Hello.
In 2017, there was a new season of Twin Peaks. I had never seen Twin Peaks, so I thought,
perhaps now is a good time to start. I then fell into an eight month fugue, after which
I awoke with a shelf full of Twin Peaks books and this notebook that is clearly the prop
of a B-movie serial killer. I can only hope that, in the period of my disassociation,
I did not myself become the ironic butt of that joke. Despite the clear frenzied mania
contained in these notes, there is certainly some insight that's worth exploring. That,
and I need to justify the large void in my bank account I left for myself while in the
throes of this obsession. To begin, I will read for you the pretentious introductory
statement taped to the inside cover:
It starts with a question.
You're looking at a mirror and you see a version of yourself that looks both familiar
and unfamiliar. It's been a long day, a hard day, and maybe it was just out of the
corner of your eye- but you saw it there, staring back at you, something you never knew,
or something you'd forgotten. It is what Freud would call unheimlich-
[sigh]
-what we translate as "the uncanny." Something that is close to real, but unreal at the same
time, as though someone had broken into your home while you were away, taken out all the
furniture, and then put it all back exactly as they found it. You feel that something
is wrong, but you don't know what. And maybe you never will.
A question is like an insect that's burrowed into your skull and can't stop rooting its
limbs around in your brain. Maybe you want an answer so bad you'd pry your head open
with a speculum. When a question is big enough, it's all you can think about. It eats your
consciousness until you start seeing it everywhere -on the road, in the trees, in the faces of
your friends. And, if you're lucky, one day you wake up with the question solved,
and the high-pitched tremble of your obsession recedes like the echoes of a fever dream.
Not every question has an answer. Not every question should be answered.
On April 8th, 1990, from nine to eleven PM, ABC aired the pilot episode of a new series
called Twin Peaks, which, quite unexpectedly, infected much of the western world with a
tremendous new question: Who killed Laura Palmer?
On April 8th, 1990, I was exactly one year old.
The question is not whether this was intentional. The question is whether it is meaningful.
It's clear that there were a number of ideas that concerned me, particularly questions
and coincidences. The history of Twin Peaks is littered with both, as we will see, but
first- hey, what is Twin Peaks about? I assume that if you are watching this video, you know,
but if you don't know, here is a brief thematic introduction:
Twin Peaks is an idyllic logging town in the Pacific Northwest whose seedy underbelly is
exposed when the homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, turns up dead, wrapped in plastic, on the
shores of Black Lake. The series follows the investigation into her murder as conducted
by FBI special agent Dale Cooper, who believes Laura's death is the second in a series
of serial killings. Parallel to this, we witness the dramatic, troubled lives of the citizens
of Twin Peaks, from unrequited love and cheating boyfriends to international drug smuggling
and prostitution. More, still, is the growing threat of a force that exists in the forest
that surrounds Twin Peaks, which may or may not be responsible for much of the evil that
happens in the region.
To say that Twin Peaks has been influential is like saying for-profit prisons are a very
bad idea -it's a statement so banal in its objectivity you might as well be pointing
at air and saying, "That is air." The observation by itself borders on meaningless,
but in the space between the observation and the opinion resides a question: Why? There
are countless other TV shows that have come and gone in the last 25 years, but why is
it that Twin Peaks -with a mere thirty episodes across two seasons- has remained a point of
discussion, obsession, and in some cases outright delirium, to this day?
While this question, for the purposes of this series, is generally academic, it is also
uniquely personal. If I wish to understand the nature of obsession, I must also attempt
to understand myself. Twin Peaks offers something to those who are open to receiving it -a stealth
opposition to everything else we think we know. It cannot just be that Twin Peaks is
good. Lots of things are good. Spaghetti is good. Goodness alone does not result in 25
years of spaghetti fan festivals, highly granular inter-pasta spaghetti fan theories, or lenticular
graphic genderswapped spaghetti hentai. There is something else going on here which transcends
goodness.
So, gear up, strap in, or otherwise verb a different noun, as we, together, make the
inadvisable choice of diving face first into the rabbit hole that is Twin Peaks.
Hello, I am a hopeless pedant. It would behoove all of us for me to just get to the point,
but unfortunately I like to sound like I know what I'm talking about. So, let's establish
a shared vocabulary for some things, and then lay down some basic historical context.
