Are You Really Surprised Twin Peaks Wasn’t Nominated For A Golden Globe?
“Lettin’ you know
You can’t gain or maintain
Unless you say my name”— LL Cool J “Mama Said Knock You Out” —
Twin Peaks has been called, “An Outsider’s Show.” As a network television product, Twin Peaks has never been given respect by the standard cadres of criticism and fanfare in the actual years of the show’s broadcast and Season 3 is no exception.
Personally, I don’t find a lot of value in awards shows. I don’t appreciate the fashion or the pomp and I find these affairs to be more political than artistic, and this was clearly evident in the Golden Globes of January 2018. It was the year of #metoo and that is an important social movement but it’s not about Art. James Joyce would call that Didactic Art, something which seeks to push the viewer away morally from the central theme. The Handmaid’s Tale won Best Drama and, besides being a fantastic show in terms of writing, pacing, production, acting, and overall execution, it deals with an extremely timely conflict that relates directly to the aforementioned hashtag, but it is a Didactic work of art according to James Joyce’s definition, and therefore improper. Joyce noted two forms of “Improper” Art, the Didactic and the Pornographic (art intended to move the viewer to possess the objects represented). And Joyce also had a definition for Proper Art and the easiest way to describe what it is by what it does and does not do. Consider the following words of the late Mythologist Professor Joseph Campbell in his masterful book The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth And As Religion:
“All ‘improper’ art, whether pornographic or didactic, thus moves one, or at least is meant to move one, to action, either with desire toward the object, or with fear and loathing away from it. It is therefore, as Joyce says, kinetic (Greek, kinetikos, from kinein, ‘to move’), whereas ‘proper’ art is static (Greek, statikos, ‘causing to stand’). We speak of esthetic arrest. One is not moved to physical action of any kind, but held in sensational (esthetic) contemplation and enjoyment. In Joyce’s words: ‘The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.’ In this elevation of mind and, with the mind, the eye, above desire and loathing, desire and fear, that brings the way of art and the artist into relation to that of the mystic. Without this transformation at once of consciousness and of vision, the portal of the mansion of art has not been entered.”
In this author’s opinion, Twin Peaks is Proper Art of the highest order, yet it wasn’t even nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press and this was a huge misstep because it was the most ambitious television art made since, well the first Twin Peaks. Look, Twin Peaks is not the most accessible show and Season 3 was divisive. You either pretended as you got it, you complained about it, or you did your best to ignore it, and the Golden Globes chose the latter to the detriment of American Art. Ask any serious watcher of television about the shows that changed the art form within the medium and those that changed art outside the medium of television, art that also changed the hearts and minds of anyone brave enough to let it inside and Twin Peaks will be at the top of that list.
Five years in the making, Twin Peaks Season 3 played out over 18 hours of provocative television storytelling that dealt, not with dragons, zombies, political scandals, legal or medical serials with predictable endings, and no dystopian end of the world fight for human rights. Season 3 of Twin Peaks continues the story of an FBI Special Agent with more Don Quijote than Fox Mulder in him, a man left trapped sitting in an interdimensional armchair 25 years ago. Season 3 is a journey home, modeled off Homer’s The Odyssey and Kyle Maclachlan, nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television, barely spoke the entire 18 episodes, and still acted his handsome ass off! He did more with his facial features than most lead actors do with their dialogue in an Aaron Sorkin script, Kyle stumbling around in a daze, while forces of evil and benevolence swirled around him an hour after hour, until the darkness at the end of all hatred, a force of “Extreme negative energy,” ended the show in a way that David Chase could certainly relate to and appreciate.
And some people were pissed when it was over. Some people were wrecked. I myself became excited enough from my experience watching Season 3 of Twin Peaks to start writing a book with the goal of canonizing the season as one of the great works of art in the medium of Television. For Twin Peaks to not win the best Drama in Television is expected because it’s an Outsider’s show but for Twin Peaks to not even be nominated is a crime against American Art and because of that, no one should be surprised that it was ignored. The Hollywood Foreign Press has been committing crimes against American Art since the organization was founded.
In ten years, Season 3 of Twin Peaks will be worshipped, studied, cheaply imitated, and some will still foolishly try to ignore it. But if future showrunners truly want to achieve greatness in the medium of Television, they will damn sure have to say the name and go through the gate of Twin Peaks as one of the key measures of Television as Proper Art.
JB Minton is co-creator of The Red Room Podcast and the author of the forthcoming book “A Skeleton Key to Twin Peaks Season 3.”
