Okay, it’s a TV show. But the argument over it reflects growing anxieties about the evolution of entertainment.
If you follow enough TV or movie critics on Twitter, you’ve spent much of this week wondering why they’re all (usually jokingly) arguing about whether Twin Peaks, Showtime’s summer revival of the classic small-town mystery, was a TV show or a movie.
I got in on the fun (which I’ll freely admit depends heavily on your definition of “fun”), too:
So just what’s going on here? To those of you not intimately steeped in what we in cultural criticism call “the time of year when we all throw together a top 10 list and pretend it’s objectively true,” it might seem weird to have a big debate about whether Twin Peaks, which aired on TV, over 14 weeks, and was divided into 18 hour-long episodes, is actually a movie. And to be clear, I’d agree with you. As a TV critic, I am loath to allow film critics to “take” Twin Peaks just because it’s from beloved auteur David Lynch (behind such films as Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., and, uh, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me).
But the debate gets at something fascinating happening in the film and TV world right now. As the classic distinction between movies and TV shows collapses, as all of our screens increasingly become the same thing, the idea that movies are something you go to see in a theater, while TV is something you can watch at home, increasingly seems alien to many. Why is the Netflix film Mudbound a movie at 2 hours and 20 minutes, while Amazon’s Fleabag is TV at just under 3 hours?
The major distinction — movies are made to be consumed in one big gulp, while TV is consumed episodically — still mostly stands. But as more and more projects occupy a weird, in-between space, this conversation will only continue to grow, and it will expand to include even casual fans of film and TV. A question like “What is a movie?” or “What is a TV series?” is becoming harder and harder to answer with every passing year, and it has huge implications for how stories are told onscreen. So let’s look at it through the lens of Twin Peaks.
The debate over Twin Peaks’ status kicked off thanks to the annual top 10 lists by two of the most prestigious film publications out there. Both the UK’s Sight & Sound and France’s Cahiers du Cinema, which have reputations as being among the most intellectually rigorous film journals, placed Twin Peaks: The Return within their top two. (We’ll just have to wait and see how the American Film Comment responds when its top 10 list is published.)
The foremost argument Sight & Sound has advanced for the placement of Twin Peaks on its list is that it didn’t ask the critics it polled to limit their list to only movies. Instead, it asked for them to vote for what they most loved on a screen of any size — “screen things.” The publication tweeted out a wide variety of non-films, from short online videos to video games, that received solo votes. Yet the publication still dubbed its list the “best films” of 2017, and the labeling is what kicked up the kerfuffle.
Another argument both publications could make is that while putting a TV series or TV episode on a list of the best films of the year is unusual, it’s not unprecedented. The original Twin Peaks made a fair share of lists, while former Time critic Richard Corliss routinely peppered his lists with Simpsons episodes in the early ’90s. Cahiers also found room in its top 10 for the first season of 24 in 2002.
Meanwhile, lots of projects that began their lives as TV shows in their native countries, from the Polish Dekalog to the German Berlin Alexanderplatz, are commonly viewed as films in the English-speaking world, because they were released in theaters here first.
But the biggest argument in favor of Twin Peaks as a movie boils down to Lynch, and it goes beyond the fact that the director is known for making films primarily (though Twin Peaks is almost certainly the work of his that’s been seen by the most people). The miniseries’ strange, unfiltered vision makes it feel like no other TV series out there: It’s loose and experimental in form, with storylines that go nowhere and episodes that seem structured more by emotional mood than any sort of narrative cohesion. It’s hugely groundbreaking for television — but it would be slightly less groundbreaking for film, where this sort of experimentation is more common (though it’s not like it’s happening every day).
Lynch himself also claims Twin Peaks is an 18-hour movie, and even though lots and lots of TV producers use “This is really just an X-hour movie” in their promotional tours, Lynch really did shoot and assemble Twin Peaks as if it were an 18-hour whole. There’s care spent on each individual hour, and each entry has a rough episodic structure that helps viewers distinguish one from the other. But in the process of making the series, Lynch was mostly focused on the macro, not the micro. Twin Peaks wouldn’t be shown in theaters, but it was shot, funded, and edited like a film.
Not to tip my hand too much here, but c’mon. Twin Peaks is a TV show. Matt Zoller Seitz advanced this argument best in a great Twitter thread:
The things that seem to set Twin Peaks apart as more film-like than TV-like actually aren’t all that unusual. Lots and lots of heavily serialized TV shows (like Game of Thrones first and foremost) go into a season with a rough episodic plan, then mix and match scenes among those episodes to make sure the season has the right flow. The idea of a season of TV just being a long movie is quite common in the industry and has arguably hurt TV drama in the last five years more than any other idea. (Say what you will for most TV showrunners, but they’re not David Lynch.)
But the fact that Twin Peaks was specifically crafted so each hour had a specific tension and release and concluded in roughly the same way (with a new musical performance each week) is what makes the best case for it as television. As Seitz points out in his tweet thread, the season’s justly acclaimed eighth episode (which goes back to the detonation of the first atomic bombs to trace the roots of the series’ greatest evils) has power precisely because the series is structured like a TV show. Because Lynch and collaborator Mark Frost have structured the show to make viewers think we know what to expect, they’re better able to pull the rug out from under us with a black-and-white flashback in that eighth hour.
The mention of Frost keys in to another way that Twin Peaks is fundamentally TV: Though Lynch’s name almost always comes first when discussing Peaks, it’s also Frost’s show in a way that auteurists rarely acknowledge, and Frost’s involvement is part of what makes the series as good as it is. Lynch, from the world of film and visual art, gives the series an unusual grandeur, while Frost makes sure it coheres in ways we expect from television. The two push each other to newer, more intriguing places.
This sort of thing happens in all collaborative arts, including film, but it’s especially fundamental in television — which, after all, was produced for most of its history at a breakneck pace that meant no one person could be in charge of everything. The idea of the director as auteur is a very, very old one in film. Television has a similar cult of the showrunner, but it’s only arisen very recently, and it doesn’t have the same weight.
But even if I accept Sight & Sound’ s framing of “screen things,” the way these polls are structured is designed to tilt toward movies. It’s primarily film critics who are invited to vote, and film critics are going to be most heavily invested in film. Thus, they very likely haven’t seen as much television as a TV critic such as myself has.
But that cuts both ways: Were I to turn in a hybrid list of my favorite “screen things” of 2017, it would have movies and TV shows, as well as the 45-second video of the bus blocking the demolition of the Georgia Dome, but it probably wouldn’t have some of the more obscure film releases favored by many Cahiers or Sight & Sound voters.