First, to my mind, there are three distinct "units" of Twin Peaks: the Original Series,
the prequel film Fire Walk With Me, and the 2017 series The Return. There are also five
canonical tie-in books, the first three of which are part of the original series, and
the second two are part of The Return. Now, because the universe is an aimless void without
purpose or meaning, there is some debate as to how one should refer to the 2017 series.
Showtime originally titled it "The Return," but no one seems to be sure if this was a
creative choice or a marketing gimmick. Later, some producers said to call it season 3, while
the home-media box set calls it "A Limited Event Series." For the sake of simplicity
and my own sanity, I'll be sticking to "The Return." If you want to debate me on this…
Don't.
Another additional complication is the numbering of the episodes in the original series. Because
Mark Frost, David Lynch, and the executives at ABC were wrong, they decided that the Pilot's
episode number would be "Pilot," and then the second episode of the series would be
numbered "1." It would be far easier to just call the pilot episode 1, but I am a
coward who buckles in the face of tradition, and also every single book and article written
about Twin Peaks follows this numbering. So just know that, while the series finale is
technically episode 29, there are actually 30 episodes in the original Twin Peaks.
Hello, have you ever looked at a calendar? Let's do that.
The pilot episode of Twin Peaks aired on April 8th, 1990, and the first season concluded
with a total of eight episodes on May 23rd.
On September 15th, the first tie-in book was published, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer,
which quickly became a New York Times best-seller. Two weeks later, on September 30th, the second
season premiered the first of its 22 episodes. Two more tie-in books were released in May
of 1991: The Autobiography of Dale Cooper, and the Access Guide to Twin Peaks. The hope
was these books would help fuel desire to greenlight a third season -but, after declining
ratings and generally bad reviews, ABC canceled the show, and the series finale aired on June
10th.
In September of that same year, director David Lynch announced the production of a feature
film that would, fans presumed, tie up the loose ends left by the cliff-hanger finale.
That film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was screened at Cannes Film Festival in May 1992
to disastrously bad reviews, and its refusal to solve the series' cliff hangers earned
it a bad reputation among many fans.
These fans are wrong, and they are criminals.
In 1993, TV network Bravo bought the syndication rights for Twin Peaks, and commissioned David
Lynch to film a new introduction for each episode featuring Margaret Lanterman, AKA
The Log Lady. This would be the last official Twin Peaks canon for over two decades.
But, vital to our story, in October of 1992, just a couple months after the film's US
premiere, friends Craig Miller and John Thorne published the first issue of Wrapped in Plastic,
a magazine devoted solely to analysis of Twin Peaks and the works of those involved in its
creation. They would go on to publish a total of seventy five issues, until announcing their
indefinite hiatus in September of 2005.
In July of 2014, CBS released the Twin Peaks: Complete Mystery box set, which contained
the original series, Fire Walk With Me, and a compilation of critical deleted scenes from
the film as edited by David Lynch, which he called The Missing Pieces. Just three months
later, Showtime announced the revival of Twin Peaks, with the involvement of both David
Lynch and series co-creator Mark Frost. In 2015, Lynch announced his departure from the
project due to budgetary constraints, but came back a month later when Showtime acquiesced
to his demands.
On October 8th, 2016, Mark Frost released The Secret History of Twin Peaks, a book contextualizing
the universe of the series and setting up several plot threads for The Return, as well
as marking the first substantial addition to the canon since the Log Lady intros.
This book is controversial.
Come February of 2017, John Thorne would join Scott Ryan in the creation of a new fan magazine,
Blue Rose, which has so far published five issues.
And then, after literal decades of anticipation, May of 2017 saw the premiere of The Return,
an 18-episode miniseries directed entirely by David Lynch. It was a season of television
so good that HBO announced the cancellation of Game of Thrones out of sheer embarrassment.
Finally, on Halloween 2017, Mark Frost published The Final Dossier, a book meant to cap off
the last loose ends of the Twin Peaks canon.
This book is also controversial.
This timeline is significant for understanding just how improbable the series' legacy is.
