February 24th, Entering The Town Of Twin Peaks

“Diane, 11:30 AM, February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks.”

And here we are, just a little over a month after Lynch ascended to the White Lodge, it’s Twin Peaks Day. Presumably, this is going to be a big one, lotta people at the Twin Peaks sign this year, I’ll bet.

Since Lynch’s passing, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is about Peaks that appeals to me so. I wrote before about how much Twin Peaks meant to me, and the degree to which it cooked my noodle as a kid, and the way it stayed with me ever since. But why this one? It’s hard, sometimes, to dig into why we like something that we like.

Like I said about another piece of art that I love, sometimes the answer really is because there was a hole in your heart the exact shape of that piece of art that you didn’t know was there until that art clicks into place. That’s less satisfying, though.

It’s made harder to see by the fact that a whole lot of the discussion around Peaks now is about how influential it was, and the long shadow it cast over all TV since. The genre-mashup, the serialized storytelling, the way it finished the job Miami Vice started and established that TV could look like a movie, started what would become peak/prestige TV. But, we didn’t know any of that in 1990, and I certainly was too young to appreciate the ways it was different from other TV other than in broad vibe-based strokes.

It’s also weird when something you like and means a lot to you turns out to be a big hit. There a vague desire to have those things be obscure, personal choices instead of the biggest TV show of 1990. But sometimes something comes along like Twin Peaks or Star Wars or Totoro and it turns out a whole lot of people had similarly-shaped holes in their hearts. I didn’t know Peaks was a huge event when I was thirteen, I just thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t need popularity to sell me on it. At the time I’d have probably said I liked it because it was funny and spooky.

So what, then?

A whole lot of it is Special Agent Dale Cooper, himself. If there’s a spectrum for “masculinity”, he’s on the point furthest away from “toxic.” He’s the rare genre lead that solves problems by being smarter/braver/more empathetic rather than by being stronger/tougher/better armed. He’s always coming in at problems from oblique angles, so far outside the box you can’t even see it anymore, willing to entertain just about anything that might work. Dreams, strage Tibetan rock throwing, psychic logs, sounds good to him. He’s kind to everyone, upbeat, accepts people without question, The kind of character who makes smiling and speaking in a friendly tone a show of strength, not weakness.

But, as the show reminds us on a regular basis, he’s also really good at the general FBI stuff. There’s a scene early on where they’re in the firing range and he explains the four holes after six shots as that he put “one through each eye and two through each nostril,” which is basically the same joke from Lethal Weapon but funnier. Then there’s a scene towards the end of the run where they’ve found another trap/clue from Windom Earle, and while maintaining a conversation, Cooper casually pulls his gun out, loads it, and fires seemingly without aiming, hitting the target perfectly and disarming the trap. His inclination is to be gentle, but not because that’s his only option.

He’s also solidly a real person, he likes cherry pie and donuts and black coffee, “black as midnight on a moonless night.” He’s got complex friendships with other FBI agents and the members of the Twin Peaks Sheriffs department, he gets into trouble because he falls for the wrong lady.

He never does what you expect, “How’s Coop gonna handle this one?” is a core pleasure of the show. He’s also the rare character that’s a Good Person without having that make them boring. One of the other central attractions of the show is the way the other residents of Twin Peaks settle into a mood of “yeah, he’s a weirdo, but he’s our weirdo.” More than anything, he’s a fun character to spend time with.

And that extends out to most of the rest of the cast too. There are a lot of shows that have a large cast of “eccentric” characters and/or spend time out in rural America. The thing that sets Twin Peaks apart is that Lynch and Frost seem to genuinely like Twin Peaks, the town.

By way of comparison, The X-Files also takes place largely in semi-rural small town America, which, in that show, is entirely populated by weirdos, bumpkins, and victims. Twin Peaks is populated by people.

The locals are frequently comedic, but they’re never to laugh at. As funny as it is that Deputy Andy cries when he sees a body, the show takes an extra beat to let you ask yourself, if your kid was murdered, wouldn’t you want their death investigated by someone who was as upset as you? On the one hand, the Log Lady is objectively ridiculous, but the show—and the other characters—always treat he with profound respect. “My Log has something to tell you” is never a joke.

The show affords all the characters a level of dignity that most other shows don’t bother with. Much has been made over the year that Twin Peaks serves as a satire of both nighttime soap operas as well as police procedurals. The difference here is that this show treats both halves with full sincerity. The relationship between Big Ed and Norma, or the intersecting high school love triangles between Donna, James, Bobby, Laura, Shelly, and Leo, or the evolving father-son understanding between Bobby and Major Briggs, are treated just as sincerely as the central murder itself, or the drug smuggling around One-Eyed Jack’s, or the Lost Pages of the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer.

To put all that another way, this show takes Benjamine Horne and his schemes much more seriously than Dallas ever took JR Ewing.

In the grand scheme of things, does it matter that Donna fell in love with her best friend’s boyfriend, or that Big and Norma married the wrong people, or that Bobby realizes that his Dad loves him but has been saying it in a way Bobby could never hear? No, not of that “matters”, except it matters to them, more than anything. One of brilliant moves the show does is to pull away from the mystery around Who Killed Laura Palmer and let the town take the stage; learning why one woman died isn’t as important as a bunch of other characters learning how to live.

One of the reasons why the back half of that second season still grates so much is that the show loses this; everyone other than the main few characters fade away to comic relief. Ben Horne plotting a fire with Catherine Martell is a million miles away from civil war reenactments and yellowface makeup.

