Hear me out. Because I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time.
Yesterday, someone I follow on Twitter pushed forward a bootleg clip someone had taken of a scene from the brand new The Flash movie, which shows two quite legendary characters making cameo appearances during what appears to be a climactic sequence. Now, for the purposes of making my point, I’m going to reveal who they are in this article. If you really care, genuinely don’t read any further, or at least skip over it. If you don’t, welcome to my world.
“Whose world is this? Ours!” So chant the men of Don’t Worry Darling in one key moment that speaks to the core of Olivia Wilde’s second film as director.
Her movie is yet another rejoinder at the promise of progress, suggesting equality—especially among the sexes—is not as keenly rendered as we might like to think in the early 21st century. There are lots of anxieties about this lately – Alex Garland’s Men, for example, throwing a traumatised woman into a remote country space filled with haunting, mythical examples of male control and toxicity; or imminently, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, adapting Joyce Carol Oates’ searing, tragic examination of Marilyn Monroe’s life of abuse after abuse by entitled, toxic males, and the psychological complexes that come from it.
Wilde, working from a script by Katie Silberman that stemmed from the esteemed ‘Black List’, presents these issues less through Pagan horror or grotesque celebrity but rather via the ghoulish lens of not just psychological or psychosexual thriller but as conspiratorial mystery within a quasi-fascist utopia; a perfect world of historical American values that never truly existed based on order, symmetry and defined, accepted gender roles. Don’t Worry Darling fears we remain trapped in this dark fantasy, that our ‘wokeness’ disguises a terrifying somnambulism encasing modern women.
It is a film driven by our modern discourse yet at once it has, off screen, been eaten alive by it. On screen, it struggles to live up to the powerful promise of the concept, becoming lost in derivative approaches.
A curious thing happened to me while watching Obi-Wan Kenobi, the latest piece of event television to emerge from Disney’s wider Star Wars universe.
Part III contained what is arguably the singular momentous storytelling beat for Star Wars since Rey found an old Luke Skywalker at the end of The Force Awakens. Ewan McGregor’s middle-aged, beaten down ‘Ben’ Kenobi faces down his former protege Anakin Skywalker at the peak of his Darth Vader transformation, long before any kind of redemptive beat we will eventually see in Return of the Jedi. They draw lightsabers. They fight. Vader, in his immortal James Earl Jones-style drawl, tells Obi-Wan he is weak. It is pure Star Wars catnip.
Yet I felt nothing. Granted, Star Wars isn’t exactly ‘my’ franchise. I’ve always enjoyed it but the passion for it doesn’t exist as it does for Star Trek or The X-Files or James Bond etc… That being said, I am as readers of this blog will know, someone who laps up popular culture in many forms and frequently the return of characters, or existing franchises, does excite me. Vader’s reappearance properly for the first time since 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, to fight Obi-Wan Kenobi no less, should have thrilled me. Except it just left me numb.
It felt like an example of just where mainstream IP has taken us, and is continuing to take us, in the age of the streaming service. Back to a lesser re-tread of a classic, beloved moment in cultural history.
“The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art”. So said Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, and while she isn’t referencing Twin Peaks, her medication on perception is key to the experience of watching this unique, mind-bending series.
Many people I know have a long association with Twin Peaks to a degree I never have. They watched it either in subsequent decades since it premiered in 1990 or even perhaps at the time on ABC latterly BBC2 in the U.K., where it ran as a two season cult hit that though failing to be renewed, latched onto the public and cultural consciousness and never quite let go. I was just seven years old when David Lynch & Mark Frost’s series arrived, too young to step into the Black Lodge as a viewer but old enough to feel its existence somehow.
During the 1990s, Twin Peaks became an American import that was discussed in hushed tones as a modern classic, something dark, horrific and deeply strange, almost akin to the boom in schlock horror of the period where VHS tapes were king and satellite broadcasts were just penetrating the mainstream. It was not long afterward, around 1995, that I discovered The X-Files—still a lifelong passion—without truly understanding as a teenager the pervasive effect FBI Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation into the death of teenager Laura Palmer had on the show I rapidly fell in love with.
Years went by. Decades. I watched so many series recognised as American classics, beyond my penchant for science-fiction. Breaking Bad. The Sopranos. Mad Men. The list went on. Twin Peaks lurked, however, at the back of my mind, continuing to latch on. References abounded, references I didn’t get. And when the series came back in 2017 for The Return, a long gestated third season, I missed the boat. Was I afraid of it? Was it just too legendary, too impenetrable? Was I terrified it wouldn’t match the expectations?
Last year, the time came, during the second Covid-19 lockdown. It was time to walk with fire. It was time to order some cherry pie. It was time to let the past dictate the future.
culturalconversation.co.uk 