If we consider the tremendous cultural footprint of Twin Peaks, it seems impossible that the
original series was on the air for barely more than a year. This is even more astounding
if we consider that the first season is the only part of the series that is unambiguously
beloved, with large chunks of the second season widely derided by even the most devoted of
Twin Peaks fans. Less than a third of the series is where the cultural zeitgeist lived,
eight episodes that aired over just two months.
The entire Twin Peaks phenomena is isolated to just over two years, from April 1990 to
August 1992, the vast majority of which was, at the time, generally disliked. Yet, despite
the brevity of its presence and the perceived quality of its latter content, fans kept the
series alive with conventions and artworks and usenet message boards. I'll stress again
that a self-published fan magazine about Twin Peaks managed to run consistently for thirteen
years.
Which leads me back to the question: why? It's hard for me to speak to this solely
through Twin Peaks, as I came to the series very recently. But I know the feeling- I am
a lifelong apologist for Lost, a tv series which captured the public conversation in
a very similar way. If you leave a comment on this video about how Lost is bad because
the castaways were in purgatory the whole time, I will whisper your name into a mysterious
stone vortex.
"All the things that just happened, they kind of didn't happen."
"What do you mean they didn't happen?" "Well, because it wasn't real."
"Yes it was!"
As someone who watched every episode as it aired for six years, who engaged in online
speculation about the many mysteries of the island, the arc of the series carries the
weight of my entire adolescence. Questions that were, for me, gargantuan nexi of speculation
are, for people who watch all six seasons in a weekend, barely even questions. Which
is to say that, paradoxically, temporal distance creates psychological presence. A question
is all the more potent when you have to wait a week or more for an answer, and for fans
of Twin Peaks, the wait was two and a half decades.
This makes my experience of the series somewhat unique among Twin Peaks devotees, who have
spent the majority of their time in the fandom living with a cliffhanger and no promise of
a continuation. For me, the original series, FWWM, the books, and The Return all exist
parallel to each other in a way they simply don't for many fans. This is not to make
a qualitative judgment either way, just to establish a difference in perspective that
subtly paints me as an objective authority on Twin Peaks while avoiding saying as much
out loud.
"Is it future?"
Hello. Let's talk about Lynch and frost.
David Lynch, by 1989, had directed four films: Eraserhead in 1977, The Elephant Man in 1980,
Dune in 1984, and Blue Velvet in 1986. He had a reputation as an uncompromising director
whose works always seemed to court some kind of controversy.
Mark Frost had written two episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man in 1975, which he completed
for college credit. In 1982, Frost began his tenure on Hill Street Blues, a police procedural
that was considered groundbreaking in its realism and complexity, for which he won several
awards.
Lynch and Frost were introduced in 1985 by a mutual agent, and by all accounts it was
a perfect match from day one. They began their collaboration on a veiled biopic about the
death of Merilyn Monroe, which they claim was nixed when the studio saw their intention
to frame Monroe's death as a murder, as committed by Robert Kennedy. They then co-authored
a screenplay for a comedy called One Saliva Bubble, whose production was stopped when
producer Dino de Laurentiis's studio went into bankruptcy. They then moved towards TV
and pitched a series called The Lemurians, which involved FBI agents investigating the
paranormal effects of an Atlantis-esque civilization on the modern world. This was considered too
weird for broadcast television, a judgment so profoundly unvisionary I imagine the executives
in question were all literally blind.
To all my blind viewers, I apologize for that insensitive joke. I know in my heart of hearts
that you would have greenlit The Lemurians.
The history of the Lynch-Frost collaboration is important for our discussion because David
Lynch's name has always been the dominant focal point in any conversation. I am skeptical
of the idea that Lynch was a dictator driving the train while Frost rode along on his train-coattails,
because contextually it was Lynch who was in a hard spot. Though many of his films were
critically beloved, none of them were exactly moneymakers, which made studios nervous. On
top of that, he had no real connections in the television world -it was Frost who was
well-regarded in the industry, and who probably could have gotten a job just about anywhere
if he wanted to. I find it hard to believe that a one-sided partnership of this nature
could have survived three consecutive failed projects in as many years -which is really
just to say that, as we go forward, we should be careful about who we claim "authored"
Twin Peaks.
