Tigron and Taboo: the Freudian Dream Theater of FLASH GORDON (1936) + Aura the Merciful

The murky Freudian sexuality of dreams sometimes creates a kind of bilateral lurching movement, as if drunkenly crashing sideways through a row of Natural History Museum dioramas. Each shallow and pleasantly imprisoning landscape offers a giddy warm panorama of exotic wonder and dichotomy: shallow yet vast, static yet propulsive, sexual yet frustrating. As they are in the museum's exhibits -- neanderthal couples reacting to an approaching mammoth, or whatever-- the dream theater is neither indoors nor out, but a strange combination of the two, as if the whole world was now under one roof, with no doors or ways out, only waking escapes it. The original STAR TREK's TV show displayed great genius to understand this: alien colored sky backdrops a few yards behind the actors, eerie color gel light from some unseen sun, some shadowy mist, a big driftwood branch in the foreground, a few foam rocks, some red sand, and viola! These strange new diorama worlds offered a cozy 'small world' interiority that mirrors a dream; like sneaking out of a sunny afternoon, through a back door and finding yourself behind some diorama display along the flume track of a Disney haunted house. It was only when TREK production went out of doors, in the desert canyon scrub of LA, to show their alien world, that mundane reality seemed to intrude. These worlds all seemed like TV westerns, with Native American archetypes, monsters looking hot under desert sun, and wandering too many canyons. Those episodes were never as fun or sexy.

Freudian dream theater tableaux, it seems, are almost always outdoors experienced indoors. This either/or dichotomy toppled, all the other divisions between consciousness and subconsciousness fall like dominoes. 

And on a Freudian level, all important is the sanctuary complex in men's sense of the embryonic, from boys building forts out of sheets and boxes to older men watching Das Boot or Ice Station Zebra every night over a few brandies after their bossy wife goes to bed. Women dream of shoes and travel, escaping their natural morass of reproductive stasis, growing around their limbs like hyperactive tendrils of thorny vegetation, preventing egress in favor of yet more babies. Men on the other hand, dream of losing their shoes and staying home, safe in their televisual wombs, their collections and basement man caves (for obvious reasons).

This was all brought home to me after recently re-watching Universal's original 1936 serial of FLASH GORDON. Instead of masking its poverty with one too many stunt generic fist fights between interchangeable heroes and henchmen in the same suit-tie combinations, recycled car chases around the same back lot, and talky stretches--the way so many later serials did--FLASH packs in imaginative cliffhangers, monsters, fights, ray guns, death beams, hypnosis, giant lizards, allies and foes, and most importantly, sublimated sex, in every chapter.

Overflowing with pulp-sexy gonzo shoestring madness, this original 13-chapter groundbreaker captures the semantics, lurid subtext, sketchy detail, and tumble-over-itself breathless pacing of pre-adolescent 'ur-sexual' dreams. Flash might be aimed at the younger viewer, but it's not aimed at children. Just as Zarkov blasts Flash, Dale, and himself to Mongo in a phallic ship to save the Earth, the film blasts us off to adulthood at the kinky dream sights of bare chested electro-shock torture, flogging, Dale's' bare midriff, her back pressed against the throne room wall, as the heartily-laughing/leering King Vultan of the Hawkmen advances towards her, as crazed with pre-desire as we are. Our brains scrambled by the weird pleasure/pain danger/excitement, we're lifted out of our snot-nosed, ice cream truck-chaser phase and onto a semi sexually awakened pre-teen plateau. Suddenly, just pulling a girl's hair so she chases you around the playground isn't enough, but we have no earthly idea what else to do (except in dreams). But Flash is not puerile or pandering. It's still made after the code. There are rules, and within those rules an understanding of how rules keep sex exotic. We may see lots of nubile cleavage and slave girl midriffs and chains, but the camera doesn't leer.

AURA

Kim Morgan's excellent New Beverly piece on the remake--her startling praise for the color red and the progressive awesomeness of Ornellea Mutti as Aura--inspired me recently to revisit both that film and the earlier original series. Though considered just a post-Star Wars imitation (though really it's Star Wars that's the Flash imitation), the 1980 remake has stood the test of time as a pinnacle in utilizing kinky pulp magazine ur-sexuality (1) in the service of kid-friendly feminism, and that's especially due to Aura. The kinky daughter whose 'appetites' are never censured by her amoral hedonistic tyrant father, Aura makes the hero's journey myth work for her needs as well as the hero's, making this all more than just empty male fantasy. It's her growth from spoiled pagan nymphomaniac to loyal friend of Flash and Prince Barin that charts the film's real story evolution. Flash is little more than an impetus, the union rep; Aura is the Norma Rae.  

Alas, the Aura archetype has been all but hounded out of the sci-fi fantasy sphere these last 30 years. Certainly there's no one remotely like her in the Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings cycles, nor Harry Potter --where women, if any, are but wallpaper: helpless girlfriends (i.e. Dale) or tomboy pals (or moms). Even the relatively equal Marvel universe tends to prefer male super-villains, and though the many female superhero characters are well-sketched in for the most part - they never occupy Aura's unique 'centrist' position as the engineer of the action. Aura is the only truly beyond good and evil, motivated by a desire for Flash that transcends any concern for her own safety or loyalty to her father. She may be Ming's daughter, but if not for her interference Flash would be dead after the first episode. Time and again her courage and resourceful thinking save his life, only for him to let her down by his blonde moping in favor of his blonde moper Dale, always more like Flash's cheerleader and imperiled damsel, never equal or using her brain beyond feebly smiling at Vultan or Ming to buy time. Aura jumps in the ring with the monsters. Flash saves Dale but Aura saves Flash, risking her own life time and again to keep him safe; to pay her loyalty back (in lieu of sex) the best he can do is spare her father Ming's life, even if presented with the chance to run him through with a sword. 

As a result, the four of them become--Ming, Aura, Dale, Flash-- locked in a kind of continual imperil-and-rescue circle very similar to how children's war games are played (i.e. no one dies for long). Neither Dale nor Flash nor Ming nor Aura are ever in possession of their desire, but chase each other around the planet and its various kingdoms, always granting each other a pass due to familial or planetary obligation. Aura is the center of the wheel: she makes sure Flash stays alive through all his many trials- but has no interest in helping Dale, as she rightly sees her as a rival. So Flash makes sure Dale is safe from Ming while he refuses the advances of Aura (who is undeterred); Ming tries to kill Flash for cockblocking him with Dale; Aura prevents her father's killing Flash; Ming doesn't want to fire on Flash if daughter Aura in the way; Flash doesn't want to kill Ming because it would hurt Aura, so round and round the 13 chapters they go. Part of Flash Gordon's schtick is that he never doubts Ming's word, and ably steps into every new role, including dashing courtly duelist, brave pit fighter, invisible scamp, and so forth. Unable to show the slightest duplicity, he has only two speeds: doe-eyed paragon or indignant brawler. 

 When I see it now it reminds me of similar chains of childhood obsession I was part of, wherein the younger sister of a neighbor followed me around in a kind of pre-tween crush while I smittenly followed her older sister (my age, hence more mature) and she in turn mooned after the boy chasing her still-older sister, and so on, eventually ending with the oldest, cutest girl as the head of a mighty serpent, with whatever tyke was loping after the sister loping after me as the tail (and the older sister ever looking out for the youngest as de facto babysitter). In Flash, father and daughter are a two-headed snake. Easily the most pro-active and ingenious character in the series (Ming can only assign and delegate, Dale can only adopt a stricken pose and shout Flash's name from the sidelines, and Flash can only escape Aura's embrace to go chasing off to Dale's rescue), the series should really be called "Aura, Princess of Mongo."  She alone actually changes and in doing so, brings the series to a quick close. 

"Because I like you."

Villainesses in other fantasy films tend towards the devouring monsters of narcissism and ice queen sociopathy (Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman, Nicole Kidman in The Golden Compass, Jessica Chastain in Crimson Peak, Julianne Moore in Hunger Games, Kate Winslet in Divergent, etc.) If they should, as Aura does, learn a 'better' way, less vanity-based and more sisterhood-baed, then they become 'un-sexed' ala Angelina Jolie in Maleficent or Elsa (Idina Menzel) in Frozen. They don't get to display uninhibited carnality and be powerful, manipulative, flawed but ultimately good-hearted and courageous, fallible but larger than life. Only in big lit adaptations, like Wuthering Heights or Gone With the Wind are genuinely complex flawed but incredibly strong-willed, intelligent and assertive females allowed to mature uncorrupted by the vile touch of unsexy censorship. But in sci-fi and fantasy, where have they gone? Is Aura really the only one and last one of her kind?

Just try to picture Luke Skywalker's survival if the Emperor was smart enough to send some foxy enemy seductress out to get him, or the Emperor smacked his lipless gums at the thought of buying the scantily clad Leia from Jabba (who's too fat and abstract to represent any real sexual menace). Instead, rather than risk seeming too sexist to the blue state feminists or too sexy to the red state bible thumpers, the current operational fantasy franchises avoid the sexually active "chaotic neutral" female character altogether. They allow one girl - a bland heroine princess or tomboy--and maybe a mom, and that's it. Fantasy films featuring female characters with real guts and condoned sexual desire, as in Twilight or Vampire Academy are as unjustly maligned by male fandom, reflecting their troll-ish fear of all but the most servile and extraneous of feminine archetypes. (Though this isn't really true in Asian cinema, where strong, morally complicated heroines still loom large --at least in the films of Tsui Hark).

For Star Wars, Lucas raided the Flash Gordon serial box and took almost every crayon except Aura red. She stands alone now, a relic from a bygone era. She reminds that, once upon a time, desire was allowed to exist in the heart of strong beautiful amoral women who didn't even have to die as penance. In Flash we don't judge Aura for her carnality, far from it; we roll our eyes at Dale's lack of guts and judge Flash for being such a prude that he'd deny the desires of a hot babe who just saved his life, out of loyalty to a square helpless Earth woman he met a mere chapter earlier. The racist implications are obvious. In the remake, Aura even suffers the bore worm torture rather than rat out the coroner who helped her smuggle Flash to freedom by declaring him dead. All Flash can do to pay her back is inadvertently tip off Ming's goons to her machinations by telepathically linking with Dale (which she answers out loud, like the putz she is) instead of satisfying the lusts of his liberator like a true gentleman. Flash is the type who'd repay you for busting him out of jail by shouting "thanks for busting me out of jail!!" as you pass the officers manning the front desk. 

Another 'red queen' - Fah Lo Suee- Fu Manchu's daughter

I know I'm rambling now but sorry, Aura rocks. She represents "the Red Queen", the root CinemArchetype, and what's sad about it isn't that she's too adult, too far along on the current of budding sexuality, for modern audiences. And it's all Lucas' fault. In denying her validity, he's kept boys held in a kind of arrested sexual development, with never a soul to tell them a sexual, intelligent and aggressive woman need not be crushed like a spider found suddenly under a lifted math book.

