Who killed Laura Palmer? It was FBI agent Dale Cooper, an unforgettable role by Kyle MacLachlan, who is sent to a small American town on the border with Canada to solve that murder that is as mysterious as it is bizarre. That town was called Twin Peaks, as was the TV series in which this whole story was revealed. It was a question that engaged countless viewers worldwide and led to a veritable Peaks mania from the very first episode, in April 1990.
In the series, agent Cooper, a curiously cheerful man with a penchant for apple pie, finds himself in a very strange, surreal world; the small town seems so peaceful and idyllic, but behind the facade of a petty bourgeois, neatly ordered existence hides a malevolent world full of deranged, psychopathic and sometimes literally demonic characters. And this typifies much of the work of the creator and maker of Twin Peaks: David Lynch.
While the film music of Angelo Badalamenti sounds, on the surface everything seems to be pais and peaceful, people are happy in their beautiful house with spacious garden. But in that garden, among the blades of grass, lies a severed ear. A young woman is allowed to stay at her aunt's house in Los Angeles because she wants to make it there as an actress. Until suddenly it turns out that another, injured woman with amnesia is also hiding in the house. In other words, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, two highlights of Lynch's work.
That he could do more than make weird and unsettling mysteries, he proved back in 1980 with The Elephant Man, a film about the life John Merrick, a man who went through life with severe physical deformities. Almost 20 years later, in 1999, he made The Straight Story, a gentle and warm story about looking back, forgiving and reconciling.
That Lynch was a versatile and utterly unique filmmaker, no one will dispute. Unfortunately, ‘was’ should be written here, because on Wednesday 15 January, Lynch died at the age of 78. Reason for Rialto to dwell on this loss, and what better way to pay tribute than by screening some of his films. First of all, the enigmatically fascinating Mulholland Drive starring Naomi Watts and Laura Harring.