David Lynch

Twin Peaks - The Return

published in The Wire No.486, London, 2024

Excerpt

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But something entirely invisible motivates my reading of this episode of Twin Peaks: the CG animation is set to composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961). The bulk of the ‘fly-through’ in the CG animation images a library of abstract dynamics, each timed to Penderecki’s series of excoriating sheets of stringed decimation: liquid paint spills across a watery frame; murky celluloid vainly tries to focus on over-lit scenes with blurred vision; frenetic sparks of white shoot across an obsidian void; a billion ‘hairs in the film gate’ dance in a dimension of dirt; black liquid with boiling oxygenated bubbles swirls; multi-coloured stellar explosions erupt in dark voids; fiery walls crash into each other like molten waves. Threnody was written for fifty-two strings. The score calls for an orchestra stripped of heroic horns, triumphant percussion, entrancing woodwinds. Penderecki orchestrates dissonant swells of hyperactive bowing techniques, nearly all designed to molecularly blur any registerable pitch, and transform any ‘note’ into a melted chorus of wailing. The brute obviousness of Penderecki’s metaphors of anguish would be irksome if it weren’t for the severe sonic world he creates through his strict blockage of any humanist reading of the composition.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Showtime.