‘Twin Peaks’ Mysticism Won’t Save You From the Patriarchy

This guest post by Rhianna Shaheen appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

(MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!)

I have a Twin Peaks problem. I love Twin Peaks (1990-1991). In college, I was so obsessed with the show that I animated a Saul Bass-inspired titles sequence and wrote a spec script for my screenwriting class. However, as I became a better feminist, I awoke from my stupor of admiration for the show. I began to question the dead girl trope and ask myself, what is so funny about the sexual abuse and torture of an adolescent girl? I’ll admit I was thrilled about its announced return in 2016, but I wonder if a continued story will do more harm than good. Will the show continue to pull the demonic possession card when it comes to violence against women?

In the TV series, Special Agent Dale Cooper first encounters the evil spirit BOB in a dream. However, no one seems to see BOB in real life except for Sarah Palmer, who becomes increasingly unstable and otherworldly after her daughter’s murder. Much of this is due to her terrifying visions of BOB as well as her husband’s recent, strange antics. When Maddy Ferguson, Laura’s lookalike cousin, comes to support the Palmer family she sees similar visions of BOB in the house.

In the hunt for Laura Palmer’s killer, the local Sheriff’s Department is absolutely useless. As soon as Agent Cooper turns them on to Tibetan method and Dream Logic, all serious detective work goes out the door. It also doesn’t help that the town chooses to project this crisis outside of “decent” society. According to Sheriff Truman:

“There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but…it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we’ve always been here to fight it.”

But this old evil is within the town as well as outside of it. The show’s “quirky allure” tricks viewers into believing that Twin Peaks is different. That some places remain untouched by patriarchal evil. When we discover that it was Leland Palmer we are shocked. Leland’s mirrored reflection of BOB exposes the threat as one within the confines of the domestic space. It is patriarchy passing itself off as the loving and benign father of the nuclear family.

But what is even more shocking is that an entire community allows this to happen. In the prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) we follow Laura Palmer through the final seven days of her life. Unlike the series, Laura has a voice here. We get to see her walking, talking, and acting like a teenager. When pages from her secret diary go missing she confides in her friend Harold that “[BOB] has been having [her] since [she] was 12” and “wants to be [her], or he’ll kill [her].” Harold does not believe her. It’s an extremely painful scene, because not only do we know she will die, but we know that many real-life victims of childhood abuse are often not believed either.

Days before her death, Laura finally discovers that it is her father. At dinner, Leland torments his daughter’s dirty hands and questions her about her “lovers.” Leland then pinches his daughter’s cheek. The sheer look of horror on Laura’s face is heartbreaking as she looks into the eyes of her abuser. Her mother, Sarah All-I-Can-Do-Is-Scream Palmer, tells her husband to stop, saying, “She doesn’t like that.” He replies, “How do you know what she likes?” It’s absolutely chilling, but even then the mother remains ignorant. How can everyone be so clueless?

As viewers, the warning signs seem obvious. The only way Laura can cope with this parasitic spirit is through copious amounts of cocaine and promiscuous sex with strange, older men. Why would a Homecoming queen who volunteered with Meals on Wheels, and tutored disabled Johnny, act this way? Well, to anyone schooled in recognizing sexual abuse the answer seems obvious. As many as two-thirds of all drug addicts reported that they experienced some sort of childhood abuse. The link between prostitution and incest or sexual abuse has also long been established.

Now this brings us to the question: Who’s at fault for Laura Palmer’s murder? Was it poor Leland or the demon that possessed him?

Moments before his death, Leland confesses his guilt to Agent Cooper:

“Oh God! Laura! I killed her. Oh my God, I killed my daughter. I didn’t know. Forgive me. Oh God. I was just a boy. I saw him in my dream. He said he wanted to play. He opened me and I invited him and he came inside me.”

With fire sprinkler water pouring over him, Leland seems cleansed of his sins. Lynch paints a pretty sympathetic portrait of Leland. He is cursed and tormented rather than murderous and abusive. He is blameless for his actions. Leland gets to go “into the light” while Laura is condemned to the purgatory of the Black Lodge.

In Diane Hume George’s essay Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks she perfectly discusses the problem with Leland’s poignant ending:

“We are instructed regarding how to situate our sympathies and experience our sense of justice. But this is just another clever use of the simplistic formula by which lascivious misogyny is presented in loving detail, […] scapegoating offenders whose punishment casts off the guilt that belongs to an entire culture ethos. And that ethos, both pornographic and thanatopic, not only goes free. It gets validated.”

Things become even more fucked up after Leland’s funeral where people remember him as a victim. Agent Cooper gives Mrs. Palmer some words of comfort:

“Sarah. I think it might help to teII you what happened just before LeIand died. It’s hard to realize here [points to her head] and here [points to her heart] what has transpired. Your husband went so far as to drug you to keep his actions secret. But before he died, LeIand confronted the horror of what he had done to Laura and agonized over the pain he had caused you. LeIand died at peace.”

I’m sorry, but death does not absolve you. Horrible people die and somehow we’re supposed to forget the history of horrible things they have done? We all die. This does not erase our actions, even if you’re a white cis male.

For a minute, let’s forget that BOB is a thing (ESPECIALLY when you consider that most of the town has no knowledge of these spirits and how their worlds work). These people are celebrating the memory of Leland Palmer after (I assume) finding out that he murdered and raped his own daughter (along with Maddy Ferguson and Teresa Banks). Excuse me, is anyone else bothered by how much denial these people are in?

Like many fans, I turned a blind eye, preferring to seek refuge in the myth of Killer BOB and the Black Lodge rather than identify the clear signs of abuse in front of me. As Cooper says: “Harry, is it easier to believe a man would rape and murder his own daughter? Any more comforting?”