In Alex Raymond's original strip, just as Ming is derived clearly from Fu Manchu, Aura is derived from his insidious, super-sadistic daughter, Fah Lo Suee (most memorably played by Myrna Loy in MGM's shockingly racist 1932 pre-code Mask of Fu Manchu). I'm not sure if author Sax Rohmer himself had a source for her awesome evil, or if Fah Lo Suee was just a mainstay archetype of kinky "men's adventure" pulp miscegenation fantasies, the type written perhaps by xenophobic shore-leave sailors too high to figure out how to escape their rented berth at some inland opium den. Dragon Lady in Terry and the Pirates seemed too adult and complicated for me as a kid (she and Terry had a complex relationship), and that strip never got kinky enough (I could tell). But the feral purity to Fah Lo Suee or Aura was something we kids could understand --maybe even especially understand if we were younger. As kids too terrified of rejection to ever ask a girl the time of day,  Aura's kind of aggressive no-subtlety seduction was a dream come true. Flash had to be the biggest bonehead in existence! On the other hand, if we were Flash, Ming would still be in power and we'd be another of her smitten booty call reserves rather than her main obsession through the whole serial (we know that now, consciously at least). As kids we were used chasing cute girls and being continually frustrated by a kind of ur-desire we never understood enough to quench.

One of the reasons I liked Suicide Squad was the Aura archetype's re-emergence in the form of Harley Quinn. You can argue that (as per her origin flashbacks) she was driven mad by a man, the Joker, just as Aura was morally bankrupted by father Ming, so it's all just the patriarchy doing its Trilby sexual subjugation number, but if that's as far as you go with your deconstruction then you miss the point, like stopping a cross-country journey after ten miles because the road you started on is closed, rather looking for a map in the glove compartment. You can turn around if you want, but don't kid yourself: you pussied out, not the highway system. Any display of unrepentant feminine enjoyment outside of the parameters of Earth's antiquated morality is empowering, whether or not it's a turn on to the boys! It's like invalidating a straight-A student's grades since they're product of abusive, overly strict parenting, i.e. a sign of trauma rather than triumph. Hey, those tiger moms delivered doctors and conductors and your own indulged kid is still living in your basement, blaming his failure to become a rock star on you for refusing to pay for his band's demo until he actually got a job. 

DALE

Aura acts, good or bad, with clever, if self-serving, thinking. Dale Arden, on the other hand only reacts, without thinking. She's all good but all-passive --her goodness is a burden. Aura leaps into the fire if Flash is burning; Dale just faints and screams his name. Aura saves Flash from death; Flash saves Dale from 'marriage.' Aura is morally neutral, i.e. complex, Dale is all-good, i.e. a simpleton; when she sees Flash alive after the latest chapter-ending trial, she blurts his name, delighted, like a child seeing a puppy gambol towards her across the park. When he's in trouble, Dale reacts by lurching back and forth on Universal's sets in a kind of expressionist dream theatrical style worthy of the Weimar era. Even so, her dewy innocence establishes her as a kind of inner child /anima figure caught in a dark adult web. Though highly sexualized in her concubine robes, threatened by a laughing Vultan, she's nonetheless untouchable, a true dream chimera, the unassimilable sleepwalking void around which the Flash-Aura-Ming pinwheel nebula spins.

ELEMENTAL DREAM LOGIC

Laden as it is with unconscious elemental symbolism--sky (floating city; ships) / water (undersea kingdom) / earth (lizards, Bronson) / fire (tunnel dragon, pits, cliffhangers)---the trappings of childhood trauma and anxiety ingeniously cohere in ingeniously frugal art direction showing that when you stick close to the archetypes, threadbare mono-dimensional cheapness can assume nightmare potency.

For example, next time you pass through chapters 2-3, consider how Kala the Shark Man's underwater kingdom resembles an ordinary bathroom gone Rarebit Fiend-awry: shower curtains stand in for boudoir walls; scallops of welded steel provide walls and thrones; windows are washing machine door round; water leaks in from behind bolted metal plates as if a sleeping viewer's full bladder; it makes you have to pee as they're all slowly turned to let Flash out of a large water tank 'tub,' where Flash is fighting an octopus that looks very much like a wash rag. The shark men who swim towards him are just men wearing a 'fin' ridge on their bathing caps; and they come at him like porpoises across the Olympic swimming pool distance. In short, this is 'bath time' run amok, a world invented on the spot by a child with his rubber octopus, army men, wash rag, and soap suds. In this dream universe, scientific logic equates with the 'seemingly obvious' reasoning of children, i.e. if you fall off the moon you tumble down to Earth. On Mongo you don't need pressurized suits and everyone speaks English and daytime and nighttime merge; the ocean is perfectly represented by your tub's spatial dimensions, your washrag scuttles across the bottom of the tub and you can feel its power in the eyes of your army man when he's smothered by it.

Another dream logic element is the weird disembodied male voice that shows up regularly to do all the overdubs (narrating, diegetic radio news broadcasts, and occasional actor voices) all done by the same booming actor through what sounds like a tin microphone invented from before the age of sound recording, whenever the speaker has their back to the camera, or is outside the frame. (As per imdb, this is the voice of editor Saul A. Goodkind, saving money no doubt on rehiring actors for post-sync re-recording). His attempts to match offscreen character voices are so 'off' they become sublimely surrealistic. Lost in the zone between a commentary track, overdub, and voiceover, his deep slow speaking voice works to enhance the otherworldliness, the dreamy disconnect.

"Maybe you will like my friend, Urso."

My favorite example is when the bear with the white stripe down its back, Urso, comes into King Vultan's throne room to 'terrorize' Dale, who's still in her sexy Ming-given midriff dress, her bosom heaving, stomach sucked in with terror. Her heaving and Vultan's near-incessant 'uproarious' laughter makes the weird bear so much more disconnected, especially when that disembodied voice comes on, slow and deranged: "You don't like me? Maybe you will like my friend, Urso!" Since the voice is heard alongside the bear's close-up, we're led to wonder, is that the bear talking? The slow drawl of the voice is heard only when we see the bear close up - which could indicate it's the bear talking (about himself in the third person) or the editor is worried about lips not matching. When Vultan opens the door back up so the beast will leave he gives it a playful slap on the hindquarter and the white (or yellow) dust flies up, reassuring us the poor creature wasn't actually painted and it will all come off in the pool.

Meanwhile all through the bear's arrival and departure, Dale heaves against the wall in terror, her lovely exposed midriff like a flag before a bull, driving any red-blooded American boy to a man's level of hypnotized distraction and Vultan laughs in a semi-insane impression of heartiness. It really is like a fledgling dream has spilled right onto the TV out of a fevered 11 year-old's brain, nailing a time when we're not quite old enough to realize how villainous our lascivious response towards her fear really is, with Goodkind's slurring deep voice like some primal father pimp puppeteer.

As for the limits of the special effects, we kids (and this I remember from when it was on local TV in reruns late at night, as a space-filler) had enough visualization imagination to fill in the blank spaces. We didn't need to see an actual octopoid: give us aquarium stock footage of an octopus intercut with what looked like Flash caught in a nest of rubber hoses at the bottom of a swimming pool, and that was enough for our imaginations to make us see monsters still unmatched by modern CGI.  Today the footage looks very mismatched and sloppy, but at the time, Flash's panic (Crabbe was an Olympic swimmer so he knows how to convey fear of drowning) struck me as vividly etched and I still remember lying in bed that morning (we'd been allowed to stay up all night thanks to a huge drunken block party) swooning to memories of the string of monsters and adventure I'd just witnessed in a run of the first three chapters of the original serial on local TV (after a showing of some Gamera movie). Looking at it today, I'm amazed how much work the show got out of my childhood imagination, as what I saw then as a seamless and terrifying ordeal was in reality some mismatched octoposu stock footage, unconvincing sponge tentacles, miniatures, and flailing. 

And monsters weren't the only thing conjured this way. Sex was also generated in my childhood mind, without there ever even being a kiss in the whole 13 chapters until the very... very last shot (and even then we fade out before their lips actually touch- as if with the first 'real' kiss comes the waking up from the long almost-but-never-quite-wet dream of childhood. 

I know it's hard to keep X-rated stuff out of the realm of children today, alas, due to Youtube. But my generation, even in the 70s (we were maybe the last ones) could easily spend the first decade-plus of our childhood in complete sexual darkness, so that our sudden urges when beholding underwear models in the Sears catalogue seemed rapturously unique to us alone, And since these feelings weren't yet tied to the tedious mechanics of actual adult sex, they could scale some pretty bizarre sadomasochistic heights. We couldn't know there was a 'release' valve that would end the sweet suffering, and so--mired in the anal stage--we could find only Freudian punishment scenarios at the end of our tortured rainbow.

THE LONGING FOR CLOSURE IS THE CLOSURE

Like in dreams, FLASH's sexual roundelay is never 'resolved' or able to offer a distinct climax and denouement. Its salient goal, as in dreams, is to keep your attention riveted so that you are unaware you're asleep (or in the King's Features strip, to keep up your subscription to the local paper). My local newspaper never got the Flash comic strip, but certainly we knew, too, that feeling of mildly titillating prolonged torture to be found slogging along endlessly evolving narratives in daily 'dramatic' features like Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom and Brenda Starr (all of which we did get in my dad's daily-tossed Courier News). Day after day, a few panels at a time, always doubling back to bring new readers up to speed in the first panel, advancing the story in the middle one, then stalling out with another cliffhanger, these features loped along their elliptical paths. The Flash strip itself seemed pretty risque (above) from what I gleaned in the comic book history tomes at the high school library, where I wiled away endless "study halls."

It was in those books that I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland and--just as those full page 1920s Sunday strips ended with Nemo back in bed wondering what he's missing over there in Slumberland now that he's been so suddenly yanked out of his own cliffhanger-- in the Flash Gordon 1936 serial, there was the aching feeling that our absence was still being felt in the kingdom that our alarm clock had just yanked us out of (the way mom would yell for us to come in for dinner right when we were 'getting somewhere' with a neighborhood game or flirtation, and we'd wolf down dinner asap to race back out, only to find night fallen and everyone gone).

By now you should, being astute, garnered my proposed connection between the cliffhanger's suspense "Tune in next time, same bat channel" or "Next week at this theater!" or tomorrow's paper, and the delirious longing and frustration that comes from being teased by a pretty schoolmate, or, in bed, denied orgasm, but made out with long into the night and then left hangin'.  Maybe, like me, you learned to love this torment, and if so, brother, is Flash for you. Its sense of sexual bait-and-switch is all important in serials for the same reason as it is for dreams or evolution - the basic function of the dream being to keep the conscious mind from 'waking up' - as if a movie being made by an internal director who loses his audience the moment the audience realizes it really is time to get up and go to the bathroom or answer the door, that the buzzing isn't spaceships but alarm clocks.  Maybe the reason rocketships sound so much like alarm clocks is to down them out, but not enough in a sense to fool the conscious mind into waking up even earlier than planned. So the rockets are soothing  masks meant to block out alarm clocks like noise cancelling headphones - you can fall asleep to their genial hum.

