Over the last few days, the internet has, of course, got very excited about the announcement that a new series of Twin Peaks, co-written and entirely directed by David Lynch, is to be released next year. This news raises a lot of questions: Will Dale Cooper still be possessed by BOB, or will he have managed to shake him off in the past 25 years? Will Sherilyn Fenn return, despite Audrey Horne apparently meeting her demise in a massive explosion at the end of season two? Will Harry Goaz still be able to pull of the role of bumbling Deputy Andy Brennan now that he looks like a hard-bitten badass? More important than all such speculation, however, is the fact that the news marks a welcome return to the moving image for an artist who, in the interim between now and the release of his magisterial last feature INLAND EMPIRE, has largely concerned himself with other creative pursuits. These endeavours have included painting, photography, music, and, most recently, designing luxury sportswear. However, in none of these disciplines, not even the latter, has Lynch achieved the artistic success he has attained with visual storytelling.
In my book Good Day Today, I argue that the brilliance of David Lynch’s film work lies in its unique ability to shake up its viewer using nothing but the visual rhetoric you're already used to. Countless accounts of his movies refer to their otherworldliness, as if they were completely without precedence. Yet, if you freeze-frame one of his works at any given point, more often than not the shot could readily have been taken from a conventional Hollywood film. The enigmatic nature of Lynch’s filmmaking is not so much due to radically innovation. Instead, the power of a film such as Mulholland Drive lies in the way in which Lynch uses otherwise commonplace cinematic devices for unusual effect. In short, Lynch’s work is properly uncanny, in the sense of being both familiar and unfamiliar.
This is nowhere more evident than in Twin Peaks, because many episodes were not directed by Lynch. Watching episodes for which he was at the helm, alongside episodes which he didn’t direct, gives us a chance to compare his and others’ treatment of very similar material, and think about the idiosyncrasies of Lynch’s directorial style. As I show in Good Day Today, one such comparison can be made between the use of sustained close-ups in, respectively, an episode entitled ‘Coma’, directed by Lynch, and an episode entitled ‘Laura’s Secret Diary’, directed by Todd Holland. In 'Coma', Shelly Johnson (Madchen Amick) is visiting her comatose husband Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re) in hospital, and learns from Dr. Hayward (Warren Frost) that the wounds sustained by Leo have left him in a coma. She bursts into tears, and is guided from the room by Dr. Hayward. As this happens, the camera begins a gradual zoom into the reflection of Leo in the mirror over the operating table, accompanied by an insidious drone. This zoom continues until the mirror almost fills the frame, and the shot is then held in close-up for a matter of seconds. This close-up is not employed to hammer home a revelation or a plot twist; nothing more happens in a narrative sense. However, the unease or tension which would usually accompany such a development remains.
In ‘Laura’s Secret Diary’, on the other hand, there is a scene in which Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) confronts his lover Josie Packard (Joan Chen) about her suspicious activities. She acts shocked and upset, and they begin to kiss on a sofa beneath a window with open blinds. As this happens, the camera zooms into the action similarly as in the last shot from the scene in ‘Coma’. The zoom, however, becomes a tilt, and ends at the window. Outside lightning illuminates the figure of Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) disguised as a Japanese businessman. This sustained close-up is certainly not played out for its own sake. Instead, contrary to the exact same technique in ‘Coma’, it is 100% used to provide information to the viewer. It is fortunate that Holland (or, for that matter, Caleb Deschanel or Diane Keaton) won’t be given the reigns for any of the upcoming episodes of Twin Peaks, so we can look forward to being profoundly disoriented by moving images again, after an almost decade-long drought of such offerings from Lynch.
However, it's not entirely true that Lynch has taken so long a break from making this kind of work. Instead, during every so-called hiatus from filmmaking, Lynch has consistently produced commercials.
Sometimes these are fanfared, such as when he made a promo for Dior. Other times these projects are less widely reported, for example in the case of his advert for Barilla pasta starring Gerard Depardieu.
Falling into the latter category, are a series of Japanese commercials made in the early ‘90s, in which much of the cast of Twin Peaks reprise their roles on sets replicating those of the TV show, in order to flog a brand of canned coffee named High Quality Georgia.
It's not always a case of Lynch taking-the-money-and-running. In some instances Lynch has used commercial commissions as opportunities to make some of his most bizarre work yet, such as an advert for Parisienne cigarettes which has nothing whatsoever to do with Parisienne cigarettes. This was not the case in terms of the Twin Peaks coffee commercials, though.
In these 30-second TV spots, Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is accompanied by a Japanese man named Ken, who may or may not be a fellow officer of the law, in pursuit of a missing Japanese girl. At some point in all of them, Cooper will announce his love for canned Georgia coffee enthusiastically – and kind of rudely, since another character is usually in the process of preparing him a coffee in the old-fashioned, non-sterilized way. In the original series, Dale Cooper’s declared love for coffee is another example of Lynch shaking up the viewer. Cooper’s endearing eagerness seems out of place, not only in terms of the grisly occurrences during the series, but also because it's just filter coffee.
In the Twin Peaks coffee commercials however, the reason for Cooper’s enthusiasm for coffee isn't ambiguous at all. Instead, it is clearly disingenuous acclaim of a product in return for cash. Similarly, the only (comparatively) sustained close-ups are cutaways to said product. It is disappointing and odd that, even if High Quality Georgia Coffee drove a dump truck of money to his door, someone who is avowedly as much of a coffee aficionado as Lynch would promote a product which almost certainly does not ‘taste as good and rich as any cup of coffee’, as Cooper asserts in each of the commercials. Lynch has admitted to drinking up thirty cups of coffee a day, and even has his own brand of the stuff, called David Lynch Signature Cup. Reassuringly, however, when he made an online commercial to promote this coffee more recently, it was really unsettling and weird, but at the same time very comforting and familiar, like all of his best work.
Daniel Neofetou is a writer and filmmaker. His book 'Good Day Today' is out now via Zero Books.
