Those familiar with David Lynch know his fascination with the evil undercurrent--or, as he would name it, the “darkness”--swirling beneath a veneer of the pleasant, pedestrian, pastoral--i.e., the “light.” This fascination (that of the duality shared between light and dark) has become a central theme in his oeuvre, beginning with the decision to film Eraserhead in a highly contrasted black and white (and almost exclusively at night), carrying through to the violence that occurs in the suburban apartment of Dorothy Vallens (played by Isabella Rossellini), visited only at night by Kyle MacLachlan’s character in the film Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont, and finally arriving in the idiosyncratic town of Twin Peaks, which lends its name to the seminal 1990 television series. Twin Peaks is first and foremost a whodunit, following the formulaic construction of narrative to which all detective stories adhere. From a narrative standpoint, the juxtaposition between dark and light is obvious: here is a small town proud of its pleasantries and lack of crime having to face the reality that one of its children has been murdered. But Lynch, who began as a painter/visual artist, explores the theme of that dark, swirling undercurrent in a more visceral and convincing way through the use of visual rhetoric. This is no more evident than in the inclusion of Invitation to Love, a fictive soap opera that exists solely in the realm of Twin Peaks.
The “nested story” trope has been utilized throughout in works like The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane; but Invitation to Love recalls most readily The Murder of Gonzago, a production put on by the travelling players in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare uses the nested play to bring Hamlet to action, confirming for him (and thus, too, the audience) Claudius as the culprit in his father’s murder. Invitation to Love is used in a similar manner, but its effect is opposite. As Nicholas Birns argues in his essay “Telling Inside from Outside, or, Who ‘Really’ Killed Laura Palmer”, Invitation to Love works to mislead the audience (i.e. us). By pairing characters from Invitation to Love with characters in Twin Peaks, Birns is able to assert that the nested story points to Ben Horne (played by Richard Beymer) as the culprit. Because we know this to be untrue, the purpose of Invitation to Love becomes less transparent. It’s in this lack of clarity that we find Lynch’s intentions.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes introduces the concepts studium and punctum. If the town of Twin Peaks is the studium, i.e. that thing by which we “enter into harmony with” (27) the intentions of the photographer (or, in this case, director’s), then Invitation to Love is Twin Peaks’ punctum. Barthes explains that the punctum is the thing that “breaks (or punctuates) the studium; [it is] the element that rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow, and pierces” (26) the viewer. He states that the studium is “that wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste...it is of the order of liking, not of loving” (27). The argument can be made, then, that the punctum is that thing that leads a viewer to the order of loving. And, if the town of Twin Peaks and all of its citizens are the studium (the thing by which we begin to understand Twin Peaks and decide to like it), then Invitation to Love is one of the show’s punctums. It is notable that the title given to the fictive soap is Invitation to Love, a gesture made to the audience that stings, pricks, bruises even. For it is in analyzing the fictive show that we find Lynch’s truth, a theme at the heart of all his work, most prominently in Twin Peaks. That is that darkness and light, good and evil, the beautiful and the damned exist concomitantly. Taking as truth Birns’ assertion that Invitation to Love misleads the Twin Peaks audience as to who the culprit of Laura Palmer’s murder is, we can see that the character of Ben Horne (who Birns effectively points out is criminal in more ways than one) is innocent of the crime central to the show’s narrative. Furthermore, Birns shows that revealing Leland Palmer (played by Ray Wise), Laura Palmer’s father, as the true culprit results in a more satisfying twist for the show’s audience. This fact alone proves Lynch’s truth by placing in us, the audience, a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment and excitement at the revelation of filicide. And without the visual rhetoric displayed through Invitation to Love (e.g. the argument that bad is invariably bad and good is invariably good), Lynch’s argument that the beautiful and the damned exist in duality would ring false in the Leland revelation. Because the audience has come to expect a mimetic display from television, Lynch gives us a more true to life conclusion than the utopian values preached by (mainstream) television (e.g. Invitation to Love).
The effect arrived at through deception is not confined to narrative works. In Andrew Wyeth’s most famous work, Christina’s World, the viewer is given a pastoral scene of what appears to be a woman lounging in a field, looking at a house near the horizon. The deception, however, exists in the painting’s title. Christina, or Anna Christina Olson, was one of Wyeth’s muses and primary models. Olson is believed to have suffered from Charcot-Marie Tooth (CMT) disease, which causes weakness in the feet and lower leg muscles. With this knowledge, the reading of Wyeth’s Christina’s World changes drastically. And with further research into the history of the painting, it is discovered that only the lower half of the figure in the painting was modeled by Olson, leaving the upper half of the figure to be modeled after Wyeth’s 20-year younger, more attractive, and healthier wife Betsy. The visual deceptions at play here result in a much different reading than the initial one. The same is true for Civil War era photographs, namely those taken by Matthew Brady, in which bodies were collected and displayed in such a way to affect the viewer. Or in the cultural and historical revisations of works like Extramadura, photographed by David Seymour (Chim). The concealing and revealing of secrets in visual rhetoric shapes meaning and interpretation, and thus--as in the case of Hamlet--action.
It is finally through the parodic example of Invitation to Love that we can separate our perceptions of life and how these perceptions are shaped through television. Were we to believe, with Sally and Lucy and whomever else, the nested show, then we would fail to recognize our own perceptibility to evil, allowing an open door for the “BOBs” of our realities to enter and take control. I think this skill is necessary to our students as readers. In order to arrive at a true and deeper understanding of whatever text they are studying, they will need to be ready to analyze and understand the multi-layered meaning that exists simultaneously in any work.
A still from Invitation to Love.
A still from Twin Peaks.
Still from Invitation to Love of Emerald and Jade played by Selena Swift
Stills from Twin Peaks of Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson (Laura’s cousin and doppleganger) played by Sheryl Lee
