EPISODE 217 – IT’S GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL THING

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

It would be safe to say that my ordination was not what I expected. The Jesuit who was to oversee our service – a massive undertaking -- never showed up for our rehearsal. The four of us to be ordained arrived for the actual ceremony a half hour beforehand to find priests running around the sacristy in a panic; they could not find any communion wafers for the 1500+ expected. Eventually wafers had to be rushed over from another parish. I am not kidding.

A Jesuit who was to be involved in the services, someone who had been in recovery for some time, also turned up having apparently leapt quite vigorously from the wagon, and spent much of the time pre-Mass chatting up the bishop in a corner while others tried to figure out what to do (and searched for more wafers).

And the bishop himself called a major audible during the Mass, requesting the four of us leave our pews and sit directly in front of him for his homily, during which he shook his finger in our faces as he mostly scolded us for all the bad things we might some day do. (The congregation, stationed at a much more normal distance away, found him quite charming, while I spent the entire homily irrationally fearing he could somehow read the things going through my mind and would refuse to ordain me.)

Just before Mass a priest came up to us with a loopy “Can I talk to you about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” grin on his face and told us, in a knowing whisper, “You have no idea what’s about to happen.”

YA THINK, BUB?

Afterwards we threw him out a window. (In our minds we did, anyway.)

Not all the surprises were bad ones; and even most of the craziness I remember kind of loving. It’s like rain on your wedding day (which isn’t ironic, Alanis, shut up) -- you either freak out and have the worst time ever, or you just let it all go and enjoy the fact your life is actually a CBS sitcom.

(My parents would be so good on Big Bang Theory, I can’t even tell you.)

Maybe the most unexpected thing, though, was an article the four of us were given by a priest a few days before the service. “I’ve read this every year since I got ordained,” he told us, which honestly was not the strongest selling point, as he was kind of a kook. (Have you ever been to an event where there was time allotted for questions, and standing mikes set up all over the room? He’s that person who comes to the mike and really doesn’t have a question but nevertheless always has a need to share a long meander through the story of his life, usually at exactly that point when everyone feels ready for the event to be over.)

The article he gave us was called “Because Beset by Weakness” (link seems a little dicey; the article can also be found elsewhere via Google); it was a reprint of a letter that had been written by Fr. Michael Buckley, S.J. to the Jesuit seminarians he was in charge of at Berkeley in the late 60s and 70s. Those years were a crazy time in the U.S. Church – priests and nuns were leaving in droves, often with each other and sometimes immediately after getting ordained; there was a famous story of a provincial (sort of the Jesuit version of a bishop) who just left a note on his desk and ran off with someone. Basically, anything could happen.

In the midst of such upheaval, you might think the question to be asked of potential priests is whether they’re strong enough to get through it all. But Buckley thought that was absolutely wrong. The real question seminarians have to ask themselves is not “Am I strong enough” to be a priest, he said, but “Am I weak enough?”

Is this man deficient enough so that he cannot ward off significant suffering from his life, so that he lives with a certain amount of failure, so that he feels what it is to be an average man? Is there any history of confusion, of self-doubt, of interior anguish? Has he had to deal with fear, come to terms with frustrations, or accept deflated expectations?

In other words, is he unable to fully protect himself from the affairs of the world? Is he unavoidably vulnerable? Because that openness to the realities of life is what will end up making him a good priest.

It been striking me a lot lately that Buckley's point is not really about priesthood but about what will make for a good and happy life. When I’ve just tried to pitch an idea in a writers’ room or a meeting and suddenly I’m that guy at the mike and I’m not making any sense and I know everyone wants me to stop but that very fact has rendered me totally incapable of doing so even as I see the plane shattering into pieces all around me as it goes down in an inferno of flames, taking my career and the future and all the good things in life with it – this is an experience that may be more than hypothetical...? – my mindset afterwards is grief and shame.

Which, you know, fair enough. Sometimes we fail; you're going to feel that. Ideally you learn how to do things better and also how to pick yourself up and dust yourself off more quickly. One of the things you hear from experienced writers is how frustrating it gets when someone in a room is sulking over their failed idea/pitch/life choices. TV writing being a group sport and all, it doesn’t work very well when one player has decided to sit down and pull out the grass.

But my theory is, maybe that pain of failure is also a good thing, insofar as it demonstrates that we've invested so much in what we're doing that we've let down some of our shielding. It’s the same as with relationships – no one wants to be hurt, but if you’re not willing to put yourself in a position where you could be, yes, you never will be, congratulations, but also, hey fool, you’re never going to be in very much of a relationship. Vulnerability is the prereq for the seminar that is life, and no AP class can get you out of it.

It’s not to say we should be hoping for pain, or elderly clerics waving their little bony figures in our faces (trust me), or failure on the job.

