Non-Exist-ENT
Clocking in at a robust thirty-three minutes of airtime out of the roughly ten hours we've been back in Twin Peaks so far, the Roadhouse is a major presence in The Return. Its outsized role in the new series, however, is far from universally appreciated, both in the sense of being liked, on the one hand, and--as I shall argue here--in the sense of being understood, on the other. Along with the slow pace of the "Cooper in Vegas" narrative and the demanding abstractions of Parts Three (Cooper's journey back to Earth) and Eight (the atomic blast at White Sands), the prominence of the Roadhouse and the precious time allotted to the songs performed therein is one of the most carped-about aspects of the new series. The carping reached a crescendo this week after Part Ten ended with a Roadhouse juggernaut--Rebekah Del Rio's seven-minute performance of "No Stars"--in a comparatively short episode (just over 54 minutes) that many hoped would grace us with Special Agent Dale Cooper's long-awaited awakening from somnambulance in Vegas or at least a first appearance of the much-beloved Audrey Horne. The three most common complaints one hears about the Roadhouse are that (1) it's too commercial ("What is Lynch doing carrying water for hipster bands?!"), (2) it's not my kind of music ("I don't really like these songs and it's a pain to sit through them!"), and--one suspects, most importantly--(3) it's a waste of precious time ("Why are we languishing away with Rebekah Del Rio for seven minutes when we haven't seen the old Coop or Audrey yet?!"). I sympathize with folks who have lodged these complaints. The Roadhouse does seem a bit like a band showcase at times. I don't personally love all the songs (though I do confess to loving some of them). And knowing from recent experience how much action Lynch and Frost can pack into thirty-three minutes, it's hard to resist weighing the opportunity cost of Roadhouse performances in lost nostalgia for Coop and Audrey and Big Ed's Gas Farm and pie. Notwithstanding my sympathy for these complaints, however, I think they all misfire. In what follows, I'll explain why I think these complaints are misguided, briefly sketch what I take to be a more productive way to engage the Roadhouse scenes, and set up a therapeutic exercise that might help viewers--Roadhouse lovers and haters alike--to make the most of what these scenes have to offer. The complaint that the Roadhouse scenes are a glorified form of hipster-friendly product placement, while tempting at a time when twee-loving culture vultures are the new yuppies, is fundamentally out of step with Lynch's aesthetic. Heineken and Pabst wars in Blue Velvet notwithstanding, Lynch famously abhors the trend toward using films as promotional instruments of any kind (see above: "total fucking bullshit!") and cares notoriously little for "what's hot" in terms of broader cultural trends. He admits to working on the occasional commercial to make money, but is adamant that the commercialization of film "putrifies the environment." Given that what attracted Lynch to Showtime in the first place was having total creative control and a budget that precluded the need for any kind of commercial pandering, those who wish to frame the Roadhouse as some sort of sell-out to hipsterism face the uphill battle of explaining why in blue blazes Lynch would choose to engage in a practice he openly despises--"to putrify the environment," as he so scornfully puts it, of a work of art decades in the making with no commercial pressure to do so. The Roadhouse just ain't about showcasing hipster bands on any reasonable interpretation. The complaint that the Roadhouse scenes confront us with songs we don't particularly like, while perhaps perfectly true for some of us and perfectly fair for those approaching Twin Peaks as mere entertainment, is not a legitimate reason for those approaching Twin Peaks as a work of art to eschew the duty of interpreting these scenes in the context of the work as a whole. Obviously, if you're watching just for fun and the show feels like being stuck in a carpool with a Smashmouth fanatic, then get out the car. But if you think of yourself as aesthetically bent or critically astute or even open to a little interpretive challenge, expressing frustration with the Roadhouse because you don't like the songs is a little like hating on Guernica because grey's not your favorite color or because "it's not very realistic." The challenge of the Roadhouse scenes is to see beyond the particular songs and bands to their resonance within the work of art as a whole: how are the Roadhouse scenes inviting us to see, hear, feel, and