Twin Peaks FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About a Place Both Wonderful and Strange

429 Pages·2016·15.05 MB·English

by  David Bushman

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: I’ll See You Again in Twenty-Five Years
1. It Was Almost Fun Not Knowing: From Concept to
Cancellation
2. All That We See in This World Is Based on Someone’s Ideas:
Key Creative Personnel
3. In a Dream, Are All the Characters Really You? Dossiers:
Principal Characters
4. It’s Not Really a Place, It’s a Feeling: Significant Locations and
Landmarks
5. The Usual Bumper Crop of Rural Know-Nothings and
Drunken Fly-Fishermen: Dossiers: Locals
6. The Quiet Elegance of the Dark Suit and Tie: Fashion in Twin
Peaks
7. Another Great Moment in Law Enforcement History: Dossiers:
Lawmen
8. Let’s Rock: The Music of Twin Peaks
9. Break the Code, Solve the Crime: Dossiers: G-Men
10. Take Another Look, Sonny: Totems, Themes, Motifs, and
Other Significant Recurring Details
11. You May Be Fearless in This World, but There Are Other
Worlds: Dossiers: Spirits and Other Mysterious Entities
12. The Magician Longs to See: The Mystery and Mythology of
Twin Peaks
13. Guaranteed to Cause Some Sleepless Nights: Dossiers: Persons
of Interest
14. The Bookhouse: Twin Peaks in Print
15. The Only Thing Columbus Discovered Was That He Was
Lost: Dossiers: Outsiders and Interlopers
16. I Feel Like I’m Going to Dream Tonight: Fire Walk with Me
17. Morons and Half-Wits: Dossiers: Deer Meadow
18. I’m Ready to Lay the Whole Thing Out: A Twin Peaks
Timeline
19. I Have No Idea Where This Will Lead Us: A Twin Peaks
Episode Guide
20. There Was a Fish in the Percolator: Memorable Moments in
Twin Peaks
21. You Remind Me Today of a Small Mexican Chihuahua: Twin
Peaks Ephemera, Tributes, and Homages
Twin Peaks Timeline
Appendix: Two Thumbs-Up
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
We rely on the kindness of friends. Mitchel Deltuvia, Lucas Gluszak, Ken
Mueller, and Benjamin Myers all aided us with the research and fact-checking
for this book. We salute them, plus The Paley Center for Media’s Jane Klain, the
patron saint of researchers. For their assistance with photographs, we thank also
Rob S. Wilson, Ellen O’Neill, Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Materials (especially
Dollie Banner), and Photofest (especially Derek Davidson, Todd Ifft, Howard
Mandelbaum, and Ron Mandelbaum). We are grateful to everyone who provided
images, especially Richard Beymer, who portrayed Benjamin Horne so
brilliantly over two seasons and documented the final days on the set with a
series of extraordinary photographs, some of which we are fortunate enough to
include in this book.
So many people have kept the spirit of Twin Peaks alive over the years with
their passion and commitment, and no doubt played a significant role in
convincing David Lynch, Mark Frost, and Showtime to revive the show. We are
especially indebted to the following Twin Peaks and/or David Lynch experts for
their magnificent work in this field over the decades: Brad Dukes, Craig Miller,
Greg Olson, Chris Rodley, John Thorne, and everyone at the Twin Peaks
Festival, especially Rob and Deanne Lindley.
A very, very special thanks to Pieter Dom (Welcome to Twin Peaks), Scott
Ryan (Red Room Podcast), Mischa Cronin (Twin Peaks Archive), and Andreas
Halskov for all their insight and expertise, and for never saying no.
We also extend deep gratitude and appreciation to the following for their
counsel and support: Peter Byer, Jay Fialkov, Svetlana Katz, Barry Monush,
Maria Pagano, Rebecca Paller, and James Sheridan.
Last, but certainly not least, we thank our families for accommodating all of
the demands of this project, and for their unwavering support and inspiration:
Mariam, Alex, and Scout (for David) and Jenny and Owen (for Arthur).
Introduction:
I’ll See You Again in Twenty-Five
Years
Are you looking for secrets? Is that it? Maybe I can give you one.
What Twin Peaks Means and Why It Still Matters
Once upon a time, a poorly rated (after its brief tenure as a media sensation)
show attracted a cult, excited some critics, and vanished quickly. It’s a common
tale in network television, a uniquely unforgiving medium that ravenously
consumes content while fearfully attempting to appease its sponsors, the
corporate purveyors of soap and cars and diet soda who care about nothing but
return on investment, the highest number of the most demographically desirable
viewers. Promising shows are killed in infancy all the time. Why is Showtime
bringing the series back to the screen decades after its cancellation? What’s so
special about Twin Peaks? Why, twenty-five years later, do we still care?
Because Twin Peaks was unique, and its uniqueness stems from the fact that
the series, for all of its reveling in lowbrow genre junkiness, was Art. Art with a
capital A. Television, at its best, had certainly been artful before Twin Peaks, but
never before had prime time featured a work that so thrillingly embraced
surrealism, absurdism, and postmodern semiotic playfulness. Never had an
American TV show dared such unnerving, alienating elements; such passages of
incomprehensible weirdness; such emphasis on mood and texture over narrative
clarity; or exalted enigma, formal beauty, and oneiric potency over the
comforting tropes that define even its most progressive fellows. Twin Peaks
snuck a cornucopia of high-culture rigor and experiment onto the tube,
disguising its abstractions and disruptions as an ostensibly familiar soap
opera/murder mystery, and demonstrated mainstream, serialized television’s
potential as a venue for something beyond well-wrought entertainment.
But maybe that’s the sort of thing that excites only critics and academics. What
explains the show’s lingering effect on normal, reasonable people?
Twin Peaks, like much of cocreator David Lynch’s work, has the ability to tap
directly into the darkest corners of the receptive viewer’s subconscious. His
faux-naïve, intuitive process bypasses the audience’s psychic defenses to
