Bigger Than Life as Twin Peaks Cinema #17 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

The conclusion to my three-month "Ray's Haunted Fifties" season, Bigger Than Life may have encouraged more Twin Peaks comparisons than any other Nicholas Ray film (except perhaps last month's entry, Rebel Without a Cause - whose direct influences are more on the surfaces and whose indirect connections are more subtle). Like the title that kicked off this season, On Dangerous Ground, Bigger Than Life centers an angry, violent father, but in this case the father's wrath is directed at his family rather than on its behalf; or rather, he convinces himself that his patriarchal rage is meant for the benefit of his wife and son...even it costs them their lives. As a mild-mannered schoolteacher turned by addiction to Cortisone into a psychopathic abuser, James Mason's Ed Avery runs a similar gamut to Leland Palmer in Fire Walk With Me (or, for that matter, to Walter White in Breaking Bad, which also comes up in this discussion). Tackling one of the most common fifties motifs, familial domesticity in suburbia, Bigger Than Life offers an early subversion of its tropes in ways both obvious - Avery's controlling mania undercutting the idea that "father knows best" - and more subtle (there's even a cameo from the star of Leave It to Beaver himself in a bit of black comedy). The film's portrayal of the family's financial precarity and spiritual ennui, even before Avery goes mad, evokes a broader societal malaise behind his own personal drama.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 17

Rebel Without a Cause as Twin Peaks Cinema #16 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

The title of this summer season, "Ray's Haunted Fifties," evokes Rebel Without a Cause probably more than any other film. This is by far Nicholas Ray's most famous work, so famous indeed that it transcends his own reputation as a director to become an indelible piece of American pop culture mythology. If all of the director's films are haunted, Rebel feels particularly so given not just its own wounded characters but the tragically young deaths of all three leads, most famously James Dean himself (the star died, still in his twenties, before the movie was even released). And if you were to select a handful of Hollywood classics to represent the fifties, Rebel would be up there; it defines our image of that decade to the present day as surely as Elvis Presley records on the jukebox, Leave it to Beaver episodes on the black-and-white living room set, or posters of Marilyn Monroe below movie theater marquees. That aspect of Rebel - the almost intuitively iconographic - is what first leaps to mind when connecting it to Twin Peaks, which calls back several decades (to Lynch's own childhood) for its touchstones of teen culture. James Hurley is obviously derivative, as is Bobby Briggs in his own way, and the way the adolescent characters congregate with one another to take refuge from and figure out the adult world is quite reminiscent of Rebel's second half in particular. All of that occurs in the pilot and much of it is lost as the series progresses and loses touch with its high school roots. But Fire Walk With Me indicates deeper, richer thematic connections to Rebel Without a Cause, linking Laura Palmer to James Dean and Natalie Wood alike - both the characters they play, and the actors themselves.

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On Dangerous Ground as Twin Peaks Cinema #15 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

Just as my Lost in the Movies podcast recently kicked off a six-month season devoted to Hollywood classics, Twin Peaks Cinema is going to explore a similar terrain through an auteurist lens in a more focused period - I'm calling this miniseries of three podcasts "Ray's Haunted Fifties." I'm not sure I've ever heard David Lynch speak about Nicholas Ray as a particular aesthetic or thematic touchstones although Rebel Without a Cause is all over the Twin Peaks pilot and many have observed the connections between Fire Walk With Me and Bigger Than Life. On Dangerous Ground emerges from earlier in the decade, its gritty black-and-white noir milieu closer to our popular cinematic conception of the forties than the fifties, with its gritty black-and-white noir milieu. Indeed, much of the movie unfolds in an urban landscape quite far from Peaks but when the cynical police officer Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is dispatched to a rural crime scene, connections begin to reveal themselves. Before exploring those links, I read a full review of the film that I wrote over ten years ago to establish the story and flesh out the mood. In the discussion which follows, we tease out Jungian concepts that relate as much to Mark Frost's vision of Peaks as Lynch's, while observing the dynamic between Wilson and the blind hermit Mary Malden (Ida Lupino) in light of Cooper and Laura. I also discovered a fascinating dispersion of Leland Palmer's personal qualities between the young, mentally ill perpetrator of the crime (Sumner Williams) and the ferocious patriarch (Ward Bond) who seeks vengeance against his daughter's killer. In the heat of July, the new season of Twin Peaks Cinema finds its footing on a thick blanket of snow...

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