Twin Peaks. The Awesomeness Thereof.
So, this year (or, well, last year, ahahaha HANGOVER), has seen me encounter three TV series that seem to be made expressly with me in mind by thoughtful TV gods - a phenomenon I’d only encountered previously with Buffy. Anyway, while Avatar is just about due for a rewatch and I still haven’t finished Revolutionary Girl Utena, a bout of pre-Christmas flu saw me work my way through all of Twin Peaks, which, while not exactly consistently awesome a la Utena (so far), or even Avatar, nevertheless triumphs over its dead-girl Mcguffin premise triumphantly enough to have won me over within, oh, about five minutes.
Also, Special Agent Dale Cooper, FBI.
And glazed doughnuts.
And pine woods.
I fell, internet, and I fell hard.
And, since I got the film for Christmas and watched it in a slightly blurry post-New Year’s state this afternoon, spoilers ahead.
So, the best thing, the very best thing, about this series is probably, yes, Special Agent Dale Cooper. Really, what a fantastic role, and what a wonderful performance. Also, what hair. Never has hair-oil been so charming, not even on George Clooney. Really, my only regret is that apparently Kyle MacLachlan demanded a smaller part in The Movie, which, hmm. Bad Decision. Really, I’m not sure the film has had time to sink in yet, but, well, it may not have been as bad as I’d come to expect (via vague internet-osmosis), and it explained a lot - almost, I think, too much - while certainly giving Laura Palmer her due, but it was really, oddly, slight. Strangely, given that Mulholland Drive started off as a TV pilot but works very well indeed as a film, this seemed almost like a compilation of highlights from a lost season of the series - albeit one filtered through a little-girl-lost fairy-tale, flowered-wallpaper story, David Bowie and all (why, yes, I did watch Labyrinth at an impressionable age. Why do you ask?).
Mind you, that might be my regret at the altered focus of my second favourite thing about the series, which is undoubtedly Twin Peaks itself. The film is heavy on the horrifying domestic interiors - as in every great gothic work, trouble begins at home - but a bit more sketchy on the sense of place. And, oh wow, the sense of place in the series had a kind of miniature-model crispness, Log-Ladies and all.
Twin Peaks devotes the same kind of exquisite attention to its various icons of Americana - diners, doughnuts, glasses of milk and cherry pie and hot black filter coffee in white china cups - that David Foster Wallace uses to push things wholesale into the uncanny valley. It’s so punctilious about this, in fact, so powered by the juxtaposition of the spruce and cheap and neon against the wild dark forest (see, for instance, the opening credits - not to mention Laura’s body, dead, sandy flesh wrapped in plastic), that it’s hard to believe that it was actually made by an American in America.
I mean, I know that (arguably) few nations are as invested in national myth making as the US, but Twin Peaks is so deliberate about investigating the sex n’ death n’ picket fences version of small town America, so determined to get to the dark side of creamed corn and convenience stores, so nigh-on fetishistic about ring doughnuts and green formica, that, well, I can see why it was big in Japan.
Really, it was almost as schematic about slotting together all the iconic necessities of small town America as Lars von Trier’s Dogville, the one where the houses are drawn in with chalk. But, y’know, David Lynch seems like a nice guy whileas one gets the feeling that von Trier is a complete wanker. So, there’s that.
It also has a strong streak of the kind of fascination with what happens when you put theatre on film which is put across so very baldly in Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio scene: the Black Lodge, with its red curtains and odd, stagey furniture, smacks of provincial theatre, and the doubling of the roles of Laura and Maddy creates something of the same self-consciousness about the tricksiness and talent of acting that Mulholland Drive is so bullish about.
In short, I guess Mulholland Drive makes much more sense to me now. And, also, I should really watch some more Lynch (the only other film of his I’ve seen is Eraserhead, which is still pretty much my gold standard for horror).
And, of course, there’s the overt fascination with eighties’ soap operas, which makes me wish I had slightly more of a grip on soap opera, or indeed TV and film, in general. Twin Peaks is just so fantastically suggestive about the possibilities of television series, and makes so much sense as a kind of missing link between eighties baroque serials and expensive nineties weirdities from the X-Files (which I have fond memories of) to the Sopranos and Six Feet Under (neither of which I’ve seen) varieties, that I’m just thrilled and slightly awed that it exists.
