David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, has died. His death at 78 comes after a short but intense battle with emphysema, diagnosed late last year and undoubtedly the result of eight decades of constant smoking, often straight into the camera during one of his daily weather updates. A musician and visual artist, he was a film director first and foremost. David Lynch’s body of work contains more quality per square minute than most far more prolific creators. I’m no expert in film (or any medium, for that matter), but the place I see his impact is in my favourite lane, long form TV drama.
Simply put, if you like your flavours spicy and your TV shows deep or dark, your favourite TV show didn’t happen without Twin Peaks.
There will always be debate about where the golden age of television started. The conversation always starts with HBO in the late 90s, the studio of studios, showing most obviously a willingness to push the broadcast boundaries of sex and violence but much more importantly a willingness to deliver a depth of writing and characterisation that had previously been the domain of cinema. David Chase’s Sopranos usually gets the early consenseus, thanks in no small part to its occasional willingness to use dreams to tell the story (and in one episode, to be the entire story), which couldn’t have happened ahead of Twin Peaks’ red room scenes as early as season 1.

Of course, as soon as you say Sopranos, someone will counter with David Simon’s The Wire, a tale of the inevitable destruction of the individual by institutions within the living, churning cell that is a 21st century American city.
Some other skinny, bearded dad of a certain age will interject with a classic “well actually” and point out that Oz predates both by a couple of years, introducing us to the ensemble cast while retaining most of the mechanics of a weekly-instalment soap opera. Oz, however, drove forward the graphic extremes without really pushing any limits on depth of writing or real emotional connection to the characters. Sopranos was the great leap forward, and nothing mattered before that.

Of course, I wasn’t satisfied to start television history from half way through my own life, so i started gonig further back. In all honesty, it gets very difficult to find good eating before 9/11 having been on a HBO diet since then, but a few spots shone. The early signs of a deeper point being made by MASH, amidst the benny hill-esque nurse chasing and eyebrow gags that have aged like sour milk. Hill Street Blues, with its challenging, natural dialgoue pattern of characters speaking carelessly over each other and at the same time. Sure, Altman has a hand in this with works like Nashville, but the fluidity of language employed by Davild Milch , later of Deadwood fame (there’s that HBO golden run again) , pointed to a writer that would realise his potential to a far greater degree when the right time came along.
The toughest place to find something special from the Before Time was the late 80s and early 90s. The media landscape seems to have been dominated by musclebound morons with increasingly large guns, which is fine if it’s popcorn you’re after, but I was on the hunt for hidden caviar. The other trope of the time, smart-alec boy aged 9-13 with a host of one liner catchphrases verbally shat directly into the audience’s face with nary a hint of a fourth wall (John Connor, Bart Simpson, Kevin McAllister – blindfolds please), is incredibly hard to stomach for anyone that isnt both a boy of that age and in that time, further thinning the field. Strangely, amidst all the plastic Mattel noise, the batman animated series of the 90s was a rare gem of darker and higher stakes drama than most of the drama. It was largely, however, an absolute wasteland for anything that could indicate hope for the decade to come.

Except for Twin Peaks.
On the outside, a short tv series about a homecoming queen being murdered in a small american town, frequently lampooned and referenced in other shows. Once you get into it, it’s a melodramatically performed tale of the supernatural, exploring themes as wide and intense as any show that came later. It’s also a telenovella about the interweaving romantic entaglements of the town. It’s also a deconstruction of the state of TV at the time. It’s also the birthplace of a mythos that demanded not just a prequel movie but also a third series made 25 years later with all the outward trappings and ingrained quality of a HBO golden age show. Twin Peaks is like watching a musician play three instruments at once, flittering wildly between film noir, soap opera, paranormal horror and even a musical at times. The acting, while heavily stylised, is absolutely necessary for Lynch’s style of portraying human emotion. Think Freddy Mercury at a time when most drama desperately wanted to be Leonard Cohen.
I could wax eternal about the meaning of Twin Peaks. Maybe it’s a 3 part parody of the dominant style of tv or movie of the time. Maybe it’s a criticism of the glamourisation of violence against women, as almost all Lynch’s work could be read as. Maybe it’s a literal allegory for TV, with the show being a show that’s aware of itself and all the characters gradually realise=ing this (usually facing reflective surfaces).

Maybe it’s the auteur indulging himself by realising his erratically zig-zagging ideas, and the meaning comes from the interpretation of the audience. Maybe it’s all of these things at once, with a hell of a questions left not unanswered (I see you, Damon Lindelof’s LOST) and instead left for the audience themselves to answer. Giving us the credit to realise that the meaning in art comes from ourselves as well as the artist, strengthening the link between writer and audience further than the barrier of condescension that explicit spoon-feeding fosters.
Because ultimately, Lynch chose to trust us. Where many others spell out the explanation, moving at the slowest possible intellectual speed to allow everyone to catch up, Lynch chose instead to tell only the parts of stories he wanted to tell. “The clues are all there”. He left it to us to decipher – or more accurately, decide – what was meant by all the spaces between the scenes, pauses between the shots. And yes, there was timeline fuckery, and bizarre demonic forces, and self-insertion. But there were also things like the core of a nucelear explosion to a Penderecki soundtrack, or the greatest rug-pull ending of all time (until a screen went black and we all stopped believing), or the absolute satirical fan anti-service of Dougie Jones. Taking it all as merely an array of weird shit that happened would be a brutal mistake, as this show works on more levels than most shows have episodes. Lynch not only refused to spell out his motives on the screen, but in interviews, frequently touting the value of mystery being killed by the need for answers.
And yet it disappeared, in a hail of company drama and low ratings (albeit with one of the most mentally magnetic cliffhanger endigs ever made), followed up with a movie that was absolutely critically panned on launch because while the audience wanted closure on twin peaks, they got a prequel instead. In retrospect, it feels like Lynch was doing his best to turn off the people that were missing the point by demanding closure and resolution. In 2017, Twin Peaks returned for a slow moving, bizarre, 18 hour marathon of a show that once again drove away most of iuts audience after episode one. By the end, Lynch had once again crafted a masterpiece, but this time substituting the soap opera of the 90s for the GrittyEdgyDark™ top drawer drama of the 2000s. That this scene, of Laura Palmer once again a vehicle for and victim of the female trauma on TV, and Agent Dale Cooper – the best version of the audience – realising his/our insistence on dragging the past around is the unwitting cause of all the inevitable pain inflicted on her, would be Lynch’s last creation in TV or film is perfectly fitting.

Sopranos, and those great dream episodes. LOST, and its normalisation of truly wobbled timelines. Lindelof’s far superior Leftovers, and its brash rejection of resolution. Every single time you enjoy that moment of interpretation or deduction instead of mere absorption? Thank Lynch. He was the first prime-time showrunner that took us seriously enough not to colour in his own picture, not to explain his own lyrics, not to dumb down his own message. And he did it so flawlessly that the forces of capitalism coudln’t help but be dragged along by the sheer creative willpower of The Dreamer. His fearless ability to marry the surreal realm of human emotion with commercial viability and hollywood mainstream acceptance won’t be seen again.
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