Television
This soap won't wash
Martyn Harris
Idislike director David Lynch so I had been looking forward to getting the knives out for Twin Peaks (BBC 2, 9 p.m., Tuesday). Lynch's films, such as Eraser- head, Blue Velvet and the latest, Wild at Heart, are stuffed with the clichés of what passes for avant-garde in the United States: grinding musical backing tracks; tricky camera angles; images of sexual disgust and the kind of whimsically incon- sequential behaviour which Americans mistake for intellectual depth. The first episode of Twin Peaks had all of these, but also managed to be watchable in a remorseless, knee-in-the-chest kind of Way. It opened to the sawing of bass cello strings and the grinding of teeth on a circular log-slicing blade. Mountain tops brooded over misty Douglas firs; there were wet roads, white picket fences and declining sawmills. This was small-town America, where nothing ever happens, so naturally it was only seconds before the first corpse appeared: the drowned body of high school queen Laura Palmer, fetching- ly clad in plastic sheet and with a dab of blue lip-rouge. Laura was 17, virginally pretty and wildly popular, so once again, under Lynch-law, it was inevitable she should be I swiftly suspected of drug addiction, sexual deviancy and extortion. Clues to the mur- der began to pile up fast in the shape of safe deposit keys, porn magazines, coke sachets and enigmatic videos, but not so fast as fresh victims and fresh suspects. Sheriff Harry S. Truman (yes!) spent the morning pondering ponderously while de- puty sheriff Andy burst into tears over each new corpse. But riding to the rescue was clean-cut FBI agent Dale Cooper who drove into town a few hours after the murder and a few seconds after his chin, ruminating into a pocket recorder upon such recondite matters as cherry pie and snowshoe rabbits. Dressed like Napoleon Solo in The Man From Uncle, the FBI man talked as if he was addressing a tape recorder even when he wasn't. Stopping the sheriff in a hallway he remarked: 'Sheriff, let me stop you here 11 this hallway.' Holding in his hand a small 'lux of chocolate bunnies he commented D,truthfully, 'I am holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.'
.. The cello strings sawed relentlessly, and the sound track was laden with the suck
and click and wheeze of respiration, as if everyone in Twin Peaks had a microphone implant in their lips. And in case porten- tousness should ever flag, Lynch's camera spent a lot of time inspecting banister rails, ceiling fans, traffic lights and empty corri- dors. Meaningless detail was loaded with false significance, and dramatic scenes were just as regularly deflated. At the tense stakeout scene Cooper asked Tru- man if he knew why he was whittling a stick.
`No, why are you whittling that stick?'
`Because that's what you do in a town where the yellow light means slow down, not speed up.'
Lynch has set out, apparently, to reveal `the unspeakable filth behind the picket fence'; to create a Peyton Place for the Nineties; to subvert the soap-opera genre; but he has chosen a barn door-sized target. What I want to know is why are there only bad soaps at one end of the spectrum, and parodies of bad soaps at the other. Wouldn't the real challenge be to make a good soap in the first place? For all its calculated cultishness Twin Peaks will have to speed up soon.
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