While I no longer indulge the BOB theory, I do read BOB as patriarchal oppression. Its truth is one that women (Laura, Maddy, Sarah) see and know too well. Cooper only solves the mystery when he FINALLY believes and listens to a woman. Laura Palmer must whisper in his ear, “My father killed me” for him to finally understand.

M.C. Blakeman writes:

“While he may ultimately let Leland off the hook by claiming he was “possessed” by the paranormal “Bob” the show’s resident evil force, the fact remains that the women of Twin Peaks and of the United States are in more danger from their fathers, husbands and lovers than from maniacal strangers.”

I do believe that Lynch and Frost meant to use BOB as “the evil that men do” and as a means to understand family violence and abuse, but they jump around the issue so much that it only reflects uncertainty. The show’s inability to hold evil men responsible for their actions is too reminiscent of our own society. As soon as we answer “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” the show does its best to rebury the ugly truth that we so struggled to uncover. After that it fully commits to understanding the mythos behind it. This is troubling to me. As one of the most influential shows on television, Twin Peaks created a narrative formula that will forever shape the way this country looks at rape and child abuse. It’s important that as viewers we constantly question this, even if it is disguised as harmless, intellectual programming.

Rhianna Shaheen is a recent graduate from Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Fine Arts and Minor in Film Studies and Art History. Check her out on twitter!

Of Phallic Keys and Ugly Masturbation: Let’s Talk About ‘Mulholland Drive’

That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze ‘Mulholland Drive’ for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.

Written by Katherine Murray as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze Mulholland Drive for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.

Mulholland Drive (2001), more colloquially known as “Mulholland WTF Did I Just Watch?” is a story told in two parts, both of which were written and directed by David Lynch.

In the first part, Laura Harring plays Rita, a woman who escapes attempted murder but ends up with amnesia and doesn’t remember who she is or what’s going on. She stumbles across Betty (Naomi Watts), a plucky go-getter and brilliant actress who’s come to LA to launch her career, and Betty decides to Nancy Drew this thing by helping Rita piece together her identity. Along the way, they discover the body of a woman named Diane, who killed herself, and briefly run across an actress named Camilla who’s cast in a leading role as result of mob-related conspiracies.

Betty and Rita start a sexual relationship and go to a creepy post-modern theatre where everything is a facade. Then, Rita finds a magic blue box, and stuffs a key inside, at which point all of the characters and plot points go through a blender and the story starts again.

This time Naomi Watts is playing Diane, a failed actress who’s in love with her much more successful best friend, Camilla (Laura Harring). Camilla’s dating a man, which makes Diane insanely jealous, and, when she finally can’t take it anymore, she hires a hitman to murder Camilla and then feels guilty and shoots herself.

The most straightforward interpretation of the movie – and therefore, the one I will steadfastly cling to – is that the second story, about Diane and Camilla, is “true,” whereas the first story is a fantasy created by crazy Diane as a way to escape from her pain.

The first story shows Diane’s alter-ego, Betty, as being capable, likable, talented, and charming. She totally kills her first audition (even after being placed in an awkward position by her co-star), she lives in a beautiful apartment (owned by her aunt, who isn’t present), and she has a timeless, youthful appearance that invokes the sense of an earlier era.

Diane’s idealized version of Camilla is Rita, who takes her name from Rita Hayworth, also invoking the sense of an era gone by. In contrast to Betty, Rita is vacant and dependent, constantly deferring to Betty’s judgement and praising Betty’s abilities without offering any ideas of her own. She’s also the one who initiates their sexual relationship, which frees Betty/Diane from having to feel responsible for it.

The first two thirds of the movie, then, is a story about the way things should have been, from Diane’s perspective – the way, perhaps, that she imagined they would be, before her youthful optimism was crushed by the film industry. So, what do we make of the fact that Diane’s such a creepball?

Because, make no mistake, now – Diane is a creepball. She behaves in a way that makes Camilla uncomfortable; she pretends to be Camilla’s friend while simmering with hatred, envy, and jealousy from the sidelines; she has Camilla killed (which is creepball enough); and her ultimate fantasy is one in which Camilla’s not even a person, but rather a prop in a story about how great Diane is. To drive it all home, the second story treats us to a long, ugly scene where Diane angrily cries while she masturbates, because that’s what her life has become. She is president of the Friend Zone, but the lesbian aspect adds an extra layer of discomfort.

The first part of the film, with Betty and Rita, feels uncanny and bizarre, like you’d expect from a David Lynch movie. You’re not going to sit there and think, “My, what a beautiful love story that isn’t unnerving at all,” but there’s a sense in which the lesbian romance is not a big deal. You’re just watching two attractive, basically likable people, with no secret, evil agendas, who decide to get it on. It’s a nice change from the way lesbianism was portrayed as sinister and corrupting in Ye Olde Hollywood – and that change lasts exactly as long as it takes for Rita to stick a key in a box and uncover the truth.

I haven’t checked to see, but I bet there’s a paper out there about what it means that one of the lesbian characters discovers her true identity as a straight woman after sticking that key in the box. I’m just saying. I won’t subject you to that kind of symbol analysis, but I do think it’s significant that, after we’re shown such a nice, cuddly picture of lesbian intimacy – like, almost right after – it turns out that Diane is a creeper who’s destined to wind up alone.

The trope of the lesbian friend who weasels her way into your life while secretly creeping on you is something that’s on the way out, but it still exists. You can see it, for example, in Notes on a Scandal, where Judi Dench pretends to be friends with Cate Blanchett while secretly stealing her hair. Somehow, she ends up looking like more of a creep than the woman who’s having sex with a 15-year-old boy.

