"Twin Peaks: The Return" and the Fantasy of Returning

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s tortuous Twin Peaks: The Return drew some lukewarm reviews when it premiered in summer of 2017. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, for instance, complained that “the series’s deliberate, lovingly observational pace, though admirably bold, also turns portentous and vain.” In the six years since it aired, though, The Return has steadily accrued accolades, most notably Cahiers du Cinema’s naming it, provocatively, the best film of the 2010s. One reason The Return’s stock keeps climbing is that it rewards close and careful parsing and re-viewing—see, for instance, YouTube commentator Rosseter’s epic and fanbase-shaking video “Twin Peaks Actually Explained (No, Really),” with its remarkably thoroughgoing dissection (one I’ll reference later). 

Another reason The Return continues putting on thunder is less happy, maybe, but worth exploring: it transmits a compelling allegory for the U.S.’s still-darkening political situation—an allegory looking more oracular with each passing month and year. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Mad Men" and the Myth of Counterculture

How did hip morph, in U.S. culture, from a secret code of the dispossessed to something good for selling semi-disposable furniture and hamburgers?

It seems a pressing question now that hip is so omnipresent in our lives, lurking in every Starbucks coffee cup, every Urban Outfitters store, every Volkswagen ad. It even finds distressingly fertile ground on the Web, winking out at us from a billion images of light saber-wielding cats.

The suspicion for years now has been that the 1960s were the turning point—the moment when hip quit flirting with the mainstream (à la Dizzy and Kerouac in the '50s), abandoning its bungalows and rat-hole apartments to shack up with capitalism. And because advertising was the medium by which so many square Americans made first acquaintance with hip's delights, Madison Avenue has often been cast as the horse whisperer that lassoed hip, made it behave, and sold it to Peoria and Levittown.

For this reason, it's inevitable we look to the celebrated AMC series Mad Men, set on Madison Avenue in the '60s, for theories about what really went on in advertising in those crucial years. And the good news is the show doesn't disappoint, offering a sophisticated, nuanced vision of a love-hate relationship between the advertising industry and the ultra-hip counterculture headquartered just a few Manhattan blocks away.

As Mad Men sees it, '60s advertising didn't just co-opt and defang hip; it also found a soul-mate in it, was infiltrated by it, and even learned to do its bidding—just as hip learned to do Madison Avenue's.  In positing a complex symbiotic relationship between hip and consumer capitalism, not a simple parasitic one, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner throws in with such recent cultural theorists as Thomas Frank, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, and—especially—John Leland.