The Ultimate Neo-Noir TV Show That Redefined the Genre
When it comes to neo-noir crime dramas, the arrival of Twin Peaks at the start of the 1990s completely changed the game. The show created by David Lynch and Mark Frost employed the themes and tropes of film noir in ways that hadn’t been seen before on the small screen.
In fact, nothing on TV since Twin Peaks has embodied the noir aesthetic so powerfully. Most of the best neo-noir shows have come in the past three decades, yet none of them capture the original spirit of film noir quite as well as their seminal forerunner.
It’s no surprise that a show co-written and co-directed by David Lynch should be so immersed in the traditions of noir cinema. Lynch was famously an avid fan of film noir, as his feature-length masterpieces Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive illustrate. Several of the best characters in Twin Peaks are actually direct homages to the movie genre.
While various 21st century TV series have been more precise or formulaic in their tributes to film noir, Lynch’s show captures the essence of the genre on its own original terms, presenting something unique in screen history. Still, if we unpick the elements of surrealism and horror from Twin Peaks, it becomes clear that the series is noir at heart.
Twin Peaks Is The Ultimate Neo-Noir TV Show
It’s difficult to find a modern movie that does noir better than Twin Peaks, let alone another TV show. For many David Lynch fans, the series is his greatest achievement, surpassing even his best works of cinema. In terms of noir tropes, at least, Twin Peaks is certainly his most comprehensive effort to honor the traditions of film noir.
Visually, thematically, and tonally, Twin Peaks is vintage noir refashioned for a contemporary audience. Its most important characters are classic noir archetypes. There’s the detective searching for moral and rational solutions in an irrational and depraved setting, and a femme fatale who is both a victim and a perpetrator at different points in the series.
As detective Special Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation unfolds, his moral and rational aims begin to unravel, and the darkness and cruelty of an apparently evil world are laid bare. As we learn more about the people of a seemingly ordinary American town, the show’s characterizations become progressively more morally ambivalent, and we find it harder to trust anyone.
Twin Peaks reinforces these narrative aspects of noir with lighting, coloring and music that convey the shadowy nature of the titular town and its inhabitants. From the very start of the story, it’s impossible not to feel uneasy about what we’re watching, purely on the basis of visual and soundtrack elements of the show.
David Lynch Made Twin Peaks A Deliberate Homage To Film Noir
Gordon Cole (Lynch) gives a thumbs up from the shadows.
It’s not just that the series employs noir tropes while telling its story, though. Twin Peaks goes as far as directly referencing some of the best film noir movies ever made, as motifs deliberately worked into the show by David Lynch and Mark Frost to pay homage to the genre.
Six different character names in the series are allusions to film noir. Most famously, of course, murder victim Laura Palmer is named after the 1944 noir film Laura, directed by Otto Preminger. Then there’s Maddy Ferguson, whose name is a composite of two characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a movie that’s widely acknowledged to have prefigured neo-noir (via Collider).
Meanwhile, Walter Neff and Gordon Cole are lifted straight from Billy Wilder’s noir moviesDouble Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, respectively. Even the pet bird in Twin Peaks named Waldo, whose records are found at Lydecker Veterinary Clinic, is a reference to another character from Laura, Waldo Lydecker.
Sheriff Harry S. Truman alludes to the U.S. president at the height of the film noir movement. Moreover, the name of the titular town, Twin Peaks itself, is a subtle metaphor for the moral ambiguity which underpins the noir genre. The town and everyone who lives there are situated between the “peaks” of good and evil – right and wrong.
In addition, throughout the show Lynch applies stylistic touches that pay homage to specific noir movies. There are the tapped conversations between Dale Cooper and Diane Evans, which mimics the style of voiceover narration in noir films such as 1945’s Detour.
There’s also the stylized use of flashbacks in the series, in homage to Laura, and other noir greats like The Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past. Twin Peaks presents fragmented perspectives of its story, too, with Dale Cooper in particular having a limited grasp of what’s going on, akin to the protagonist in seminal noir film The Third Man.
No 21st Century Show Embodies The Spirit Of Noir Like Twin Peaks
Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) looking distraught at something off-camera in Twin Peaks
Plenty of crime shows have changed the genre before and since Twin Peaks first aired, and some of them probably fit more neatly into the neo-noir TV genre. The Wire for example, is grittier, while Better Call Saul is more nihilistic, and shows like Mad Men and Mindhunter fit the technical criteria of noir dramas more archetypally.
The likes of Ripley and Babylon Berlin openly seek to emulate traditional noir aesthetically and thematically, in far more straightforward terms than Twin Peaks. But David Lynch’s surrealistic approach in his classic series, as different as it might be, somehow penetrates the essence of film noir on a deeper level than any modern TV show.
Sources: Collider; The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
0 Comments