imagine the world of Twin Peaks differently than we might without them, and how do those modes of seeing, hearing, feeling, and imagining illuminate that world (or fail to illuminate it)? That a work of art fails in some way is inevitable, and you might well conclude, after a serious engagement with these scenes, that they are an artistic flop. Be that as it may, the Roadhouse ain't ultimately about you and your fave bands. The complaint that the Roadhouse is a waste of precious time is a bit more complicated, since it is conceivable that one could engage the Roadhouse scenes on their own terms in view of their place in the work as a whole and come to the conclusion, as noted above, that they fail to do anything beautiful or interpretively important, or at least that the opportunity costs of indulging the beautiful, significant things they accomplish outweigh the time devoted to them; one could perhaps make a cogent case that Twin Peaks would have been a more beautiful or compelling work of art without the Roadhouse scenes, or with some other aesthetic strategy in place for accomplishing the intended effects. It seems fair to suggest, though, that if one is aiming at a charitable interpretation of the work--if one is attempting to remain genuinely open to seeing, hearing, feeling, and imaging the world that the artist has painstakingly created for the viewer and invited her to explore and to wonder at and to relish--the conclusion that the Roadhouse scenes are a waste of precious time is one that should not be reached summarily, on a whim, at the merest whiff of indifference to the particular songs, or aesthetic taste offended, or narrative expectations thwarted. So suppose one is genuinely open to idea that the Roadhouse matters to the work of art--that it's not ultimately just a showcase for "hipster" music, or a video jukebox featuring records you love or don't, or a sonic filler that displaces potentially more important narrative "content". What reasons do we have for thinking that the Roadhouse is important--that careful aesthetic attention to it will repay our time and effort? Here we can point to reasons that are both external and internal to Twin Peaks itself. Externally, we have Lynch's four-decade commitment to marrying film, music, and sound in revelatory, revolutionary ways that have transformed the medium--ways about which entire books have been written. In the foreword to Beyond the Beyond: Music from the Films of David Lynch, Kristine McKenna describes Lynch's uncanny ability to intuit just the right song for illuminating an image or narrative: "Who can explain the alchemy of a song, or what causes it to combust in the human heart? Lynch doesn't question it or try to explain why; he just knew that no other song could be playing when Pete got his first glimpse of the smoldering beauty, Alice, in Lost Highway. [...] From the grinding of a rusty gear to a symphony, Lynch is tuned in to the sounds of life on earth. His receptors are acutely sensitive and unfiltered, and he makes no value judgment of the sounds or the songs he hears; they simply fascinate him, and he knows how to pair them with images that transform them into something new. I can see him, one ear pressed to the ground, listening to the distant groan of shifting tectonic plates, the other ear pointed heavenward, hearing strains of a popular song he loved as a teenager. He listens, marvels at what he hears, then brings it all back home to the rest of us." (Beyond the Beyond, 8, 11) McKenna refers above to the use of Lou Reed's "This Magic Moment" in Lost Highway, but we could just as easily cite the use of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren" in the same film, or Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet, or Rebekah Del Rio's "Llorando" ("Crying") in Mulholland Drive (more on that in a minute), or a dozen others. Music always matters--and matters a lot, too--in the films of David Lynch. Borrowing the words of the one-armed man, Philip Gerard, we might say that Lynch "means it like it is, like it sounds," insofar as the meaning of being in Lynch's films--the significance of what is appearing before us--is so inextricably tied to how it sounds that it sometimes feels like things come into existence through and as music. Internally, we find a preponderance of evidence that music--and in particular, music in the Roadhouse--matters a great deal in Twin Peaks. In first run of the series, Julee Cruise's "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" and "The World Spins" (see above) are the gateway into the unforgettable scene in which the Giant appears to inform Cooper