The question for Mulholland Drive – and I confess that I don’t know the answer – is whether we’re supposed to see Diane’s situation as being universal to the human condition, or as being specifically wrought by her sexual preference. In other words, is this a story about envy and disappointment – the illusions we hold about ourselves, our regret when we don’t live up to our own expectations, our sense of being duped by the images we grew up watching on TV – or is it a story about how lesbians creep on their straight friends? Is Diane’s desire supposed to be creepy because she objectifies Camilla and wants to strip her of agency – because she feels entitled to have Camilla belong to her in a way that is creepy, regardless of gender – or is her desire creepy because she’s a girl?

I think it’s possible that the answer to all of those questions is, “Yes.” Mulholland Drive is a movie that, in many ways, could be about anyone but that, in being about a lesbian, connotes something different than if Diane were, instead, a straight man (or a woman in love with a man – or any other combination there might be). Notwithstanding recent events, as a culture, we’re much more relaxed about men who want to possess women than we are about women who want to possess. The experience of wanting something that doesn’t want you back is filtered very differently, depending on how much privilege we have, and Diane is rejected in a specifically woebegone, Hollywood lesbian way – a way that is, sadly, in keeping with the golden age of cinema she thinks she wants to resurrect.

That said, Mulholland Drive doesn’t feel like its trying to say something really self-reflexive and insightful about the way lesbians have historically been portrayed in film – it feels more like Diane is just creepy. But her creepiness is only one layer in a multi-faceted approach to character that touches on Big Themes of longing, regret, and self-hatred – so, it’s both. It is both a story about our universal humanity, and how lesbian friends are the worst. Complete with phallic keys and ugly masturbation.

Recommended Reading: After Ellen’s review of Notes on a Scandal, AMC’s blog post: Movie History – Why Are There So Few Lesbian Romance Films With Positive Endings?

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Portrait of the Dead Girl: Victim, Saint, and Enigma of the Crime Narrative

More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family and society.
However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person.

More often than not, the victim of violent crime in film and TV is a woman. With your average procedural, take for instance, Law and Order: SVU, almost every episode features a woman who has been raped or one who has been raped and murdered. In real life, women are disproportionately the victims of violent crimes and these stories increase awareness of the physical and psychological aftermath faced by these women, their friends and family, and society.

However, by positioning a narrative to begin with the victim already dead and voiceless, she is only that, a victim in the story, never allowed to become a person. This structure also creates distance, so the viewer is less likely to identify with the dead girl and feel true fear and sympathy for experiences.

The exploitation of the her person and body is also seen as evidence of sexism in the crime narrative. As in horror movies where the murders of women are more graphic and garner more screen time then those of men, the dead girl usually suffers extreme sexual violence and disfigurement, which are shot it graphic, loving detail. The crime scene or crime scene photographs are frequently shown and her suffering is discussed at length in near fetishistic tones.

Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of Laura, dead and wrapped in plastic

There is an appeal to the public imagination in the image of a beautiful young woman in peril, particularly a young, white women known to be popular among her peers and viewed as sweetly, saintly, and virginal. The much-loved cult TV show, Twin Peaks, originally centered around the investigation of the murder of beautiful, blue-eyed blonde Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and promotion for the series depended on viewers’ investment in the mystery of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” When The Killing premiered in 2011, its advertisements asking, “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” were clearly influenced by Twin Peaks.

Along with the evocative question, the series was known for two iconic images of Laura, the dead girl, that stand in for the show in popular imagination: the homecoming portrait, which shows her rosy cheeked and smiling, and her dead body, fished out of the water wrapped in plastic, shades of gray and blue. The central importance of the portrait, which hangs at Laura’s high school as well as her family home, was inspired for the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura, where a detective fixates on the portrait of a glamorous murdered ad-exec and falls in love with her through it (luckily, it’s a case of mistaken identity and Laura’s not really dead).

Viewers so latched onto the idea of Laura Palmer, that actress Sheryl Lee, originally brought on to appear in a few scenes in the pilot, made reoccurring appearances in flashbacks as Laura and regular appearances as Laura’s look-a-like cousin Maddie Ferguson, as well as starring in the prequel film after the series ended.

In early episodes of the show, it’s suggested that lead investigator FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) has romantic feelings towards her and has a dream/prophetic vision of a seductive Laura, sitting with him in a mysterious red room. At the end of the dream, she whispers in his ear the identity of her killer. Though Cooper forgets what she said upon waking, his eventual memory of her words gives him certainty of her murderer’s identity. A victim of incestuous rape, abuse, and murder at the hands of her father, Leland (with an ancient demonic spirit, BOB, inside him–or something), Laura is allowed the satisfying and cathartic opportunity to name her killer and help to catch him.

In the fantasy of the series, this room is described as a sort of way-station to the afterlife, a refuge between good and evil and a part of the dangerous realm of pure evil, the Black Lodge, that holds onto human souls while demons walk the earth in their bodies, so Cooper’s dream is not in fact a dream, but Laura’s first opportunity to speak for herself. Before her death, she wrote in her secret diary (different from her regular diary) about her dream of this same encounter with Cooper.

After her death, the dead girl’s reputation is often changed according to the flawed Madonna/whore dichotomy and her neighbors, family, and peers come to realize she was not the person they thought she was. In procedurals, boyfriends learn their girlfriends had other lovers, and parents learn their daughters had sex lives. Though it’s rare, sometimes there’s the opposite revelation, as the boyfriend who murdered his girlfriend for cheating learns she was always faithful.