In this sense too the 'petit mort' of orgasm acts as a 'waking up' to a reality they thought they were escaping via pursuing their desire. This post-desire satiation leaves 'a mess', things are suddenly awkward between you and your lover and the air feels colder. The post-orgrasm blues can easily segue into guilt or disgust, like eating a big steak and realizing you are now overly full and grossed out by the leftovers on your plate. What was initially so desirable at 8 PM - hhmm-mm hot and juicy, is within an hour reduced to a plate of slowly rotting cut-away fat and sinew; the age of the goddess revealed in the sudden guilty chill of post-orgasmic depression as the nymph you went home with is just another broad with too much make-up smudged off her face when you wake. One's eye casts about the messy floor for one's pants as if on survival instinct. But the urge to run or kick the person out is tempered by the need to not seem like a douchebag. So there you sit, waiting for the check as the rotting meat on your plate nauseates, you long to run out before the bill arrives, be free from a bed that mere hours before you were dying to crawl into.

The trick around this problem, to avoid that disgust and depression, is to never have that elusive orgasm the first night, or even the first few. This translates for Flash into an endless roundelay of lusty chasing, where people make a concerted point to never catch each other. Every kid who's played war in their backyard knows that no one ever wins, loses, or dies for long. The last man standing invariably steps on a mine and falls dramatically or is killed by some dying enemy, and only then may all the slain arise and pick new teams. The game is in how well you die, how much 'veritas' you can bring to your character and to the over-all imaginative 'reality' of the pretend experience. In Flash Gordon, there is never a need to just kill opposing forces quickly in order to end the game fast and go home. What are you going to do there? Play polo? Hang out with dad and his telescope? Knowing this truth, instinctively, if Flash has a laser beam rifle in his hand he is always quick to toss it away if the opponents are unarmed. He might point it at Ming's guards during an escape, but if he wants to subdue them he needs to fight bare-knuckled. If he surges too far ahead, and traps Ming on his throne, sword to his neck, he'll let him bargain his way out, over and over again. Promise Flash he may marry Dale at once... then change it to a week's time so the kingdom can prepare, Flash may expect trickery, but he'd never try to out-trick Ming. You got to let Ming be Ming, then you can react, the way only Flash can, by immediate, unthinking fisticuffs. 

It may seem ridiculous to any adult, but this catch-and-release theater of the mind thing is something kids understand: it's how you keep the adventure flowing. Once a side wins, it's all done, the 13 chapters are up. That means one thing: time to wake up and go to goddamned school again. All out of excuses. You have to turn a blind eye to Ming's machinations because otherwise you would prevent him from making them, and then he wouldn't be Ming, and if you stopped to think ahead about anything, to make a plan or counter a scene, then you wouldn't be Flash. Once you act in anticipation of betrayal, you might live longer, but you're no longer innocent--you're on the road to Ming-hood. The frustration we feel as viewers as Flash lets Ming escapes justice, each time, is metaphorical with the frustration we get from pleasant dreams that never work out with us actually 'completing' our union with our animas - our alarm clock rings (or mom calls us into dinner) And when we finally get back to the room where we left her, she's gone, of course. That's the anima though. When you're old enough you realize the game was fixed from the start, to keep you from waking too fast, to keep the game going, so you're able to finally enjoy the ride and realize the longing for closure is closure. Come to it too fast, the whole rest of the night you have to just kind of lie there, ashamed of your bad 'performance.' 

And just as dreams seemed to be largely repurposed imagery from waking 'content,' as if everything you saw or experienced in school, or the mall, or the back yard whiffle ball game, comprised a casting office and scenery storage palette to draw from, so Flash repurposes an array of familiar sights and sounds from earlier movies -- particularly from Universal's horror films --then in regular local TV rotation so quite familiar to us--especually Franz Waxman scores and the expressionistic prison and other sets from Bride of Frankenstein, now adorned with some funeral statuary from 1932's The Mummy.

Then other films are used that were never on TV, like Just Imagine (1930) from which were hewn the sexy cutaways to the many-armed statue with the scantily-clad maidens writhing on it, seen again and again in the credits and in the serial but only seen on screens in the film by the priest when he "consults with the great Palace of Tao"). Still, we all dreamt about it, for those credits were magical, and-- in its dark strangeness-- tapped into a vein of dark adult sex I was scared of (like those weird Asiatic gnomes on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) but drawn towards, a jagged-edged murky magnet (succeeding where the Eyes Wide Shut orgy fails) pulling me over a cliff with that icy coccyx sensation I now only seem to still get when looking down from steep steep ledges.

If this all then seems about a childhood sexuality and Freudian dream theater jouissance (4), like an actual dream of someone right on the lip of puberty, then let this next part be a whole other sense of dread, of the symbol for the churning storm waiting beyond desire's crashing shoreline, marriage.

MING AND MARRIAGE:

Living a kind of Gengis Khan-in-winter repose, Emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles B. Middleton) on the throne, surrounded by brides and daughter, harkens back to a long line of primal father / barbarian kings. We can uncover racist subtext in his name and style of dress easily but it seems myopic to cast judgment on it for any perceived xenophobia, instead of reaching deep down for the subliminal Freudian Moses and Monotheism reading. Being a resident of Mongo--as the Congo does for Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness--frees Aura and Ming and the other 'natives' from guilt over lust or attraction. This is a libidinal zone where all sexual desire is allowed and there is no hypocrisy or provincial morality. Ming might be a licentious primal father but he doesn't try to scold or censure his daughter's own uninhibited carnality, regarding it with detached bemusement, to be censored only if it undermines his own. And interestingly, Aura is libidinally freer than Ming himself. Though all-powerful, his lusting after Dale still needs marriage to be fulfilled, the same way Dale and Flash would never sleep together before their own ceremony (or even be seen kissing). Both men need a ceremonial precursor to any actual sex. While Ming is emperor he is still bound to follow the codes of conduct centered around the great god Tao.

Thus, in the codex of fairy tale symbolism, there's an understanding that once even a hypnotized individual says "I do" (or--as in Flash--when the gong strikes thirteen), their freedom is gone forever, like a limb lost to gangrene. A 'wedding' is, in reality, a purely symbolic ceremony with no real biological ultimatum beyond the psychosocial, the marriage ceremony in fairy tales, as in Flash, is more than just a 'green light' for sex, rather it is a substitute, a place card, a masque for sex that must stay on until midnight (i.e. when the child is old enough to learn about 'the birds and the bees'). For a child, marriage is the transfer of one identity to another, and there is no return --more than sex it is the diploma for maturity and escape from one's own parents. If Flash had come to Dale's rescue after the 13th gong as Flash battles the fire dragon, all relative parties, including the viewer, understand he'd lose Dale forever. Even if she was coerced (i.e. given the equivalent of a roofie). her innocence would be lost. We take that idea-- conditioned as we are by the iconography fairy tales--at face value. A closer reading though, and it all falls apart. But no one does a close reading, unless they're trying to argue their way into premarital sex, of course. But kids are not and every kid knows about marriage for years longer than they know about sex, so marriage feels somehow real, retaining a mythic power even into 21st century adulthood. 

No matter the culture in which they occur, marriage ceremonies are mystical acts of transubstantiation, wherein even the most fallible human relationships are imbued with an all-powerful magic --it's as if, especially to an innocent child, babies form somehow from the ceremony alone---hence Flash's race to stop Dale from saying 'I do' (or the gong striking 13) being as frantic as any other cliffhanger. If he's a gong too late, her innocence as gone and little Ming-lets start popping out all over the James Whale leftover set.

the priest of Tao displays the manacles of marriage

It'll all be over in a minute, Godfrey

As with the three sisters archetype, which includes the three brides of Dracula in the 1931 original, the multiple wives or concubines luxuriating around the throne are a sign of a pre-empathic binary moralism, a disregard for Christian or modern values reflecting a lack of empathy similar to what a child feels before their empathy drive 'kicks in' (3). Here on Mongo, love doesn't necessarily factor into desire, making it more associated with power and objectification, the 'love' Dale feels for Flash is the polar opposite of the desire Aura has for Flash, or Ming for Dale. But there's no sense of 'sin' to either of these emotions in the context of the film -there's no missionary to condemn any lascivious gazing. Note that the other wives of Ming are, for the most part, his loyal agents, holding Dale in place during her hypnotized marriage (above) - though maybe they're just happy Ming has shifted his focus. It takes a few viewings perhaps to note a small detail (above): at the anticipation of the 13th gong, the priest whips out a set of manacles, and holds them up high in front of the old Ra statue from The Mummy - thus mixing kinky bondage and ancient Egypt, but on a small screen it's so subliminal we'd just miss it yet pick up the dread idea of marriage to Ming as being pre/sexual slavery.

FLASH the MISSIONARY

To this end, Flash comes to Mongo as a kind of monogamy missionary; though he met Dale literally only an hour or so before meeting Aura, he's somehow loyal to her - not out of obligation but out of a kind of chaste racial purity. We kids all would have obligingly gone off with Aura, and left Dale to her own devices, and none of this shit would have had to happen. Would it not be like real life, then? Aura and Flash might be ruling Mongo with Dale as Ming's rich widow and all's well. Instead Flash stays true to Dale and in the process he brings in a kind of New World Order of renounced (or deferred) libidinal  enjoyment. 

Though no doubt the result of censorship, it still makes sense under this reading that the two Flash sequels (Trip to Mars and Conquers the Universe) the hems go lower, the clothes and hair get less exotic, more recognizable; the actors age and get unflattering shorter hair cuts and perms. Meanwhile once agin Ming, i.e. the devouring Cronus elder God, returns, and naturally sees his chance under all this accruing repression. You can't keep a devouring libidinal 'enjoying' father down, no matter how much Moses, totem and taboo you bury him under,. 

We were so sure we'd killed or banished our dark Cronus forever that--when he suddenly erupts back from the abyss for the sequels--he easily seizes large chunks of power, joining forces with whatever rising tyrant star needs an advisor (not unlike the escaped Nazi commandoes finding work and refuge after the war by escaping to Palestine). We only then, when Ming returns, do we realize--as if a reverse "dawn of shame in Eden" epiphany --how dull we've become, how much he was needed. By Conquers, Ming is way looser and more active and flashy, strutting around in crazy plumed black caps, epaulettes, shiny black boots and lascivious facial hair while Flash and Dale seem wider and squarer, as if Earth's gravity has been slowly flattening them after their bodies became adjusted to the loosey-goosey gravity of Mongo. Dale and Aura's now censor-sewn dresses and unflattering perms unsex them. It's only a four year period from the first serial to Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, yet their clothes and hair have been as drained of sex by the dictates of Mongo's new morality, pre-code jazz age libidinal freedom tampered down by Joseph Breen's Legion of "Decency" sturmtruppen, just as the actors have by time itself. Ming seems the same, but his face is frozen in a macabre stony mask, as if he's had plastic surgery, a Ming disguise grafted to his face. But he's the same old Ming. Crabbe and Rogers meanwhile cotton not the least to recapturing libidinal youth, refusing even light diets or modest tights. 

