Wally Brando Represents Everything Great About ‘Twin Peaks’ and David Lynch

At the end of 1953, Marlon Brando was the biggest movie star in America, with two Oscar nominations to his name, and a third to come soon after. It was this environment that The Wild One came bursting into existence, a hot-blooded piece of “rebel” cinema that sent motorcycle culture into the mainstream. It also primed the country for James Dean, Elvis, Kenneth Anger, rock ‘n’ roll, and a general sense of youthful angst that would permeate most of American art for the next 20 years. If Brando was already an icon, The Wild One helped him become a legend.
At the end of 1953, David Lynch was an occasionally agoraphobic child with pyromaniacal tendencies on the verge of his eighth birthday in Boise, Idaho, surrounded by the types of streets and houses that would appear in the opening of Blue Velvet more than 30 years later. Lynch inhaled the bucolic surfaces of suburban life, while being drawn to the decaying, violent ugliness that lived just beneath. He also loved movies and television. The 1950s as a concept would shape so much of Lynch’s art in the decades to come.
It is here that we must confront the return of Twin Peaks, the first four parts of which are an intoxicating, roiling tempest of contradictions that manage to capture multiple phases of Lynch’s artistic evolution. Lynch is many things, and the show has brought out many of those strands. Nowhere do all of Lynch’s interests get distilled into one perfect moment than halfway through Part 4. There is no better moment to exemplify all of what Lynch is as an artist, and what Twin Peaks can do at the height of its powers.
The scene begins with Twin Peaks Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster) walking out of the sheriff’s department building to greet the son of Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) and his wife, receptionist Lucy (Kimmy Robertson). At this point, all we know about Andy and Lucy’s son is that he’s 24 years old, was born on Marlon Brando’s birthday, and that Andy wanted to name him Marlon. They named him Wally instead, for reasons that go unexplained. Wally, meanwhile, has taken the surname “Brando” as his own, rather than “Brennan.”

The camera then cuts to Andy and Lucy flanking Wally (Michael Cera) in the parking lot. The camera drinks Wally in. He is bedecked in a black leather jacket with his name on it, boots, cuffed jeans, and a motorcycle cap tilted low to the right side. Wally leans on a hog that, if I were to hazard a guess, is the same 1950 Triumph 6T Thunderbird Brando rode in The Wild One. Wally doesn’t just share a birthday or an adopted surname with Marlon; He has become Marlon.
The scene lasts approximately four minutes and 52 seconds. In that time, every piece of Lynch’s obsessions boil to the surface. First, the obvious references jump out in big, bold letters. Cera is not merely dressed as Brando in The Wild One; his rambling eulogy to his life, and to the town of Twin Peaks, is spoken in the accent and language not of Johnny Strabler, but rather Vito Corleone. “I want to pay my respects.” “As you know, your brother, Harry S. Truman, is my godfather.” The rhythm and idiosyncratic vernacular drips of Brando’s late-career master stroke, rather than the angry, radiant beauty in the earlier film. The juxtaposition of the two recalls the breadth of film history that Lynch infuses into Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and even Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
But even more crucially, the text that Lynch brought film history through the most was the original iteration of Twin Peaks itself. Like Blue Velvet before it and Wild at Heart after it, Lynch stirred a rich postmodern pot of iconography and references, melding the 1950s to the late 1980s and early 1990s with fluid aplomb. Audrey Horne’s saddle shoes, the Haywards’ white picket fence, and James Hurley’s biker persona, along with Angelo Badalamenti’s noir-influenced synth score, managed to pack a whole generation of film and television motives into one show. These juxtapositions were key to Twin Peaks’ style.

