Freedom from Formula: discussing David Lynch & Auteur TV with Martha Nochimson, author of Television Rewired

Five years ago, I spoke to author and David Lynch scholar Martha Nochimson about her two groundbreaking studies of the great director: The Passion of David Lynch explores his first few films through the lens of feminism and Jungian analysis while her follow-up David Lynch Swerves incorporates quantum physics and Vedic spirituality. Now she has returned to this fertile ground, with Twin Peaks and particularly David Lynch at the center of her new book Television Rewired. This study, subtitled "The Rise of the Auteur Series" does not just limit itself to Lynch and Peaks. Using his troubled ABC production from the nineties and his fully-flowered Showtime series from 2017 as bookends, Television Rewired devotes a chapter each to David Chase's The Sopranos, David Simon's The Wire, David Simon's and Eric Overmyer's Treme, Matt Weiner's Mad Men, and Lena Dunham's Girls. An introduciton called "The David Effect" discusses the genesis and evolution of the trend toward auteur TV while the penultimate chapter, "Backlash! Formula 2.0" focuses on innovative but still formulaic series such as Breaking Bad and The X-Files.

Struck by the way Lynch "modeled freedom," Nochimson builds on her previous work with both him and David Chase through new interviews with both those and other TV auteurs. She sees them as facing a challenge similar to Cooper in Part 3 of the new Twin Peaks limited series (while admiring the dozen poetic resonances of "The Return" she's abiding by producer Sabrina Sutherland's admonition to avoid that title). Unlike Cooper, however, Lynch, Chase, and others don't descend back into the confinement of the black box - they leap out into outer space, into the unknown...falling, or flying? Nochimson discussed this sequence extensively in a lively chat with Scott Ryan in The Red Room podcast a few months ago; for our part, we concentrated on questions about Judy and the presence of evil, the New Mexico girl and the possibility she's Sarah (an idea Nochimson loathes), whether there's a "there" there for poor Dougie, and if there's a relationship between Fire Walk With Me and season three. We also spend a little time on The Sopranos and Girls (I avoided reading about or discussing Mad Men and The Wire, shows I'm still in the process of watching) as well as discovering the stubborn divergence of how we perceive the David Lynch/Mark Frost collaboration - or lack thereof. And, after a ten-minute introduction of her premise, we open the back-and-forth with a particularly fruitful investigation of what TV formula means and how artists could, and perhaps should, relate to it.

I hope you enjoy listening to this lengthy, in-depth discussion as much I enjoyed participating in it (the video is primarily audio-only, but uses images to illustrate various sections if you want to jump around, leave and come back, or just have some visual stimulation as you listen to it unwind in one sitting). Nochimson's book is well worth reading not only for its insights but for the dialogue and reflection it opens up among readers.

My Adventures in Television: I begin a Wednesday tradition

From now on, Wednesdays will be devoted to entries in my "viewing diaries" for various TV series - most of which I will be watching for the first time

As we slip further into the twenty-first century, the long-standing division between cinema and television continues to blur. The experimentation and artistic quality long assumed to be the provenance of film are increasingly found on TV and perhaps more importantly, definitions of the medium are changing. Shows like True Detective and the upcoming renewals of Twin Peaks and The X-Files promise to tell enclosed stories rather than stretching themselves out over multiple seasons to keep viewers tuning in. The term "showrunner" has come to mean what "auteur" did for a previous generation - a designation asserting the television show's right to be considered an artistic venue and not just a vulgar commodity. Meanwhile the gulf between art and entertainment has grown wider in movies, always a sign that decadence and decline have set upon an art form, while many of the most-discussed and loyally-followed TV shows manage to fuse the satisfactions of good drama, the challenges of complex characterization, and (to a still somewhat limited extent) the flavor of adventurous style.

Or so I hear. I have not seen most of the acclaimed and/or popular shows of the last decade, and have missed out on many earlier precedents (like The Prisoner or The X-Files) which supposedly helped pave the way for shows with overarching mythologies and enclosed, but extended, stories. I am now planning to address this oversight.