provoke primal responses impossible to achieve through conventional
storytelling techniques. Twin Peaks beguiles with its intriguing oddness, its
autumnal beauty, and its cheeky subversion of expectations born of our
experience with countless stories of murder, forbidden love, small-town secrets,
and heroic knights errant. But the show stays with us because under all of that
cleverness and high style, it hits us where we live, rubs up against our most
private fears and desires, unsettles us profoundly even as it ensnares us in its
gauzy web of seductive lyricism and queasy titillation.
Twin Peaks is a beautiful dream that tells us everything very likely will not be
all right, that terrible things will happen and that the world is full of hidden
dangers and unspeakable evil. The show is a dark reckoning with an
unresolvable mystery: not the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer, but the origin of
the wickedness and cruelty and chaos that exist everywhere if we but look
closely enough, even in such an idyllic little community as Twin Peaks.
It tells us this terrible truth, and we can’t get enough. Like Laura Palmer, Twin
Peaks is an irresistible contradiction, a crucible of beauty and depravity that
simultaneously engrosses and repels, delights and disgusts. It gets under your
skin and sets up shop in your lizard brain. It haunts you, like a first love lost, the
shameful memory of the worst thing you’ve ever done, a photo in a locket. It’s
full of secrets, and whispers them close to your ear in a voice both familiar and
unsettlingly strange.
“Diane, 11:30 a.m. February 24. Entering the town of Twin Peaks . . .”
Notes on Analyzing Twin Peaks: Or How We Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love the Mystery
When discussing Twin Peaks, it’s natural—but unfair—to focus on Lynch’s
contributions rather than those of his partner Mark Frost. Lynch is after all the
marquee name, the rare behind-the-scenes figure as alluring to the press and
public as the movie stars enacting his scenarios. And it is Lynch’s unique
aesthetic that makes Twin Peaks a landmark piece of entertainment, elevating a
slyly subversive genre pastiche into the realm of high art, worthy of serious
academic study and revolutionary in its expansion of the possibilities of the
medium of television.
But it’s Frost who makes the show work. Much of the pure entertainment
value of Twin Peaks—the crackling, offbeat dialogue; winking soap opera
shenanigans; the procedural investigative aspect of the story and much of the
general charming tenor of the town and its residents—comes from Frost. More
crucially, his command of more traditional narrative structure gives the story
shape and movement, and grounds the viewer in a relatable world (albeit one
constructed from a postmodern tangle of cultural symbols and genre tropes) that
gives the visionary disruptions of Lynch a context in which they can fully
resonate with the viewer. Consider the very mixed reaction to Lynch’s version of
Twin Peaks that did not include Frost: Fire Walk with Me. The film is a gut
punch of surrealist horror, a searing nightmarish plunge into madness; it’s a
potent and primal distillation of Twin Peaks’ most avant-garde and transgressive
elements, but its baffling approach to plot, flamboyantly expressionistic
presentation, and relentlessly bleak tone clearly could never be sustained over
the course of a serial narrative.
That said, in the course of our consideration of the thematic and aesthetic
aspects of Twin Peaks, we’ll largely be focusing on Lynch. For the reasons listed
above, admittedly, but here’s a better one: the haunting, unresolvable questions,
mysteries, and puzzles that kept the series alive in the hearts and minds of its
fans are the result of David Lynch’s painterly, abstract sensibility colliding with
the familiar, predictable narrative rhythms of series television. Frost’s work is
more readily graspable; we’ve all grown up watching television dramas, we
understand how they behave, and there is not much more to say on the subject
after acknowledging the fact that Frost took the basic elements of Twin Peaks
and made them into a show that worked, and he did it exceptionally well. It’s the
tension between Frost’s more orthodox (and necessary) approach and Lynch’s
disregard for these storytelling conventions in pursuit of a personal artistic vision
that has generated the fodder for so much richly rewarding theorizing,
speculation, and armchair analysis since Twin Peaks’ debut.
And now it’s our turn. We love plunging into all of the theorizing, speculation,
and armchair analysis as much as anyone; it’s why we wrote this book. But
before we lose ourselves in the tangled semiotic thicket that is Twin Peaks, some
prefatory notes might prove helpful:
Embrace the mystery
For Lynch, a mystery is not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity for
exploration. He is far less interested in the mechanics of a whodunit than in the
possibilities inherent in the unknown. The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer is
an invitation to immerse one’s self in the world of Twin Peaks, not a game to be
won with logical deduction.
“She’s dead, wrapped in plastic.” The murdered Laura Palmer in an image dreamlike, beautiful, and
heartbreaking.
ABC/Photofest
Lynch cares about story, not plot
Plot is what happens. Story is what those things that happened are about. The
story of Twin Peaks is: A beautiful girl is killed by a terrible monster, and a good
man seeks justice for her. The plot of Twin Peaks would fill a dozen volumes,
and while the plot is necessary to tell the story, it’s not the point. Spot an
inconsistency? Confused about something vague? Hung up on a contradiction?
Get over it or learn to live with pain; it really doesn’t matter. The plot is like a
car taking you to the story: even if the electrical system is wonky and you can’t
tune the radio in clearly, you will reach your destination, and your trip will be
more interesting for the weirdness. The rest is details.