Holiday In the Trees

Happy Fourth of July everyone. I chose a pretty much all American film to watch last night, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I actually just finished watching through the first two seasons of the series again and I'm looking forward to starting season three again next week. It's funny how the show that seemed so much about sweaters and misty, evergreen forests basically became an ideal summer series in its third season. But time had long since changed David Lynch from a director of small town Americana of the north to one who passionately loves desert landscapes and towns.

I wonder if all small towns are somewhat like Twin Peaks, not just American towns. It's not that the cheerful, graciously communal layer is an empty veneer but it seems inevitable that there would be a dark flipside to it as the leverage petty and competitive people apply to the secrets of their co-inhabitants mingles with the restlessless of dwelling within the scope of the small town. Would Nadine have gone mad in a big city where she might have been forced to meet an alternative to Ed? Certainly Ed and Norma wouldn't have to work so hard to keep their relationship secret. Would it be so easy for Leo to abuse Shelly in a densely populated neighbourhood? Obviously domestic abuse still occurs in cities but that Sherlock Holmes quote that comes to me so often comes to me again:

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

So, er, Happy Independence Day. Here's to a country that can foster art that holds up a brutally honest mirror. Not every country is so lucky.