When Laura’s body is found in the series, most people in town know her only as the Homecoming Queen, a model for the perfect American teenage girl. Early on, she shows up in flashbacks and home videos, kidding around with her best friend and smiling lovingly at her boyfriend (himself introduced as the perfect American teenage boy). However, as her murder is investigated, the people of Twin Peaks come to see a darker side of Laura, mired in sex, drugs and a heretofore unknown seedy underbelly of their picturesque little town. As Laura is no longer around, and the abuse she had suffered are originally unknown, her reputation is tarnished in the eyes of many townsfolk and she is unable to give any sort of explanation to the people who would condemn her.

Sheryl Lee also played Laura’s cousin Maddie, who meets a similar fate

The duality of Laura is suggested through the character of dark-haired identical cousin Maddie Ferguson. Maddie is everything Laura was not–innocent, naive and close to her family. While Laura is glamorous and sexual, making coy recordings for her therapist and advertising herself in adult magazines, Maddie is mousy and eager to please. Becoming more like Laura (by ditching her glasses and taking more control of her sexuality) gets Maddie killed as Leland mistakes Maddie for Laura.

Though there are other readings of the duality of Sheryl Lee’s two characters, it is easy to see them as Madonna and whore. Unusually for the trope of identical cousins, where the blonde is commonly presented as good and the brunette as bad, Twin Peaks suggests Maddie is the embodiment of goodness and purity. By contrast, Laura, a victim of rape and abuse, has one foot in darkness and is revealed to have had sex or sexualized dynamics with almost everyone she interacted with.

In addition, Laura questions her own goodness and independently seeks out a therapist to help cope. In her last week alive, she quits her position heading up the Twin Peaks Meals-on-Wheels program, suggesting she has given up on trying to help others. In the prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , it is clear she feels unworthy of salvation, as she tells Donna she believes the angels have abandoned her and she will burn forever. Later on, she watches as angels disappear from a painting in front of her.

This storyline, though suggestive of the self-loathing felt by abuse victims, makes the unfortunate implication that the abuse Laura has suffered has made her a bad person, or at least lesser than Maddie.

Laura realizes she is not a bad person when an angel appears to her in the red room after her death

The film allows Laura to emerge on the other side, in the Black Lodge’s mysterious red room, to see her own angel waiting for her. It ends with her smiling and laughing, assured that being abused did not “corrupt” her or make her undeserving of love, a great relief after watching her suffering throughout the TV series and film.

Focusing on the last week of Laura’s life with her as the main character, Fire Walk With Me has dark undertones of hagiography, the story of the life of a saint, as it revels in her suffering, allowing it to elevate her and cast her as a hero for enduring. It also gives her a chance to speak and show viewers who she was in her private moments, reconciling the two opposing views of her as both a saintly meals-on-wheels volunteer and cocaine-addicted prostitute into a complete person.

Perhaps what endears viewers to the dead girl as a character is our culture’s glorification of female victims, specifically for being tragic and fragile. In an essay at Rookie, Sady Doyle writes, “We love Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic and bright blue, tortured and murdered just as surely as good St. Dymphna.” Accordingly, many dramatic teenage girls look to women like Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe as heroes, not for their achievements but for the glamor and depths they see as going along with pain.

However, the film can also be criticized for its unflinching portrayal of the graphic violence visited on Laura and her friend Ronette Pulaski. They are shown tied up, screaming and bleeding, while they are brutalized for extended sequences. At one point, Laura is forced to look at her face in a mirror while she is raped, suggesting her abuser wants to make it impossible for her to pretend to be anywhere else or that this is not happening to her.

In her last moments, Laura is forced to watch her own abuse

There are a lot of reasons fans of the series disliked Fire Walk With Me; most wanted more time with the kooky inhabitants of Twin Peaks and missed its quirky moments. The film is much darker and more violent then the series and almost entirely lacking in comedy. Though it has David Lynch’s trademark surreal touches, the story at its heart is also much more real. The film forces viewers to try to understand the horror Laura has gone through as a victim of incest and abuse, how the Palmer house has become her own private hell and she has watched her death draw nearer, sure it would come for her soon. With this in mind, the film is harrowing and difficult to watch, but its existence is integral to the understanding of Laura’s character as a developed character and complex human being. The release of a book, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, intended to be the character’s diary discovered on the show, has a similar effect. It was a best seller, particularly remembered among people who were teenage girls at the time of its release.

Fire Walk with Me is often hard to watch due to Laura’s suffering at the hands of her father

The dead girl continues to be popular figure in crime narratives, though some more recent examples have tried to give her a voice in interesting ways. In the TV procedural Cold Case, the murdered character in each episode was shown in flashbacks throughout the episode, following him/her right until the moment of the murder. However, these flashbacks, and those on several other procedurals with similar narrative styles, are the memories of living characters, filtered through their perception of the events, rather than the way things were experienced by the victim. At the end of each Cold Case episode, the dead character’s ghost appears to watch their loved ones, allowing them a slight voice in the narrative, as if set free by the discovery of the killer.

The dead girl’s ghost hovering around postmortem and giving advice on the investigation is a storyline that’s been used on almost every fantasy series, from Buffy to Charmed. Unlike these stories, where the existence of something supernatural is undisputed, crime narratives often use the ghostly figure of the dead girl to suggest the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind. In the first season of Veronica Mars, the titular character’s (Kristen Bell) murdered best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), often appears to her. Like Laura Palmer, Lilly managed to become one of show’s most beloved and enigmatic characters with minimal screen time.

Lilly appears to Veronica in the clothes she was wearing when she died, still bleeding from her head wound

Lilly appears to Veronica to comment on how much she has changed since Lilly’s death, becoming tougher and wiser and to give cryptic hints. In one scene, Veronica sees her out of the corner of her eye, running around the Kane house and leading Veronica to the scene of the crime.

