Serge Bourguignon

Films of Serge Bourguignon:

• Le Sourire (The Smile) - Serge Bourguignon (1960)
• Sundays and Cybele (Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray) - Serge Bourguignon (1962)

“Sundays and Cybele” - Serge Bourguignon (1962)

Although the ultimate nature of love is unfathomable (at least within the terms used by our modernist perspective), it does seem somehow connected to the quintessential mystery of human existence – who are we?  How can we solve this mystery?  Logic and modernist philosophy fail us here [1], so we must turn to the arts to explore this crucial area of love and being.  And within the compass of the artistic realm, the most narratively expressive art form available to undertake this exploration is the cinema.  And so far, to me, the greatest ever cinematic expression of love’s mysterious character has been the French film Sundays and Cybele (Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray, 1962).  This is not just a magical film; it is a magnificent monument to human expression.  The film won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1963 [2], but its greatness extends far beyond that specific category.

The film’s story is about a traumatized young war veteran who befriends an 11-year-old orphan girl, and it recounts their ensuing relationship.  It is based on the novel Les Dimanches de Ville d'Avray by Bernard Eschassériaux (1959), but 33-year-old director Serge Bourguignon, for whom this was his first feature, introduced some crucial alterations that I think greatly enhanced the story told.  In fact the film’s script by Bourguignon and Antoine Tudal received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay [3].

Bourguignon had already gained international attention with his documentary about a Buddhist monk, Le Sourire (The Smile), which had won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.  Here on the occasion of making Sundays and Cybele, Bourguignon was greatly assisted by the contributions of gifted cinematographer Henri Decaë (Les Enfants Terribles, 1950; The 400 Blows, 1959; Les Cousins, 1959; Le Samouraï, 1967; and Le Cercle Rouge 1970) and famed musical composer Maurice Jarre.  In fact, although Jarre won US Oscars for his film scores for both Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), I feel that his moody musical score here for Sundays and Cybele (which was also nominated for an Oscar [3]) was his best work.

In addition to the excellent technical contributions behind the camera, the film benefited from outstanding performances in front of the camera, particularly on the part of the three principal players: Hardy Krüger, Patricia Gozzi, and Nicole Courcel.  Nevertheless and despite the enthusiasm with which the film was received overseas, the response to the film in France was more muted.  This was apparently partly because Bourguignon, although youthful and loosely classified as part of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), was considered to be an outsider by the critical clique at the influential journal Cahiers du Cinema, which comprised a number of new and aspirant filmmakers in competition with Bourguignon [4,5].

The main theme of the film concerns love and how it defines us.  Of course the world ‘love’ has many interpretations and comes in many guises connected with varying contexts.  This can include motherly and filial love, sexual love, brotherly love, and agape (the love God has for humankind).  But Sundays and Cybele concerns the very essence of the feeling of true love – that soul-immersing encounter when one feels a dissolution of any separation from one’s beloved.  Lustful physical pleasure is not intrinsically part of this.  The film places this experience in a poetic context that enables the viewer to see it, and feel it, from multiple perspectives.

In this respect there are two main world-view perspectives evoked in the film:

• Ego-Analytical. 
  This is the rational and logical world-view that is comprised by our modernist culture.  Of course, there are many variants to this, but they mostly advocate objective and evidence-based rational decision-making.  The rational observer sets him- or herself apart from what is observed and seeks to make sense of the world from an outside perspective.
   
• Natural-Organic.
  This is a more primitive and primordial perspectival way that sees oneself as intrinsically embedded in nature.  One must, as Martin Heidegger counseled, use hermeneutics to find “pathways through the woods” of our experiential worlds.  But we, and others, are essential and inextricable parts of this natural world.  It is a world of narratives that truly constitutes our existence.

The story of Sundays and Cybele passes through the four narrative phases as its tale is told.

1.  Pierre Meets Françoise. 
In the opening scene, which is presumably a psychological flashback, Pierre (played by Hardy Krüger) is piloting a warplane over Viet Nam in the French Indochina War.  As he strafes a local village, he sees a young local girl in his gunsight just before his plane crashes to the ground.  We will later learn through narrative technique of slow disclosure that Pierre was found half-dead by rescuers and taken to a hospital, where he kept babbling, “Did I kill her?”. 

The scene now shifts to a suburb of Paris, Ville-d’Avray, where Pierre lives with the nurse he had met in the hospital and who is now his girlfriend. Although Pierre has physically recovered from his injuries, he suffers from amnesia – presumably brought about by the anguish he felt in likely killing the young village girl.  He now doesn’t know his past or even who he is.  In Eschassériaux’s original novel, the Pierre character was a hardened gangster and not a traumatized war veteran.  I think Bourguignon’s shifted picture of Pierre is crucial to our empathizing with Pierre’s character and is a profound enhancement to the story.

One wintry evening while idling at the local train station, Pierre is disturbed to see a young girl  (Patricia Gozzi) crying while quarreling with her father.  Pierre tries to cheer her up and is charmed by the girl’s infectious smile.  Fascinated, Pierre follows the father and girl to a Roman Catholic convent, where the father dumps her in the convent’s orphanage.  Then the father runs away and disappears from the story.

