Mysterious Skin as Twin Peaks Cinema #14 (podcast)

This is a tale of two abused children who grow up into troubled young men. Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) is a shy, reclusive UFO hunter and Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a gay hustler; both of their far-apart lifestyles represent escape from and obsession with the trauma that fuels them. This of course reflects both the actual narrative of Twin Peaks, in which a fascinated detective hunts the secrets of a troubled young victim (although Brian, like Laura in Fire Walk With Me and The Secret Diary, is both detective and victim), and also the behind-the-scenes Twin Peaks meta-narrative, in which the creators discovered Laura Palmer's emotional depth only in the course of telling her supernatural mystery story. The duality of Mysterious Skin - two narratives connecting only in the end - is itself a very Lynchian structure. All of these observations, and much more, are developed in my lengthy analysis of the film, which also allows me to re-visit season three's relationship to the ending and legacy of Fire Walk With Me. Does the conclusion of Mysterious Skin present an alternative, more successful (if bittersweet) version of the older Cooper's alienated, bumbling attempts to bring Laura "home"? This podcast, one of the last I recorded for patrons (along with the episode I'll publish next month), is also one of the few Twin Peaks Cinema entries to document a movie influenced *by* Twin Peaks rather than working as a potential influence upon it (the director Gregg Araki is an avowed fan of Fire Walk With Me who would later cast Sheryl Lee in one of his movies). That lineage, and Mysterious Skin's complex weaving of denial, confrontation, and mythologization, make it an appropriate conclusion to the three-month "Traumatic Transformations" miniseries which incorporated Belladonna of Sadness and The Sweet Hereafter.

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The Sweet Hereafter as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #13 (podcast)

Twenty-five years ago, The Sweet Hereafter premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Its reception was far more rapturous than the maligned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which debuted to Cannes boos exactly five years earlier), but the films have much in common. Both are moody nineties portraits of secret lives, dysfunctional families, and small town tragedy. They both center an adolescent girl (here played by Sarah Polley, worthy of the comparison with Sheryl Lee) who attempts to take control of her own story in the limited ways available to her. And Laura Palmer's and Nicole Burnell's stories are both rooted in abuse by an incestuous father. The Sweet Hereafter also recalls the series Twin Peaks with its somber portrayal of grief (in this case, following a school bus accident that massacres the town's children) and placement of an outside investigator as its protagonist (in this case, Ian Holm as a civil litigator far more dour but no less determined than Cooper). I've placed this discussion in May because of the festival anniversary, and to connect it to a month devoted to Fire Walk With Me (which I'm currently covering in-depth on my Lost in Twin Peaks public podcast). But it also works as the heart of my three-month "Traumatic Transformations" theme. While less overtly fantastical than Belladonna of Sadness or even the forthcoming Mysterious Skin, it dabbles in fairy tale by lacing The Pied Piper throughout its own text, in image, word, and even music. There is also a sense, reminiscent of Twin Peaks, that on a metaphorical level the town's tragedy is generated by Nicole's trauma. This is especially palpable in the final, moving shot, which matches well with similar images from Belladonna and Skin (I've used all three frames for their podcast icons). Bright light overwhelms the viewer, paradoxically evoking the character's traumas as well as their attempts to transcend them.

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Belladonna of Sadness as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #12 (podcast)

An appropriate tie-in to my recent listener feedback episode of the Patreon podcast, which included a passage on the dark fairy tales themes coursing through Twin Peaks (specifically emphasizing Sleeping Beauty and the work of Anne Sexton), the Japanese proto-anime Belladonna of Sadness also kicks off the new three-month season of Twin Peaks Cinema. I'm calling this season's theme "Traumatic Transformations". These films all begin with characters haunted by trauma: loss of loved ones, abuse by powerful men, sometimes both. These traumas become wrapped up in fantasies of various kinds, some casually poetic (a fairy tale read to children when babysitting), some obsessively escapist (a UFO special sparking both avoidance of and a search for the more disturbing truth), and some literally manifesting in supernatural powers (an impoverished peasant evolving into a hypnotic witch whose magic threatens the very lord who raped her). Even the more realistic films suggest, in an offhand way much like Twin Peaks, that the tragedies unfolding across their communities may be connected on some deep, fundamental level with an individual's private crisis. This is certainly true of Belladonna of Sadness, a fascinating project mixing fable with social history, psychology with pornography, and static illustration with pulsating psychedelic montage. Connections to Peaks abound, perhaps most directly to The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer as our heroine Jeanne struggles with a BOB-like demon who is both a manifestation of her own personal defiance and a product of the assault which has become intertwined with her own identity.

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