and the rest of us that "it is happening again" as Maddie is murdered. And now that it is happening yet again here in 2017, what are the Giant's (or at least his close relative, ???????'s) very first words to Cooper and to us in the very first scene featuring new footage? "Listen to the sounds." Among those sounds, so far, are thirty-three minutes of Roadhouse performances, the culminating seven minutes of which--just this past Sunday--are a performance by none other than Rebekah Del Rio, the very diva whose heart-rending performance of the aforementioned "Llorando" at Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive (embedded below) delivered a life-shattering epiphany to Betty/Diane, the film's tragic protagonist: your nostalgia over the past and your expectations of the future will rob you of the unfathomable richness of the world present before you right now. Those who have seen the film will know that Betty's thwarted expectations of life in Hollywood enslaved her--or rather her alter-ego Diane--to a feedback loop between regrets over the past and anxiety over the future that turns deadly both for her and for the woman she loves. And here in the Roadhouse, we find Rebekah Del Rio saying the same differently, singing of unrequited hopes ("No stars!") for a return to the starry night on which it all began, perhaps alerting us to our own thwarted expectations of life in Twin Peaks--those regrets over the past (Cooper's trapped! Audrey's dead!) and anxieties about the future (No Coop? No Audrey?) that threaten to rob us of the mystery, wonder, and beauty that the film gifts to us right now, with each and every passing week. Assuming there are good reasons to pay close attention to what's going on in the Roadhouse, then, how might the presence of these scenes enhance or even transform our seeing, hearing, feeling, and imagining the world of Twin Peaks? How can these performances aid us in being fully present to what is unfolding before us? I suspect there are many answers to this question and that individual viewers paying close attention are finding their way to all sorts of edifying vistas on the series by way of these performances. My approach has been to see these scenes as functioning somewhat like a chorus in Greek drama--a company of players tangential to the main action that appears on stage at regular intervals for various purposes that are crucial to the advancement of the story and the viewer's orientation within it. In a brief but illuminating post on this topic, Kris Haamer describes the Greek chorus as serving a wide variety of functions, meeting everything from the practical need to pace and space major events in the narrative, to the literary needs of providing commentary on actions and events and guiding the atmosphere and expectations of the audience, to the emotional need of distilling the very essence of the story into an affective experience that the viewer can feel even and especially when the drama cannot adequately convey it through didactic dialogue. In my experience, the Roadhouse has served all of these functions at various times, from Rebekah Del Rio's sage warning above, to the Cactus Blossoms providing transportation back down into the Mississippi mud after a surreal journey into the beyond in Part Three, to Nine Inch Nails anesthetizing me into believing that an edgy if conventional journey into an aging industrial icon's rage would be the highlight of the evening only to propel me moments later into the abstract core of atomic evil in Part Eight, to Chromatics' whispering the unspeakable heart of The Return directly into my spirit at the end of Part Two such that I will never again be without it, nor ever forget where I was and how I felt when I first received it at an illicit screening in an anonymous theater in Los Angeles on May 21, 2017 where there was--at least for a fleeting, transcendent, inexplicable, transgressive moment--no discernible difference between everything that is me and everything that is Twin Peaks and everything that is everything else. The Roadhouse, for me, is about attunement, about a weekly coming-into-resonance with Twin Peaks, as if each performance strikes a tuning fork, drawing me inexorably into the orbit, the mood, the interpretive horizon within which its many gifts have appeared, can appear, and are appearing. I have come to rely on the Roadhouse you see, and to depend on its orienting compass. I missed it dearly in the single standalone episode where we got no help from it, Part Seven--an episode that, bereft of the guiding hand of its chorus, as if reminding us how important the Roadhouse really is by its flaunting