Don't Go in the Woods...Alone!

Interesting Greil Marcus piece on Twin Peaks, among other things:

Does the sylvan village feel familiar not because it's part of a cultural memory everyone shares—even if nobody actually experienced what everyone remembers—but because what happens in the village is no more archaic than the If-I-Can't-Have-You-Nobody-Can murders chronicled in our own daily news, and just as routine? "He dealt with this in the good old-fashioned American way," says Detective Lennie Briscoe to his partner Ed Green on a 2004 Law & Order episode. "What's that?" "A .38." "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," D. H. Lawrence wrote, speaking of what he took to be the nation's founding crime, the extermination of the Indians—so that there was no step one could take in the United States without stepping on unmarked graves. What the old murder ballads say—voicing, one can imagine, a helpless or even patriotic instinct as, generations after the events supposedly passed into the history textbooks, the solitary in the big city or the small town reenacts the whole of the national drama, from the erasure of the Indians to the filling up of the country with slaves who could be put down like cattle—is that America is a country where anyone can be killed at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all. The ballads call the cops, but the sense that the killer is justified, that he is only doing what everyone yearns to do, that almost everyone will root for his escape, is almost never missing.

Comments

[Jeff]

I just got a copy of _The Shape of Things to Come_ in the mail and it has a very long section on Twin Peaks and another on Pere Ubu. Now if only I could find time between diaper changes (the baby's not mine) to sit down with this book.