Music plays: "I'm trying hard not to be ashamed, not to know the name of who is waking
up beside me, or the date, the season, or the city. But, at least-" [lyrics are garbled]
Sometime in 1988, Mark Frost and David Lynch were loitering at a diner, banging their heads
together for a new TV pitch, when Frost brought up his grandmother's charming bedtime stories
about that time a woman named Hazel Drew was killed and dumped in a lake and her killer
was never found. The subsequent image -a dead girl washed up on the beach some foggy morning-
captured their imaginations. From this image sprang the concept for a series they called
Northwest Passage, in which the death of the homecoming queen would serve as an introduction
into the dramatic lives of the town's inhabitants. From March to August of 1988, Lynch and Frost
had several pitch meetings with ABC executives, particularly vice president of drama series
development Chad Hoffman. Mark Frost recalls one early meeting in which Lynch, operating
at peak lynchian quirkiness, pitched the series by waving his hands and making wind noises.
"I remember David said something about, there's the wind and the trees, and he moved
his hands a certain way, and they all kind of leaned forward."
Instead of being ejected from the building and blacklisted from the entire city of Los
Angeles, the pair were encouraged to continue developing their pitch. By all accounts, it
was Chad Hoffman -a fan of both Lynch and Frost's work- who championed Twin Peaks
to ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard, who ordered a pilot episode late in 1988.
The network aspect of this story is dry and inside-baseball, but it's important in that,
in 1988, ABC was at the bottom of the barrel in terms of ratings among the big three of
broadcast television. We need to understand that for every pitch that gets accepted, there
are a hundred that get turned down, and of every pitch that goes to pilot, maybe one
in twenty makes it to series. The safe bet for any network in this process is to look
at what has worked, and what is currently working, and to greenlight anything that is
like that, but different. This is why police procedurals, soap operas, and medical dramas
are so numerous, long-lasting, and consistent throughout the history of broadcast television.
They're a narrative format that's inherently suited to serial broadcasting, they can feel
complex and involving without needing every second of your attention, and you can watch
any episode out of order without feeling confused.
But, historically, a struggling network is far more likely to take risks. Throughout
the late 80's, ABC was attempting to create a unique, identity-driven lineup of shows
like Roseanne, China Beach, Thirtysomething, and The Wonder Years. In 1988, the idea of
an acclaimed Hollywood director migrating to television was more or less unheard of,
and that, in combination with the mediating force of a tried-and-true TV writer like Mark
Frost, and the less risk-averse attitude of ABC at that moment in time, is what allowed
for Northwest Passage to proceed past the pitch. Had the series been pitched even a
few months later, it's likely it would never have gotten off the ground- in late 1989,
Chad Hoffman left ABC, and Brandon Stoddard was replaced as president of ABC Entertainment
by future Disney CEO Bob Iger. Though Iger was initially supportive of Twin Peaks, Lynch
and Frost would quickly find the network as a whole was skeptical of the series' place
on television, which eventually spelled its demise.
The pilot finished filming in March of 1989. It was intended to air later that year, but
test audiences were mixed, which gave ABC executives cold feet. It was at this point
that Lynch and Frost did something that simply could not happen today: they took their show
on the road. They held public screenings of the pilot, sent copies to various newspapers
and magazines, and otherwise marketed the series to the world with neither the approval
or involvement of ABC. The first big result of this campaign came in the September 1989
issue of Connoisseur, which boldly claimed that Twin Peaks would be "the series that
will change TV forever." Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, Film Comment, and many others would
follow in their hyping up of David Lynch's arrival on broadcast television, which pressured
ABC into ordering a seven episode first season. At this point, ABC began their own marketing
campaign, airing advertisements during the 62nd Academy Awards, and announcing that they
would be airing the two-hour pilot without national advertisements on Easter Sunday,
1990.
"When was the last time you heard about a TV show like this?"
This self-driven marketing campaign may be a big contributing factor to why Twin Peaks
has stuck around as long as it has. To say it came out of the blue isn't necessarily
accurate- it was already a big deal long before a single episode even aired. This suggests
something of the immense hunger of audiences at the time for something different. Though
media historians are mixed about how much influence to award Twin Peaks, ask anyone
who was there for that premiere and they'll tell you it was like nothing else on television.
That the show wound up being so good obviously played a large part in its success, but the
frenzied media hyperbole as encouraged by Frost and Lynch's guerilla marketing campaign
clearly primed audiences to consider the show in hyperbolic terms.