She appears in several flashbacks and at the end of many episodes, in Veronica’s imagining of the murder taking place as she entertains new suspects.

Her appearance is also used as a reward for Veronica after she finally solves Lilly’s murder at the end of the season, when she imagines herself in paradise, lying in a pool full of flowers with Lilly. Lilly’s final appearance is in Veronica’s dream at the end of season 2, as the marker of what Veronica’s life could have been like if she wasn’t murdered. The scene doesn’t successfully give Lilly as voice as it focuses on how Veronica would have been different, not on the tragedy of what Lilly would have been able to experience if she had lived and will now never be able to.

Veronica imagines Lilly set free by the arrest of her killer, allowed to relax in paradise

The posthumous narrator is a rare and interesting devices, used most memorably in American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard, where murdered characters look back on their lives. As it’s already a rare concept, a posthumous female narrator is even more rare. A notable example, The Lovely Bones, focuses on Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan)’s family trying to rebuild after her death, rather than the search for her killer. Her murderer is not caught, either with her ghostly help or without, but is punished only by his own accidental death.

The dead girl is an interesting figure in the landscape of crime fiction–one who can easily become a victim or a caricature. Experiments with flashbacks, fantasy, dreamworlds, and narration are intriguing ways to give her a voice and return some humanity to her and the real life victims she mirrors.

See also on Bitch Flicks:

Hannibal’s Feminist Take on Horror Still Has a High Female Body Count

A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

David Lynch’s "Good" Guy vs. Bad Guy in ‘Blue Velvet’

The director David Lynch likes playing with dichotomies. His director’s fetish is portraying opposite worlds that coexist. He carries us from happy-go-lucky settings to dark depths with embarrassingly sincere dialogue, awkward props and too-blunt-to-be-ignored sound design. When writing about Lynch one must incorporate phrases like “seedy underbelly” and “seemingly pleasant.”

While a world of starkly presented binaries is a great place to explore gender roles, this does not always appeal to audiences and critics.

Roger Ebert, for instance, was not pleased with Lynch’s Blue Velvet. He was particularly disturbed by how Lynch presented the character of a woman experiencing abuse. He felt that the contrast between the absurd and evil lent a disingenuous tone to scenes in the film that should have been poignant.

“Either this material is funny, in which case you don’t take advantage of your stars, or it isn’t funny, in which case it shouldn’t have so much campy and adolescent dialogue along with a really powerful sexual scene,” Ebert said in his review of the film.

Blue Velvet movie poster

His argument is a thoughtful one, but it doesn’t fairly represent the message of the film. It doesn’t look like Lynch is trying to be screwy. He’s not trying to make us laugh at the pain others. Instead it seems he is trying to evoke deep sympathy for the foolish-but-kind characters who use “campy and adolescent dialogue.” If Lynch is manipulating the viewer, it is to turn our cynical snark against us and make us respond empathetically.

Lynch is not a master of a feminist message – and while there are good intentions between each line – we are hung up in prescribed roles and never released. His frustration isn’t with the constructs that create a violent world, but simply with the violence itself.

Blue Velvet, released in 1986, is a surreal noir film about a college boy, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who returns to his cheery suburban hometown to tend to an ailing father. He gets mixed up in the dark and violent aspects of his town after discovering a de-bodied ear. He enters this world at his own volition because of his almost-innocent voyeurism. Jeffrey comes by this dubiously ethical curiosity honestly when his friend and romantic interest Sandy (Laura Dern) says, “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.”

His inappropriate cliché-of-choice response: “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

This is directed at the audience as well. But, we don’t get much of an answer. Lynch portrays Jeffrey as a well-meaning voyeur. But, clearly (and rightfully so), that’s not a culturally accepted characteristic in heroes. Jeffrey treats the discovered ear as if it was an exciting clue instead of evidence to severe criminality. His watching of the following events satiates a selfish desire – however well-meaning.

Through Sandy’s help (her father is the local detective) Jeffrey finds that the ear is somehow connected to a local singer, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). He decides his next step is to break into Dorothy’s apartment to find more clues.

What Jeffrey encounters is ultimately a brutal scene. His detective adventure swiftly plunges into twisted horror. He doesn’t panic, though, but just takes it in.

Dorothy first finds Jeffrey hiding in her closet and assumes – reasonably – that he was spying on her undressing. She turns the male gaze back on him by making him undress. This is not a moment of female empowerment – nor is it really the living-out of a male fantasy. Instead it is the disturbing result of naïve curiosity clashing with Dorothy’s own sexual dysfunction and delusion. She is masochistic. But Jeffrey views his subsequent sexual interaction with her as an expression of his caring for her. This mismatch in attitudes makes for clumsy moments with troubling demonstrations of affection. Jeffrey never consents to undressing, so their initial meeting and introduction to their sexual relationship is even more unsettling.

Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet

After this brief encounter, we meet Frank (Dennis Hopper). He knocks on the door and Dorothy rushes Jeffrey into the closet. Frank threatens, abuses and manipulates Dorothy. He has kidnapped her husband and child as a way force her to be sexually compliant. Jeffrey watches as Frank slaps, pokes and mounts Dorothy.

Jeffrey regularly visits Dorothy after the first night, and while maintaining a boyish tone and outward sweetness, ends up slapping Dorothy somewhat in response to her request. It’s “somewhat” because while she begs him to hit her, he doesn’t seem to do so because she asks, but because he is angry at her asking. Because he spends his nights in the ugly side of the world, he has taken on hateful aspects of it. He has seen Frank’s violence and has unwillingly absorbed it. It the morning, as he wakes up in his childhood bed, Jeffrey cries remorsefully. The evil he saw in Frank had changed him.

