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.
Fix Their Hearts or Die
Let’s do one more day of Lynch stuff. Regular Icecano programming returns Friday.
Everyone quotes “fix their hearts or die”, and rightly so, but I think “those clown comics” is heavily underrated as a dismissal.
Kyle MacLachlan’s remembrance on Instagram is really something: Kyle MacLachlan | Forty-two years ago, for reasons beyond my comprehension, David Lynch plucked me out of obscurity to star in his first and last big budget... | Instagram, as is his piece in the NYT: How David Lynch Invented Me . Live your life in such a way that your longest running coworker writes something like that after you pass.
Laura Dern's letter to David Lynch: You wove L.A. into our dreams - Los Angeles Times: ditto for Laura Dern’s.
Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer's Theme: I cannot tell you how many times I have said “don’t change a single note!” in a David Lynch voice.
David Lynch: The Film is the Thing: There’s a documentary called Great Directors that had an amazing interview with Lynch talking about why he doesn’t talk about his films. That clip seems to have gone off line, but this interview is pretty much a restatement of the same worldview.
A lot of people wrote a lot of stuff about Lynch over the last few days, my bluesky feed has been basically non-stop Lynch material, which has been just great. Here’s some of the ones I particularly enjoyed, which you might too:
Nothing Will Die, Especially Not David Lynch
David Lynch Forces Your Brain to Work Differently
The Best Show on TV Is Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch's top five sandwiches - by Raquel Laneri
“Fix Your Hearts or Die”: David Lynch’s Work Has Always Been Deeply, Powerfully Queer | Them
In Heaven (Everything is Fine) - by Marya E. Gates
A Tribute to David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks'
RIP David Lynch (and links to help LA)
And Rusty Foster sums it up in Today Service Tabs
Beautiful Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine
It would have been David Lynch’s 79th birthday today. Gonna have some black coffee and donuts in tribute.
It’s been really heartwarming to see all the tributes and remembrances from around the web the last few days, clearly I’m not alone in having been deeply touched by the man.
Some clips of or about the man that I’ve enjoyed over the years:
David Lynch on Where Great Ideas Come From : A few jobs ago I used to quote this incessantly.
David Lynch Meets George Lucas : I get it, I really do, but man, the Lynch Return of the Jedi would have been amazing.
David Lynch on iPhone: I think it’s very funny that Lynch only says “telephone” in this, and the kind of nerd who would edit this together had to, just had to make it about the iPhone, specifically.
David Lynch Teaches Creativity and Film (Masterclass): an abbreviated version, and cough check the description.
Naomi Watts, Laura Dern & Patricia Arquette Tell David Lynch Stories | W magazine: I cannot think of another famous person who everyone does an imitation of, but the imitation is always positive.
John Ford Scene | THE FABELMANS (2022) Movie CLIP HD: Spoilers, I guess? Lynch as John Ford at the end of The Fabelmans
David Lynch: The Art Life - The Films - The Criterion Channel: The Criterion Channel has made The Art Life free though the end of January!
Mulholland Drive - Original TV pilot: Oh snap! I havn’t watched it yet, but the original TV pilot configuration of Mullholland Drive is up on the internet archive.
His book is out of print, but the audiobook version is still available, and considering he read it himself that’s probably the better way to go: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
As the man always said: Have a Great Day!
A Place Both Wonderful And Strange
I first encountered the works of David Lynch with Twin Peaks. In what I suspect is a common experience for the Gen-X cohort, I was just slightly too young to be ready for it, which probably means I was exactly the right age. It was different, it was funny, it was scary, it was exciting; it felt dangerous in a way that is still hard to describe.
A lot of people have that story about that piece of art that changed everything for them; their first punk rock album, or seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or finding a book of Bosch paintings, or watching the Star Destroyer go overhead in Star Wars, or hearing Bowie for the first time. For me, it was watching Dale Cooper drive in to Twin Peaks. That was my “you’re going to grow up to be a different person now” art moment.
I’m clearly not alone, Peaks was a lot of people’s first contact with Lynch. It was a huge hit, mostly what I remember was that my entire family was obsessed; both my parents and every single aunt and uncle. Peaks was pretty much all anyone talked about at family get-togethers, as the oldest child in my generation on both sides of the family, and at the age where I had, metaphorically at least, moved from the “kids table” to the “grownup table”, I was looped in on all of that.