These changes illustrate the downside of Flash and Dale's 'civilizing' influence in Mongo, the price of 'goodness' being renunciation of the pleasure enjoyed by the primal father ala Freud's theory of monotheism's rise (in Totem & Taboo) as the guilt of the sons after they collectively murder their primordial warlord father, determined to never 'enjoy' libidinal freedom again, but to each keep but one wife, and to thus assuage their patricidal guilt (or something). This is the 'original sin' that ends polytheistic pagan prehistory (humans divided into tribes with one father and many women, including his own daughters, with sons are kicked out at puberty, or devoured), signaling the dawn of human civilization as we know it (e.g. incest is now "a crime.") With their dewey devotion to one another and their allies, Flash and Dale resist Ming-style sexual displays of enjoyment, and through their missionary 'decency' liberate Mongo from its tyrannical father figure with the knowledge that with this liberation they forever separate themselves from unrestricted libidinal enjoyment. 

Conquers' 1940 Flash and Dale represent childhood's last gleaming the way the 1936 original serial's Aura and eternal Ming represent adulthood's first dirty leer. Each approach has its good and bad points and each both endangers and educates the other. Aura (eventually) learns the value of self-sacrifice in the service of love (i.e. the kind of love wherein you help the object of your desire achieve their own desire, rather than obliterating all rivals). By turning around and making a decision to stop chasing after Flash and instead love the shambling lummox who loves her in turn (the tellingly named Prince Barin), Aura brings an end to the chain of pursuit and cliffhanger escape that has been going on all through the first 11 or 12 chapters. She becomes "Aura the Merciful" because--after saving Flash's life nearly as many times as Flash has saved Dale's honor--Aura 'settles' for her side of the planetary tracks. Whether or not she retains any lust for Flash seems moot: she's mature enough to hide it from us if she has - and is this not part and parcel with emotional and sexual maturity? (You can still enjoy sex in the post-Cronus 'moral' order, you just have to do it in private. )

"Strangely," my own personal childhood experience mirrors the psycho-historical timeline very well: the arrival of puberty saw the end of my 'decadent desire' phase (the 1936 serial and its sadomasochistic pre-orgasmic desire as per the first part of this long-ass essay), and in its place heralded a yen for WW2 stuff (model planes, HO scale armies, etc) which is mirrored in the history of film and censorship and its relation to the actual WW2 vis-a-vis Flash. In between my polymorphous phase, lying in bed imagining having rows of slave girls (or the reverse, me as the slave), and lots of spanking, and leashes and lap-cuddling but nothing beyond basic anal/phallic stage sexuality), to a cocoon phase when girls were gross and all I did was play war and make WW2 airplane models, to then losing all interest in war and becoming a Playboy-stealing onanistic teen obsessed with not being the last boy in my pack to lose his virginity (the libidinal post-Kinsey/Freud late-50s-early-60s) to being a well-laid rock musician in college (late-60s/70s sexual revolution, culminating in the 1980 ultra-libidinal Flash Gordon remake) to my current Tiresias post-sexual Siddhartha the Ferryman phase (2012+ = the internet age of collective psychosexual alienation). 

As hem lines grew longer for 1940's Conquers the Universe, the country was on its way into war and out of 30s decadence; it's as if war comes along and says hey, there are more important things than arguing with censors. A kind of socialized group positivity becomes necessary. The lone outlaw is replaced by the bomber crew; the lustful sheik is replaced by dutiful husband; Ming deposed by Barin (instead of Aura); Flash brings Christianity to the East; as the permissive Weimar era is trounced by intolerant Nazism. Decadence is eclipsed by fascism; sexual freedom eclipsed by slasher movies, the luridness of pre-empathic libidinal Dionysian childhood replaced by the stringent Apollonian joys of war. And then, sadly, the collapse of desire's promise, the betrayal of biology, as if God has AIDS locked and loaded, just waiting to slap us back down into intolerance after a decade without shame or guilt. 

But just as Ming represents the Cronus primal father repressed/killed by his sons (Barrin, Thun, Vultan) who--to avoid civil war--must pay for their crime by collectively renouncing all enjoyment of his power/ women, so Flash represents the civilizing force, the John Wayne making things safe for Jimmy Stewart to teach the frontier to read. 

The unrestricted libido's consolation prize to this renouncement of unregulated enjoyment is the creation of the unconscious, where id may reign free (i.e. the dream, the myth,  serial, comic strip, itself). The cost of the good guys winning, of Flash and self-sacrifice carrying the day, is apparent in the chasteness and desexualized modesty of the fashions and figures upon their return in subsequent sequels. Ming's uninhibited carnal appetite becomes solely the province of "legend." Carnal love desire circle games are replaced by chaste married strategy counsels and formal attire receptions, but hey - we can always read the lurid pulps under our sheets with a flashlight and put in the DVD once the babysitter's paid off and the wife contented in her (separate) bed. 

Natural Selection, Adieu

Hitherto, on Mongo, a natural selection model has been the order - similar to how male lions take over the pride after killing or driving away their predecessor (and his cubs, if any), with the females having no real say in the matter of who their next mate is. Before Flash, natural selection superseded love and monogamy. Flash and Dale buck the trend. They turn enemies into friends by sparing their lives, introducing them to the preferable model of peace and brotherly love. The catch: the monogamous pair bond marks the breaking point of evolution as per Darwin's Natural Selection. The flaws in the natural order/polygamous lion pride system are revealed as requiring a constant flow of chaos unsuited to civilized order. This becomes the non du pere concept: we--the sons --team up to depose our Ming-primal father, and to "free" his harem of wives, but then we renounce our rights to the enjoyment of his brides/harem, and indeed all future such arrangements (if we didn't, we'd be fighting over them nonstop until all were destroyed). This is the tape splice connecting the sides of the Moebius strip -- the bump in the road: what goes up warlord fiefdom comes down Christian monogamy based democracy. Rather than fight over the spoils, we will agree to set the spoils free, no one shall have them. 

Clearly, it's the more effective measure, as countries still honoring the old system are more or less stagnant (all it takes is one or two generation scared to rebel against their parents and you have a stalled society soon eclipsed by the rest of civilization, still shunning progress and dressing like their ancestors, ala the Amish, the Hassids, or Mormon agrarian splinter cults). The monogamous pair bond / nuclear family system ensures less genetic defect (due to incest promoting inherited chromosome issues, ala the hip problems that plague the pug community) but at the same time booming out the population with people that Darwin would willingly cull from the herd (see: Idiocracy.)

This makes in that sense Flash Gordon if taken as a boy version of Wizard of Oz. In that film, loyalty to Dorothy--and her fresh outsider perspective--binds an array of 'symbolically neutered or non-threatening' male figures to her side--a lion, tin man, scarecrow --as some evil devouring mother wants her shoes, (and as we know, shoes have magic powers within the female unconscious). Flash is helped by (and helps in turn) Lion, hawk, woodsman (sparing their lives in duels often is the key to earning their friendship) etc.--and some evil primal father wants his girlfriend (13). As the new blood / new kid in town / at school / in the land, Dorothy and Flash both act as rallying points for the conglomerations of 'of-themselves' inactive elements (of the subconscious) to band together against the force that has kept them in bondage (i.e. devouring mother / primal father). These elements-- the hanged man,(Scarecrow) wild man (Lion) and android/mechanical man (Tin Man)--are archetypes - each a valuable source of personal power/advancement within the unconscious - but on their own --just nodes of contact, stars within the unconscious' dream nebula). The effect of the visitor from Earth is galvanizing on all them, the way- say, it is, conversely) for E.T. on the suburban household he invades, disrupting the normal flow of events - creating an opportunity for change and profound growth / maturation, and risking complete destruction and terror as opposing forces rise to meet it.

The demographic for Flash being a little older, the friends and Ming-allied foes are all eligible bachelor princes and though not neutered, are otherwise dysfunctional and unappetizing compared with mighty Flash: they're either rotund boisterous brigands (Vultan of the Hawk Men), big mustached lummoxes (Prince Barin, rightful ruler of Mongo- he says), little bald gangsters with Egyptian eyebrows (Kala of the Shark Men), or bandy-legged bushy-bearded Wild Men (Prince Thun of the Lion Men).

ZARKOV

In Flash, a dream version of the children's game 'tag' with its use of a safety zone or 'base'- comes roaring to life. Our sense of 'base' (first grasped in the primordial game of 'tag') as a place of undisputed neutral safety is an important and oft neglected aspect of adventure and dream mythos (the jail in Rio Bravo, for example). Zarkov's laboratory in the Flash series is generally 'base' - there's a lab for him in each kingdom. Wherever he winds up he's employed making weapons to fight the other teams, like a forerunner to Werner Von Braun, whisked from Nazi V2 lab to found NASA, excused from moral responsibility for any destructive use of his inventions, too important an asset to waste time treating punitively. Completely defanged and desexed, Zarkov is actually the most dangerous of all characters due to his knack for inventions (such as making Flash invisible) but each ruler never doubts their own ability to handle his new technology.

Sex Lacks- I.E. PHALLIC STAGE 
(The phallus is defined as its own absence)

Longing for the lost Chapter of the Tigron, the rare Topps card.

The fundamental difference is in age, of course, and the pre-adolescent phase of sexuality, when it's all tied in (or used to be) with the fear of physical punishment. Spare the rod, spoil the child was the old motto and to a degree it's true but only insofar as it remains a threat, which carries a druggy, giddy charge of dread, something we forget as adults when we're no longer subject to parental whims (presuming we escaped childhood unmolested). But if, for whatever reason (usually some early sexual act or witnessing of the primal scene) a side effect of this is generally this kind of agitated jouissance, that comes out, for example, in latent adult sadomasochism, books like Fifity Shades of Grey or films like Scarlet Empress (see: Taming the Tittering Tourists) 

But even if this trajectory around the object produces displeasure (frustration, exhaustion) there is a kind of satisfaction found in this nonetheless. This is one way of understanding jouissance. Freud tells us that the drive is indifferent to its object, and can be satisfied without obtaining it (sublimation). It is not the object itself that is of importance, but what Joan Copjec describes as “a particular mode of attainment, an itinerary the drive must undertake in order to access its object or to gain satisfaction from some other object in its place. There is always pleasure in this detour – indeed this is what pleasure is, a movement rather than a possession, a process rather than an object” (Copjec, UMBR(a): Polemos, 2001, p.150). - What does Lacan say about Jouissance (Owen Huston)

Growing up watching Flash on TV, never in the right sequence or in one binge, only the warlord and his dozen captured wives social unit seemed a rational social construction (once Flash kills Ming, he will take over ownership of the wives, presumably) and we understood the frustration of that never happening the way he eventually understood the impossibility of ever 'completing' our Topp's Charlie's Angels bubblegum card collection. We had to realize that we'd never see the serial in total. The same way dreams never 'end' satisfactorily, we'd never see the 'end' of the serial (they would show the serial chapters to fill in dead spots in the line-up so there was never a consecutive 13-week run we kids could find). Thus, the show, like our jouissance and unrequited longing for local classmates and teachers, never resolved but kept twisting our loins into new agonizing yet dimly pleasurable pre-adolescent shapes. 