The usual line on Peaks is that the first season is good and the second season falls apart, which is not wrong, but I always forget how far into season two the good stuff lasts. Especially before the show was out on DVD, there was a sort of folk-memory that the murder was solved at the end of the first season, but no, the murderer is revealed halfway through the second. The first half of the second season keeps the energy and vibe of the first going for quite a while. There’s early concerns, like Nadine mentally reverting to a teenager, but overall the show keeps trucking until the murder is solved.

One that happens, though, it’s remarkable how fast it goes off the rails. “What happened?” is well covered ground, and the answer is as simple as it is stupid; Lynch and Frost went off to work on other things, and the people they left minding the store couldn’t hit the same alchemy.

There’s a real flopsweat quality to the back half the second year; increasingly absurd reasons for Cooper to stay in town, James’ interminable motorcycle side plot, the utterly wasted David Warner, the aforementioned civil war reenactments, UFO abductions, suddenly there’s a super-villain evil ex-FBI agent. The show mangages to become a spoof of itself, as well as becoming the thing it was satirizing in the first place.

Much ink has been spilled over the years about how influential the pilot of Twin Peaks was, and it was, but I’d argue that the last ten or so episodes have become just as influential. Whereas the pilot was what it looked like when a genius made a new kind of TV show, that last dozen is an extended warning about killing the golden goose. Not anyone can replicate the start, but everyone can understand the warning of that ending. I’d argue both X-Files and Lost at least, are extended efforts in avoiding that particular set of mistakes, for good or ill.

Ironically, the actual last episode is brilliant. It’s a remarkable return to form right at the last second; suddenly, all the loose plot threads and spare vibes of the failing show snap together and start working. The old magic shows back up for one night, and then ends on one of the most chilling cliffhangers of all time. “How’s Annie?”

Speaking of that cliffhanger, one of the other things I love so much about the show is the way the supernatural creeps in around the edges. There’s nothing otherworldly in the pilot, there’s no indication this is anything other than a small-town crime show. Cooper’s dream with the Red Room and the “dancing dwarf” aren’t until the third episode. The show plays with that for a long time—is Cooper just having weird dreams, or is there something more going on here? Even by the time the show fully arrives at “FBI Agents vs ghosts(?)” the supernatural is never knowable, never understandable. It’s probably the all-time best example of people stumbling across the unknowable, we only ever get glimpses of the other world the town of Twin Peaks has rubbed up against, and nothing anyone learns ever becomes useful. There aren’t rules, it can’t be manipulated or used by the good guys. No one reads Tobin’s Spirit Guide or builds a proton pack here.

Would it have stuck around if it hadn’t ended like that? I spent most of my adult life absolutely haunted by the end of that show, and more by the fact that we all knew there wasn’t going to be any more. There was the movie, Fire Walk With Me, but it was hard not to be disappointed that it both didn’t resolve the cliffhanger and really didn’t have Cooper or most of the other characters in it. There were always rumors; that FWWM was supposed to be the first part of a trilogy, that the first cut was four hours, that maybe that other stuff would surface. I don’t think anyone ever expected anything to happen.

Then! In 2014 Peaks came out on Blu-Ray, and not only had they finally cleaned up the rights to FWWM enough that they could include it in the set, and not only were the semi-mythical deleted scenes going to be on there, but Lynch had edited them together in to what was effectively a new 90 minute movie, The Missing Pieces.

Watching that was the strangest experience: two decades later and here it was, new Twin Peaks. And even stranger, it was scene after scene that had been rumored, talked about, agued over on Usenet and the old web. Had these scenes really been filmed? Turns out, yes. All of them, and more. A whole parallel movie to FWWM played out, what was everyone else up to at the same time as the last days of Laura Palmer, the full unedited David Bowie scenes, everything.

And then, in what probably is and will remain my all-time peak movie-watching experience, it got to the end of the movie. And kept going. Reader, I leaned forward so far I almost fell off the couch as The Missing Pieces just walked off the end of the movie and into the last episode of the show. Intellectually I knew what we were watching had to be deleted scenes from the show, but there had never even been the faintest whisper that such a thing existed. Suddenly, there we were. watching new Twin Peaks, moving past the cliffhanger, not far, but a tiny step forward. Just a hint of what happened next.

I’d have been happy with that, but that led to three years later sitting down to watch The Return, which I still can’t quite believe really happened.

It’s had remarkable cultural staying power for a show that was on for as short a time as it was. it’s the sort of show where you can make an off-hand reference to “the black lodge” and assume someone in your audience will get it. Usually you have to be something like Star Wars or be on for a million years to get that sort of pop cultural penetration. There aren’t a lot of 35-year old TV shows pulling in new fans.

This, despite, or maybe because of, that fact that for a long time it wasn’t on home video. It’d pop up on some obscure cable channel from time to time, but other than the movie prequel Fire Walk With Me, the show just wasn’t around between 1992 and 2007 other than bootleg copies. I rewatched it all in college on crappy VHS copies, everyone I met then was either haunted by it like I was or didn’t remember it existed. Then the first full DVD release landed in ’07, and it was back.

It’s solidly in the cultural substrate now. Some of this, to be sure, is the revival of interest bought on by the 2017 sequel, and by the fact that it’s back to being readily available after being out of sight for so long.

In the end, though, it’s none of those. Twin Peaks is the sort of art that’ll find you eventually; if you’ve got that hole in your heart, sooner or later Peaks will slot itself in. You’ll read something, or a friend will turn to you and say “hey, did you ever watch Twin Peaks?” and before you know it there’s Dale Cooper, driving into town.

Got to find out what kind of trees these are, they’re really something.