Then Pierre is shown with his loving and supportive girlfriend, the nurse Madeleine (Nicole Courcel), discussing his amnesia.  Pierre also spends therapeutic time helping out a local artistic sculptor Carlos (Daniel Ivernel).  Carlos reminds Pierre that it is good for him to spend time around trees.  Pierre acknowledges that the trees are good, but that when he looks up at trees,  he experiences vertigo, a vestige of his traumatic experience in the war.  Carlos reassures him that “the day you stop getting vertigo you will be cured.”

Since Madeleine is currently assigned hospital work on Sundays, Pierre goes the next Sunday, without telling Madeleine, to look in on the young girl at the orphanage.  There he is mistakenly assumed to be the girl’s father and permitted to take her outside.  He takes her back to Madeleine’s apartment, where the girl relates to him how both of her parents have now abandoned her.  The girl is known as Francoise at the convent, but that is not her real name, which she keeps a secret.  But she impishly promises to reveal to him her true name if he would get the metal cock atop the nearby gothic cathedral steeple and give it to her.  Francoise wants Pierre to adopt her, but he tells her that would be impossible.  So she settles for his promise to come visit her every Sunday.

At this point with most of the principal characters introduced, it is appropriate to consider how they fit into the film’s thematic content with respect to the two main world-view perspectives mentioned earlier.  Let me assure you that the film is not so schematic as the following characterizations might suggest, and I offer them here only to support a deeper understanding of what transpires.

• Francoise
  Her real name, which is only revealed towards the end of the story, is Cybele, and this is symbolically important for the story.  The name Cybele refers to an ancient (and hence pre-Christian) Greek and Anatolian mother goddess.  She is the goddess of mountains, trees, earth, and fertile nature and hence symbolizes the Organic-Nature perspective mentioned above [6].  Our Francoise/Cybele in this story embodies in her own innocent way that perspective, too.
   
• Pierre 
  With his amnesia wiping out his Ego-Analytical memories of his past and who he was, he is now like an innocent child starting out all over in life.  He is ready to be captivated by Francois/Cybele’s Organic-Nature engagement with the world around her.
   
• Carlos 
  His artistic engagement with the natural world enables him to see things from the Organic-Nature perspective.  He counsels others to let Pierre find his own pathway through the natural woods.
   
• Madeleine 
  With her medical profession background, she is used to seeing things from the Ego-Analytical perspective.  But her sincere, loving nature places her on the fence and open to the possibilities of the Organic-Nature perspective when she discusses things with Carlos.
   
  
• Bernard (Andre Oumansky)
  He is introduced later and shown to be a doctor in the hospital and with amorous intentions towards Madeleine.  He is emphatically categorical and the supreme representative of the Ego-Analytical mode.
   
• Carmela (Bibiane Stern)
  She is Carlos’s briefly-seen wife and is also strictly Ego-Analytical.

2.  Meetings on Sundays  

In this section the relationship between Pierre and Francoise develops when he starts regularly taking the girl out on Sundays.  He takes her out on to the town lake where they sometimes visit an abandoned gazebo and explore their fantasies.  The two innocent souls are gradually enthralled with each other, but there is no trace of sexual attraction.  They are in their own world of imagination.  In fact Francoise frequently entreats Pierre to toss a stone into the still waters in front of them, which creates circular ripples that distort their reflected image.  When they gaze at their reflection enframed by the circular ripples, Francoise tells him, “now we are home”. 

But there are also sometimes little pouts that arise from Pierre’s occasional feelings of jealousy.  On one occasion Francoise admires a handsome rider on horseback, which disturbs Pierre.  On another occasion Francoise is playing with some children her own age and one of the boys roughhouses her a little.  This causes Pierre to smack the boy harshly, causing Francoise to look on in horror. 

But she overcomes her misgivings and takes comfort in the fact that he loves her.  And she swears that she loves him, too.  She tells him that she is almost twelve, and when she reaches the age of eighteen, she will marry him.  After they make up, she asks him to carry her through the woods, while she sings a love song to him.  She also tells him about her romantic dream of spending Christmas with him.  Despite all these romantic gestures, their love is completely innocent, without any elements of sensuality.

All the scenes showing Pierre and Francoise together in the woods are beautifully filmed, with  Decaë’s camera compositions often including distant shots of the two of them embedded in the natural sylvan environment.  Indeed it was apparently Bourguignon’s and Decaë’s intention here to evoke the black-and-white imagery of old Japanese woodblock prints with their cinematography [7].  This is a further visual conjuring of the Organic-Nature perspective, and it is enhanced by Jarre’s haunting background music that adds an interiority to what is shown.

3.  Madeleine’s Concerns       

Unbeknownst to Pierre, Madeleine arranges to take the next Sunday off so that the two of them can attend a luncheon together at the lakeside café with some other couples, including Dr. Bernard. Pierre learns about this at the last minute and is disturbed, because it is too late for him to inform Francoise that he can’t meet her.  At the luncheon, Pierre is distracted and can think only about Francoise.  At one point he looks out of the café window across the lake and mistakenly thinks he sees Francoise with the handsome horseback rider (it turns out to be another woman with a cap similar to Francoise’s).  All the while, Madeleine is lovingly attentive and tries to mollify her frowning boyfriend.

Afterwards they all stop at an amusement park where Pierre visits a gypsy fortune teller.  While the woman is not looking, he steals an African sorcerer’s dagger the likes of which Francoise had once described to him.

