Long before the shouty, opinionated nerds of Twitter, the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma had already perfected the art of trolling. Its annual list of the year’s 10 best films is always my most anticipated, if only to see what its contrarian critics will name as their wildcard choice. Personal favourite provocations include Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2004), M Night Shyamalan’s The Lady in the Water (2006) and Ang Lee’s $40m flop Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2017).
Rounding up the decade in cinema, Cahiers declared David Lynch’s 18-part TV series Twin Peaks: The Return its best film of the 2010s. The inclusion of a television show in this kind of list isn’t exactly unprecedented; Cahiers named the original Twin Peaks joint fourth best film of the 1990s and The Return its best film of 2017 (bizarrely, Fox’s terrorism-themed TV show 24 also appeared on 2002’s list). And anyway, Twin Peaks: The Return appeared on many end-of-year top 10s when it was released in 2017, ranking at number two in Sight & Sound’s end of year poll.
And so, to return to a recurring theme: does The Return belong on a “best film” list, if it is not in fact a film? More pressingly, does it matter?
On ideas of ageing, memory, loss and trauma, Twin Peaks: The Return is exquisitely moving, and its surrealist bottle episode (Episode 8) remains some of the most formally inventive and exciting film-making I’ve seen this decade. But that a project with elevated, experimental, or “cinematic” qualities should appear to transcend the “lowbrow” form of television is a kind of snobbery.
On the other hand, Cahiers making the case for The Return as the decade’s crowning cinematic achievement is its own radical statement – an embrace of a new and more elastic understanding of what constitutes cinema. The way films are being produced and consumed is changing at breakneck speed, and so it makes sense that the way critics are responding to those “films” is changing too.
Cinema and television aren’t interchangeable forms, but the advent of streaming means that viewing experiences are increasingly flexible. One could, in theory, watch Scorsese’s a three-and-a-half-hour epic The Irishman on an iPad, in five digestible parts, or set up a projector and treat an 18-episode TV series such as The Return as though it were one long film, supposedly the way Lynch himself initially conceived the project. (Never mind the fact that Lynch already made a Twin Peaks movie – 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a haunting feature-length prequel that is markedly different in both form and tone to the series.)
Anticipating a Cahiers-style upset, Sight & Sound magazine revised the rubric in its poll this year, instructing its voters that “films mean films as traditionally understood” (whatever that means; binge-watching anything can give it a disposable quality). “Linear short films are okay,” its editors wrote, “but we will exclude TV, games, VR, and other expanded forms of the moving images.” A separate poll for TV was sent out. But as the critic Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker’s best movies of 2019 package, an “editorial policy that favours reviews of theatrical releases risks pushing already-overlooked films and film-makers further into the margins and off the map”.
If criticism is first and foremost a work of record, then lists are documents that reveal the temperature of a particular cultural climate. As reference points for what critics thought of as the important issues of the day, of their political leanings and aesthetic preoccupations and thematic concerns, lists can be both fascinating and useful. Given the kind of online debates that have animated film criticism over the past decade, such as #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, #MarvelVsScorsese, it’s inevitable that Cahiers’ list would reflect its stake in these conversations. Indeed, the list’s omissions are just as telling; consider that Cahiers chose to honour just one female film-maker (Maren Ade), one film-maker of colour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) and one documentary (Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book).
Still, it’s entirely predictable that the critical establishment felt empowered to include something directed by a garlanded auteur. Acclaimed film-makers such as Lynch are making work for television and streaming platforms because it’s the best way to get their projects made at scale. Their turn towards Amazon, Netflix, HBO and others might feel like a turn towards new technology, but it’s a survival tactic. Similarly, the investment of streaming services in original productions might feel like a revitalisation of the film industry but these services are capitalising on bankable names, priming Oscars titles that will in turn feed their own streaming figures. And, in any case, Lynch is already a Cahiers darling – The Return is his eighth appearance in a Cahiers top 10.
• Simran Hans is a film critic for the Observer