Today, both the movie and the serial remain one of the few unvarnished myths of kinky adolescence.  Navigating hormonal drives is a lost art. There is no longer a heroic man 'saying no' to some carnal woman; no myth where he will lead the fallen woman out of darkness ('beyond good and evil' as befits her royal status) and into a normal pair-bond from 'her own planet.' So often in the more 'mature' miscegenation fantasias the (white) man and (other) woman sleep together and fall in love (there's no Dale on their desert island), and then she has to die, either taking from a blowgun dart meant for him, throwing herself into the volcano to save her people, or... well.... those are the only two options, usually - so the white man can sail home and marry the white girl. But Aura doesn't die and doesn't shag the hero, instead she contextualizes herself into framework of the new order brought about by Flash's system of benevolence and friendship over pleasure-seeking. Aura 'settles' for the lummox-y Barin, more a Beery than a Crabbe (though in the remake he's actually way cooler and hotter than Flash!)

This is, as some analysts point out, a key to happiness, a way to break the daisy chain of dissatisfied Athenian lovers chasing each other round and round through the enchanted woods. Stopping the chase, turning around and loving the one who loves thee, the one who is not as hot therefore not as vain, the one who is less spoiled therefore more capable, less indulged, therefore more grateful. And if they find someone else to run off with, would you care? You'd be left better equipped to seduce the vain, prissy, and indulged one who will have missed you chasing her and so maybe turned around at last. 

Of course dreams never work out like that, only reality.

Face it, whomever you are, whatever gender or orientation, you'd sleep with Aura first and worry about Dale marrying Ming later. Once they had you for a few nights, beach would tire of you, leaving you free to loaf around the palace, getting high on all the local druggy delicacies. Everything would be just as it is, only with less responsibility. And then maybe the Tigron, the great best of Mongo, and the poor dragon would all still be alive. Ever think of them, Flash? The poor woman who trained that Tigron since it was a cub, now forced to watch it die at your hands? That Tigron deserved better. If you'll excuse me now, I have to wake up.  That buzzing is no ship... it's my alarm. 

All hail, AURA - QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE!

NOTES:
1. jouissance-based sexual fantsizing of a phallic stage pre-adolescence (specifically my own such memories filtered via Freud). 
2. The most important thing, in my kiddie circle especially, was to lie about your sexual experience and knowledge so, since everyone did (since we did, we figured they did too) the truths were taken with the same inwardly-horrified but surface-jaded grain of salt that the lies were, bringing about a collective body of contradictory knowledge and heresy that lives on in adulthood with myth, conspiracy theory, and unsolved crimes.

2.2. would there were a sequel about them for once - we never even learn what happens to the 3 brides after Dracula leaves Transylvania - they only get that one shot.

3. I've written before of my recollection of the moment my own empathy kicked in, and never kicked off again 'til cocaine. 
4. I've still never had a wet dream, to my knowledge, go figure, so maybe I'm the worst unconscious Puritan of all.
5. see 'Mom- A Jail' - This ironically becomes the polarizing locus of anxiety and frustration after puberty - as anything remotely to do with the safety granted by proximity to mother becomes suffocating, the same hormonal drives that bound you to her now repel you. Eventually that dies down of course, once independence is established
7. though I stayed interested in it as a philosophy, and am still enthralled by the idea that sexual heat/desire can transmute pain into pleasure via proximity, sex turning all other intense sensations into pleasure by a kind of reverse-fever (going through alcoholic convulsive withdrawal was, I found, greatly eased with Ginger Lynn movies on TV in the background) I think this should be explored medically as a tool for opiate withdrawal as well (i.e. think of sex while wounded on the battlefield to transmute the pain), though people might object to XXX rated movies in hospitals. On the other hand, I find the trappings of bondage a little ridiculous in films. It only works via novels, or spoken in the act.
9. The roots of Stockholm syndrome lie in this: a woman who can adapt to sleeping with the warlord who has killed her husband  is the one who survives to procreate; the genes of the woman who kills herself in protest die with her --thus patrician codes of honor are meant to assuage the guilt of the losing side (i.e. male family members deciding a woman isn't capable of knowing when to kill herself  -i.e. John Carradine's nearly shooting the 'lady' at the climax of Stagecoach).

10. Roland Barthes, Mythologies
11. See Freud's Theory on Infant Sexuality,
12. See my short story 'Missing the Orgy' somewhere on the web
13. I'm not saying men wish they could collect girls like girls collect shoes, because that would be objectification. But rapey magazines like Esquire subtextually encourage such fantasies through corporate projection (peddling a pimp-like promise that owning a Rolex means you will soon own a gorgeous woman too - for they are shallow things obsessed with signs of wealth. I mean I've had hot girls at bars grab me by my wrist, look at my cheap watch, shake their head, and throw me back. But who would want such a vain spoiled vapid gold digger like that? Only the insecure male desperate to seem like da mack daddy pimp).

The Primal Scenesters: TWIN PEAKS

(NOTE: CONTAINS SEASON 1, 2 SPOILERS)

Thanksgiving has come and gone, other holidays are beginning to roll around; everyone with parents and grandparents to visit begin the backwards slide into composites of past versions of themselves, to not alarm their elders who remember them a certain way and the one chance for differing political views to find themselves handcuffed to tradition and turkey like a seasonal DEFIANT ONES. Self-righteous drunk sophomore English majors try to show racist uncles BLACK MIRROR, season two episode 3 ("The Waldo Moment") and uncles snidely flip to football cuz they claim they can't understand British accents.

After enough booze is drunk, and it's late, things get better, as if sensing a lull in the hostility, wives and aunts start nagging to go home or yelling down the stairs that it's time to go to bed just when you and your racist uncle or communist nephew are just starting to feel the buzz of familial love you've been drinking towards all night.

Hang all those reproachful female glowers,! Clink your ice and toast each other's burning health.

TWIN PEAKS has found an even better route to this union of opposites: the common bond of mystical forestry. Take only footprint casts and leave only pictures, polaroids hidden barely under autumn leaves right there on the forest floor... don't tell me of what the pictures are of, though, let Cooper look on my behalf, for his eyes are trained for horror, and peruses the back issues of Flesh World with the dispassionate eyes of a doctor.

On this we can agree: money buys booze which buys at least numbness, and before the morrow's dry mouthed pain, fluid ecstasy. And it's in the valley between those two states of mind that TWIN PEAKS does its misty mountain creeping. Especially once one folds in FIRE WALK WITH ME, because-- for all your family's flaws--unless they've sexually abused or otherwise warped you, they're good parents. If you're formed into an adult with a somewhat concrete sense of reality vs. fantasy then they did a decent job and deserve a break. If not, what right did they have spreading their Usher-esque inherited madness onwards into the future like a plague?

Of course there's no way for YOU to know if you are a single cohesive whole with a grasp on collective reality --you're too close to yourself. Only when you meditate, or trip really hard or get a massive fever, may you see just how easily your perception of self and reality can shrink to nothing but a pinpoint, or widen to the universal with each breath. And, alas, back again.

When you come back to normal from the madness of that serious acid trip, or your fever breaks, or your meds are adjusted, then you feel like a rebooted hard drive, and what programs open and how the drive structures itself --its basic startup OS--that's the parental gift. If you come back into a feeling of well-adjusted parameters of self, a good moderate balance between emotional extremes, then you owe your parents or caregivers big time because from age 1-5 they paid attention and partitioned your hard drive right, made you feel adored and then forced you kicking and screaming if needed, to go to kindergarten and to endure what seems like dozens of painful booster shots, then let the doctor give you a lollipop.

Like LSD or pneumonia, Twin Peaks bumps the neurochemistry of a 'normal' Pacific Northwestern small town so that the usually subconscious demons and darkness can come bobbing up to the surface like a ship's hull in stormy seas. Incest--that of Laura Palmer by her possessed father Leland--structures the core of the warping reality of Twin Peaks, the way that of Jack and Danny or/and presumably Jack and his father (not necessarily in physical reality) structures The Shining. 

Is that lil Jack in the costume, and his dad?

My theories here expand on those of Roger Ager in his Shining analysis, a genuinely disturbing interpretation in the vein of ROOM 237 but far darker and more inescapable, a kind of mad mixture of Oedipal detective deconstruction and blood-chilling fate-amplifier feedback. As with the best theorists (as opposed to the dry 'respectable' ones), Ager doesn't give a shit if he sounds like a crackpot--it's not like we can do anything to help Danny, or Laura for that matter --they're fictional characters. He knows this. He never succumbs to 'think of the children!' hysteria.

Instead he just warps back around with perfect logic until creepy paranoia sets itself up in the reader organically. Ager's theory is all the ghost stuff is cover memories and excuses for this most odious of abuses, covered by Shelly Duvall's denial. While I agree to a point, he begins to lose me when insisting these ghosts can't be both real and figments of a warped cover memory. Basic physics proves adequately to even the laymen that the perception of matter as solid is a hallucination, as is the perception that we are not on a giant rotating orb whizzing inexorably through space and time.

Perhaps--as in the 'stone tape theory--trauma releases an energy beyond our three dimensions that then leaves a permanent imprint; like some stray outlines of images from a deleted movie on a hard drive, outlines that show up superimposed on parts of the next film to be downloaded, just waiting for the right (disturbed) laser beam to come along and decode them into a solid form and 'see' that form into a kind of sub-existence.

UNTIMELY RIPPED:

The disturbing implication of course is that we're all somebody's bad dream cover memory. Be the part of the dream that helps the dreamer, that's the Cooper/Buddhist way, joyful participation in the sorrow of the sexy 50s universe pleasant dream that oscillates regularly into nightmare and back again. THE SHINING, on the other hand, is almost swallowed whole by that dream's devouring demon maw. There's no Cooper there, no cops (aside from emergency radio monitors who are powerless to intervene once the radio is smashed), nothing to help keep the one source of sane goodness--Shelly Duvall--from total breakdown. There's no sexual desire anywhere in the film, no connection whatever between husband and wife --the only expressions of love are between mother and son, and father and son in a weird terrifyingly 'off' way (the only way Danny can even voice his concern is by asking "Dad, do you feel bad?" The only desire in the film is for alcohol, and other venues of escape (including murder), things which--relatively speaking--help the dreamer either wake from the dream or else go deeper --into total unconsciousness / the past (where Jack apparently finds peace).

The common conspiracy theories about the reptilian sexual predator Illuminati CIA Monarch 7 programmers in our midst (see: Make up your Mind Control) tend towards young women, but other branches of the theory say members use their own children in sacrificial ceremonies and sex magick rites, not necessarily just for some kind of perverse pedophile enjoyment, but to intentionally create split personalities they can then use to their own ends (as assassin amnesiacs, etc.) and to create a massive amount of negative energy which sixth generational reptilian overlords love to drink, and/or use to enter our plane.