its conspicuous absence, begins with a man screaming in abject desperation "I don't know where I am!" and ends in somnambulant disorientation with the song "Sleep Walk" piped into the R&R, where people are disappearing and reappearing seemingly willy nilly. How fascinating that Part Ten appears to function as an orienting opposite of sorts to Part Seven: Jerry Horne knows where he is (or at least that "I've been here before!"), we advance in more linear ways than usual on a host of plot lines, and we get double-time in the Roadhouse, as if Rebekah Del Rio senses the vacuum left by Part Seven and decides to let us in on a major secret as a bonus: until your experience of the now alone is adequate, with no past regrets propping it up and no false hopes motivating it, you will never be present enough to the world for it to reveal itself to you in all its grandeur. I promised, in conclusion, a therapeutic exercise for cultivating deeper appreciation of the Roadhouse. You're probably already onto it, as it's nothing particularly complicated: just a cordial, curated invitation to spend some more intentional time with these performances in the spirit of what Kristine McKenna calls "Lynch's capacity for deep listening"--listening "to each song as a universe unto itself." (Beyond the Beyond: Music from the Films of David Lynch, 7) What follows is a collection of all the Roadhouse performances in the order of their appearance, each with accompanying lyrics beneath the embedded video. When you listen to these songs and reflect upon their lyrics, what is stirred in you? How do you feel? Of what are you personally reminded? Are any of these stirrings such that they allow new revelations to appear from out of the narrative flux? I hope this labor of musical apprehension is as evocative and rewarding for you as I have found it to be! Please share any revelations in the comments! Chromatics, “Shadow” (Part Two, 49:46 ff, approx. 5 minutes) Shadow, take me down Shadow, take me down with you For the last time For the last time For the last time For the last time You're in the water I'm standing on the shore Still thinking that I hear your voice Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? For the last time For the last time For the last time For the last time At night I'm driving in your car Pretending that we'll leave this town We're watching all the street lights fade And now you're just a stranger's dream I took your picture from the frame And now you're nothing like you seem Your shadow fell like last night's rain For the last time For the last time For the last time For the last time Cactus Blossoms, "Mississippi" (Part Three, 56:14 ff, approx. 3 minutes) I'm going down to the sea M-l-S-S-l-S-S-l-P-P I watch the sun yellow and brown Sinking suns in every town My angel sings down to me She's somewhere on the shore waiting for me With her wet hair and sandy gown Singing songs waves of sound There's a dive I know on River Street Go on in and take my seat There's a lot of friends I'll never meet Gonna take a dive off River Street You look different from way down here Like a circus mirror I see flashes, of you on the surface I'm coming up from way down here The water's clear, all I want is to see your face I'm going down to the sea M-l-S-S-l-S-S-l-P-P I watch the sun yellow and brown Sinking suns in every town Au Revoir Simone, "Lark" (Part Four, 55:23 ff, approx. 2.5 minutes) So So long So long ago There wasn't anyone out there I thought I needed to know But no more When I find the day leave my mind in the evening just as the day before I saw the window was open The cool air I don't know what you saw there Don't know what you saw in me Sometimes I want to be enough for you Don't ask Know that it's understood There's not enough of me I saw that something was broken I've crossed the line I'll point you to a better time A safer place to be Sometimes I want to be enough for you Don't ask Know that it's done no good Sometimes I want to be enough for you Don't ask Know that it's done no good Trouble, "Snake Eyes" (Part Five, 47:13 ff, approx. 4 minutes) *instrumental* Sharon Van Etten, "Tarifa" (Part Six, 55:28 ff, approx. 3 minutes) Hit the ground The yard, I found something I could taste your mouth Shut the door Now in the sun tanning You were so just Looking across the sky Can't remember Can't recall No I can't remember anything at all We skipped the sunrise Looking across the grass Said he wanted And not that I'm every It's the same, I could mean you were right Everyone else Hasn't a chance, don't Fail me now Open arms, rest Let's run under Cursing myself at night Slow it was 7 I wish it was 7 all night Tell me when Tell me when is this over? Chewed you out Chew me out when I'm stupid I don't wanna Everyone else pales Send in the owl Tell me I'm not a child You summon Forget about everyone else Fall away somehow To figure it out Nine Inch Nails, "She's Gone Away" (Part Eight, 11:55 ff, approx. 