David Lynch and the “Twin Peaks” revolution, an unprecedented bridge between cinema and television

EWhat if the best film by American filmmaker David Lynch, who died on January 16, was a series? Besides, can we reduce this monster work to a single genre – 48 episodes and forty-two hours of images, that is to say roughly the equivalent of 28 films of an hour and a half, more than enough to fill a filmmaker’s life?

The story goes that a writers’ strike having dried up the pipes, ABC had little to lose when David Lynch and his co-writer Mark Frost, one of the architects of Hill Street Blues (broadcast in France under the title The Captain and the Lawyer), came to present this improbable project of a detective series mixed with soap opera, knitted around the death of a high school girl in the northwest of the United States, a setting close to David Lynch’s native Montana. Two years later, on April 8, 1990, the launch of the first two episodes of Twin Peaks is an event on the channel, which demonstrated a certain flair: a few weeks later, David Lynch won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Sailor et Lula. The enthusiasm is immense.

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