Consider the implication in a lot of these stories (THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING in particular) that deep cover memory repression of dark events provides the current that activates the dark ghost 'residual energy' captured in the walls, so that traumatic moments in the past keep repeating. That energy stays there, up for grabs to anyone with the right wireless router to tap into. And who has that router? Free-floating demonic spirits--formless and powerless usually, like inactive ions or dried-up flies in the corners and basement doorways--the trauma recorded in the stone provides the energy jolt back into corporeal existence (on some higher or lower frequency from the spectrum of most human's perception). Be the energy coming from the trauma of past dark crimes or--in the case of poltergeists--boys or girls hitting puberty.  The huge amount of psychic disturbance shocks the inert magnetic anomaly some choose to call Satan into our dimensional spectrum.

In other words, incest or similarly abominable crimes are like a wave generator that gets the boat of consciousness bobbing, allowing the usually unseen barnacles on the lower hull to rise above sea level. Thus the unseen barnacles whisper to sleeping seamen above them through the wood, bidding them to obscenely vile doings.

This is why we need our dad to protect us from demons, why we long to sleep in our parents' bed. Monsters are afraid to come bother us there, this is a fact in our minds - UNLESS the incest is real and the parents are the monsters --then the child has no one to run to. That's so horribly unfair and cruel it's too horrible even for horror films (except in the abstract, as past events) and may explain the bad vibes and press accorded Fire Walk With Me. Nearly every living human agrees pedophiles are monsters and we have no wish to see their despicable acts. Is the refusal to film or see these things what makes us human? We know such things exist - as we hear about their 'rings' being busted up - but most of us, I trust, wouldn't have the first notion how to find them or slightest urge to want to. If I didn't believe that, how would I be able to look my fellow humans in the eye on a day-to-day basis? They exist, these people, but out of sight.

And the craziest part, is that the incest doesn't even need to be 'real' to have this dehumanizing effect. The primal scene witnessed at the right age and blocked from consciousness, existing only as a dark projected reflection in the water of the child's subconscious, creates a weird pre-school jolt of anal phase sexuality creates the nucleus hollow jouissance core around which will be spun the tennis ball threads of healthy adult sexuality. Covered up as it is with lime green felt, the hollow core is still there, giving the ball its bounce, even if usually it's never even seen.

With 'real' pedophiles (who were usually, almost always, molested themselves as children), the outer felt never forms. the threads hang loose, and there is no core, or core is all there is.

The cocoon of reason brings death's head moths.

And surrealism, of course. The primal scene and repressed infantile sexuality are the interior decorators of the subconscious. And if the filmmaker is a good surrealist--like Bunuel or Lynch--they decorate the mise-en-scene with seemingly incongruous details that point to truths too deep and subconscious to approach directly. As with dreams they are the mirror to the Medusa; gazing directly at the primal horror of our own primal birth, the gaudy horrors of the human reproductive life cycle, will drive even anyone mad. The whole process, from erection to umbilical snip, is like some bloody, gooey scene from ALIEN until--ideally--that tennis ball felt forms around it, a felt of birth announcement postcards, cure hand-knitted booties, and wedding veils. The flesh wraps like a forgiving curtain over an autopsy.

It is happening... again

The lurid-hollow core underneath the felt is supposed to be in the subconscious, a bad dream, interpreted as in the sidpa bardo by entwined lovers as fires in the cold empty darkness. If you get too close and you get stuck on the flypaper womb and are reborn into the world of time and space and sorrow and joy. As a child you are far closer to your previous life than adulthood. Unable to process where you are, or resist the giant hands constantly picking you up and putting you down, you are trapped in a narrow window of time, the past curtained off, the future totally out of your hands --all you can do is either cry or suckle; soon that is all you know--life and death polarities as simple as the nipple (rubber or human) vs. the yawning abyss of powerlessness and sleep void of dreaming as there's nothing yet to repress or remember.

This is only part of why the first glimmers of sexual desire in young children tend to be focused onto their parents, who--as most do--merely accept these fleeting crushes as passing stages, using them to perhaps encourage them to clean their room, but they must never reciprocate or indulge or even encourage such a crush. Otherwise the young, developing brain warps like a plant growing in on itself or a feedback squall. Dissonant and destructive reality itself becomes like a dream, a time and space-melt occurs, the usually progressive phases jam up on each other like a bunch of kids piling up like a highway pile-up halfway down a twisty water slide. Multiple selves spring up to accommodate; the singular slide becomes a hydra, each head branches away in opposite polarities (one self is a wanton harlot, the other a virgin, etc.)

Usually a kind of yin-yang dividing line between the adult conscious mind (structuring 3-D space/time reality and correct decoding of social signifiers), and the unconscious mind (dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, mythic correlation; the ability to become immersed in a book or movie narrative) becomes a complicated post-war map where boundaries are susceptible to constant invasion far beyond our usual 'waking up into or out of a dream' while either falling asleep at your desk in class, or having a lucid flash in a bad dream and trying to wake up out of it in the dead of night by clicking your ruby slippers together like Dorothy trapped in reform school after drowning Mrs. Gulch (yet there she still is, every night, in the mirror- the mouthful of toothpaste water spat at her does but melt her for a moment)

Consider the WIZARD in this context: if Dorothy was molested, say by her aunt and uncle while growing up, then the wicked witch would be unstoppable. The Wizard would have Dorothy's face beaming back at her instead of his own; and all the scarecrows and lions would be left to their own devices while she hid forever in the poppy fields, and later killed the tin man, emptied out his armor and hid inside it when the Emerald City PD rolled through.

The first thing she'd do when back in Kansas is become a tornado chaser, then later when that didn't work, move to Kansas City to become an opium addict prostitute who--when she looks in the mirror--sees the dead wicked witch of the east looking back. Gotcha, you wicked old witch, the witch says to her, my little pretty - now it's hydrophobic Dorothy running from the sweet young witch and her rubby slipper fetish.

It's fate, baby. If you can't even look in your own backyard without a tinge of terror and shame, then you'll be very distressed to know there's no place like home because even at home you are still, as they say, no place.

Thats why Lynch is such a genius and why we can see through the bullshit tropes of the other Twin Peaks writers--the ones from season two who turned it into a kind if Cheers set in a Pacific NW police station (i.e. the dopey romance between Andy and Lucy); and why--even if you were a TWIN PEAKS fan in 1991--you too were horrified by the 'cop-out' answer to who killed Laura Palmer in 1992, because it brought in the supernatural in such a way as to almost seem like cheating (the 'it was all a dream' twist that leaves any respecting horror fan feeling disgruntled).

THE HACKS DESCEND

There were other annoying things, all involving the fame of the show itself, for a craze had sprung up in the weeks before the season one ending cliffhanger, and thus the show now had the burden of becoming of a whole summer of expectation and speculation. By the time the Bookhouse boys were raiding One-Eyed Jacks and dealing with Michael Parks rocking the worst French-Canadian accent in the history of  TV, we realized it had become the show our parents were remembering--like if someone wanted to make a movie about Dali's melting clocks, so they cast a normal American family called "the Clockers" living in a tropical environment without AC and having the usual adventures (teacher's nights, PTA snacks gone wrong, starting a small bakery) while slowly melting from the heat.

In other words, what Seattle feared would happen, happened: I know, I was part of it. Moved there with my then-girlfriend after college, summer of 1989, left for good the following spring 1990. TWIN PEAKS was riding up in my rearview as I drove across country like a boomerang. Starbucks too, was in my backdraft (indeed, one can see how thoroughly Twin Peaks influenced Starbuck's then-nascent dark wood / low yellow light chain aesthetic when one realizes that when the show first came out, Starbucks was strictly a few 'stands' set up at various Seattle malls and locations around the Pike Place Fish Market, etc. - in other words, it's success marks it as the first and most enduring sign of how thoroughly the show influenced the dark look of 90s America). Nirvana was still a few months away. There was no time to even change into your rattiest flannel shirt before flannel shirts were fashionable and then you couldn't wear them anymore.

I'll confess, I loved it all. I felt like all the things I loved about the Pacific NW had come back east with me, like some kind of virus care package.

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came out around the same time as season two -- you could feel the TWIN PEAKS air in its veins--and took the whole moody small town serial killer leaving enigmatic clues thing to a whole other level. Naturally the sudden season 2 appearance of Wyndham Earle seemed a rather hamfisted move to keep up with the Lecter craze (the super genius serial killer leaving strange clues thing). Dumb shit like the one-eyed crazy wife Nadine thinking she's back in high school and exhibiting superhuman strength after an amnesia conk; the dewy, pleading, over-acted puppy-eyed David Schwimmer-esque agoraphobe with the special diary; James--the bland leather jacketed, dumb-as-a-post pretty boy with the dyed-black hair--embroiled in a femme fatale's rich husband killing scheme like goddamned John Garfield after riding his bike away to mourn yet another murder of his girlfriend; the love affair and pregnancy between the dangerously incompetent buffoon cop Andy and the baby-voice nitwit receptionist Lucy at the sheriff's office; Josie Packard's old Hong Kong pimp flying in to raise hell over a perceived double cross (that part was OK, but underdeveloped); Ghostwood Estates, Joan Chen, Peggy Lipton's ex-con husband the poor man's Patrick Swayze glum soap opera mid-age hunk type; idiot James blaming himself for everything that goes wrong... When Lynch isn't at the helm of an episode, the traumatic disruption of the primal scene isn't there, the underlying dread of a real, dark, reality-altering secret isn't there to vivify the symbology, the tennis ball has no bounce; the clocks do not melt.

Instead, dead husbands are now alive for no real reason; the furor surrounding a noted anonymous travel writer / food critic A.M. Wendt (what a chortle to be had over all the painfully trite mistaken identities!) seemed like some middle-aged hack who'd been banging out scripts since the Lucy Show might think is "that Twin Peaks kinda kooky," like "that Barton Fink feeling," the sort they glean from a cheat sheet faxed over by their agent.

As the series petered out there were still spots of brilliance: Lynch's appearance as Cooper's boss at the FBI came with his incomparable homage to the Weenie King in THE PALM BEACH STORY ("you have a nice clear voice like a bell!"); Wyndham Earle evoking the great Brember Willis in two James Whale movies--as the kindly woodland hermit in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and crazy cackling Saul Femm in Whale's 1932 OLD DARK HOUSE--in his befriending and torture of still-alive Leo--who eventually (after being sadistically tortured enough by Earle that our need for vengeance is satisfied) becomes sympathetic. The great David Warner himself importing genuine menace, class and surprise as Josie Packard's old pimp, surprising everyone by re-bonding with Dan O'Herlihy, the man he tried to kill,  still alive; after all; David Duchovny as the cross-dressing FBI buddy of Cooper's (their easy by-play exhibiting truly wondrous Hawksian male professionalism)

But there were other less inspired things: Earle's elaborate games with the pretty girls of the show--their naive excitement over a "Miss Twin Peaks" contest (I think they'd had a real-life 'Girls of TWIN PEAKS' group Vanity Fair cover by that point) deadens their collective mystique the way our love for Nick Drake deadens when we hear first hear "Pink Moon" in a car commercial.