But maybe when there is a cost, maybe in addition to not liking it or screaming in pillows and blaming others (my midlife version of the Fidget), maybe it’s also a sign that we’re doing at least one thing right, pretty much the most important thing, and that is continuing to let life in. ++

A much less Irish version of this: for the last couple weeks I’ve been working on an article about the ‘90s TV show Twin Peaks, which returns to Showtime after a twenty five year hiatus this coming Sunday.

(Aside: I would very much like to be in a position where someone can someday say of me, "Returning after a twenty five year hiatus...".)

I finished a Netflix binge of the whole show a few weeks ago, and I have to say, some of it absolutely blew me away. You'd think a show from the 90s would not be capable of really hitting the same levels as things more current. I mean, they don't even know about framing things in letterbox. Heathens!

But Twin Peaks... man, it's still got something.

Those of us who were alive in the 1990s may remember the absolute madness that surrounded the show. The concept was compelling – who killed small town homecoming queen Laura Palmer -- and the cast both largely unknown and very appealing.

(Sherilyn Fenn, people. So good.)

But it was the show's weirdness that really sealed the deal. Twin Peaks featured an FBI agent (Dale Cooper) who could beat Rob Lowe in a contest of upbeatery, was obsessed with Tibetan mysticism and spent an unusual amount of his private time talking into a tape recorder to his secretary Diane about things like the weather and what he had eaten. The local police station was usually filled with more donuts than a Krispy Kreme. There was one character who walked around holding a log like a baby, and insisting that the log had messages for people.

And different people, including Cooper, kept having absolutely crazy visions of killers and people in red rooms talking backwards, except they really weren't talking backwards, they just sounded like it because they had been filmed in reverse while walking and talking backwards.

(In order to pull that off in the pre-digital effects age the camera operator had to film the scene upside down. It was all kinds of messed up.)

The show was co-created by Mark Frost, who had been a writer on Hill Street Blues, and David Lynch, who makes all the craziest movies. I remember watching his Dune as a kid. I was so excited to see it I went even though I had kind of a low-level fever. Then I kept getting sicker and sicker during the film; by the end I couldn’t tell where the movie ended and my own fever dream hallucinations began. And I'm pretty sure that's exactly what Lynch wants for us in every film.

You don’t want to oversimplify the way that Frost and Lynch worked together, but I think it’s safe to say that Frost brought at least some of the show’s stronger serialization -- one of the amazing things about Twin Peaks is just how much it anticipates the serialized, cinematic TV dramas of today; and Lynch brought the dream-like and the disturbing -- the grieving mother whose screams go on and on in a way that is somehow not exactly real, and yet somehow more real as a result; the grieving father who consoles him through obsessive dancing; and above all, the supernatural killer BOB, who even now pretty much the most frightening thing I have ever seen on television.

A crazy thing I discovered in reading a recent oral history of the show: not just the casting but the whole idea of BOB (for some unexplained reason his name is all caps) came about as an accident. The guy who plays him, Frank Silva, was not an actor but a set dresser on the show. It was his job to make sure everything on different characters’ costumes looked right, and to reset anything that had changed between takes of a scene.

At some point during the pilot Silva was standing off-camera during a shot of Laura’s mother sitting in Laura's room, and Lynch noticed him move in a reflection in a mirror. Actually he was reflected in a reflection from a second mirror – which is itself kind of crazy, because Twin Peaks is a show obsessed with doubles and duality.

And Lynch was so struck by that image of Silva, he stopped everything and told Silva to get down on the floor behind Laura’s bed and look up through the bed’s bars at her mother, which he did.

Here's the shot:

And here's her reaction:

All of this goes completely unexplained. We've never met this guy. He's not even really there.

But just like that, Silva became the villain of the whole series. He appears only sporadically; Silva in fact kept his job as set decorator), but each time only more strange and frightening than the last.

(If you want to see what I mean, check out this moment when Laura’s near-twin cousin Maddy has a vision of BOB in Laura’s house.

This is my reaction watching it, every time:

This, it turns out, is the real genius of David Lynch – not the ability to create such indelibly visceral images, but the capacity to be present in the moment, and to be open to whatever he found there. In the oral history, cast and crew regularly talk about moments where a mistake happened, or a musician was rehearsing, and Lynch would seize upon what he saw or heard there and use it.

Or he’d think a scene needed something more and he’d go away and listen to the wind or meditate (Lynch is a long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation) and an idea would come. So for instance when they were finishing the pilot they had to shoot a second ending in case the network decided to make it a stand alone movie of the week instead of the start of a series. And he wasn’t sure how to do that.

He tells Variety that “he walked outside during an early-evening break from editing and folded his arms on the roof of a car.