(My other abiding memory of that original broadcast is an Aunt who was absolutely livid that they didn’t solve the Laura Palmer case by the end of the first episode. Just gobsmaked that such a thing was even possible; it had never occurred to her that a TV show might not tie everything up in a bow at the end and then start over next week.)
I was initially hostile for a reason that’s extremely 1990 and now feels like a transmission from another place: that second season of Peaks aired on Saturday nights. My parents were not and are not night owls, they preferred to tape it and watch it later, which had the benefit of being able to watch it more than once. The problem was that also airing late on Saturday nights on PBS was my favorite show, Doctor Who, which they would also tape so we could watch it the next day. Two shows on different channels at different times was beyond the ability of the 1980s VCR technology at hand, so the year Peaks was on became a Who-free desert.
(Ironically, Who had been cancelled by that point, but I don’t think we knew it yet. I don’t think the last season had made it across the pond yet, and any delays around more were still using phrases like “hiatus”. It has not escaped my notice that my two favorite TV shows of all time’s original broadcasts were separated by only four months, that has always felt like sloppy writing in my backstory.)
In any case, that initial hostility was short-lived, I was transfixed by it. I could not have articulated this at the time, but both shows attracted me for the same reason—they were about people who solved problems by being smarter, braver, and kinder than everyone else, not because they were stronger or better armed. Dale Cooper is one of the all-time great protagonists, solving problems by being willing to think about them differently. Whatever the opposite of “toxic masculinity” is, that’s what Agent Cooper was.
So, you know, that ending was a little bit of a bummer.
I didn’t see Fire Walk With Me until much later; my parents hated, hated, hated it. There was a real sense of betrayal there: you ended the show on a cliffhanger, then got to do a movie, and the movie is a prequel? Screw you too, etc.
For a long time, my line about FWWM was that it was pretty good if you could take it on its own, but it was a terrible conclusion to Peaks as a whole; now that it’s finally free from having to serve as the capstone, it’s much easier to see it for what it is. Personally, I think it has my favorite Lynch movie, which is a big change from how I felt about it circa 1996 or so.
I used to say that I had spent my entire adult life wondering about Cooper and the Red Room; other things got sequels or reboots or rumors thereof, for me Peaks was always the one I wanted more of the most. How does he get out?
Flash forward 25 years, and then it actually happened. It’s hard to even know how to set expectations for something like that. The 2017 Twin Peaks: The Return was the one truly great revival of the Legacy Sequel era. Things I wanted to happen didn’t, things I was afraid would happen did, but mostly what I wanted was to be surprised, and boy was I.
Sidebar: I was solidly in the “Diane isn’t real” camp until the 2017 show came out; but when they started announcing the cast, and Laura Dern was in it in an “undisclosed role”, I said out loud, at work “oh, she must be Diane.” Heh.
Watching The Return was and will probably remain my all-time peak media-consumption experience of any flavor; I was way more excited about that than anything else, and found it endlessly enjoyable.
It was on the same night as Game of Thrones, and so we’d stream the pair, Thrones first, then Peaks. The difference was fascinating; this was Thrones at the height of its powers, the peak of “peak tv”, and with a rep for being shocking and surprising, built on the back of killing off a character played by Sean Bean, aka the guy whose character always dies.
And every week, because we’d seen more than one TV show, Thrones would do basically what you expected. Every storyline would move forward a little in a generally expected way, and it was fully entertaining.
Meanwhile, I literally never had any idea what was going to happen that week on Twin Peaks. Always surprising, never even remotely what you expected. An hour both wondrous and strange.
Personally, I found the end incredibly satisfying. And if nothing else, I will treasure “Deputy Bobby Briggs” until my dying day.
The words people usually reached for to describe Lynch was “weird” or “odd” or “incomprehensible” or “confusing”, but it wasn’t really any of those things, what it was was “unique.” A very specific viewpoint of a singular artist. It clearly wasn’t an affectation, he wasn’t doing it to “Be Weird”, he was just being himself, and refused to stop.
Plot-wise, at the 10,000 foot view Twin Peaks is incredibly straightforward: it’s a show about FBI agents fighting evil ghosts. But it’s the details where it sings. A lot of people have made art about “the dark underbelly of small towns”, but no one else made art about a small town where everyone accepted The Log Lady. Where a former coworker shows up with a new gender and the reaction is “OK!” and a handshake.