When Lynch directs an episode you can tell right off as the surreal touches stack up like an eclipse of uncanny frisson; when other hands take the controls, we just get the 'sequel' - the 2010 to Kubricks' 2001.

I'm not blaming anyone in particular. If anything it's the public that are to be blamed, myself included.  The whole TWIN PEAKS craze had broke out in full over the summer before the second season started-we were TWIN PEAKS obsessed but there were only seven episodes and now we had a long wait for more. Like JR before, we had to know who killed Laura Palmer. All that summer you could feel the pressure they were under to not lose track of whatever they felt had led to the success, even though it was maybe never intended to emphasize those elements.

A long-time practitioner of transcendental meditation, Lynch surely knew the damaging effect that kind of acclaim can have. Lynch has an ego like a polite and gifted child who sings sweetly and musically and keeps quiet when asked because it knows it's not in charge--its part of a soul's democracy with higher and darker forces of yin and yang. But pity the man with no self-distance or humility in a similar circumstance, who lets the acclaim he's receiving puff out his ego so it just never shuts up, shrill and incessant and laughing at its own jokes. A strutting marionette rather than a worthy king, old Ego hears the praise and it just puffs him further out until the unconscious anima voices that won him the acclaim are drowned out and hackwork carpetbaggers move in, the same baggy-suited shills who've been slowly killing suddenly popular TV shows since the 50s.

I know Lynch wasn't the only creative force involved with the show, but Mark Frost never really registers except as an all-around TV series guy--harnessing Lynch's surrealist imagery and use of music to a series-ready narrative chapter structure (normally a weakness with Lynch, who often has to backtrack out of narrative and replacing divots, filling holes and dead ends with Moebius loop tape and dissociative character dissolution). We could feel Lynch's unholy touch when he took control and directed episodes--they're infinitely more intriguing, darker, stranger, than the rest, more resonant with tiny observed detail as opposed to gaudy momentum. In this difference we can learn much, which is why I stress it below... here... now:

What's immediately apparent is the difference between true surrealism (reflecting the primal scene and subconscious' incestuous dread--which again doesn't have to have actually ever happened--to 'exist' on some level in the collective subconscious) and 'bein' quirky' - i.e. surrealism lite, the kind you can show to grandma. Whereas in Kubrick and Lynch (and Bunuel), the incongruous elements point towards dark subconscious desires which are neither there nor not there, in the hack episodes the elements point only to older sitcom and soap plots, arduous contrivances to lead to some slapstick buffoonery (Andy with his foot in an umbrella stand at the snooty wine tasting - Bwa Bwa!). The writers and directors on these episodes are like the dad who crashes his son's game of war and decides he can shoot around corners and and never has to die because he can make bullets become dandelions before they hit him. Half the kids leave as soon as they realize he's not playing by the rules, but the son is trapped and then--so proud of himself--the dad later boasts he's such a good parent for 'entering his son's imaginary world.'

But in trying too hard to be 'different' in that by-then mass-marketed Twin Peaks-style, these lesser episodes only accentuate how bad formulaic weirdness is vs. what's at the deep deep core of true weirdness, which is something no sane parent wants any part of and hence is always present below the levels of actual perception or existence (like radio static).... the primal scene. As inescapable and under the surface, as immediate and foregone an eventuality as sudden cannibalism. We don't lunge at our children and devour them at dinner, and we don't molest them -- it's a no brainer -- on such things society is formed, and the titans like Cronus are banished to the depths of the Earth for doing both and so the sun finally comes out. Whether or not the Illuminati demand corruption of the innocent for their magicks or if it's just the collective subconscious burbling up through the cracks of regressive post-suggestion hypnosis I for one cannot say, but I can say, this being the age of "After Freud," that it doesn't necessarily matter. If the primal scene / repressed libidinal picture of Satan worshipping child molester gathering in robes with candles to commit ritual violation didn't exist it would by very virtue of its taboo status be dreamt about anyway and seen by paranoid schizophrenics and visionaries as all too-real.

The next time you look in a mirror and wince or see yourself in your parents features, remember that they too see themselves in you and that's not always a blast for them, either. Bad parents never instill that revulsion because they never create the right conditions for it. They spoil you rotten one week and ignore you the next, so that you live and die by their smile even after you're old enough to move out. Remember how you screamed and cried when mom first dropped you off at school, feeling as if she stuck the knife in and twisted, sending you off to your death instead of kindergarten? You'd have been so happy if mom relented, if she heeded your cries and took you home.

But if she did, where would you be now?

You'd be happy for a few more hours but then fucked forever. More often than not, thank heavens, mom knows this and her innate maternal instinct is tempered by the juicy thought of being free from your neediness for a few golden hours. Just as we must stop sleeping in our parent's bed, and we must go out and play with other children, mom must shoo us from the room. If not done soon enough, Norman Bates is the result.

 So what happens if, instead of Norman Bates, we have the Laura Palmer? What if instead of enduring this trauma during the Elektra complex phase of a girl's life, she actually does take the mothers' place in the primal bed? It's an infantile wish the young girl doesn't even understand the implications of, and she shouldn't have to, the frustrations of not being able to supplant her mom fade as the thwarted energy builds to knock her into the next stage of development. If the dad comes to her when she's deep asleep while still in this phase, it might not even register as more than a disturbing dream just way more vivid than most. Even if he's a typical good dad, the dream might still be there, but coded, vivid enough that a hypnotist with an agenda can coax it into reality and maybe it will even be 'remembered' as real if the hypnotist digs deeper than the actual reality and unearths the subconscious instead, like she's trying to excavate the back yard to put in a pool but accidentally cuts into a water pipe or deep reservoir of repressed libidinal sewage. It's a simple mistake but the result destroys the father's life and ruins the backyard forever.

No family is innocent of incest if the subconscious is taken as real. The result if it is is an inversion, the conscious--the social life, school, normal boyfriends, family dinners--are made dream-like, nightmarish. If she's pretty and charming the subject's dreamlike disconnect can enrapture and confuse a whole community. When she dies it's like a triple reverse axle of depth of field --her body is marooned in the river of the real, a decomposing home to crabs and muddy water, and yet her mystique is even more assured. Her profound effect on the community increases to the point of mythic heroism; she lives on now in the collective subconscious like the princess anima for the entire town. She's the madonna of their personal nativity, the siren of their collective ocean, and the demon whore of their private nightmare delirium tremens.

SCHRODINGER'S CAT-SCAN

If we can't remember back to our own childhood conception of sex, the weird miasma of magic and misunderstanding by which we imagined our coming out of our mother but carrying our father's features, we're maybe lucky. I envisioned a soundwave-based process wherein my mothers' "stomach" received a radio signal from my father's brain.

It's perhaps the duty of parents to put up with the child's constant curiosity about these big issues, their being drawn to the sound of the primal scene going on upstairs, the Oedipal 'mom is being hurt; thing.' If we learn the truth too early, let it be from other kids so it comes masked in plausible deniability. I remember being told about by kids who'd seen X-rated magazines in the parents bedrooms, and calling them liars. Hearing it from other kids first we get a grace period for it all to settle in the brain as fiction prior to fact (we're grossed out --that's where we pee from!), so the monstrosity of these acts can slowly fade under the safe buffer of possible fiction. Hearing it from our parents we can't deny it. We're like a middle-aged smoker waiting for the results of his first chest cat-scan. Sure, smoking killed our relatives, but as long as the doctor's cat scan hasn't come, we can bluff our cough and grey pallor in the mirror. While waiting for the X-ray results or the Cat-Scan, we're ashen with genuine fear. This is the Schrodinger's Cat-scan paradox.
---



All fans of horror must deal with the feeling Freud doesn't mention, but Lacan does, that the primal scene also carries a current of jealousy and if prolonged over time ("Bob's been coming to me at night since I was seven") the cover memories become part of the maturing identity ("Laura was like two different people"), which could never grow if stunted by the traumatic realization that this bestial act is how in fact we came to be. If it comes too soon upon the heels of our birth, the very same horror that created us now destroys us, like Lot's wife turning around to look at the explosion too close to the blast radius, only instead of becoming a pillar of salt we're merely bereft of any sense of security or safety, with no idea of what is a dream and what is reality because we don't trust the person who should be waking us up when we're screaming. That's why Lynch is such a rare great filmmaker for he can tap into that zone. There's no need to distinguish a dream from reality for Lynch, there is no difference in importance between the two, because meditation and vision have given him the strength to not flinch from the blinding light and scalding sunshine. He can hear colors and see sounds! At the very least, he's found the ultimate 'door in the floor' to his own subconscious mind. Therein be monsters that can come up to grab you (Bob to Leland; Leland to Laura) like a maniac from the backseat suddenly grabbing the wheel while you're going 80 on the highway.

It's in Lynch that this dark incestuous table cloth flip comes to life via surrealist touches--collective cover memories woven together from 50s teenager pop culture-- worlds darker and farther beyond most dime-store freak-show nonsense.

Today you can see the myriad half-assed attempts at being shocking that confuse vivid torture porn and kinky abductions and brutal serial killer artists with that kind of edge --or worse, don't bother to mine the actual Freud below the brutality, but take the surreal touches as their own reality, leaving a diluted sense of prefab emptiness, like expecting an oven to arrive but instead getting a meat thermometer and a pie recipe. Lynch's edge is so deeply etched that the surface can be portrayed as a very tranquil stream with just a tiny eddy in the current, the music from Angelo Badalamenti just as layered -- the pretty emotional sweep atop, the lower ominous bass drone below. Rather than get an oven, Lynch turns the heat up in your house to broil and sticks the thermometer in your ear.

If the incestuous reverse primal scene happens for real it's like a fish riding a dark 'devouring father' pederast Cronus bicycle through the mirror, splintering the budding superego reflection into a thousand persona splinters; the fish may as well be plastic and mounted on the wall, and occasionally turning to face the camera and singing "Take me to the River." We spent thousands on marketing and mass audiences really responded to that song, while showing women subjected to brutal rapes is okay for the church, a female orgasm is demonic. Behind me right now is playing a film on Syfy, a Predator rips the spine out of a dude, but the dude literally can't even say 'shit'!  The most basic and obvious taboos are so far afield they're blind to them - but Lynch isn't. That's the surrealist difference and you can sense it even with your eyes closed, maybe even especially.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE: Audrey Horne

Audrey used to be favorite crush, but that was 25 years ago. I have changed, gone from her approx. age to old enough to be her father. Seeing the show now, Audrey seems impossibly young and superficially coy; cherry stem knot or no, she's out of her depth at One-Eyed Jacks. Still, we admire her for going, as we admire Cooper's fortitude in rebuffing her sexual advances without disrespecting or humiliating her; he changes an explosive situation into a positive growth experience. We also note with relief the healthy disregard and wary respect her capitalist father, Benjamin Horne, has for her. Rather than see her as a confederate or opposition or burden, Ben is scared of her. He might try to ignore her as much as possible but at her age, isn't that his job? Compared to the incestuous closeness of Leland to Laura, he's a saint. Her freedom from negative paternal influences (Ben and Cooper both) allows for room for Audrey to safely practice the art of feminine manipulation. Working on the manager of Horne's department store (above) to get a job at the perfume counter, the 'gateway to Jacks' comes easy and seems-at first-a walk in the park. But once there, Audrey is subject to a near miss of incest (that would have horrified Ben even more than her, which is why we like him, relative saint that he is.) 