Over 34 million people watched the pilot, some thirty percent of all the human beings
who looked at a television that night. It was universally acclaimed and instantly recognized
as something entirely new. Its atmosphere and mystery became the subject of intense
conversation among all types of people, which would later be described as the "water cooler
effect," where everyone gathers around the water cooler at work to talk about the show
they watched the night before, in essence serving as inadvertent marketers for the network.
And it's here, at last, some "Twenty" minutes into this video about Twin Peaks,
that we will actually start talking about Twin Peaks.
I, uh-
I'm not wearing a watch.
"Is it… past?"
The pilot opens on a pair of ducks swimming across a pond, which fades into a wide shot
of a lakeside house. We then cut to the base of this statue of two dogs facing right. We
then pan left to see a reflection of our first character, Josie Packard, as she hums and
puts on makeup. This strikes me as a fascinating choice, considering Josie's relative lack
of importance in the overall story of Twin Peaks. Regardless, starting here immediately
sets up several key ideas. Beyond the bog-standard symbolism of a mirror implying duplicity,
we also feel that literal doubling is a concern.
Two ducks, two dogs, two Josies. Can you say for sure which is which? If you were asked
which duck is good, and which duck is evil, do you think you could answer? I know I could.
The answer is the left one. It isn't until Pete Martell bids his wife, Catherine, farewell,
that Josie turns her head towards us, her lips parting just so, her eyebrows arching
-as if she knows or expects something. Pete carries his fishing rod and tackle, and pauses
to appreciate the horn that has been sounding throughout this sequence, saying "a lonesome
foghorn blows."
Just in these first few minutes, there's already a potent air of mystery and intrigue.
Angelo Badalamenti's score eases in with a subtle tone that mingles with the foghorns,
giving an otherwise mundane sequence of events a pre-emptive emotion of tragedy. A running
motif in the first half of the pilot is the way that people realize Laura Palmer is dead
before they are explicitly told, and in this moment we, too, get a sense that something
awful has happened before anyone else -besides, perhaps, Josie Packard.
The pilot is, easily, one of the best episodes of television ever produced. Every character
is introduced in a way that immediately tells us everything we need to know about them,
and we quickly get a sense of their dizzying web of relationships and rivalries. To whit:
Laura Palmer was dating Bobby Briggs, who was cheating on her with Shelly Johnson, who
was cheating on her husband Leo, who we later learn was also sleeping with Laura, who was
cheating on Bobby with James Hurley, who was developing romantic feelings for Laura's
best friend Donna Hayward, who, in kissing James at the end of this episode, will be
cheating on her boyfriend Mike Nelson.
So, it goes without saying that Twin Peaks is very melodramatic. Within the first twenty-seven
minutes, we see Leland and Sarah Palmer, deputy Andy Brennan, Donna Hayward, Principal Wolcyck,
and a mysterious girl all break into grievous weeping as Laura Palmer's theme swells in
the background. This heightened emotion can be a barrier for someone new to the series,
because it is earnest in a way that we aren't used to.
And this gets us to something of the question of genre -I was under the impression, when
I started the series, that Twin Peaks was a parody of soap operas, but this isn't
entirely accurate. David Lynch and Mark Frost were certainly aware of the tropes of the
soap opera, but they aren't utilized here in the sort of cynical, wink-wink-nudge-nudge,
"baby's first postmodernism" way we tend to associate with parody. In numerous
interviews, Lynch balks at the idea, and insists instead that Twin Peaks is, itself, a soap
opera.
The term "soap opera" comes from the serial radio dramas of the early 20th Century that
were specifically targeted at housewives and sponsored by soaps and other household items.
It was, from the beginning, a derogatory term meant to denigrate the genre for its association
with women and domestic housekeeping, which I think we can all agree is... a touch sexist.
To this day, despite the omnipresence of soaps throughout the history of radio and television,
they remain a generally undervalued and unstudied corner of the medium, to the point that more
people use the term "soap opera" as an insult, than who have actually watched a soap
opera. It's really frustrating to think that shows like Dark Shadows and Peyton Place were,
in their way, pushing boundaries and telling complex stories for decades while being ignored
or ridiculed by mainstream media -but as soon as shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The
Wire start showing up -which, you may have noticed, all star men- suddenly television
is revolutionized by these fantastically innovative trailblazers, as if these shows are not, themselves,
textbook soap operas. And maybe that's not a bad thing.
