Peyton Place as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #11 (podcast)

Closing out the three-month season of "Small Town Blues", Peyton Place may seem like a break from the previous two entries. Of course, just last month, I said the same thing about Our Town! Granted, Peyton Place shares a darker, subversive streak with Kings Row that the more innocent ensemble of Our Town avoids - and while Kings Row is set in the Midwest, Peyton Place could be just a few towns over from Our Town in New Hampshire. For the most part, though, Peyton Place is the odd one out. Both Kings Row and Our Town were directed by Sam Wood, in black-and-white, almost back-to-back in the early forties, whereas Peyton Place belongs to the widescreen, Technicolor era of sweeping melodramas in the late fifties (as such, it feels a bit closer in mood and aesthetic to Twin Peaks). Kings Row and Our Town are set in the quaint turn-of-the-century days long before World War I, while Peyton Place evokes a far more recent history for its audience, unfolding just before and during World War II. Like those other two films, Peyton Place crossed mediums, not just from novel to cinema but eventually as one of the most popular soap operas of all time and a direct precedent to Peaks; in fact, when David Lynch's and Mark Frost's mutual agent suggested the project, he introduced the concept as "Blue Velvet meets Peyton Place." As I discovered in this re-viewing, Peyton Place already has a bit of Blue Velvet about it - while lacking the Lynch film's surrealism and mystery plotting, it also depicts a cozy small town with a sleazy underbelly, and was viewed as quite subversive in its own time. One of the most striking and disturbing elements that connects Peyton Place to Twin Peaks - a quasi-incestuous abuse haunting one of the characters - is also shared with Kings Row (albeit more obliquely, given the censorship of that time). This is a connection cemented by casting, as the author Lindsay Hallam has pointed out to me in the past. Hope Lange, the troubled young woman in Peyton Place, would go on to play a mother in Blue Velvet; in Peyton Place, her own mother is played by Betty Field...who played a similar victim in Kings Row.

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Our Town as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #10 (podcast)

Sandwiched between Kings Row and Peyton Place in my "Small Town Blues" miniseries, the 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder's beloved play Our Town might seem out of place, more tame and innocent in the lives it depicts (though not in its avant-garde presentation on the stage, translated more naturalistically but still unconventionally to the screen). Certainly most of the characters in Grover's Corner, New Hampshire, have fewer secrets than the folks we met in Kings Row (Missouri?) and will meet in Peyton Place (also New Hampshire). And the seamy side of this turn-of-the-century community is left mostly unexplored - especially compared to those other two scandal-mongering texts. But Our Town, starring William Holden, Martha Scott, and an ensemble of top character actors, has its own dark, melancholy heart, marked by a wistful sense of mortality, and it's perhaps this quality which most informed Mark Frost in the creation of Twin Peaks not just as a series but also as a literary universe. Frost has cited Wilder as his favorite playwright, and the idea of building and exploring a community always animates his interest in the world of Twin Peaks, Washington. Incidentally, another Our Town connection that unfortunately never even comes up on either podcast - maybe someday in a later piece - is its director, Sam Wood, who also helmed Kings Row a couple years later. Subjects that do arise in this discussion include the heroine's ability to watch her loved ones from another realm; the more or less comprehensive town portraits on television, stage, cinema, and page; and how season three adds a dimension of passing time which brings it closer to the perspective of Our Town.

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Kings Row as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #9 (podcast)

With the new year comes a new themed miniseries for my Twin Peaks Cinema podcast: "Small Town Blues" (the last series, "What's in a name?" explored Laura, Vertigo, and Sunset Boulevard as seminal influences on Peaks). One of the most fascinating things about the work of David Lynch and Mark Frost is their world creation, the way they explore the social fabric of a complex community. "The bucolic small town with a dark, seamy underside" has been a particular American mainstay for generations, with Lynch's own Blue Velvet preceding Peaks for several years, itself drawing upon melodramatic tropes of fifties cinema. One of the best examples of this "genre" (if we can call it that) may not have had any direct impact on Peaks at all - I don't think Lynch or Frost ever referenced it - but it certainly feels like a kindred spirit. Kings Row explores the old-fashioned charm of nineteenth century life alongside a fascination with (explicit) Freudianism. Its characters cavort in sunny fields and lurk in delipidated old houses; they travel as far afield as Vienna and also venture across the wrong side of the tracks for romance - a shabby, more urban-feeling neighborhood that in some ways feels even further from their home than Europe. Like Twin Peaks, Kings Row contains worlds. Thematically, the connections are quite striking, especially when it comes to Cassandra Tower (Betty Field), a troubled young woman whose aura of mystery and repressed secrets torment the protagonist (Robert Cummings) as he comes of age. Of course Kings Row's lasting legacy was that it provided Ronald Reagan's most acclaimed role and the notorious line that he borrowed to title his memoir (before launching a political career dead set on denying the dark undercurrents that Kings Row unearths beneath America's optimistic topsoil). "Where's the rest of me?"

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