Frank is the hyper-violent and dominating side of masculinity. Dorothy was forced to be a submissive woman, broken and tormented by being used as a sexual object. Jeffrey and Sandy instead fit into gender roles in a sunny and nostalgic way. Jeffrey is Hardy Boys curious; amiable, but also direct and flirty. Sandy is kind, demure and willing to play a support role to her male lead. They meet their dark and brutal alternatives in Dorothy and Frank.

A particularly controversial scene takes place when Sandy meets Dorothy. Sandy and Jeffrey return from a date and stumble upon Dorothy walking slowly through the neighborhood – arms outstretched – naked. She has bruises on her body and her face is blank. Sandy’s old boyfriend, who had been jealously chasing the couple, retreats and begins apologizing as Dorothy collapses in Jeffrey’s arms.

Ebert said about this scene: “[Lynch] asked Isabella Rossellini to be undressed and humiliated on the screen as few actresses ever have been, certainly in non-porno roles… That’s painful for me to see a woman treated like that and I want to know that if I’m feeling that pain it’s for a reason that the movie has other than to simply cause pain to her.”

He said that because of the “smarmy” dialogue, it was unfair to include such provocative scenes.

Ebert had a point in that provocative imagery should not be used simply for shock value. But, juxtaposing hilarity and tragedy does not necessarily trivialize violence. When using violence and sex, directors should be wary of gratuity and insensitivity. But, this scene forced us into awareness. We can’t choose a tragedy one day and a comedy on the other in Lynch’s world (or the real one). We can’t chose nostalgic gender roles one day, and violent destructive the other. We have to accept that these things feed into each other. We have to address the destructive aspects.

While Lynch isn’t necessarily challenging prescribed roles, he is challenging our perception of them and the resulting violence. He forces us to acknowledge the ugly side. And then also presents us with surprisingly poignant absurdity. The campiness in Blue Velvet isn’t cruel, but touching. These worlds do coexist and it is funny and heartbreaking and beautiful and ugly.

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Erin Fenner grew up in small-town Idaho where she took solace in cult cinema. Her burgeoning feminist ideals didn’t dampen her enjoyment in viewing even the most obviously gender-norm-dependent films, but created another angle of intrigue. She went to the University of Idaho where she nabbed a Journalism degree. There she was a student blogger, radio show producer and self-described feminist activist. Now she lives in Portland, Oregon, and works remotely for the reproductive rights organization Trust Women where she writes about the state of pro-choice politics for their blog. She also says she is a poet, but refuses to publish, perform or share lest someone offer constructive critiques.

Guest Writer Wednesday: A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Welcome to Twin Peaks.

This is a guest post by Cynthia Arrieu-King and Stephanie Cawley.

Cynthia’s take:

Why do I like Twin Peaks?

I remember dialing through Netflix Streaming back in May of this year as a way of breaking up the cooking of several chopping-intensive dishes. The show was totally unappealing to me when it came out and I was in high school. But this year, for the first three episodes or so, I could take it or leave it: adultery and hysterics and murder with the occasional bright spots of Dale Cooper being absurdly smug about the quality of cherry pie.

Slowly I paid more attention to the idea of intuition present in Cooper’s scenes. I felt more indifference about its postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities: fifties diners, women who all wear bright lipstick and clingy sweaters, a revolving door of high school types, baddies and inscrutable parents.

Then, I saw the clip in which Agent Cooper dreams he is old, a little person talks to him backwards in a red room (redrum! redrum!) as does Laura Palmer who then whispers the name of her killer in his ear.

What.

And by the light of the next day, Cooper makes everyone go out in the middle of the woods, whispers the name of each murder suspect to a successive series of rocks in his hand and well, I’m not going to say more, but I was like what kind of bizarre Jungian Joseph Campbell version of the Trickster versus the Intuition is going on here?

I love these parts but the over-the-top violence constantly involving the women characters wore on me. Because even as satire, Twin Peaks always asks you to recognize that if not at that moment, you once felt real emotion for characters like this, you fell for it, and it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes, then splashing the cold water of flip logic and optimism in your face.

And over and over until about the beginning of the second season, I felt an edge of incredulity in myself: How could this have been on network television? How in the world did this happen?

What did you like about it Stephanie?

Stephanie’s take:

What do I like about Twin Peaks? The Log Lady, the stoplight, the giant and the room service guy who brings Cooper his milk, every second of Angelo Badalamenti’s walking double bass, when Lucy says, “most of his behavior was asinine,” Ben and Jerry Horn stuffing their faces full of brie sandwiches, Audrey Horn’s saddle shoes, Nadine’s glorious silent drape runners, my unflagging belief in Agent Cooper. So many strange, wonderful things to marvel at in this show! You hit some of my favorite scenes, and the scenes that most stuck out to me on my second time through the show: the donut table at the stone-throwing divination and the first dream in the Black Lodge.

What I love about Twin Peaks, and Lynch in general, is his strange intensity and earnestness. What you called “postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities” I actually see as Lynch making some kind of weirdly authentic invocation of the past or a spiritual core of America through the kitschy trappings of Twin Peaks. I don’t think that Lynch sees cherry pie and creamed corn and prom queens as truly “good” or the “true America,” the way that politicians might conjure apple pie and pick-up trucks to signify some idealized version of America. But I think Lynch uses these images and stock characters as potent cultural symbols that he can shuffle and reconfigure, but that carry strong psychological and cultural associations. As you said, I think that Lynch really is trying to wrestle with good and evil with Twin Peaks, using these cultural signifiers, and this is something I kind of love about it, even if it gets messy and maybe fails at making any kind of coherent statement.