The big takeaway here is that, if Twin Peaks were strictly a parody, it wouldn't still
work as a standalone show 28 years later. For a parody to function, it requires thorough
knowledge on the part of the audience of what is being parodied. In 25 years, Scary Movie
will read like the Voynich Manuscript, and the world will be a better place for it.
If Twin Peaks is anything, it's a pastiche of soap operas, an embrace of their style
and substance rather than a mocking of it. As is always the case, the difference lies
in the execution. The soapy elements here are made more palatable by the context in
which they reside, by the ways they are utilized as a filter for relatable, human emotions.
A viewer in 1990 was certainly aware of the soap opera connection, but the series still
reads well today because the formula was utilized with distinct intention.
Despite the incredibly violent, disturbing, and often subversive elements of David Lynch's
films, one gets the sense that he isn't a particularly cynical man. It is a frequent
observation that Blue Velvet details the seedy monster that exists under the face of the
American dream, but Lynch's actual philosophy seems a little more complicated. In Twin Peaks,
though Laura Palmer's death does reveal a night-life of murderers and drug peddlers,
the lighter, campier aspects are not presented as a facade meant to hide these things, but
as a direct counterpoint to them. It is not that the melodrama is a shallow performance
to cover up the evil that lurks beneath -the melodrama is a force in direct conflict with
that evil, in a battle over the human heart's ability to earnestly feel emotion.
"American network television has long been considered the home of the bland, the cautious,
and the predictable."
36 minutes into the pilot, we meet Special Agent Dale Cooper, a man who is a perfect
honey-coated cinnamon bun fresh from the oven whose presence invigorates you with a sense
of meaning and purpose that no god or drug has ever accomplished in the canon of human
history. Were we to distill Dale Cooper into a tonic or some kind of topical cream, said
product would bring an end to all wars and instigate immediate transcendental awareness
in the hearts and minds of every human on earth. I hesitate to call him the protagonist,
but for all intents and purposes that's exactly what he is. Cooper serves as our gateway
to expository dialog about the town and its citizens, as well as bringing with him the
intrigue of a serial killer and methods of deduction which are, shall we say, questionable
in their legal admissibility.
Watching Twin Peaks today, Cooper comes as something of an antidote to our overwhelming
abundance of cynical antiheroes. There's a reason he is the face of Twin Peaks- he's
an upbeat guy who likes coffee and donuts, who's swept off his feet by fir trees and
mountain air, who is good at his job and doesn't afraid of anyone. It would be easy to take
this foreign FBI agent and turn him into a manipulative, duplicitous, mean-spirited outsider
-and, in fact, in today's television landscape, that would be the go-to move to make the show
feel… "real." But it is precisely his meandering niceness that makes Twin peaks
feel, in its way, realistic. No one is just their job, and the real joy of Twin Peaks
is in seeing the mundane pauses in between plot developments.
If there is one characteristic that is pure Lynch, it is his willingness to spend long
stretches of time lingering on virtually nothing -in fact, Duwayne Dunham, a writer on Twin
Peaks, recounts that their scripts were often a full ten pages shorter than was standard
for hour-long dramas, because of all the time they spent on moments like this:
"I'm gonna transfer you to the phone on the table by the red chair. The red chair
against the wall. The- the little table. With the lamp on it? The lamp that we moved from
the corner? The black phone, not the brown phone."
But the way pop culture remembers Cooper isn't entirely accurate. In the pilot, he's actually
kind of a jerk. A lot has been said of how many of the characters undergo a transformation
at the start of season 2, but Cooper himself undergoes something of a softening between
the pilot and the rest of the series. There are a number of moments that contradict our
rosy recollection, like when Coop reacts to Bobby Briggs' indignant protest at being
accused of killing Laura Palmer by saying, "You didn't love her anyway."
We remember the Coop from episode six who found Audrey Horne, an 18-year-old girl still
in high school, naked in his bed, and instead of seducing her, ordered malts and offered
to talk to her as a friend. We don't so much remember the Coop who calmly asks Sheriff
Truman about Josie Packard by saying, "Who's the babe?"