That the situation--part of the season 1 cliffhangers--is resolved, and nothing happens between them (neither discovery, nor incest) is a pointer towards how daddy-daughter relations can have respect and tension without all the physical closeness craved so unrealistically, even frenziedly, by say Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. If a daughter still wants to climb all over her dad's lap by the time she's 17, something is wrong. She should hate him, or think he's square. And he should encourage that freedom from himself. This is the natural order. Ben has his own peccadilloes to worry about - Audrey comes and goes as she pleases. Her mom is a clueless depressive, her brother mentally handicapped --both are seldom onscreen. Audrey may feel unsupervised but with the run of the hotel (and its secret passage system) she's unusually protected and empowered. It's only when stepping outside its walls--into the red velvet womb lining of One-Eyed Jacks--that she becomes endangered. We admire her because her motivations are noble --her desire to help Dale more than just desire to earn his gratitude, but a recognition of his goodness, the sort of goodness that allows her to practice bad girl behavior under a roof of relative benign paternal safety - making her the opposite of Laura, who played at good girl sainthood under the roof of sordid incestuous uncertainty.



Note above the masks echoing the Illuminati masquerade party in Eyes Wide Shut. If you know you're conspiracy theory you know the whole one eye shut signifier is Illuminati code, pointing to the Eye of Horus (as in the top of the dollar bill pyramid - watch it next time you're tripping and see if you can catch it winking --magic's everywhere, bro).

Of all the younger characters, Audrey us the closest to Cooper in her mixture of poetic depth and genuine altruism. With her weird scene ending jukebox dances at the diner she indicates she doesn't need drugs or sleazy drug dealing pimp types to be really high, to keep a foot in the fantasmatic.

Ben Horne makes the universal Illuminati sign, "The Eye of Horus."

Lack and the world laughs at You:

Cocaine and the Fantasmatic

Alternately, Laura Palmer died after she degraded herself with the two nastiest characters in the series--Leo, and the fat, gross drug dealing bartender slob Paul Renault, purveyor of the sick sex and drug parties given in the cabin in the woods. Conspiracy theorist will point out the compulsion towards degradation in Monarch-victims and incest survivors, but one can't forget too the all-consuming jones that comes with regular use of bad drugs like cocaine and heroin. I've seen impossibly gorgeous models go home with sleazy townie-toothed dirt bags for coke. It's quite shocking and upsetting. I'm too cheap, and decent, and high-class, to not be horrified. A noble Cooper/Audrey type, I am! But hey, if you have a lot of cocaine, and bring some to a model party, but leave the rest at home, you can score with girls normally way outside your league. All you have to do is have enough, have far more than you personally use, and be patient enough to nurse their jones into full on addiction and then you cut off the supply--but make it clear (but on the DL) you have plenty but aren't passing it out anymore, and are now leaving to go home-- and see who asks for a ride. You didn't hear it from me. I'd never stoop so low myself. But I've been to those parties sober, and seen the externals of that whole process, and even drunk off my ass, was horrified. 

Lynch wisely makes no attempt to capture the realness of that scene--the sordid externals of the druggie backwoods lifestyle--but rather conveys a mix of what it's like to actually be that super high on 'tactile' drugs like cocaine and ecstasy and what an outsider straight-edge like Lynch-- who by all accounts doesn't do drugs--might imagine with a mix of envy and horror. 

Not doing them or having wild orgies himself (by all accounts), allows Lynch to invest these scenes with his subconscious fantasy, what Todd McGowan (in his book The Impossible David Lynch) calls the fantasmatic level (rather than the tawdry sadness of, say, a cocaine rehab). According to McGowan, Lynch's films occur on two levels at once, the fantasy conscious idealized small town social constructs (picket fences, log trucks, diners, poodle skirts) and the fantasmatic (dark red or blue velvet on the walls, kinky sex, drugs, road houses, slow dancing), each a reflection of the other - made extreme by the other's extreme (the sunnier the upperworld, the murkier the lower). Cooper is a variation of Kyle's Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, an Orpheus descending from the Upper into the Underworld to find lost souls (Palmer's body like the ear in the field), just as Bob ascends from the fantasmatic dimension to the real, i.e. One-Eyed Jacks and the cabin in the nebulous stretch of woods between Canada and the USA on the 49th Parallel, i.e. Canada  ("border towns bring out the worst in people" as Charles Heston says in Touch of Evil).

DESCENT INTO THE FANTASMATIC

The most amazing and least talked of aspect of the show is the way dreams and mystical visions
are never doubted as evidence or valuable clues, not even by Mel Ferrer's FBI coroner

Agents: Cooper goes deep--to the Black Lodge--from his position in the above,
a representative of the US and the FBI, a paladin essentially from heaven;
Bob - goes up, from his position as a representative of the Dancing Dwarf. essentially from Hell
with Bob, for all his fierceness, imprisoned and subject to some lower order dictated even to the Dwarf

ex-gang members: One shot Cyrus; one stabbed Bernardo

---

EPITAPH-EDRINE

I mention all this to posit gratitude for parents born, dead, even indifferent, because if you're not a split personality coke whore schizo at your soul death's door it's not for your lack of trying, it's for their time and investment. They may have done dumb things, or ignored you or fought or burdened you with their problems, but if your primal scene crypto-Elektra complexes were grown out of-- relegated to the subconscious basement of childhood--then you're lucky, because so much work and energy and care has to go right for you to come out normal --at least six or seven years of solid attention, the right brand of attention, and then the ability to lessen that attention and--if necessary--to boot you out the nest, hoping you fly but willing to let you crash to the forest floor.


And as for the series itself, Season two especially warns us of the danger of moving too far afield from primal scene anxieties and the other subconscious elements (the misconstruing of what constitutes sex, the mysteries of one's own conception and inheritance of one's father's features) and instead reflecting already reflected signifiers, the sort found in nearly every small town soap drama: food critics, conspiracy, jailbird husband stalkers, cross-eyed imbecile cops, every male wearing the same terrible curly haired black toupee, amnesia, hospital pillow snuffing, femme fatales seducing cross-eyed pretty boys into offing their husbands, shady gambling dens and brothels, disguises, seductions, identical cousins investigating a murder from a different town, beauty contests and other lame attempts to become everything it thinks you think the show already is, rather than what you're afraid of dreaming.

If in doubt, consider the slasher movie, still loping around dying drive-ins prior to Twin Peaks' 1990 debut, vs. the game-changing (and Twin Peaks-reflecting) Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Suddenly there were countless dark Vancouver-shot psycho mood pieces. These indirectly led to the X-Files. Badalamenti's memorable music led to loungecore and trip-hop, led to Lana del Rey. And the Black Lodge.... is still there, alive in Salvia culture and Ancient Aliens, and the dusky Pacific NW old growth romance vibe is in Twilight, and the dark wood and yellow lighting aesthetic of Starbucks (which moved east from Seattle in conjunction with the show's success). And you were there, Tiny Dancer, Tim Scarecrow. And your crutches and sobriety fell like glitter from a Wigstock head trip makeover, down, down into the abyss of the materiality second wind, the rich co-opting our fabulousness to sell each other art and perfume, couture...

Maybe too it was the disturbing second murder episode halfway through season two where we see in vivid detail a terrifying dual performance from both Ray Wise as Leland and Frank Silva as Bob - each one more terrifying than the last. Ray Wise especially is genuinely blood chilling as his compassion and sadness at what's happening intensifies to higher and higher degrees until the madness of a howling rabid dog.

Critics fawn over Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET (1986), a precursor of Lynch's that led to TWIN PEAKS, but on revisiting both, Ray Wise as Leland blows Dennis Hopper out of the water; for that matter so does Dana Ashbrook as Bobby (left), because his eyes show real madness, just as Lynch's visions are mad, vs. the way people between the lines and inside the box think of as mad, in terms of the surface, i.e. put a giant waiter talking in cryptic code up in there or have a shrink with 3D sunglasses and an obsession with Hawaii, hey far out, the fake mad vs. the real mad.

Instead of relying on familiar tropes, Lynch goes deep into the moment. You never know where another is going to land --blood on the donuts, squeaky chairs. Now that I, too, am insane, I can smell the real deal vs. the trying to be crazy version, and for all his coiled angst, and Dennis Hopper's sobriety gets in the way of his Frank. He's an angry, strung-out man pounding cracks in a wall like De Niro did as RAGING BULL (1980) - but he doesn't break through any wall. The crazy exhibited in the work of Dana Ashbrook and Ray Wise on the other hand is truly wall-eroding.   Wise's layered madness in season two is marred only by his insistence on singing, which might be the writers' idea, but I always suspect actors of asking directors to let them have a scene where they can sing once it's clear the series is going to either be renewed for a third season or canceled; they do it a lot in actor indulgent TV shows like later seasons of most anything when the original creators begin to run out of ideas.

I remember this image from the local Seattle paper when I lived there, needless to say they were very dismissive -- how dare a non-Pacific NW native attempt to depict their lifestyle and love of gourmet coffee?

In its terrifying over the top way, this second murder is up there with the greats, like the last act in the original Texas Chainsaw, or the type that needs no markers of quality or realism but gets to the true terrifying core - offset by the Suspiria cherry reds and deep ocean blues of the Roadhouse stage where Julee Cruise plays regularly, all the would-be rescuers hypnotized by the emotion of the music and with no direction or guidance except the giant, noting "it is happening again," while we're powerless to know where or whom.

Alas - while Fire Walk with Me and the second season second murder both reverberate with a pulsing surreal horror, there are still some 12 episodes or so remaining after that in which to kill time after the killer is caught. Cooper's almost out the door, back to Washington, and in walks a DEA Fed and a Mountie, railroading Cooper on behalf of Jean Renault who's angry about his dead brother Jacques. Not so fast! 

You can hear the entire nation groan in the feeling they're being taken for a ride. Or rather, the weight heaving on the trolley as the few million viewers still left all got off in one collective outraged howl.

If that wasn't bad enough, forth cometh the quirks, the soapy nonsense, the frills and the meandering

If The Shining didn't have any murders, what would it be?
A tree falling in the woods?
Would you answer it?
Even if it was her... hot and damaged Del Rey that was the tree and she was falling...
falling....
in love?

And she was out of meds? And it was the rainy season?

Zooey Deschanel was ten when her mom was shooting Twins (as
Donna's mom) and you can kind of tell.

Trip to the Lounge, Swim to the woods.
TWIN PEAKS to DEL REY 
Post-Histaural Chronologic Signifer Map