Every Moment Matters in Fiction
Post-draft progress on The Smiling Man Conspiracy is smooth. I’ll be making an announcement in the next few days that you’ll want to keep your eye on. It won’t be the release date, but if you think artfully you’ll grasp how much ground is covered.
Now that I’ve gotten that enticing nugget out of the way, it’s time for this week’s blog post. Sponsored by: EMM the Pace Master.
Who is EMM? Well, he’s an otherworldly force that exists in all of the best works of fiction. He’s poignant and timely. He doesn’t rush to get ahead of the viewer or reader. He doesn’t bog down the scene with superfluous dead air. You might say that with EMM, every moment matters.
Last night, I watched two programs on separate premium cable networks. One show established current character predicaments, pending conflict, and foreshadowed multiple plot points. The other took twice as long to do anything similar and wasted valuable viewer time with a six minute musical performance while ending about seven minutes early.
Yes, I’m talking about Game of Thrones and Twin Peaks. It’s sad to say that my interest has waned considerably for the latter. It’s painful to admit that while there are snippets of enjoyable program somewhere in the ten hours I’ve watched, I’m actually starting to hate the show. Me. Considering the original series was one of my primary inspirations for The Shadow Over Lone Oak, I feel like I’ve lost touch with a friend.
Why is this happening? It’s because the revival is antithetical to everything that made the original show special. It’s not a murder mystery. It’s not a soap opera. It’s not warm or charming. It’s not even all that compelling. It’s like someone sucked the soul out of the show and the lifeless husk went on pretending that it had a reason to exist.
But that’s not the whole problem. I can work with a darker take on the series. I’m not all that adverse to weird or dreamlike things occurring. I can deal with the false maturity that comes with being on Showtime. At the end of the day, the core problems with the show are its disjointed narrative and Lynch’s tendency to fixate on an image or a concept rather than story.
EMM is an infrequent visitor in Twin Peaks. He shows up every third episode to remind us that a plot or two do exist and that yes, progress is being made. By and large, however, he spends most episodes lurking on the periphery, waiting for his chance to shine, only to be denied by a lingering camera, an absence of dialogue and music, and unremarkable events.
As much as Lynch and writer Mark Frost are unwilling to admit it, the original Twin Peaks was not exclusively their show. It involved collaboration between multiple directors and screenwriters. It was a primetime show on network television and had to create week-to-week television to draw viewers in. The new show was written and pre-shot and chopped into chunks by Lynch with unrestrained creative control. The dissonance is enormously apparent to anyone paying attention.
That’s what Lynch wants from his audience. He wants us to pay attention, wants us to hang on every spoken word. The problem is that very little of the show demands it. In the Dougie plotline, we’re meant to be exploring the world through the eyes of someone who is basically an amnesiac newborn. We’re supposed to experience the childlike glee and confusion that comes along with entering a world we don’t recognize.
That’s not what happens. One Dougie scene blends in with another. There are glimpses of the real man, but there’s no development. Only stagnation. Nothing matters. Lynch expects the viewers to savor every second, but he’s offering them scraps. After twenty-five years, drip-feeding the audience isn’t good enough.
But Dougie, as frustrating as he is to watch, doesn’t bother EMM nearly as much as the numerous instances of unusual dead air between lines of dialogue. There are a plethora of scenes where someone speaks, then there’s five to ten seconds of silence where someone might as well have cut a fart, then another line, and repeat. EMM doesn’t like that. He doesn’t appreciate it at all.
You see, in fiction, EMM is the name of the game. A scene has to have a purpose, it has to make narrative sense, and it has to affect the characters in some way. If you write a novel that’s five hundred pages of a character eating a sandwich and staring at another person, you’re going nowhere.
Other than obvious plot development, defining character moments please EMM. What’s a good example in the new Twin Peaks? I’d say its Andy and Lucy’s “argument” over which chair to buy. Why does that work? It highlights the relationship between those characters and where they stand all these years after the end of the original show. It means nothing for the plot, but it means everything for the characters.
What doesn’t work? Roadhouse performance intermissions/endings. Sweeping the floor. Twenty minutes of nuclear explosion. Someone taking an extra three minutes to leave a room. A superfluous scene of a woman scratching a gross rash. I could go on.
Taken in isolation, any of these scenes would be grating but manageable. As a whole, they keep compiling into what feels like a middle finger to the viewing audience. Stories need momentum. Moments need to matter. Characters must act and react to things happening to and around them. Plots have to unfold in a consistent and intriguing manner.
Twin Peaks forgets that all too often. It’s a series that has long worn out not only patience but interest. The show is starved of value and EMM is practically an afterthought.
I’ll finish out the run because of my curiosity to see how Cooper’s story is wrapped up, but I’m afraid I won’t have enjoyed the ride. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a show that offends me as a viewer and a writer, but Twin Peaks is pushing it.
In the meantime, I’ll take an hour of political maneuvering, assassination, ice zombies, dragons, and a lot of EMM to cleanse my palate between sessions of David Lynch’s Dull and Plodding Ride.
