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from The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus, 2006, in the section "American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer":
In 1978, in The American Jeremiad, the historian Sacvan Bercovitch described the American artist as pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be"; the result was retreat, the artist taking refuge in the creation of "a haven for what Thoreau called 'the only true America'." That meant a place of concord and love where everybody knows everybody else: precisely what, in "the End of the Innocence," in 1989, Don Henley, unafraid of the wind he was blowing through fields of true American corn, so perfectly called "that same small town in each of us."
For David Lynch, though, the same small town in each of us has no meaning as a haven; it has meaning only as a cauldron. "I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret," the philosopher Norman O. Brown said in 1960, "and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged." For Lynch, America as it ought to be comes into being when the secret takes over the town that stands for the country, when the secret is revealed and then suppressed, reburied in the town cemetery, the new tombstone carrying the same Puritan death's-head-with-angel's-wings that was chiseled on the old one.
As Lynch wrote in the booklet that accompanied the soundtrack album for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in big letters filling an entire page as if scribbling graffiti on his own movie poster, "IN A TOWN LIKE TWIN PEAKS NO ONE IS INNOCENT."
Again, the simple, obvious phrase that stuck on me like a shirttail on a thorn when I reread it earlier today on the subway, and kept me from reading further, having to think instead . . .
. . . pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be" . . .
In 1978, in The American Jeremiad, the historian Sacvan Bercovitch described the American artist as pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be"; the result was retreat, the artist taking refuge in the creation of "a haven for what Thoreau called 'the only true America'." That meant a place of concord and love where everybody knows everybody else: precisely what, in "the End of the Innocence," in 1989, Don Henley, unafraid of the wind he was blowing through fields of true American corn, so perfectly called "that same small town in each of us."
For David Lynch, though, the same small town in each of us has no meaning as a haven; it has meaning only as a cauldron. "I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret," the philosopher Norman O. Brown said in 1960, "and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged." For Lynch, America as it ought to be comes into being when the secret takes over the town that stands for the country, when the secret is revealed and then suppressed, reburied in the town cemetery, the new tombstone carrying the same Puritan death's-head-with-angel's-wings that was chiseled on the old one.
As Lynch wrote in the booklet that accompanied the soundtrack album for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in big letters filling an entire page as if scribbling graffiti on his own movie poster, "IN A TOWN LIKE TWIN PEAKS NO ONE IS INNOCENT."
Again, the simple, obvious phrase that stuck on me like a shirttail on a thorn when I reread it earlier today on the subway, and kept me from reading further, having to think instead . . .
. . . pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be" . . .
