Halloween means spooking you out and, just as much, the end of October. I'm spooked out about bills to break, calls to make, and tops of lakes. Top of Lake. "Top of the Lake." That's a series for you. Sundance Channel. Mini-series. Seven episodes. It'll spook you out. It'll screw up yr world. Halloween. Marathon it. Not a demand, not a request, but a counsel: If you like your television, you'll probably like it.
I'll go into why you'll probably enjoy it as I did (at least if you're reading the dramatic places I go here at Pearls), but let's start with the basics: Seven episodes, about six hours, five great leads. Four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves. And an amazing performance by Elisabeth Moss (aka Zoey Bartlet from "The West Wing" and Peggy from "Mad Men") both centering and de-centering the emotional universe.
The town of Lake Top (in New Zealand, apparently) is a character unto itself much in the same way the town of Twin Peaks is (there's a brief, amusing reference to "Blue Velvet"). And the plot is remarkably similar to Lynch's nation-capturing narrative in "Twin Peaks", even down to choice of musical themes and closing credit design. Cabin lodges, treacherous pasts, mysterious underbellies everywhere, intrigue, personality, pariahs, patriarchs, and a vague feeling that the town itself has a will, a circular nature, and a guiding force all its own. Probably the biggest similarity between the two series is the eerie, deadly locales. Just as "Peaks" had a deadly, mysterious forest like Hawthorne might have envisioned, "Top of the Lake" has all around it beautiful forests, summits, and of course, that ominous and fatally cold lake. The lake, which is treacherous to cross, gives the viewer a feeling of being trapped and smothered by the town itself - that there can be no hope or salvation for any of the characters because death is just one broken promise or tip of the kayak away.
Which brings us to the detective leads and their respective missions. For all the similarities, make no mistake, "Top of the Lake" is its own entity from "Twin Peaks", feeling sort of like a younger sibling. Young Tui Mitcham, played wonderfully by Jacqueline Joe, is the center of the vast, subsuming tragedy of "Top of the Lake". You see, Tui is 12 years old and, very early, goes into the (as we later understand it) fatal lake to drown herself. We find that she wasn't depressed or mentally incapacitated: She was pregnant. And Moss's detective Robin Griffin is a Lake Top native that had left the town long ago that has come home to visit her ailing mother. And Robin just happens to specialize in sexual assault cases involving children. Naturally, Robin is summoned and, like Dale Cooper, navigates the unforgiving town through the lens of the tragedy. Tui's rape and pregnancy turns out to be an even bigger deal because Tui's father Matt - wealthy, mean, and rugged - emerges as a central antagonist to Robin and possible suspect in Tui's rape. And Matt apparently has huge influence over the townspeople.
As I see it, the key to the series, among many others, is that, unlike Laura Palmer, Tui is alive. Laura Palmer's death was a central, undeniable tragedy that led Cooper to her friends, family, and the darker forces of Twin Peaks. But ultimately, however interesting Laura might have been, we only get first- and second-hand accounts, and Laura Palmer seems more like a riff to spark conversation than a character unto herself. But Tui is alive and precocious and complicated, and lends a beating heart to the tragedy of the town and works as someone that Robin and the viewer can see and actively relate to. As Robin becomes more and more entwined with the other characters, Jane Campion and Gerald Lee's scripts allow Robin's compassion for Tui to go from innocuous sympathy to a darkly personal connection quickly and deliciously, escalating the emotional stakes and lending a feeling of original sin to the series and giving Moss's reappearance in the town the importance of a dark avenger. Tui's confusion and her complicated lot - having a birth that might kill her and a rapist that might have begotten her - go from sad-but-true observations to formal, primal judgments about the nature of humanity, even as the police station Robin works at won't prosecute anyone.
Tui is emotionally well-composed and deeply pained, someone that refuses to be an outright victim nor an outright innocent (she certainly has confidence holding a gun and riding a horse), but the show still allows her to be a kid and to engage with friends and adults naturally. In a lot of ways, Tui is the most emotionally well-composed person in the series, and the show goes to great lengths to demonstrate that learning your history in a town of tragedy does more harm than good. Tui is canny and recognizes some of the exploitation of her town, but she hasn't quite internalized it. She's still a scared little girl without the life experience to gain full understanding of how deeply the treachery of the town runs. G.H., spiritual leader of an unstructured woman's shelter on the outskirts of town, preaches about the wisdom of the body and the importance of forgetting your thoughts and "who you think you are", referring to Robin's stream of thoughts as a "river of shit". And, as Robin descends into the various histories of the town (including her own), we see the wisdom in all of this and see all the people of the world scarred by their own deeds, by their family's deeds, and by their own poisonous thoughts, all of which prevent them from achieving peace. The locale of the woman's shelter is called "Paradise" but the people of Lake Top can't long enjoy it.
A few quibbles I could make, but won't: Shocking revelation after shocking revelation come crashing down as the series progresses. Romantic engagements and dozens of plot twists lend the show a soap-opera feel. Without the darkly comic interludes of Lynch's wondrous imagination, the soap opera can feel heavy-handed and emotionally manipulative in an unearned way. Still, thematically, I had absolutely no problems with these things, and want to make an argument for this stuff as a strength. See, the "Dexter" writers weren't even allowed to kill their main character in the final season. "Homeland" seems to have had similar problems (so egregious that it caused me to write an 3000-word blog post). The potential for spin-offs and various beatings-of-dead-horses have long trumped actual resolution and actual character development. Network executives would seemingly drive a car off a cliff than acknowledge that the car's strength was its ability to transport us somewhere beautiful and clever, not to go forward for the sake of momentum.
And in a seven-episode mini-series with no apparent opening for prequel or sequel (you could do it, but all indications are this was a one-off thing), there are no episodes where you have to fixate on restoring continuity from cast defections or explosive season finales. There are no episodes where you try out a character for half a season, kill them off, and start again. No, this is a show that is small enough to stand as a self-contained literary statement, and big enough to make the big leaps of characterization that shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad have recently excelled at. In short, this is a place you can go along any path you want to. You can have elaborate, ham-fisted plots. You can have instant romances. You can hint at directions and never go there again, without forcing yourself into continuity traps or accusations of missing focus. You can have intrigue that turns out to be for nothing, and you can have unremarkable avenues that turn out to be central later on. You are, in a sense, in a writer's paradise (no pun intended). Characters can vary wildly from episode to episode, so long as you make it plausible. And you never have to worry about preserving a romantic interest or a villain or a hero. "Top of the Lake" is allowed to be as wildly entertaining and deep and spiritual and pathos-filled as it damn pleases and it never - even to the final moment - descends into inorganic plotting. The result is a natural series, filled with complex, wonderful characters, thoughtful writing, beautiful cinematography, and - what a concept! - a beginning, middle, and end. I liked it, and I think you just might too.
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