Then the group get into amusement park bumper cars, and each couple gets into a separate car. But the ensuing jousting chaos only elicits another vertigo attack for Pierre.  To make things worse, he spots Francoise among the onlookers watching the bumper cars just as Madeleine leans over and kisses him.  In a panic, Pierre smacks Madeleine and jumps out of the car.  This generates a chaotic brawl, and the luncheon party friends just manage to escape to their car and get away.

All this spawns Madeleine’s doubts about Pierre.  She finally realizes that Pierre has been secretly spending his Sundays with Francoise, and she discusses her concerns with Carlos.  Carlos assures her that Pierre is just innocently finding his inner self with Francoise.  But Carlos’s wife Carmela hatefully says that Pierre is a pedophile.  So Madeleine decides to investigate things herself, but following Carlos’s urgings, she doesn’t confront Pierre directly about Francoise.  She truly loves Pierre and wants somehow to win his confidence.

The next Sunday Madeleine skips going to the hospital so that she can secretly follow Pierre with Francoise.  She watches the two of them playing together by the lakeside. When from a distance she first sees Pierre holding the sorcerer’s dagger, she is alarmed, but she soon sees that it is just a game for them.  In accordance with the African legend, they stick the dagger into a tree trunk in order to listen to the mysteries of the tree spirits.  As she watches them play together further, she becomes convinced of the essential innocence of their relationship.

4.  Christmas Denouement
But can the innocent dreamworld of Pierre and Francoise continue?  Christmas is coming, and Pierre wants to make Francoise’s romantic dreams come true.  He takes Francoise to the lakeside café, where Francoise confidently orders two grenadines (non-alcoholic).  When the waiter frowns, she smoothly switches her order to two hot toddies (alcoholic).  Then Francoise again promises to tell Pierre her real name when he gives her the church steeple cock.

This idea of Francoise’s real name, Cybele, is important.  It represents her innermost self, which she wants to share only with her beloved.  She knows who she really is – Cybele.  And Pierre is discovering who he really is, too. 

The climactic ending is too dramatic to describe here.  Cybele does finally reveal her true name to Pierre.  And Pierre does go to the top of the church steeple, where he dismounts the steeple cock and, despite the vertiginous height, discovers that his vertigo has finally vanished. He is finally cured and has at last found himself. But the forces of Ego-Analytical coercion led by Bernard are working against the two innocent dreamers.   Tragedy is in the making.

Note that when it comes to understanding who we are, it is not a matter of understanding some structure with identified properties and capabilities.  That is the Ego-Analytical way of looking at things.  It is more a matter of understanding ourselves as multiple narratives-in-the-making.  This necessarily entails the Organic-Nature perspective and our responding to the opportunities of immersive engagement with the beloved other.  When we do find ourselves in love, our horizons open up to new and wondrous narrative possibilities, new pathways through the woods, in unified collaboration with our respective beloved ones.

It is the glimpse of this mesmerizing wonder of love that Sundays and Cybele and the transcendent performance of Patricia Gozzi, as Francoise/Cybele, give us.  You must see this film.
★★★★ 

Notes:

1. For a lucid discussion of modern philosophy’s shortcomings and inability to account for human conscious experience, see
• Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Oxford University Press, (2012).
2. “35th Academy Awards”, Wikipedia, (27 August 2017).    
3. “36th Academy Awards”, Wikipedia, (8 August 2017).   
4. Ginette Vincendeau, “Sundays and Cybèle: Innocent Love?”, The Criterion Collection, (1 October 2014).   
5. Clayton Dillard, “Sundays and Cybèle”, Slant Magazine, (28 September 2014).   
6. “Cybele”, Wikipedia, (15 August 2017).   
7. Interview with Hardy Kruger, “Sundays and Cybele”, The Criterion Collection, (September 2014). 

“Reward to Finder”, AHP, Season Three: Episode 6 - James Neilson (1957)

“Reward to Finder”, an episode on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television anthology series (Season 3, Episode 6), is a tale of people who become consumed by greed.  Scripted by Frank Gabrielson based on F. J. Smith’s story, the episode was directed by James Neilson.  It stars two well-known stage and screen character actors, Oskar Homolka (who had earlier starred in the 1936 Hitchcock thriller, Sabotage) and Jo Van Fleet.

The narrative is exclusively focused on a poor, elderly couple, Carl and Anna Kaminsky, living in a small, dingy city apartment.  Carl Kaminsky (Oskar Homolka) works as a low-paid building custodian, and he is so impecunious that he doesn’t buy a newspaper, he picks up discarded copies that have been left on the street.  One day while picking up a paper out of the gutter, he finds a wallet loaded with cash.  When he comes home, Anna (Jo Van Fleet) wonders why her husband is less grouchy than usual and asks him why.  He coyly and contemptuously shows off the wallet, which contain no identification but has 52 $100 bills stuffed inside (worth about $50,000 today). 

Over Carl’s grousing objections, Anna insists that the only conscionable thing for them to do is to check the newspaper notices to see if there is a reward offered for a lost wallet and return it to its rightful owner.  Sure enough there is such a listing for a lost wallet on the street corner where Carl found his wallet parcel.  And from a chance encounter with a local policeman, they also learn that finding lost property and not making an effort to find its owner or returning it to the police is a criminal offence.  So Carl reluctantly promises Anna that he will return the wallet to the advertised owner.