What made Lynch’s work so compelling weren’t the monsters—Killer BOB or Frank Booth or whomever—it was everyone else around them. Everyone in the town of Twin Peaks were fun to spend time with, they liked each other, they were compelling without being awful. Even certified Nasty TeenTM Bobby Briggs was someone you rooted for to get his act together. What made that “dark underbelly of small town America” so frightening was that you really wanted everyone else in that “small town America” to be okay. They weren’t just cannon fodder for some serial killer.
I could talk about Twin Peaks all day, but the movie I want to pause on for a second here is The Straight Story, because that’s the one, I think, that proves it wasn’t an act. It’s unquestionably a Lynch movie in every frame, except it’s also a G-rated Disney movie about a guy who goes on a road trip on his riding mower. There aren’t any ghosts or killers or gangsters; the “dark underbelly” there is just age, creeping up on all of us.
The secret to Lynch’s work, as strange or off-kilter as it often was, was that it was all sincere. It was never a joke or a satire, the characters were never an object of fun. No matter how silly the situation or plot, Lynch treated all of his characters with profound respect. It was all emotionally true.
The dominant form of TV-style media is the mystery-puzzle-procedural, stories structured as a puzzle that the characters, and maybe the viewer, solves by the end. He was the killler! Here’s how he did it! Here’s how he figured it out! Even stuff that isn’t explicitly a murder mystery is structured as a series of questions-to-find-answers-leading-to-more-questions way. Stuff with an explicit, “here’s the solution, here’s what it means.”
Lynch wasn’t ever interested in answers because he knew the questions were more interesting.
People sometimes act like Lynch’s work is utterly incomprehensible, and that’s only the case if you’re treating it as a puzzle to solve. It floats along on emotional logic, instead of clicking down a path of “plot.” You couldn’t “beat” a Lynch movie, there wasn’t anything to “solve.” You had to engage with the emotions and the visuals, and let it take you somewhere.
(It’s sort of a delightful piece of metacommentary that the one work of his explicitly framed around a question: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” imploded the second it was answered. It was a “question”, but a question designed never to be answered.)
They’re not questions, they’re not puzzles, they’re prompts.
It’s easy to overindex on the fact that Lynch was a painter, but in this case I think it’s revelatory to his approach to art. Paintings don’t have explainer videos or wikis of easter eggs (usually.) It’s understood that between the art and the audience something happens, and it’s that something that’s “the thing”, the part that matterss is the viewer’s reaction to the art.
The reason his enigmatic but good natured refusal to explain or talk about his work became such a meme was that Lynch understood that maybe better than anyone else in our lifetimes. The point isn’t to figure out what it meant to him, the point is to figure out what it means to you. Him refusing to elaborate had the same energy as a really good teacher with a twinkle in their eye asking “well, what do you think?” You have to bring yourself to it. You gotta let it in, let it rearrange you brain a little. Works that demand your full attention.
Whether or not this approach works for you was a real “your mileage may vary” situation, and not just for his work as a whole but per-project. Every Lynch fan I know seems to have one movie of his they can’t stand. The one most people seem to give themselves permission to dislike is Inland Empire; personally I loved it—the one I bounced off of was Lost Highway.
But it was all unquestionably his. The most unique, vital artist of our lifetimes. No one’s ever had an oeuvre like that, and no one ever will again. It was a privilege to have been alive at the same time.
It seemed like it was probably coming soon, but it was still a shock. He’d stopped doing his weather reports, he had a project evaporate at the last second for what seemed like they might be health issues, he’d been isolating in his house to avoid COVID exposure the last few years, he recently revealed that he had emphysema. And then it seems he died from complications due to being forced from his house because of the fires.
The closest comparison I can make is to when Bowie died in ’16, but Bowie didn’t die as a downstream result of a massive metaphor for the current omni-crisis. With everything, this really has the quality of the last Elf sailing from middle earth.
But, dispair was never a theme of his work, even in the darkest of times there are Donuts to eat, mugs of Damn Fine Black coffee to drink. Cooper did make it back out of the Red Room, even if it took him a while. So, I’ll leave you with my favorite obscure Lynch work, this delightfully unhinged TV Commercial for the Playstation 2:
Thank you, Mister Jackpots.