None of this is out of character, per se, but certainly points to a harder edge than
anything his character displays later on.
I bring this up because these sorts of minor inconsistencies are exactly the kind of thing
that fans of Twin Peaks have latched onto over the decades as potential avenues of meaning.
In the absence of definitive proof, every detail becomes a clue. I am not interested
in debunking or debating any particular theories, but I do want to talk about the fraught nature
of considering intentionality in Twin Peaks.
It's important to remember that, when they shot the pilot, Lynch and Frost not only had
no promise of a series order, they actively expected that this would be the only bit of
Twin Peaks they would ever produce. So, in the process of making the episode, they largely
ignored any notes from the network, and Lynch felt emboldened in following his intuition.
Now, consider two of the most important mythological elements of Twin Peaks: the Red Room, and
Killer Bob. Every parody of or reference to Twin Peaks involves showing a glimpse of the
Red Room, and Bob is the most frightening on-screen monster since… the clown from
Poltergeist.
Now consider that the existence of these things is not only coincidental, but entirely arbitrary.
One day while filming pickup shots in Laura Palmer's bedroom, Lynch overheard someone
saying to set dresser Frank Silva, as he moved a desk in front of the doorway:
"Frank, don't lock yourself in that room! And I wasn't even looking in that direction,
but the image of Frank locked in that room popped into my head, and I rushed to Frank
and I said, Frank, are you an actor? And he said, Why, I happen to- yes, I happen to be.
And I said, You're going to be in this movie. And he said, Fantastic."
Later that same day, they filmed a shot of Sarah Palmer sitting up after having a horrible
vision. This involved a camera move, a quick pan up that followed Sarah's motion. After
the first take, Lynch excitedly pronounced that they got it in one, but the camera operator
informed him that there was someone reflected in a mirror in the shot, and they needed to
do another take. Lynch asked who was in the mirror, and the cam op replied, "It was
Frank."
They didn't do another take, and that very shot is what closes the pilot -and yes, you
can see him right there, Frank Silva, a set dresser who wanted to be an actor, haplessly
ruining the shot. Lynch didn't know what it meant, but he knew it meant something,
and his openness to the importance of that coincidence is what gave us Killer Bob.
As part of the deal for making the pilot, they needed to shoot a decisive ending so
that, if the series wasn't picked up, they could sell it as a feature in the European
market. Lynch has said in interviews that he and Frost both never really had a plan
for what that ending would be, and put it off throughout the production. And then, one
day, the idea came to him -as so many ideas seem to just come to him. Truman and Coop
would discover that the killer is Bob, and Mike, the one-armed man, would kill him in
the basement of the Twin Peaks hospital. We would then jump forward 25 years, as an elderly
Cooper sits in the red room, witnessing the strange dance of The Man From Another Place,
and the secrets of a person who may or may not be Laura Palmer.
They shot this stuff real quick and dirty, and if you watch the European pilot it definitely
feels like the ending is tacked on.
Lynch and Frost were under no obligation to use this stuff when Twin Peaks went to series.
They could have thrown every bit of that European ending out into the trash for how connected
it was to the rest of the material- but instead, virtually every piece of it was repurposed
in the first season. Episode 2 ends with the Red Room sequence, Coop eventually recounts
the events in the hospital basement as a dream in episode 3, and everything from the Fire
Walk With Me poem, to Bob's infamous "I'll catch you in my death bag" speech all found
their way into the series. Explanations were eventually given. We obviously now have a
very thorough understanding of Bob and the Red Room, but it's of paramount importance
that we recognize these explanations as retroactive rather than proactive.
You won't have to look hard to find people criticizing shows for being made up as they
went along. Lost is, of course, the marquee example, as in the years since it ended we
have learned that, yes, to some extent Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were making it up
as they want along. This criticism sounds smart, but if you look closely you'll see…
that it is not.
All shows are made up as they go along.
All art is made up.
Everything is made up.
Nothing is planned, and the universe is chaos.