Of course, we doubt that the greedy old man will return the wallet, even though he reports back  to his wife the next day that he did return it and got no compensation for finding it.  Two weeks later, though, Anna notices in the newspaper listings that the wallet is still missing.  She knows that her husband has lied to her.

Up to this point in the story, Carl has seemed like a selfish man who abusively scorns his wife, while Anna seems to be just the innocent victim of her irascible husband’s temper tantrums.  But as she ponders more about the money, Anna starts thinking about what it could do to change her own miserable life.  So she confronts her husband and demands that he include her in on the take – or else she will report him to the police.

Carl is helpless to deny her demand, and Anna quickly goes off on a shopping spree, buying expensive home furnishings and women’s glamor and makeup kits.  When she soon returns wearing a mink coat, Carl knows that his wife’s greedy splurges are fully out of control.

The problem with these characters, as intended elements of a compelling story, is that neither one captures our sympathies.  Much of this episode’s screen time is devoted to showing Carl and Anna peevishly quarreling with each other.  In fact Anna and Carl are both obsessed with themselves, and whatever trace of marital love they may once have shared has long since vanished.  Now the only thing that concerns them is their personal dignity [1].  Anna, for example, who at first seemed to devote herself to satisfying her grumpy husband, turns out now to be most concerned with manicuring what she claims were her once-beautiful hands. The mink coat is a further indulgence in self-decoration.  Eventually the selfish acquisitiveness of these two malcontents commits them to further, more desperate acts.

So the episode’s final grisly twist may be an appropriate and ironic comeuppance, but it may also leave you a little chilled.

★★★

Notes:

1. I have discussed the problematic nature of the notion of "dignity" elsewhere.  See for example my reviews of  The Last Command (1928), Bicycle Thieves (1948), and Tangsir (1974).

“Traces to Nowhere”, Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep.1 - Duwayne Dunham (1990)

“Traces to Nowhere” is the opening episode of the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91) following the two-hour series pilot.  It continues with the investigation of a precipitating event that took place prior to the events described in this series – the murder of a highschool girl in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington (state).  This episode was directed by Duwayne Dunham, and it was scripted by series co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, who also scripted the series pilot and the subsequent Episode 2 ("Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”).

In the pilot it was revealed that the local highschool homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), was brutally raped and murdered, and her battered corpse had been found wrapped in plastic on the banks of a local river.  FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) was called in to supervise a local investigation led by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), and much of the series pilot is spent introducing the local characters of Twin Peaks who will figure in the  story.

This “Traces to Nowhere” episode doesn’t really have a self-contained narrative, and its time is primarily spent “thickening” the plot by introducing more obfuscating evidence and expanding on the contexts of some principal characters.  The viewer does learn a few things of interest.

Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman had arrested Laura Palmer’s boyfriend, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), and her secret lover, James Hurley (James Marshall), both of whom we know separately saw Laura on the night of the murder. But Cooper now becomes convinced that both are innocent of the murder, and he has them released.  Now evidence is uncovered, though, (sometimes only to a few) that points in other directions.

The autopsy of Laura Palmer reveals that she was taking cocaine and that on the night of her murder, she had sex with three different men

An abusive trucker, Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re) rudely orders his wife Shelly (Mädchen Amick)  to wash his clothes.  When she discovers his shirt has bloodstains on it, she hides the shirt away from him, and the shirt’s disappearance causes Leo to give his wife a brutal beating.  We also learn that Leo is embroiled in some presumably criminal operation with Bobby Briggs and his friend Mike Nelson that involves a missing $10,000 that Briggs and Nelson now owe Leo.

Also ,James Hurly’s uncle, gas station owner Ed Hurly, claims he was given a knockout drug by  bartender Jacques Renault at the local bar, The Roadhouse.  In addition, the viewer gets glimpses  of two additional mysterious characters.  One is a strange one-armed man who wanders into the police station and disappears into the morgue.  And Laura Palmer’s mother, Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) has a hysteria-inducing vision of a mysterious, sinister man hiding behind her bed.

At the episode’s end, psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, one of whose patients had apparently been Laura Palmer, is shown dreamily listening to an intimate cassette tape that is one of a series of tapes that Laura had secretly been sending to him

But apart from this specific information concerning the murder investigation, the episode spends a fair amount of time providing more background on four beautiful women in the narrative.  Since the murdered girl, Laura Palmer, was a beauty queen, one might suspect that these four women are also at risk.  All four of these women are magnetically attractive, and the viewer is drawn into following their fates as the series progresses.  In fact one could say that these four women are, along with Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, the major protagonists of the series.

• Shelly Johnson is an innocent young girl and works as a waitress at a local diner.  She is married to the abusive Leo Johnson, who I have already mentioned is a murder suspect.
   
• Jocelyn Packard (Joan Chen), a beautiful young Chinese woman, is the widow of the recently deceased Andrew Packard, who owned the local sawmill in the town.  She now legally owns the sawmill, but the land on which it is situated is greedily coveted by wealthy and corrupt local landlord Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer).  He is scheming with his paramour, Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie), who is the sister of Andrew Packard, to arrange a hostile takeover of the property.  Jocelyn, we already know, is having a semi-secret romantic relationship with Sheriff Truman.
   
• Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) is the comely daughter of unscrupulous businessman Benjamin Horne.  She uses her feminine wiles to assert her independence and defy her father’s ways.  In this episode she seductively approaches Agent Cooper for some small talk, suggesting that she is attracted to this handsome newcomer in town.
   
• Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), who was Laura Palmer’s best friend, teams up with Laura’s secret lover, biker James Hurly, to try and solve the murder mystery.  Soon, however, they find themselves falling in love with each other.

Despite these separately fascinating threads concerning the four women, though, this episode has some weaknesses due to the dramatically over-the-top presentations of some of the other characters.

• Bobby Briggs and Mike Nelson are unbearably obnoxious and behave like rabid jackals foaming at the mouth.
• Benjamin Horne and his lover Catherine Martell are ludicrously avaricious. 
• The grieving mother, Sarah Palmer, is almost continuously in a hysterical state.
• Ed Hurley’s wife, Nadine (Wendy Robie), is so persistently and outrageously eccentric that she defies believability.
• The Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson), who asserts that the log she always carries around has magical properties, is another character who seems to have no other purpose than to project further eccentricity.

Nevertheless, this episode does provide fuel for further developments.

★★★

David Lynch

About David Lynch:

• Alene Dawson, "Why Filmmaker David Lynch Says Transcendental Meditation Is the Secret to Success", Los Angeles Times, (3 June 2016).

Films of David Lynch:

• Twin Peaks - David Lynch & Mark Frost (1990-91)

Mark Frost

Films of Mark Frost:

• Twin Peaks - David Lynch & Mark Frost (1990-91)

“Northwest Passage”, Twin Peaks, Season 1, pilot - David Lynch (1990)

“Northwest Passage” is the opening, pilot episode of the original Twin Peaks (1990-91) serial drama TV series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost.  The acclaimed series, set in the fictional small town of Twin Peaks in Washington state, concerns the dramatics and intrigue surrounding the investigation of a macabre murder that has taken place there.

This episode sets the stage and introduces most the cast of characters who will appear in the series.  It begins when the naked body of local highschool girl Laura Palmer is found wrapped in plastic and washed up along the banks of the local river. Laura was the highschool football homecoming queen, and the entire community is shaken by the grisly news.  Sheriff Harry S. Truman (played by Michael Ontkean) begins an investigation.  The immediate suspect is Laura’s  boyfriend, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), who was known to have secretly seen Laura the previous evening.  The plot thickens when another local girl, Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine), is found walking in a dazed state along the railroad tracks after having been clearly sexually abused and beaten the previous night.  So FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is called in to take over the investigation.

Examining Laura’s corpse, Cooper discovers under Laura’s fingernail a tiny piece of paper with the letter ‘R’ typed on it.  He connects this to the murder of another girl in the region one year earlier under whose fingernail was found a similar piece of paper with the letter ‘T’ typed on it.  So he suspects there is a serial killer lurking in the area. 

Much of this episode is devoted to situating the story in the town of Twin Peaks and introducing the large cast of characters.  They comprise the following:

• FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan).  Straightforward and logical, he has a keen mind and an innocent demeanor.
• Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) is an upstanding and sympathetic upholder of law and order in the community.
• Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) is Sheriff Truman’s young secretary.
• Jocelyn Packard (Joan Chen) is the widowed owner of the local sawmill.
• Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is the beautiful highschool girl found murdered at the start of the series.
• Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) is the father of Laura Palmer.
• Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) is Leland’s wife and Laura’s mother.
• Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) was Laura Palmer’s best friend
• Dr. Will Hayward (Warren Frost) is the father of Donna Hayward
• Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) is a pretty highschool classmate of Laura and Donna.
• Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer) is Audrey’s father and is a wealthy landlord.
• Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick) is a highschool dropout and works at the local Double-R Diner.
• Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re), a trucker, is the abusive husband of Shelly Johnson.
• Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) is the conniving sister of Jocelyn Packard’s deceased husband.
• Pete Martell (Jack Nance) is Catherine’s gentle husband.
• Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) owns and runs the Double-R Diner.
• James Hurley (James Marshall) is a biker and secret lover of Laura Palmer.
• Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) runs a local gas station and is James Hurley’s uncle.
• Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) is a highschool girl who survived the savage attack on her and Laura Palmer, but she is in a comatose state.
• Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) is the boyfriend of Laura Palmer
• Mike Nelson (Gary Hershberger) is Bobby Briggs’s best friend and is a one-time boyfriend of Donna Hayward.
• Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn)
• Deputy Sheriff Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz)

Already in this pilot episode, the viewer learns of a number of clandestine romantic relationships among these people:

• Bobby Briggs and Shelly Johnson.  Although Bobby was the boyfriend of Laura Palmer, he was secretly seeing married waitress Shelly Johnson on the side.
   
• Ed Hurley and Norma Jennings.  Both of them are already married to others – Norma’s husband is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter, and Ed’s wife seems oddly obsessive about home decorating.
   
• Benjamin Horne and Catherine Martell. Catherine is married to logger Pete, but her greed for wealth draws her to Horne.
   
• Sheriff Truman and Jocelyn Packard.  Perhaps because Jocelyn is a recent widow and Truman is a public servant, their relationship is not widely publicized.
   