4.5 minutes) You dig in places till your fingers bleed Spread the infection where you spill your seed I can't remember what she came here for I can't remember much of anything anymore She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away Away... A little mouth opened up inside Yeah, I was watching on the day she died We keep licking while the skin turns black Cut along the length, but you can't get the feeling back She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away She's gone, she's gone, she's gone away Away... (Are you still here?) Au Revoir Simone, "A Violent Yet Flammable World" (Part Nine, 54:55 ff, approx. 4 minutes) Oceans shape the sides Touching down in the spaces Soaking from a warm goodbye An early rise offers kindly Tonight I sleep to dream Of a place that's calling me It is always just a dream Still I cannot forget what I have seen The crowd's hard to believe At their faces I'm looking But your feet I'm following In soft steps on a path the way you lead I don't want to lose myself It's a whisper It's a funny thing We fold like icicles on paper shelves It's a pity to appear this way You're flying when your foreign eyes Trace the heights of the city Steaming With rocks and clouds we breathe Violent skies A shock to my own body Speech is wild Alive sacred and sounding Wild From across and beyond, oh far beyond I don't want to lose myself It's a whisper It's a funny thing We fold like icicles on paper shelves It's a pity to appear this way Hold, hold, hold on I swear I saw it somewhere Waving, waiting, one, two, three, above the wakes that follow Hold, hold, hold on I swear I saw it somewhere Waving, waiting, one, two, three, above the wakes that follow I don't want to lose myself Tonight I sleep to dream of a place that's calling me It's a whisper It is always just a dream It's a funny thing Still I cannot forget what I have seen We fold like icicles on paper shelves With rocks and clouds we breathe, a shock to my own body It's a pity Alive sacred and sounding To appear this way From across and beyond, oh far beyond Rebekah Del Rio, "No Stars" (Part Ten, 46:48 ff, approx. 7 minutes)
My dream is to go to that place You know the one Where it all began on a starry night On a starry night where it all began When we danced With the stars in our eyes The night when it all began When it all began You said hold me Hold me hold me Don't be afraid don't be afraid We're with the stars I saw them in your eyes En tus palabras [trans: in your words] Y en tus besos tus besos [trans: and in your kisses...your kisses] Debajo de una noche [trans: under a night] llena llena de estrellas [trans: full...full of stars] Under the starry night Long ago But now it's a dream Yo vi en tus ojos [trans: I saw in your eyes] Yo vi las estrellas [trans: I saw the stars] Pero ya no hay ya no hay estrellas [trans: but there are no stars] Pero ya no hay ya no hay estrellas [trans: but there are no stars] No stars No stars Ya no hay estrellas [trans: there are no stars] No stars
7 Comments
Matteo
7/18/2017 05:22:22 am
Fascinating. It truly resonates with me. I'm amazed and thrilled at the same time. To me is exactly as you wrote in this article. It is indeed mind bending.
Reply
Dennis Gruenling
7/18/2017 12:24:39 pm
Exactly! Thanks for writing this, I had no idea how many people were not in tune with this...I'm glad someone wrote about this intelligently.
Reply
7/18/2017 02:22:05 pm
Satisfying read. Never understood people who thought an episode ended simply because music was playing given how much sound means in the Lynch aesthetic. I agree that the Roadhouse performances are as integral to the show as any other element in this undefinable work known as Twin Peaks: The Return.
Reply
Jason
7/18/2017 03:40:20 pm
My wife helped point this out: She sees the Roadhouse scenes as much like the Log Lady intros. Here they are the closing message.
Reply
Bart Hansard
7/19/2017 09:09:57 pm
My wife is the true Twin Peaks geek, having rewatched the first series, found her old Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and boned The Secret History of Twin Peaks.
Reply
Bart Hansard
7/19/2017 09:13:06 pm
That should read "boned up on".
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Mr. RoqueMonitoring the situation from a well-designed chair somewhere in Grand Rapids, MI Archives
August 2021
Categories |