Avant garde no more

David Lynch and our televised norms

Actions and consequences, as I have noted many times, may be separated by quite a period of time. Too often we assume that we open a door, then close it behind us as the example of the immediacy of these things but we don’t seem to recognize that foreshadowing behavior actually opens the door to its legitimacy.

I fully admit I may be pulling a string too far today but I, at least, am struck by some curiosities as the past meets the present in today’s news.

The announcement this morning of the film director David Lynch’s death at age 78 strikes me as the passing of a man who had a greater impact that I realized at the time. I am not really a film person so I am only guessing there are countless “avant garde” folks in the industry but I definitely remember how bizarre Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” series was. It wasn’t technically the beginning of “reality tv” but it had an important role in normalizing some things we had rarely, if ever, discussed on tv. By making things accessible in our living rooms, we eased their acceptance as one more factor in human choice, it strikes me.

My household was captivated by the “Twin Peaks” mystique in the early ‘90s as so many seeking entertainment in America. The fan devotion (obsession, more often) was akin to the more recent interest in “Downington Abbey” but the material was considerably darker, outlandish, and in the end gut wrenching. In truth, Lynch forced his huge audience to confront icky things about society that we wished weren’t true, though they certainly have always been. If you’re too young to remember, the show was about this seemingly quintessential Americana small town in Washington state where everyone was pretty normal, life went on superficially as it had during the glorified 1950s, and everyone grew old together happily—except they weren’t at all as they seemed. The beautiful blond (aren’t they always blonds?) prom queen turns up dead on a beach so the bulk of the series revolves around determining the culprit.

The investigator and the townspeople, as you got to know them better, devolved into some pretty loopy folks. I confess thirty-five years later I don’t remember all of the details but the plot introduced some rather unorthodox and despicable characters to our living rooms. The wholesome all-American vision was a complete facade uncovered by an equally weird investigator over a couple of seasons. The coup de grace was that the murder was her incestuously- motivated father, definitely a breath-sucking moment in commercial television.

David Lynch did not entirely change in social behavior. But he did have his finger on something that too many people wrote off as figments of his and the writers’ imaginations: what we were willing to watch for an evening’s enjoyment or discuss in our day-to-day work environments the next day included banality and disgusting behavior we previously chose never to celebrate in word or deed, even if we knew the tragedy happened at times. I think he opened the door to “reality television” with its array of peculiar interactions that are intended to create media frenzy because it was harsh, raw, and uncomfortable yet everyone could be that way, couldn’t they? What Lynch managed, however, despite everyone’s assurance that Twin Peaks (I think it referred to the town’s name) was just a great slice of weirdness reveled by so many, was to open the door to normalizing completely self-entitlement as if it were just what everyone does all the time anyway.

I understand that entertainment is not always happy happy, nor should it be. But, “Twin Peaks” seemed a major step towards something else.

Lynch and those behind him erased a fine line that was noteworthy. He wasn’t the first person to sell sex, violence against women, or doubts about authority figures, of course, but “Twin Peaks” seemed to tear them down in a more profound manner as I look back. Our sense of what was acceptable behavior to promote for commercial gain changed precisely while this coinciding with our emerging sense of cultural vindication following an era of forty year existential fear of an existential threat from the Soviet Union. But those Soviets were gone and curiously so were many inhibitions on what we glorified, even if it splintered society.

Lynch thus opened the door to some topics desperately needing consideration—violence against women, incest, and the deteriorating conditions in many small towns—while making it to forget that our personal and public intercourse as a society still needed some guardrails. But, this happened as we were feeling confident we were replacing the old with an iconoclastic, raw self-congratulatory new world as if that had not costs to how we interacted with each other.

I am not arguing we should not discuss the topics as a healthy society must confront all of its strengths and failures. But, to verge on celebrating even the most base of the behaviors strikes me as a step we have been paying for ever since. It has led everything to be rationalized as legitimate because “I am entitled to do it” attitudes. Actually, no, we are not all entitled to do whatever we want any time. Lynch’s series substantially contributed to a small but important degree to erasing some of the limits on social engagement. You may well disagree so please chime in.

A third of a century later we stand in a place where norms indeed seem abandoned, as Lynch foresaw, if not instigated. I could go through jaw dropping actions by public officials along with us mere Josettes and Joes on the next street that fifty years ago would have been impossible to ignore. Citizens at all levels of society and of all stripes dismiss their own major ethical issues as if everyone does whatever they want so why can’t I? “In your face” behavior, legitimized by the sense of unfettered entitlement, rarely brings the deep responses it did forty years ago yet entitlement for one likely means profound limits for another. The list goes on, at least in my mind.

Again, David Lynch was a single figure. I watched the series, after all. But, I suspect we did not appreciate in the early 1990s the emerging changes in how we viewed what was appearing on our television (far fewer folks had personal computers, and those cellphones that existed lacked screens so streaming was still decades away) as entertainment. The good, the bad, and the sickening of real life became just another show we watched rather than a bell weather for societal dangers that would tear at our fiber. Moving some things from the realm of law enforcement to entertainment had some costs.

Obviously, I wonder in retrospect whether we opened a door we now regret. I never denied those problems existed but I can’t see that a glorifying them for the sake of quirky entertainment with the idea that “everything is ok if one wants to behave that way”. My point is that Lynch’s series helped lead us around a corner where people don’t take responsibility for their actions, instead treating some bizarre behaviors as if they were acting on another episode of some outlandish series rather than living in the 2020s.

You may completely disagree with my memory of Lynch’s impact on television so please chime in. I genuinely welcome anyone’s thoughts but in an era when so much of the country is caught up in arguing about the future, it’s worth considering how we got here. I am happy to hear your thoughts on any of this column so hurl them my way.

Thank you for your time. I appreciate you taking the effort to read today’s column.

Be well and be safe. FIN

J. Joberman, “David Lynch, Maker of Florid and Unnerving Films, Dies at 78”, NewYorkTimes.com, 16 Janaury 2025, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/movies/david-lynch-dead.html