Other brief thoughts: Audrey Horne. Rules. Really, for a series that began with a Dead Homecoming Queen and ended with A BEAUTY PAGEANT, Twin Peaks was full of variously excellent female characters, although I could have done without Josie Packard managing the depressing twofer of Dragon Lady and Asian Maid. I mean, I’m guessing the whiteness of Twin Peaks is fairly true to form in the rural Pacific Northwest (please, internet, correct me if I'm horribly wrong here), but Josie, the only non-American character with a substantial part, was constantly on the verge of becoming an interesting character and - to be generous - never quite made it.
And as for Hawk, hmm. The way the series flung itself full-tilt at a lot of the clichés of suburban horror and small-town soapiness makes me wish they could have been a bit more upfront about how exactly they were dealing with Indians, in addition to Cowboys. Really, a new lawman comes into town, shakes things up, becomes privy to unmentionable secrets tied to the very land the new town is built on ... and we get some rock painting suggesting that, yes, the Black Lodge is pretty old? Really? Perhaps there was an ancient burial ground underneath it all as well, huh? I guess I’ll tell myself that they might have gone further, given the glyphs, if the series hadn’t gotten stomped on.
As it is, Hawk is a good supporting character and we have those glyphs mapping out the way to the Black Lodge. Aaaand ... that would be it, as far as Native American input on the world of Twin Peaks goes, unless you count those Haida-ish murals in the Great Northern hotel (which, incidentally, sounds as though it should be a railway). Really, for a series that has quite a bit in common with, say, Picnic At Hanging Rock (at least unease-wise), where the absence of the Australian Aborigines is, y’know, palpable and defining, Twin Peaks is surprisingly uninvested, at least on the surface, in a sense of local past. Which might be part of its bite, I suppose - you can’t get away from them there woods.
And, hey, at least Josie Packard was nothing if not amazingly gorgeous. Which is more than can be said for James Hurley, the most tedious of all the Twin Peaks teenagers - who, naturally, got a whole subplot of his very own once Lynch left the series to twist after being forced to reveal Laura’s killer.
Talking of which, wow. Those second season episodes were completely fascinating as textbook examples of how a show can go careening off the rails, through the railings, and fetch up somewhere in un-ironic soap-land, naughty wives and sulky bikers and all. It’s fairly clear, I think, that the writing staff were getting things back on track before the finale, but while, say, I can understand and respect and appreciate a lot of things that went on in late-season Buffy (so, sex is sometimes, uh, a bit fucked up? Even for ladies? Who knew?), I have never, ever seen TV as flaily and out of its depth as those few mid-season two episodes of Twin Peaks.
Watching them on dvd was, well, instructive as opposed to infuriating, but I can see why the third season never made it. Most interesting, actually, is the fate of Audrey: the writers seemed to have realised what a fantastic character they had on their hands, and decided to reward her with a young and charisma-free Billy Zane, while palming Agent Cooper off on Heather Graham. Which, what? I was actually surprised by how well the Cooper-Annie plot worked out (which, considering the finale, perhaps isn’t saying much), but Audrey’s romance with Zane (no, I can’t remember who he was playing. Some rich dude) came across as one hundred percent Mary Sue insert fanfic. Really, a rich, gorgeous, well-adjusted guy shows up and sweeps Twin Peaks’ most eligible off her feet? Really, writers? INELEGANT, I say.
But, well. Twin Peaks gets such a lot of mileage out of its insistent visual and musical motifs (man, what a soundtrack), out of its flashing neon lights and muddy puddles, out of its weirdass plotting and reassuringly true-to-life characters (really, who doesn't know a passel of dumb teenagers and a couple of Log-Ladies?), that I can't really begrudge Lynch his season two awol episode all that much. Really, I just want to start all over again right now, and it doesn't get much better than that in my book.
Also, I am amused by the fact that my first post-series act was to go and check out Twin Peaks fics on AO3: oh fandom! Less amused, though unsurprised, by the fact that most fics are pairing-related, oh sigh. Rather touched by the preponderance of Cooper/Albert, which I can absolutely believe, albeit in a rather one-sided way. But, really, what I want to read are weird little character-and-mood pieces set in Twin Peaks. I’ve found some, but not enough. Ah well.