I'm starting off by talking about the show that gave this blog its title. Twin Peaks is a cult television show that ran for two seasons from 1990-1991. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, I'm amazed that this surreal, creepy show was even allowed on air that long--and that is was insanely popular for a while to boot. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I feel that a show like this would never get greenlighted today. As we've seen with Arrested Development, Firefly, and Freaks and Geeks, even shows with a loyal fan base often get booted off the air at the first sign of lower ratings.
Twin Peaks takes place in the eponymous fictional small town in Washington state, very close to the Canadian border. It begins with the discovery of the dead body of one Laura Palmer--a beautiful high school girl who seems to have been known and loved (mostly) by the entire town. The local authorities have limited resources and soon call in FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, a wholesome and honest man with a taste for 'damn good coffee' and cherry pie.
Over the course of the first season, the show delves into the lives of a large number of inhabitants of Twin Peaks. Among them are Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James Hurley (James Marshall), Laura's closest friends who knew she was in some sort of trouble right before she died; Ben Horne (Richard Beymer), a business man who owns half the town and his spoiled daughter, Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn), who takes a schoolgirl liking to Agent Cooper; local diner owner Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) and her married lover Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill), and many others.
The main point Lynch and Frost aim to get across is that everyone in Twin Peaks has a dark side and secrets--and that's why there is a sense of evil hidden away within this friendly small town. In one episode, James Hurley reveals to Donna Hayward, his now girlfriend, that his mother is a deadbeat alcoholic. He says that he is telling her this so that there will be no secrets between them: "It's the secrets people keep that destroy any chance they have of happiness and I don't want us to be like that". In another episode, Agent Cooper tells a lovelorn Audrey Horne that he has no secrets. Indeed, it seems that this outsider is the only one without a double life. Even the upstanding sheriff, Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean), is carrying on an affair that few people know about.
This "things are not what they seem" trope is typical to David Lynch's work, as are the elements of surrealism that pop up here and there among an otherwise straightforward 'whodunnit' story arc. One example is Cooper's dream at the end of the third episode. In the dream Cooper is in a red room with a woman who looks like Laura Palmer and a little person: "The Little Man from Nowhere". The people in the dream speak strangely, both in tone (Lynch had the actors say their lines backward and then played the lines forward, resulting in bizarre speech patterns) and in words. They reveal clues to Cooper that become clear in later episodes. Despite chilling and strange scenes such as this one, Twin Peaks proves to be one of Lynch's more accessible works. Compared to Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, Twin Peaks is downright vanilla. The show most closely resembles the tone of Lynch's earlier film (also starring MacLachlan) Blue Velvet.
Well, I'm now partway through the second season of Twin Peaks which notoriously started sucking (or so I've heard) after they reveal who killed Laura Palmer. Since I accidentally read a recap that revealed the killer (and once you know who it is, it's SO obvious), I'm not exactly waiting feverishly for this revelation to occur. I'm just sitting back and enjoying the weirdness. I have yet to judge the second season, but I can say that the first season of Twin Peaks is as close to perfection as a TV show can get.
5 out of 5 stars
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