Avis des critiques

[Series] It’s clear from watching Twin Peaks that Lynch and Frost were dedicated students of the primetime soap opera, and were drawing from its immense melodramatic pull as much as they were subverting it. The show lasted as long as it did as a network phenomenon because they teased out “Who killed Laura Palmer?” as a parallel universe version of “Who shot JR?” and jammed up the plot with love triangles and florid acts of betrayal and revenge.

[Series] “Twin Peaks”... feels like an emanation from another, purer realm, where emotions are heightened and unheard vibrations sing. Most crime shows take a sociological view of evil...“Twin Peaks” explores an older, more spiritual view of life, in which evil is a disembodied, mystical force that comes from outside, affecting people the way an invisible wave lifts boats on the sea at night.

[Series] Watching a series like Twin Peaks means accepting that much of it, indeed a lot of it, is going to be fundamentally unsatisfying, because the artists are working close to their subconscious minds, writing and directing and producing in much the same way that Cooper made many of his investigative decisions. There’s no tried-and-true blueprint when you’re making that kind of art.

[Series] The series still looms impossibly large in the TV imagination. Many modern murder mysteries — or quirky small-town shows, or oddball cop shows — still feel like pilgrimages toward the altar of David Lynch and Mark Frost, the show’s creators. Investigations into the murders of teenage girls somehow become dream-trance voyages into the uncanny.

[Series] Twin Peaks isn’t just a habitat for murder and weirdness, it’s a place where you can fall in love with a stranger in a roadside diner over a cup of coffee as black as midnight on a moonless night.

[Series] Twin Peaks has a reputation for having stayed a strong show, all the way up through when Laura Palmer’s killer is revealed, in the seventh episode of the second season. In truth, the cracks begin to show long before then... Twin Peaks always wanted to infuse soap operas with real pathos, but these plots rarely rise above the realm of pure soap, and threaten to make the world’s mythology banal.

[Series] Even now, the idea of David Lynch ­being allowed anywhere near network television seems like an impossible dream... it was like watching someone hallucinate about a soap opera, floating in a nether-world of Americana between the 1950s and the 90s.

Watching the first series now, the first thing apparent to any viewer is simple: this is fantastic television, characterised by visual inventiveness, wild shifts in tone and a broad range of acting techniques. It’s funnier than the vast majority of sitcoms, scarier than most horror movies — and often both within the same few seconds of screen time.

By the end of the first season, "Twin Peaks" had become so conventional that even its biggest fans wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer... because "Twin Peaks" had stopped asking the deeper question of what made this town so strange and yet familiar, so frightening and yet so inviting... Lynch was as bad at producing "Twin Peaks" as he was good at directing it.

While Twin Peaks stretches our understanding of the medium, it nevertheless appeals to some familiar TV-watching cultural instincts: sex, violence and fashionability. David Lynch has created his own manifestation of "hip" and, as with most aesthetic faiths, he coats familiar drugs in shades of novelty, Twin Peaks dissected is an extremely interesting repackaging of age-old appetites: nostaglia, intrigue, sexual sadism... The show fails for a number of reasons, however, not the least being that while Twin Peaks is often engrossing television, it is rarely emotional. It does not make us feel. We watch out of curiosity, out of fascination, out of a kind of intellectual engagement.

Twin Peaks, which debuts Sunday as a two-hour movie, is like nothing you’ve seen in prime time — or on God’s earth. It may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV. It is also something of a miracle.

Don't be put off by all the hype about David Lynch, the cineaste's darling with the convoluted Weltanschauung. Twin Peaks is a hoot of a murder mystery, and unlike most of them, in which a few questions are posed, this one asks a million... Lynch brings his X-ray eye to TV, and gives us the pleasure of sharing the vision. He sees layers and layers and layers.