The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Marcus Greil

Author:Marcus, Greil [Marcus, Greil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Angel Baby

When Laura walks into the roadhouse she seems to be moving in slow motion. She sits at a table and looks up at Julee Cruise—and then it’s Cruise who seems to be caught in slow motion, even though sounds come out of her mouth in real time. The song she is singing, Lynch and Badalamenti’s “Questions in a World of Blue,” is barely a song at all.

With her white blond hair, deathly white skin, and nearly blank eyes, Julee Cruise looks like a ruined Laura Palmer—Laura Palmer with all the physical details wrong, the features muddy and coarse. She looks as if she’s recovering from a beating—and she looks like Teresa Banks, dead on the autopsy table, and like the woman who lives in the radiator in Eraserhead. With her little-girl voice, with an air of experience, ten years of waitressing and five years in jail, maybe former or present-day heroin addiction, she performs as someone who herself has no future, but who holds out the possibility of a future, of redemption, to whoever might really hear her.

There’s a dimension of sweetness, of forgiveness—forgiveness of life. In Cruise’s repertoire it’s all put across with the softness of fifties doo-wop, there in the way her “I Remember” ends with a flurry of drums off the beat, an orchestrated atonal ceiling above the surge of a pipe organ, and then, rising against a few piano notes, a quiet “Shoo-bop, shooby-shoo-bop…” It’s there in the way the Fleetwoods, two girls and a boy from Olympia High School in Olympia, Washington, just across the state so long before, are present in Cruise’s “The World Spins,” their “Come Softly to Me,” from 1959, as undeniable in Cruise’s throat as Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby,” from 1960. As Cruise changes the old songs into her own, they communicate as unkept promises, promises you can believe will be kept, at least as long as Cruise’s “Floating” or “Falling” or “Into the Night” lasts: four minutes, maybe five.

In Twin Peaks as it played on television, the roadhouse where Cruise sings was a secret public place, warm and inviting, a refuge and a hideout, the place where people married to other people met to sit at a table in full view of everyone else and disappear into each other’s eyes, where friends went to say what they couldn’t say in the light or the open air, where people went to hear Julee Cruise. There, against a backdrop of red curtains, she would appear with her band, a modest ensemble, almost genteel, with Cruise herself in clean black leather—cap, jacket, short skirt—as her audience of middle-aged townspeople, Laura Palmer’s high-school friends trying to figure out who killed her, and bikers passing through on their way to Spokane let “Falling” fall all over them. In Fire Walk with Me the roadhouse is the same place; it’s also a border joint, with one room in the United States, where Cruise performs, and another in Canada, which is to Twin Peaks as Tijuana is to San Diego.

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