• Donna Hayward and James Hurley.  Although Donna is the girlfriend of  the obnoxious Mike Nelson and James apparently had a secret relationship with Laura Palmer, as Donna and James jointly work to solve the crime, they find themselves drawn to each other.

The initial evidence points to Bobby Briggs and James Hurley, who are both known to have privately and separately seen Laura on the evening of the murder.  But then further evidence is found in an abandoned railroad car outside of town – a mysterious mound of dirt with Laura’s necklace, missing half of its charm, on the top and the cryptic message “fire walk with me” placed there.  The viewer learns (but not yet Cooper and Truman) that James Hurley has the other half of Laura’s necklace charm in his possession.  So James and Donna bury that part of the necklace charm in the woods.

A skin mag is also found among Laura’s possessions that has a photo of Ronette Pulaski and also an image of a truck that the viewer knows is the one that Leo Johnson drives.  So there are multiple clues pointing in different directions.

At the end of this pilot episode, Sarah Palmer has a nightmare of someone digging up the necklace charm (the significance of which is unknown to her) in the woods.

★★★★

“Twin Peaks” - David Lynch & Mark Frost (1990-91)

Undoubtedly the finest work of filmmaker David Lynch is Twin Peaks (1990-91), an American serial drama TV series that he co-developed with Mark Frost.  It is basically a mystery story, but it features a pervasively eerie and evocative atmosphere that overcasts everything.  It is this moody and expressionistic ambience, which colors the entire physical and emotional landscape, that makes this series one of the great works of cinema.

There are a number of elements that contribute to this creative mix.  The film is set in a fictional town in the northeastern corner of Washington state, Twin Peaks, whose economy centers around its local sawmill.  This setting provides an opportunity for another Lynch portrayal of the dark underside of small-town middle America, as he did with Blue Velvet (1986).  In this case there is a vast soap-opera-like cast of characters, most of them having secrets and disturbing obsessions they cannot share with others in their community.  Lynch’s and Frost’s characters are rarely straightforward and innocent – they are often driven by fears, lusts, and obsessions and are sometimes under the disturbing influence of mysterious, occult forces.

Another key ingredient is the haunting musical score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, who  worked with Lynch on a number of his films, including Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001).

The overall narrative scheme for the series concerns the investigation of a mysterious and grisly murder of a beautiful yong girl in the town.  The overriding task is to discover and capture those who were responsible for the crime.  This situation is established almost immediately in the pilot episode when the corpse of the young girl is discovered on the banks a river near the town.  A murder investigation is begun immediately by the town sheriff, but because there is a presumption that the murder investigation will involve evidence across state boundaries, a FBI investigator is appointed to take charge.  The main narrative development follows this FBI agent’s undertakings, but the narrative focalization often localizes on various other participating characters in the story.

The principal characters in the cast of Twin Peaks are:

• FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan).  He is a good-natured rationalist: straightforward and logical.  Unlike most of the other characters, he has no hidden personal issues.
• Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean).  Despite the odd historical reference in his name, he is not a politician, but an upstanding and sympathetic upholder of law and order in the community.
• Lucy Moran (Kimmy Robertson) is Sheriff Truman’s young secretary.
• Jocelyn Packard (Joan Chen) is the widowed owner of the local sawmill.
• Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is the beautiful highschool girl found murdered at the start of the series.
• Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) is the father of Laura Palmer.
• Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) is Leland’s wife and Laura’s mother.
• Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) was Laura Palmer’s best friend
• Dr. Will Hayward (Warren Frost) is the father of Donna Hayward
• Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) is a pretty highschool classmate of Laura and Donna.
• Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer) is Audrey’s father and is a wealthy landlord.
• Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick) is a highschool dropout and works at the local Double-R Diner.
• Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re) is the abusive husband of Shelly Johnson.
• Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie) is the conniving sister of Jocelyn Packard’s deceased husband.
• Pete Martell (Jack Nance) is Catherine’s gentle husband.  Nance is a Lynch regular, e.g. Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986).
• Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) owns and runs the Double-R Diner.
• James Hurley (James Marshall) is a biker and secret lover of Laura Palmer.
• Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) runs a local gas station and is James Hurley’s uncle.
• Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) is a highschool girl who survived the savage attack on her and Laura Palmer, but she is in a comatose state.
• Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) is the boyfriend of Laura Palmer
• Mike Nelson (Gary Hershberger) is Bobby Briggs’s best friend and is initially the boyfriend of Donna Hayward.
• Madeline "Maddy" Ferguson (Sheryl Lee) is Laura Palmer’s cousin.    
• Dr. Lawrence Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn)
• Deputy Sheriff Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz)
• Deputy Sheriff Tommy "Hawk" Hill (Michael Horse)

★★★★

The episodes of Twin Peaks are:

• "Northwest Passage", Twin Peaks, Season 1, pilot - David Lynch (1990)
• "Traces to Nowhere", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 1 - Duwayne Dunham (1990)
• "Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”, Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 2 - David Lynch (1990)
• "Rest in Pain", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 3 - Tina Rathborne (1990)
• "The One-Armed Man", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 4 - Tim Hunter (1990)
• "Cooper's Dreams", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 5 - Lesli Linka Glatter (1990)
• "Realization Time", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 6 - Caleb Deschanel (1990)
• "The Last Evening", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 7 - Mark Frost (1990)
• "May the Giant Be with You", Twin Peaks, Season 1, Ep. 8 - David Lynch (1990)
• "Coma", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 9 - David Lynch (1990)
• "The Man Behind the Glass", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 10 - Lesli Linka Glatter (1990)
• "Laura's Secret Diary”, Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 11 - Todd Holland (1990)
• "The Orchid's Curse", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 12 - Graeme Clifford (1990)
• "Demons", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 13 - Lesli Linka Glatter (1990)
• "Lonely Souls", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 14 - David Lynch (1990)
• "Drive with a Dead Girl", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 15 - Caleb Deschanel (1990)
• "Arbitrary Law", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 16 - Tim Hunter (1990)
• "Dispute Between Brothers", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 17 - Tina Rathborne (1990)
• "Masked Ball",Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 18 - Duwayne Dunham (1990)
• "The Black Widow”, Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 19 - Caleb Deschanel (1990)
• "Checkmate", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 20 - Todd Holland (1991)
• "Double Play", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 21 - Uli Edel (1991)
• "Slaves and Masters", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 22 - Diane Keaton (1991)
• "The Condemned Woman", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 23 - Lesli Linka Glatter (1991)
• "Wounds and Scars", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 24 - James Foley (1991)
• "On the Wings of Love", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 25 - Duwayne Dunham (1991)
• "Variations on Relations", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 26 - Jonathan Sanger (1991)
• "The Path to the Black Lodge", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 27 - Stephen Gyllenhaal (1991)
• "Miss Twin Peaks", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 28 - Tim Hunter (1991)
• "Beyond Life and Death", Twin Peaks, Season 2, Ep. 29 - David Lynch (1991)

Bob Rafelson

Films of Bob Rafelson:

• Five Easy Pieces - Bob Rafelson (1970)

“Five Easy Pieces” - Bob Rafelson (1970)

Five Easy Pieces (1970) was a signal film for more than one reason.  For one thing, it was probably lead actor Jack Nicholson’s finest screen performance, and established him as a genuine superstar.  But more significantly at the time, the film became the flag carrier for what came to be known as the “American New Wave”, a time when a new, innovative, and more artistically oriented group of young filmmakers emerged on the Hollywood scene.  Five Easy Pieces was named the year’s Best Film by the New York Film Critics Circle, and it was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture.

Indeed, what distinguishes Five Easy Pieces is its meandering and anecdotal narrative style that still manages to hold the viewer’s attention on the main character’s troubled concerns about life [1,2].  This is because those anecdotal episodes are not just random bits, and they constitute an essential part of the main character’s sense of frustrated wandering [3].  This narrative cohesion may well have arisen from the fact that the film script is based on an original, probably semi-autobiographical, story by director Bob Rafelson.  The screenplay itself was written by Carole Eastman (using the name, Adrien Joyce), who was a personal friend of Nicholson and Rafelson, and together they must have fashioned the story in a collaborative and somewhat extemporaneous fashion.  It is reported that the film was shot in sequence (i.e. shooting in the order of the scripted scenes, which is more supportive of making last minute changes in the story) and that Rafelson could not decide on which of three proposed endings to use until the film shooting was completed [4]. Nevertheless, the script as it stands is a marvel [3] – one of the four Oscar nominations the film received was for Best Original Screenplay.

Another key feature of the film is its visual style, for which much credit may be given to the expressive cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs.  On the one hand many things look raw and gritty, as if we are getting slice-of-life, hardcore realism.  On the other hand, though, many of the characterizations are carefully enhanced exaggerations of social types, which emphatically contribute to a sense of the main character’s alienation.  In fact these depictions of eccentric American social types are part of the film’s charm.  America may have a wider range of social eccentricities than other parts of the world, and this film offers an opportunity to gaze at various slices of visceral Americana.

The story begins showing Bobby Eroica Dupea (played by Jack Nicholson) engaged in the hard slogging of oil-rig work in the Bakersfield, California oil fields.  He and his coworker and buddy Elton (Billy "Green" Bush) are your typical working-class “good old boys”.  They eat in diners, go bowling, play poker, and get drunk routinely.  Bobby has a sexy but unpolished girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), who works as a waitress at a diner and who adores Bobby.  Although Bobby lives with Rayette and Elton is married with a kid, both men like to score sexually with other women they happen to meet at the bowling alley or at bars.  In fact, although Bobby is often good-humored, he can also be selfish and abusive, just to evoke laughs and to make light of the current situation he finds himself in.  We often see him struggling inside between following his immediate impulses and doing the right thing.

There is one absurd moment in this early account when Bobby and Elton get stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway.  Bobby sees that the stalled trailer truck in front of them is carrying a piano, and he gets out of his car, jumps onto the trailer, and begins manically playing a Chopin concerto.  What lies behind Bobby’s crazy actions only becomes clear later on.

This early part of the film wallows in the working-class milieu that seems to define Bobby’s existence, and it is colored by a soundtrack featuring songs sung by country & western icon Tammy Wynette, whom Rayette happens to idolize.   But things take a drastic turn when Elton  gets arrested for violating his parole and Bobby loses his job.  Bobby then goes to Los Angeles to visit his sister, Partita (Lois Smith), and we soon get an entirely new perspective on Bobby.

