What I've Been Watching: Twin Peaks

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any commentary about film or television here. Toward the end of changing that, it seems worthwhile to point out that I recently finished watching the entire run of Twin Peaks. It was wonderfully compelling, in large part because of the skillful blend of soap-operatic, don’t-miss-an-episode plotlines, potentially revelatory themes, and wonderfully artistic imagery. Despite an almost perfect pilot movie, a thoroughly satisfying season and a half, and a finale that was the most eye-poppingly surreal bit of television I’ve seen since the last episode of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks has also allowed me to experience, twenty years after the fact, one of the most rapidly disappointing declines in television history.

I am assuredly not going to be saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times since 1991, but it is stunning how clearly season two of Twin Peaks demonstrates the destructive potential of television networks. If any controlling interest in work of fiction has ever made a more glaring error in judgment than ABC did in insisting upon a solution to the Laura Palmer murder, let me know about it. I cannot fathom how anyone could have thought that that would be a good idea, when even the most casual observer should have recognized that that was what held the show together, that without unresolved questions about the slain prom queen the show didn’t really exist.

If they’d wanted to resolve the storyline out of some sense of duty to their audience, I suppose I can understand that, especially if they were confident enough in the rest of the series to expect it to maintain its appeal on its various other merits. From what I understand, though, the network never had much faith in the show, even when the public was obsessed with it. Of course, the ratings at the end of the first season and the beginning of the second should have made it clear that the accountants and executives didn’t know what they were talking about, and they should have thus been motivated to stay the hell out of the way.

I can begin to understand insisting on the resolution to the initial A storyline, but how in God’s name could anyone see value in ending it mid-season? I started viewing the show in almost complete ignorance as to what to expect, and I certainly didn’t realize that the murder would be solved when it was. Even so, the revelation was extremely powerful for me, and I was quite disappointed in myself for not determining who the killer was ahead of time. But upon viewing that extremely early climax and knowing how many episodes were still left, I assumed that what I had watched was just the beginning of the end, and that the rest of the season would entail the characters pursuing a killer whose identity the audience now knew. I also assumed that they would continue to piece together layers of the mystery, tying the minor storylines into narrative of Laura Palmer’s death.

It’s not that the latter half of season two is bad, but when neither of those things happened, and when the primary driver of the plot was wrapped up very quickly and neatly, I was utterly disoriented. I imagine that the majority of fans of the show, like me, had to force themselves past that point just to see what happened next. Once I came to terms with the fact that the bottom fell out of the show, I rediscovered its appeal from a completely different standpoint. But even though it remained good television, what could hurt a series more than several episodes of the audience collectively wondering why they were suddenly watching an altogether different show.

Because of the catastrophic effect of ABC’s insistence on something that was about as obviously bad as bad ideas come, it’s a terrible disappointment that Twin Peaks didn’t constitute a breaking point in the tradition of interference by moneyed interests in art and media. But unfortunately that was just a particular high water mark in a still-ongoing history of networks and studies derailing promising projects and preventing good stories from becoming great.

Twin Peaks was still great, but it could have been great for so much longer. Oh, there were other problems with the post-resolution portion of the show, too. The recovery period might have been quicker and smoother if it weren’t for the fact that even minor storylines were dropped and new ones with new characters had to be unexpectedly introduced in large part, based on what I’ve read, because Kyle McLaughlin was unabashedly shitting where he ate. Nevertheless, all of this built through the development of a beautifully complex mythology to a final episode that kept my mind constantly racing to keep up with a parade of nightmarish riddles.

And that final episode was intellectually gratifying but emotionally devastating. David Lynch and Mark Frost had apparently arranged to put multiple characters in peril in hopes of generating demand for continuation to a third season. This also was something I didn’t know going into it, so I, and presumably many of those who watched it when it was on television, was expecting a closed ending. But when I read the final scenes that way I came away from the show grappling with the implication that there are dire personal consequences for trying to do good in a world that possesses precious little hope.

I heard whispers that the film, Fire Walk With Me might provide some resolution to the oppressively bleak ending of the show, but it didn’t. It tauntingly hinted at the possibility of a resolution, but it didn’t follow through with it, so I get the impression that David Lynch just enjoys screwing with his audience for kicks. That said, I’d be happy to be screwed with again. Hopefully I am part of an ongoing growth of retrospective interest in Twin Peaks. If so, I honestly think Lynch should revisit the town, since Twin Peaks has the unique distinction of having specifically placed one early scene twenty-five years in the series’ future. That’s right around the corner, underneath the sycamores, behind the red curtain.

Skewed Financial Perspectives

There was a brief article put out by Yahoo! and Monster.com today, titled “Worst Paying College Degrees of 2011.” Followers of my blog will know that this is a topic that tends to get my dander up. I’ve already written fairly extensively on the methodological issues in assessing the value of particular majors, and the general problems involved in ranking them. The reason that this Monster article caught my attention is that it connects to a rather broader topic that’s been on my mind a good deal lately.

I was walking around another local street festival last weekend, where there was a arts and crafts show being held, populated by a variety of vendors presumably from the local area trying to sell a few instances of their hard work in order to support themselves through a livelihood about which they have a great deal of passion. In an environment like this, one presumes that the people you’re seeing must be struggling. It’s not necessarily a presumption based on careful observation. It’s a collective understanding that non-famous artists don’t make money from their art. I know that I was told that was the case all throughout my life. The term “starving artist” gets a lot of traction. I was also cautioned about the deficiency of money in my chosen profession. Writers don’t make much money, they said, and I’d have to be comfortable with that if I were to pursue that goal. I invariably told them that I was. But I also took them to mean that “not much” meant still being able to pay rent.