People can easily forget that Twin Peaks isn’t the only place to find Lynch’s humor. His sense of the absurd doesn’t only apply to the moments of horror that show up in Eraserhead, Fire Walk With Me, or the later films. He also uses gaps of silence and long takes to generate laughs. Twin Peaks certainly did this all the time, particularly in the episodes Lynch directed himself. Lynch will keep the camera in long shot, usually using wide angles to distort space slightly, ensuring that both the ceiling and the floor are visible to help enclose the action. Then, large pauses will puncture the dialogue, all while the performers stay perfectly still, rarely betraying their reactions in their faces.
These stylistic tropes build up to an absurd sense of elastic rhythm, built prominently into the scene between Wally, Frank, Andy, and Lucy. The dialogue, while echoing Brando’s delivery in The Godfather, is also full of ridiculous clichés and arch platitudes about The Road, fond memories of childhood, and respects to be paid to two older men. I don’t yet know who was responsible for Wally’s dialogue — Lynch, Mark Frost, Cera’s own improvisation, or some combination of the three — but it’s clear that Cera chews on every phrase like a piece of Peter Luger steak. He visibly prevents himself from breaking into laughter in multiple shots.
Lynch pushes the tension of the scene until it almost breaks. Cera pauses luxuriantly for many seconds at a time, often in the middle of phrases, creating a slow, staccato rhythm to his speech. Lynch holds his camera in medium three-shot for an equally long period of time. The scene is nearly five minutes long, and only consists of two setups. Shots of Frank take up approximately one minute of screen time. The remainder consists of Wally, in that three-shot, talking, staring, and pausing. This is as Lynch as it gets.

The scene probably wouldn’t carry as much hilarious power as it does without being linked to the scene that came before it. Lynch lives in the realm of extreme emotion, much of which is drawn out by the immediate oscillation from interminable stillness to unspeakable horror to gut-busting comedy and back again, often within the same scene. Lynch is about the horror of the subconscious, but he is also about the raging grief and pain of loss, and the memory of same. Twin Peaks was funny, scary, and heartbreaking. So was Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. Perhaps the quintessential version of all of those emotional registers was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a brutally beautiful film that has one of the most emotionally explosive conclusions I’ve ever seen put to celluloid.
It’s not clear, after four of 18 parts, what patterns Lynch might be generating in the transitions from one place and set of characters to another in the new Twin Peaks, but it’s no accident that the scene directly preceding Wally’s introduction is that of Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) laying eyes on the photo of Laura Palmer in the sheriff’s conference room. Bobby, now a sheriff’s deputy, still has the wide-eyed, chiseled beauty of his youth, but thanks to crow’s feet and a shock of white hair, wears the last 25 years on his sleeve. He probably hasn’t thought about his murdered ex-girlfriend very much in that time.
When he sees Laura’s photograph, he bursts into a crying jag he can barely get under control. Badalamenti’s iconic “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” not yet heard in the new series, rises up in the background. “Man,” Bobby stutters, “Brings back some memories.” Is it future, or is it past?

Bobby’s raw, unbridled expression of pain and grief recalls all the characters first hearing the news of Laura’s murder in the original series pilot, or the repeated, ecstatic bursts of sorrow that constantly emerged in later episodes. It recalls the pain of Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet as she tries to reassure her kidnapped son that everything will be alright, or of Jeffrey Beaumont remarking on the strangeness of the world. It recalls Diane Selwyn toward the end of Mulholland Drive, her lover betraying her, her sense of sanity and identity being slowly eroded. It recalls Nikki Grace/Sue Blue in Inland Empire, relating a story of childhood abuse that may be a character monologue, or it may be Nikki’s subconscious bursting forth into reality.
But most importantly, Bobby’s grief recalls Laura Palmer’s own fear, sadness, and loneliness in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Laura is gripped by isolation, beaten down by the incestuous rape at the hands of her father, her sanity slowly evaporating, the dread of imminent death gripping her heart. It is devastating.
That devastation smacks Bobby in the face, leaving him an open wound. Our hearts break with him, the memory of not only his loss, but of Twin Peaks, throbbing. So what does Lynch do? He swings the pendulum to the other side of the universe and gives us Wally Brando. Our laughter is just as hysterical and uncontrollable as Bobby’s tears, and would likely not have been so forceful without the preceding moment.

Considered together, Lynch gives us everything that makes him more than just a surrealist horror filmmaker. He gives us the textbook definition of the ridiculous sublime. He holds nothing back, as he never has in the 40 years he has been making feature-length moving images. His stylistic trademarks, his sense of rhythmic absurdity, his obsession with film history and the 1950s, and the tension and release of extreme emotion are packed into the most glorious seven minutes any of us are likely to see on television this year.
That is, until Part 5 debuts this Sunday. Wally Brando is David Lynch, and David Lynch is Wally Brando. We should consider ourselves lucky to be blessed with such a character now etched into our memories forever.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports.

Where to Stream Twin Peaks (2017)