Though it seems strange to say, another thing that I like about Twin Peaks is that the violence is actually visceral and horrible. Lynch takes these symbols, especially the prom queen girl-next-door All-American sweetheart and perverts them to the extreme. As you say, “it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes,” though I would also argue that the violence is of a very different quality from so much other violence in contemporary movies or TV shows.

Violence in Twin Peaks is delivered in a way that is emotional and intense, not so much about cheap bait-and-switch jumpiness or the porno gore splatter, but the horror of the moment of the attack. The horror of violence as an action, as a depraved tunnel that swallows up everything we like about the world. We get so much of humanity being bright and good in Twin Peaks—Cooper, Harry, Andy, Lucy, etc.—but we are also forced to witness and even participate in the spectacle of unspeakable violence.

(Spoiler alert) The scene when Leland/Bob kills Maddy is one of the most intense sequences I’ve ever seen on little or big screen. The clicking of the record player, Sarah Palmer’s bony hands, the glare of the lights as Maddy and Leland/Bob wrestle, their slow-mo distorted voices. My stomach is clenching just thinking about it. This scene is vivid and visceral, very different from the many horror movies or TV crime shows in which bodies, especially women’s bodies, are violated and disposed of with ease, with almost a wink to the viewer. I think that through scenes like this Lynch forces the viewers to confront violence in a serious way and thus to identify more thoroughly with its victims.

Of course, the victims are mostly women. In fact, violence against women is literally at the core of Twin Peaks. I’m not sure what my question to you is, but this is the thing I am trying to figure out—what to say about all the dead and victimized women?

Cynthia’s take:

What to say. What to say. So much victimization. So many women! I agree that Maddy’s murder is the worst violence I’ve ever seen in television or a movie. And I agree that it’s at the core of the story, and different in its tone than almost any other kind of violence against women in television. There’s no wink, as you say. But I think I read the good and evil in a different way than you do and the more I talk to people about Twin Peaks, the more it feels as if the show’s violence gets taken several ways depending on the viewer.

I like all the good characters, so to speak, they are bright, but they don’t risk pure earnestness. They all have a crazy quirk to balance out the sincerity. Nadine’s insane eye-patch and youth. Andy’s inappropriate weeping. Cooper’s hanging upside down in his gravity boots while he dictates notes. It could be delight in life, it could be Lynch’s wish to burden us with quippy or awful silences. I can’t help but like this, but at the same time, it’s part of a problematic equation: The killer gets to say, “It was Bob who made me do it,” and can say he’s not responsible for any of this violence. Oops, he didn’t mean it, and in the world of demon possession, well, he’s telling the truth. No one is responsible for the murder of women. We dads just can’t help it and we’re inconsolable too.

I read this scene when the killer is in prison as a way for Lynch to be responsible, to critique this hands-off, “the devil made me do it” stance so prevalent in the way America does, well, everything. In a system of good and evil, it’s powerful that this (spoiler alert) is the close relative of the murder victim. But then my friend Kyle Thompson said, “No, no, no, it’s an apology, it’s not a critique.”

And I would say that he, as a man, may have a way of reading all of these shuffled signs (I love that you said that) in a way we do not and could not.

Since it is pretty much the worst violence, the most operatic violence towards women I’ve ever seen, in the end I suppose all the dead and victimized women are the thing that kept me from not entirely liking the show up until I realized the show was about intuition, good and evil as you said in a way nothing else was. Twin Peaks flies in the face of our culture in so many ways it’s hard not to want to go apologist for Lynch’s apology. Which isn’t where I want to be. You’re right, it doesn’t have the kind of moral note that stems from sentimentalizing those we oppress – the wink – another-body-in-the-bank-attitude. It’s not network television crime show violence, though I feel it has some hem of magazine shows about murdered women in it, the way it wants to invoke gossip and pity with an old trope, familiar people, manufactured sensationalism. What’s important to me is that Lynch is saying, this is what it looks like close up.

I’ve met so many people who feel this is the best thing they ever saw on television. How accessible do you think the satiric aspect is for yourself or for anyone? Like Mad Men, I wondered if Twin Peaks re-inscribed racist/sexist notions until it started simultaneously to treat violence as serious and mocking us and soap opera for how enthralled we are by story.

It’s the 20th anniversary of Twin Peaks. Why does it still work?

Stephanie’s take:

I am really not sure about how accessible the satiric aspect of Twin Peaks is to today’s viewers, myself included, because of the current TV/media climate. So much TV today, especially reality TV, has this bizarre tone that is slightly self-mocking but is simultaneously dead serious about its extravagance. This is actually kind of similar to the tone of Twin Peaks, but I don’t think it’s that intentional or meaningful today. And I don’t even know if the general audience reads this kind of tone as satire, or as a particular form of humor, or if they just read it straight. After all, there are apparently conservatives who seriously believe Stephen Colbert is on their side, and there is a website of screencaps of people posting The Onion articles on Facebook and commenting as if they were serious news. And I sometimes find myself having to explain to my high school-aged students that the word “literally” does not mean “figuratively.” What I’m saying is basically that I don’t really know, but that today’s viewers might either be better or worse equipped to navigate the slippery nature of Twin Peaks, I just don’t know which!

I think you’re definitely right that Twin Peaks is wide open for many interpretations, and I want to be able to read the killer revelation as a critique, but I just don’t think that it is. I similarly want to be able to read all the gender imbalance in the Twin Peaks landscape as a critique because I really do love so much about it, but I just can’t find enough to back me up on that reading at all. I just don’t think Lynch was thinking about gender that seriously.