Vince Gilligan, showrunner of Breaking Bad, has said in several interviews that they didn't
really have a plan for where the series would end up -or, put more accurately, they had
a vague idea of where the series could end, but didn't exactly know how they'd get
there. You'll find, if you do more than no research, that this is fairly common of
broadcast television. You may have some longterm ideas, but how do you know when to build up
to them when you don't even know how long your series is going to last? This is why
the last three seasons of Lost are so much tighter than the first three- because they
made a deal with ABC to set a concrete end date and a specific number of episodes, they
were able to dole out information at a confident pace that makes for some of the best television
you'll ever see. Objectively.
In the same way, this is why the Twin Peaks pilot, and season 1 generally, are so good.
The pilot was produced as an independent unit of entertainment that could, if the stars
aligned, be expanded into a longer work, but could also stand alone as its own piece. The
rest of the season was made in a similar vein, shot in a single session without network supervision
or expectation of a second season.
We will see that, like Lost, very much of Twin Peaks does not line up with itself. But
the point, for now, is that we should be wary of speculating about what was or wasn't
the intention behind a choice. In many cases, there was no intention. Of course, this does
not make them any less ripe for interpretation -on the contrary, I find when you throw intentionality
out the window you're freed to see connections you might otherwise have missed. Like this
one:
Towards the end of the Pilot, James Hurley is locked up in jail across from Bobby and
Mike. Bobby is mad because he knows James was seeing Laura, and he wants to do a revenge
crime on him. So Bobby, as all teenagers do in these situations, starts barking like a
dog. And something interesting happens here that, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't
really been remarked on at length. As Bobby barks and howls, his voice shifts into what
is clearly a separate audio clip, morphs back to his own voice, and then descends into an
inhuman baritone. This has always struck me as a terrifying, demonic moment that borders
on the inexplicable. But in light of The Return and revisiting the entire series, I've found
that there's actually a fascinating background narrative to be drawn from this moment that
tells us a lot about the larger story of Twin Peaks.
[argument interrupted by mysterious digital interference]
What about the ceiling fan in the Palmer house? Or the stoplight at Sparkwood and 21? Or the
chocolate bunnies?
"Diane, I am holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies."
Do you think Lynch and Frost knew, one hundred percent, what these things would come to mean
for the mythology of the series? The answer is, stop asking wrong questions. You shouldn't
care in the least what David Lynch has to say about any of this, because Twin Peaks
only exists in your head. It gets to mean whatever you want it to mean. Instead of questing
for absolute truth, you should listen to what David Lynch has to say about this:
"I think if you make a film to send a message, it's not so good. They say if you want to
send a message, go to Western Union."
If you want to send a message, go to Western Union. You have to be free to think things
up. You just have to trust yourself.
[pills rattling in pill bottle]
Hello, this video is too long, and we've barely covered the first episode.
My goal for this video was to establish context and lay down a few themes that will be recurring
throughout our conversation. If I have failed in this endeavor, please feel free to leave
an annotated comment on someone else's video, preferably one about how racism isn't real.
This has been Twin Peaks: In Opposition: Episode One: Act One. Next time, on Twin Peaks: In
Opposition: Episode One: Act Two, we will be taking a closer look at the first season,
in particular the characters, the narrative, and probably we'll even talk about dreams.
Hello, and welcome to the part of the video where I tell you to give me money. But first,
allow me to congratulate the people who have already done so:
Amy Mims.
Logan McQuisten.
Austin McCauley.
and Richard Daly.
If you like the concept of this particular transactional exchange, in which you give
me ten dollars a month every month until you die, and I say the arbitrary sounds your parents
gave you as an infant out loud on the internet, then you should go to my Patreon.
Patreon dot com slash L T A S, and pledge to give me ten dollars a month every month
until you die. If that is not to your taste, you only need to pledge five dollars a month
to get access to my notes, scripts, and various unused materials, all of which will one day
be used as evidence against me.
If you want to hear more of my voice, I also have a podcast, the Trans Questioning Podcast,
where I talk about what it's like to be slowly dying on the inside. It is very relateable.
If your appetite for my incessant babbling is yet to be sated, please, find help, but
before you do, why not follow me on Twitter at hmsnofun? It's mostly unironic retweets
of self-affirming optimism from anime catgirls.
Thank you for watching this video essay on the internet.
Go watch Twin Peaks.
Goodbye.
[strange noises signal Very Unfortunate Tidings for the future]
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