I’ve been to a lot of art shows and street fairs in my life, and it was only on this past Sunday that a certain line of inquiry triggered in my mind as I looked over the merchandise. Art’s not cheap. That fact applies not just to the price tag hanging off of a canvas or a sculpture, but to the various investments that go into its production. Every one of the people who were selling their work out on the streets of one of Buffalo’s suburbs had to have the capital for raw materials, printing costs, studio rental space, and such things as credit card machines. Every one of them had to have a couple hundred dollars just to purchase a slot as a vendor at the festival. But what really caught my attention as it never had before were some of the photography that was present. I’ve seen so much photography from far-flung places at the various outdoor shows, and it’s always been clear to me that the travel involved with acquiring and distributing beautiful foreign landscape shots required a great deal of money, at least by my standards. Looking over that work inspires me and yet makes me profoundly sad, because I certainly can’t go to witness its source first-hand, and in all likelihood I never will. But it was only this past Sunday that I attached the understanding of that relative affluence to the commonplace notion of the starving artist. When people say that artists don’t make any money, to what are they comparing their earnings?

As I think back on it, I realize I’ve encountered a skewed social perspective on wealth and poverty at every turn, all throughout my life. As a child I avidly read the annual almanacs, and I still remember looking through the figures for the median salaries of various professions. Teachers at that time apparently earned annual income in excess of thirty-five thousand dollars. Upon learning that information I was pointedly told that that wasn’t much money. And no, apparently it’s not much money by the standards of typical middle-class salaries, but it’s a goddamn lot compared to what a lot of people are earning, and any annual income I’ve acquired thus far.

I find that when people use phrases like “not much money,” they use it without a proper sense of proportion, an understanding of what that phrase means and what its use implies. When we discuss potential earnings or the outcome of a certain educational or career path, we tend to only start our assessment above a certain threshold. Thirty, forty, or fifty thousand dollars a year is conceived of as the low end of the spectrum for earnings, and salaries that approach and breach the poverty line are discounted altogether. That heavily skewed perspective allows us to talk about working artists as being in an ongoing struggle to keep their heads above water, even while they keep themselves in a strong enough financial position to support their art, often even traveling widely to create it, promote it, and sell it. That may not leave them with a heap of personal wealth at the end of the year, but describing anybody in such a position as struggling, or irresponsibly using the word “starving” trivializes the seriousness of genuine financial hardships in American society. Even saying that they make “not much money” is erroneous from the perspective of anyone on the bottom, and using that terminology belies one’s ability to genuinely empathize with the poor.

The same skewed perspective allows us to talk about the “worst-paying college degrees,” so as to suggest that people who acquire them and then actually obtain substantial employment in their field are paid badly. The Monster article lists the bottom ten disciplines, according to data from PayScale. The absolute lowest-paying item on that list is Child and Family Studies, which has a median starting salary of $29,600 and a mid-career median of $40,500. And if their data is to be taken seriously, the conclusion indeed ought to be that this is the “lowest-paying” degree, not the “worst-paying.” That may seem like a subtle difference, but it’s the difference between a quantitative observation of fact and a subjective statement as to the normative value of having a career that earns such a salary. Coming from his commonly skewed perspective, the author seems to be suggesting that those kinds of earnings will be part of a rather difficult life. But there are very many people who are craning their necks to look up at those sorts of earnings, and think that given their current situation, they could live quite comfortably in that range of incomes. I’m certainly one of them. And given that I have a degree that is not among the “worst-paying,” I’m tremendously embittered by the indications that by and large people in comfortable cross sections of American society are so poor at appreciating what they have.

Tag, You're Art

There's some interesting news from the art world this week. Apparently the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has just opened the first exhibition of graffiti art at a major museum.

Naturally, this has sparked a certain measure of controversy, with some people viewing it as glorification of petty vandalism. But I think that's nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction from people who haven't given graffiti a fair and objective hearing as an art form.

As with much art and most media, there is tons upon tons of terrible, hack-quality graffiti. But anybody who's seen the works of some of the really accomplished graffiti artists and who is able to divorce his judgment of artistic merit from his personal pique at bad experiences with private property being tagged cannot possibly deny good graffiti's status as art.

It generally angers me when I see the tags that show up all around Buffalo. On one level, it's irritating to observe wanton disregard for other people's property, but that concern is secondary to my annoyance at the absolutely awful quality of the tags that most culprits cover the city with. If you're going to tag something, it ought to be public property, but more than that, if you're going to tag anything at all that's publicly observable, it ought to contribute a positive aesthetic to the landscape.

I've always said that I wish there were public officials whose job it was to not just wash clean every instance of graffiti from public buildings and underpasses, as happens on a regular basis, but rather to judge the aesthetic quality of everything slated for destruction and to only get rid of what lowers the standards for how we engage with our surroundings. It doesn't seem fair to place every tag and every unsolicited mural in the same terrifically broad category. Some of it has the potential to actually improve the artist's neighborhood, or to express something of public interest, and to sandblast everything that's drawn in spray paint all at once doesn't just discourage graffiti, it discourages the improvement of outsider art.

This museum exhibition is a definite step in the direction of what I've been advocating. It separates the artistically meritorious works from the childish scrawls, because the old impulse to just call graffiti graffiti and wash your hands of all of it is simply untenable when you've seen what some of the true artists can do.