I had just turned eighteen when Twin Peaks hit American televisions. It was the perfect combination of place and time: for me, something new and slightly weird just as I was getting ready to leave high school and achieve the big dream: college! independence! A new life for myself! And a weird, quirky, dreamlike thriller was just the thing to pull me in, especially when the first few episodes ran again all summer and I could get caught up and stuck in.
Over twenty years later, I found it on Netflix, and resolved to plow through all twenty-nine episodes again, this time with the benefit of years and sense and a slightly better grip on things like Tibetan wisdom and terminal ballistics. Last night I finished the last-but-one episode. There’s only the finale left. And I’m reluctant to run it…because I don’t want it to end.
It’s definitely dated, I admit. The pacing isn’t quite as bad as you’d expect of an 80s prime-time soap opera – and make no mistake, that’s what this is – but then, some of the slowness could be camouflaged by the abiding weirdness David Lynch brings to the table every time out. It’s also tough to wrap your head around not only a world without cell phones and the Internet (not to deny them credit for Macintosh product placement before it was fashionable), but a world where the cops still carry revolvers and people routinely smoke indoors. Twenty years ago is a foreign country.
The look is equally dated, although once again that could be partly Lynch and possibly just an affinity for the era. Let’s be honest; I was 18 and pretty much every one of the women on the show still holds up (we tend to forget that Audrey Horne was America’s designated sex-incarnate for most of 1990). Norma in particular is still lovely, although she (and presumably Big Ed) are younger then than I am now, which is kind of disturbing to think about. I’m still rooting for those two, of course – it’s tough to be with the one you love when one has a spouse in prison and the other has a superhumanly strong one with an eye patch and a drape-runner fixation.
So many plots and story lines that went nowhere, seemingly. Anything with the Packard Mill got boring in a hurry – Piper Laurie’s scenery-chewing bitchery seems much more suited to something like Dynasty. The switch from the plot being driven by the expanding Renault crime organization to being propelled by Windom Earle seems fairly abrupt. And James off with his mysterious woman served no purpose whatsoever. No wonder it went off the rails – there was just too damn much to keep track of. Lesson learned: you can be complex without being complicated.
But so much of it still works. Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry Truman remain the most underrated bromance of our time, and the evolution of Coop from mysterious eccentric sharpshooting investigative genius to humanized flannel-clad troubled soul in love with the new girl at the diner (and yes, that was Heather Graham, folks) is rather a nice character arc. I would have loved to see more of the Bookhouse Boys and seen more of their battles against “the evil in the woods” – and maybe the origins of the Faustian circumstances by which Twin Peaks became this idyllic small town taken out of time and framed by evil on all sides.
The thing is, Twin Peaks in its time tended to parallel my life. It started with a bang in the spring of 1990, when I was through with high school and anxious to get on with my future. I even bought the cassette single of the theme, deliberately thinking to myself “you know, this would make a fine song with the new girlfriend which I will undoubtedly meet once college gets going.” And then, when the show came back in the fall, it slowly deteriorated until petering out in April…which is just about how my freshman year went. One long slow deterioration until by April, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to save this bird from a hard landing. And just like my college career, the series didn’t have a happy ending either – just a cliffhanger with no obvious hope for how things could be saved.
Now? Now it’s a waking dream, a little slice of the past brought back out of the black hole, a piece of that sort of “creeping strangeness that we can’t quite bring ourselves to call magic” somewhere between urban fantasy and magical realism I mentioned a few weeks back. It’s a much better selection of jazzy ambient work music (hell, it’s a whole new soundtrack album that didn’t even exist twenty years ago). It’s an explanation for my affinity for coffee and cherry pie (which never waned). It’s the existence proof for shows like Lost or The X-Files, which never could have happened were it not for one random murder in the small-town woods south of the Canadian border.
RIP, Laura Palmer. =)