We have both admitted to fondness for the more fringe female characters like the Log Lady, Nadine, and Lucy, but they, and all the other women, really only exist according to their relationships with men. We find out the Log Lady, holder of mystical truths and wearer of incredible flannels, is a kind of Miss Havesham, that she only is the way she is because her husband died on their wedding night. Similarly, Nadine is the way she is—batty and amnesiac and eye-patched—because of husband Ed. And all of Lucy’s energy gets sucked up into a boring pregnancy and paternity subplot, though her pluckiness does seem to exist regardless of her poor taste in men-who-are-not-Andy.

And the list continues. Audrey’s character arc consists of her moving from virgin with daddy issues to non-virgin with slightly different daddy issues. Donna does some intrepid sleuth-work, but spends most of her time dealing with her sappy relationship with James. Maybe only Katherine can be said to have a personality and take actions that are not based around her relationships with men, but her wiliness really depends on her ability to use sex as a form of manipulation.

Meanwhile, Agent Cooper and Harry and Ed get to go out and fight for all that is righteous (though they also all have love lives), and Windham Earl and Leo and Ben Horn get to be menacing and threatening and powerful. Even Leland gets to be infected by demons at least! I would like it so much if any of the female characters were at least worthy of demon possession.

At the risk of sounding like feminist criticism is about score-keeping or, as you said, playing apologist for Lynch, I think I could sort of “forgive” the horrific violence against women if the women characters were actually fully drawn and able to participate in the storylines in an equal way to the men. Since you bring it up, I think this is how Mad Men succeeds (though not with regards to its handling of race, ugh) in depicting a brutally sexist world and some seriously misogynistic characters in a way that is not sexist or misogynistic itself.

That said, I still pretty much love Twin Peaks. My boyfriend and I affectionately dubbed our apartment “The Great Lodge” because it has 70s wood-paneled walls, a fireplace, and is surrounded by pine trees. The Log Lady was my Facebook profile picture for a while. But fangirlishness aside, I’ve watched a lot of TV shows and I’m hard pressed to think of any that are as interesting and strange and ambitious as Twin Peaks.

But I think part of its allure is also in its unfinished-ness. Shows that are canceled unjustly in the eyes of their fans gain a kind of cult following and fervor they might not otherwise have if they were allowed to run their course and possibly collapse or devolve into sloppiness or repetition. Many of these shows, Twin Peaks included, are legitimately brilliant, but still benefit from the extra glory that our culture loves to tack on to things (or people!) that come to an untimely end. So, when we think about Twin Peaks, we necessarily think of the disappointing and horrifying and thrilling lack of closure at its end.

Cynthia’s take:

I can’t believe there’s five years of Mad Men and only two of Twin Peaks. Argh.

I like what you’re saying about the degree of gender critique in Lynch. It’s kind of like when my former classmate Kirk Boyle saw Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch and couldn’t read the cultural critique in it – Is it about Clinton? he asked me once. I was struck by how we can look for these systems of meaning out of habit and it makes me wonder right this second if there’s some blind spot in this. It seemed the movie was about a good death, lawlessness in the American vein, and immortality and that can be undetectable to an eye looking for allegory. Maybe allegory is the case here.

I agree with you about the little power of the women in this show, their silly or violent struggle. But I’m not on the same page with you about Audrey Horne. She does some pretty unbelievably audacious moral acts. She looks for Laura’s killer when in fact she had no deep friendship with Laura. She just knows something’s afoot with her father and the murder so she sleuths her way into being hired at the brothel—looking pretty fierce until the moment her father knocks at her door and she’s in a teddy ready for sex work. And doing better work in some ways than Cooper. She takes over her dad’s business by sheer will, but not after clearing out the entire meeting of Scandinavian investors by moping slyly about her sadness at the violence. She liked undermining her dad so that he would pay attention to her power, and in the end saved his business (and notably, threw off Bobby’s advances so matter-of-factly). To me she represents an m.o. something like, “We’re all playing a role in a power-play; at least I’m choosing my role and making it work for me.”

I guess my final word on the series would be that I like how Lynch holds a serious mirror up to our faces about how much we look for the violence and what it really is like. What’s your final read?

Stephanie’s take:

I still haven’t seen Dead Man and I feel like you’ve mentioned it to me before! In my queue. Anyway.

I do think I was being a bit reductive in my characterization of Audrey. She is one of my favorite characters and that scene in the brothel is one of the most unsettling scenes of the show (and on a show that is deeply unsettling so often, that is saying something). I guess I’m just a little hung up on what happens with her storyline with the rich guy in the late second season. But I think I’d prefer to pretend that much of what happens in the late second season doesn’t really happen.

To me, one of the testaments to Twin Peaks‘ greatness is that we’ve had this long exchange about it and could probably still keep going. More than once, I have found myself writing in big, aimless circles when trying to articulate what I think. The show can be read so many different ways, and as you’ve noted, it seems that everyone can bring their own particular interests and concerns to bear upon the show. It fails to resolve neatly, but I think this is what makes it so intriguing, so worth watching and then talking about. For all the interesting, quality TV shows we get to watch today, there is still nothing, to me, that is quite like Twin Peaks.

My last words on Twin Peaks? Everyone should watch it and then invite me to Twin Peaks-themed murder-mystery dinner parties. I’ll bring the cherry pie.

Cynthia Arrieu-King lives near Atlantic City but her cat Kenny lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes poetry and grades a lot of papers. On Sundays at 11AM you can hear her and Stockton students Jenna McCoy and Laura Alexander do a talk show about local and visiting writers,The Last Word, at WLFR FM Lake Fred Radio wlfr.fm.

Stephanie Cawley lives in Philadelphia with her cat, Vincent van Gogh. She writes poetry and reads a lot of comics.