“‘The roof was so warm, but not too warm,’ Lynch says. ‘It was just a really good feeling — and into my head came the red room in Cooper’s dream. That opened up a portal in the world of ‘Twin Peaks.’”

Or where a normal show would ask actors to speed a take up if they felt a moment was dragging, Lynch would regularly insist instead that they go even slower. And then even slower than that. And then even slower than that. Which of course, made them super uncomfortable. But then in doing so, they’d discover that there were all these other moments and layers of feeling there that they had previously missed.

Even as most of his stories have ended up being about the terrible darkness hidden within the seemingly normal, Lynch’s own point of view seems to be that the world is a place of great treasures. You just have to have some trust in that, be open, and it will all come.

As he's known for saying on set regularly: “It’s going to be a beautiful thing.” ++ Obviously, like anything else, Twin Peaks is not going to be everybody’s damn fine cup of joe. But to anyone even slightly interested I want to recommend three sequences, all of which can be found on Netflix (and poor quality versions of which can also be found on YouTube, but don't watch them there because you deserve better). For me they show so much of what television can be but even now rarely is.

1. The last 8:08 of episode 103, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”, in which we get Agent Cooper’s first dream and this scene in a mysterious red room, which drove the country insane for months:

2. The first 11 minutes of episode 201, “May the Giant Be With You”, which has Cooper’s second major vision, and introduces a very minor character that is maybe my favorite in the entire show, the elderly bellboy;

(Please watch this, just so someday we can laugh about him together in person.)

3. The final 14:05 of episode 207, “Lonely Souls”. This sequence reveals once and for all who Laura’s killer is, so there’s that. But I recommend it more for its incredible range of emotions. Agent Cooper has been told to go to this roadhouse, that the information he needs to solve the crime will be forthcoming there. And what happens while he’s there is this awful and yet unexpectedly poignant sequence; it’s one of my top ten moments in television, bar none.

(If you’re planning to watch the new show, you should definitely watch the last 21:40 seconds of the series finale, too. It involves another trip into the red room , the weirdest one of all, and also sets up what should be one of the new series’ biggest plot points. It’s also great.) ++ One more David Lynch story from the oral history. One day he arrived on set an hour and a half late. It turns out, as he was pulling into the studio he saw a license plate that started with the numbers 666. Fearing it was a bad sign, he turned around and kept driving until he saw a plate whose number would cancel out the bad juju.

A man after my own heart. I recently got a call from someone whose first three digits after the area code were the same. I knew immediately, there is no way I was ever calling that person back.

Sorry, Mom. ++ LINKS ++

Everyone on American Twitter this week has been making fun of smashed avocado on toast, an Australian snack that we don’t have here so of course it’s ridiculous because America.

But we do have guacamole. And this is a thirty second music video about making guacamole that will change your life. (And if you like it, just wait – there’s a whole other song that follows about peeling bananas.)

In equally ridiculous news, people believe Avril Lavigne has been replaced by someone named Melissa (and their recent tweets to her made me cry from laughing).

TV Critic Todd van der Werff, whose newsletter “Episodes” I’ve mentioned here before, has a hilarious piece I just discovered ranking his top five big cats.

He has real feelings on matters like the the leopard:

Leopards are fine and all, but they also share space with both lions and tigers, and if you're going to share space with lions and tigers, you'd better bring your A game, and leopards have brought their B game at best. They also lose points for looking a lot like jaguars and not seeming particularly bothered by this fact. Leopards are the biggest pretenders of the genus panthera, and it's time somebody called them out on it.

Don’t even ask him about cheetahs. Whoa.

If you liked all the Twin Peaks stuff, Michael J. Anderson, who played the backwards-talking Man From Another Place, once did a video on how to talk backwards, and my God is it freaky. (Bizarrely, he knew how to speak backwards before he got the Twin Peaks job.)

Lastly, while I always want to support anything Star Wars, this trend of parents naming their kids Kylo just makes no sense to me. Might as well name him Oedipus.

Lynch has been doing a lot of interviews lately to promote the new season. GQ asked him at one point, “Who are we, really?”

"We’re super-special beings!” He says, eyes fully lit up now. “We really are! And we have a glorious future—if only we could realize that and grow rapidly toward that, it would be beautiful. The key to it is the transcendent—this deepest, eternal level of life, the big treasury within every human being. When any one human being experiences that deepest level, they grow in that—all positive—and life gets better. And they’re truly unfolding their full potential. The key to peace in the world is there. We’re special beings with a great future, great potential, and we’re supposed to enjoy life. They say the purpose of life is the expansion of happiness—beautiful description of what it’s all about. It’s real simple. We’re not meant to suffer. We’re meant to be blissful and enjoy life and enjoy all diversity.”

Stay open.