Partita is a concert pianist, and we gradually learn that Bobby comes from an educated and refined upperclass family of musicians. She urges Bobby to go to their family home in Washington state to visit their dying father, from whom Bobby has been estranged for several years.  Now that earlier mad scene on the trailer truck makes more sense: Bobby is actually a trained classical musician.

Reluctantly, Bobby decides that he has to drive up to Washington, and even more reluctantly, he gives in to Rayette’s demands that he take her with him.  Along the way, they give a ride to two women stranded on the road, one of whom offers a particularly offbeat slice of Americana.  This mannish woman continually rails against men for making the entire world a filthy place.  She is on her way to Alaska, because the white snow fields there suggest to her an absence of filth.  Although this episode seems like it is unconnected with the rest of the film, the manly woman’s  diatribe does echo metaphorically what may be going on in Bobby’s mind.  Bobby, we gradually learn, is continually running away from the world  – he doesn’t want to get stuck for long in any situation he finds himself in, because that will inevitably involve some cleaning up some of the “filth” created by life itself.

When Bobby arrives at the large Dupea family home on an island in Puget Sound, the film moves into a new sociocultural  dimension.  While the diegetic music up to this point has come from Tammy Wynette, the music from here on is dominated by five piano pieces of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin, to which the film’s title presumably refers.  The Dupea family is educated, accomplished, and refined, but they are no less eccentric than what we have seen up to this point.  And they are playing roles, too – just playing different kinds of roles than what we have seen so far.

In fact it is role-playing that is the key to Bobby’s problems and alienation.  He sees that all the people he meets are playing roles that soon become tiresome.  Like Kierkegaard’s aesthetic man, Bobby is always employing the rotation principle in order to opt out of the dead-end situations that inevitably arise [5,6].  It now becomes evident to the viewer that when Bobby was growing up in the Dupea household, he was always the impudent brat who didn’t do what he was told.  This made him lovable in the eyes of his older sister Partita, but barely tolerable in the eyes of his father and older brother Carl Fidelio (Ralph Waite), who is a violinist.  Like his siblings, Bobby was trained in childhood as a pianist, too, but he didn’t want to end up there, and so he rebelled.

After dumping Rayette at a nearby motel so that her crass ways won’t embarrass him in front of his upscale family, Bobby goes to the Dupea home.  There he meets his brother’s fiancé, Catherine Van Oost (Susan Anspach), and he is immediately attracted to her, and she to him.  Catherine is more natural and genuine than anyone we and Bobby have seen so far, but the cynical Bobby can’t help engaging in his own role-playing in order to attract her.  One time when the two are alone and Bobby plays a song on the piano for her, Catherine is honestly moved by his playing and tells him that.  But Bobby is too cynical to buy what she says and assumes she is role-playing just like he has been.  Misjudging her sincerity, he tells her that the two of them were both just faking it:

"I faked a little Chopin. You faked a little response."

Despite these missteps, the two do get together for a romantic encounter.  Catherine seems ideal, and Bobby, wondering if this is the authentic pairing that he has been looking for, asks her to run away with him.  But Catherine sees through him, and knows that a relationship with him wouldn’t work.  She identifies his basic problem when she tells him,

"You have no love for yourself, no love for family, for friends--how can you ask for love?"

The film’s ending is melancholy and memorable.  Bobby, now more alienated than ever, abandons Rayette and heads off into further isolation.   He is still running away.

Although Bobby is dropping out and can be selfish and sometimes obnoxious, many of us will be able to recognize something of ourselves in Bobby.  His alienation, like that of Camus’s Meursault (from Camus’s L’Etranger, 1942), is pervasive and existentialist.  He can still cope in the everyday world, but his engagements are invariably inauthentic and mostly playacting (as he said on that occasion to Catherine).  We might compare him to Francois Truffaut’s protagonist Charlie in Shoot the Piano Player (1960), a French New Wave film that probably influenced the American New Wave filmmakers.  Both protagonists are formally trained pianists who have dropped out and fallen into society’s lower scales.  But Bobby is more extraverted and loquacious than Charlie. Bobby can operate freely in most social situations, but they never seem to lead him to the satisfaction he is looking for.

All this is well conveyed through the superb acting performances in this film.   As already mentioned, Jack Nicholson’s characterization of Bobby is a seminal turn.  But Karen Black’s emotive performance as Rayette is equally compelling.  Both Nicholson and Black were nominated for Oscars.  Even the lesser roles are well performed.  For example, there is something about Susan Anspach’s portrayal of Catherine that persists in the memory long afterwards.

The key thing about this film is that Bobby Dupea is not a mysterious character.  We all know him and in some respects share his feelings and concerns.  The film is telling us that the mystery is not Bobby, but life, itself.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Five Easy Pieces”, Great Movie, Roger Ebert.com, (16 March 2003).
2. Michael Dare, “Five Easy Pieces”, The Criterion Collection, (11 February 1990).
3. Jugu Abraham, “154. US director Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces” (1970): One of the finest examples of screenplay-writing from Hollywood”, Movies that Make You Think, (9 December 2014).
4. J. Hoberman, “One Big Real Place: BBS From Head to Hearts”, The Criterion Collection, (28 November 2010).
5. Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, (1843).
6. The Film Sufi, “The Treatment of Love in Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or", The Film Sufi, (8 June 2011).