Back in 2011 I watched
Season One and part of Season Two of Twin Peaks for the first time in about 20
years. (I quit watching after the person who murdered Laura Palmer was revealed
in S2E7). You may not know this about me, but I obsessed obsessively about Twin
Peaks when it was first broadcast.
Let me be more precise,
since good writing is all about the details. I bought a T-shirt, and Laura
Palmer’s diary, and the tape recordings of Agent
Cooper. I watched the film Fire Walk
With Me on opening night. And a few years after the show was cancelled, I
visited Snoqualmie to see the waterfall and have a slice of cherry pie at the
double-r diner.
Oh, and I memorized Agent
Cooper’s dream from S1E3. Something which I can still recite to this day. (This
fact terrifies me almost as much as it does you I’m sure.)
Watching the show again
brought back a flood of memories, not unlike listening to an album from that
time period. (A more ambitious cultural journalist might try and write an essay
that links Twin Peaks and Nevermind, but I’m doing this for free, in my spare
time.)
I can understand how an
album or a photograph, or maybe even a movie evokes concentrated bursts of
memory and reflection, but it felt odd for a TV show to be capable of the same
thing. Especially since the first season, except for a few now-curious
haircuts, was not of its time. Twin Peaks the town felt like it was trying to
find the courage to leave the 50s behind, right down to bad boy Bobby Briggs
doing his best James Dean impression. So unlike watching Beverly Hills 90210,
which is filled with music and fashion and slang from that era, Twin Peaks
lacks clear visual and audio cues that would evoke my final years of high
school.
And yet it flooded back –
especially my unrequited crush on Jennifer Young (now married, with children,
and basically un-google-able). Jennifer also really liked the show, and I seem
to recall discussing it with her quite often. But the vividness of her, and
that time of our lives, is high-definition. I can’t immediately think of an
equivalent memory trigger.
When I mentioned the
memory burst of Twin Peaks to a friend of mine, he noted that high school was a
time when you saw the same people all the time, almost every day. And with that
came opportunities to discuss and obsess and debate a particular cultural
entity in a way that is no longer possible in my current adult life. I’ve
talked with friends about The Wire and 30 Rock, but we have neither the time
nor the focused passion to discuss these shows endlessly. Back in high school,
one had a lot more free time to spend re-watching episodes on VHS in order to
try and to solve the mystery. And/or memorize the backwards talking of a
dancing midget.
While watching Twin Peaks, I was also surprised at how much of Season One I remembered. After 20 years I could anticipate and recall most of the scenes, key moments and minor asides to degree of vividness that shocked me. I know that I watched Season One more than once back in the day, but that was over two decades ago. In comparison, when I watched The Wire for a second time I was surprised at some of the things I had already forgotten.
Season One of Twin Peaks
has aged quite well. It’s well shot, consistent in tone, the writing is strong,
the acting solid to brilliant (e.g. Albert the coroner). The soap opera
elements are well contained (and even mocked on the show-within-the-show). I also
feel vindicated about my crush on Sherilyn Fenn, but that’s the topic of
another essay entirely.
The debilitating flaw of
Season Two is inconsistency. According to my cursory Internet research, David
Lynch and Mark Frost were less involved in the show on a day-to-day basis.
Watching the second season reminded me that sometimes it was only a single
scene in an episode that would misfire. But later it was entire episodes that went
off the rails. Too many unnecessary new characters, slow pacing, dumb u-turns
and tangents, blah, blah, blah.
As anyone familiar with
the show knows, the network put enormous pressure on Lynch and Frost to reveal
the killer of Laura Palmer much earlier than they had planned. This ruined the
show – the scene where Agent Cooper figures out who murdered Laura was so weak
I had forgotten it.
In general I remember far
less of Season Two. I scrubbed through the final 15 episodes in an hour or two
on my laptop. Of course, I stopped to watch the last 15 or 20 minutes of the
final episode, which takes place in the red room where the dwarf (little man
from another place) lives. Or whatever – he doesn’t live there, but you get the
idea. (Even now I have no desire to be attacked by aging Twin Peaks fanatics.)
There is something
absolutely hypnotic to me about the set design and mood and pacing and style of
the dream sequence from S1E3 and the final portion of the final episode. On a
visceral level, I love watching the dwarf and the giant. It’s mesmerizing and
taps into the surrealist pleasure centre buried inside my brain. When David
Lynch is successful, it’s a singular type of rewarding.
Watching those final few
minutes also reminded me of what it was like to view a television show in real
time, knowing that millions of other people were doing the same thing, right
down to enduring the excruciating commercial breaks. And watching with the
knowledge that the show was going to end at 10pm. (As compared with sitting in
a theatre and watching a film that you know will eventually end, but having no
clear gauge of when exactly that might be).
Seeing Twin Peaks again also served as a valuable reminder of the cruel disappointment a true fan experiences when their investment and passion is abused through bad writing and crappy creative decisions. When your investment in a show is mismanaged by the creators, you feel an enormous letdown, something I was reminded of repeatedly during S2.
This helped me understand
why there are so many aspects about the work of Henry Jenkins that annoy me. I used
to be a superfan, and the experience left me jaded. Fool me once, etc.
Investing too much of yourself into any form of mass marketed entertainment almost
always means ending up in the same sad place. (I’m looking at you, Lost fans.)
In defense of Jenkins,
since completing the CFC Media Lab’s Interactive Art and Entertainment program,
I was able to appreciate something new about Twin Peaks – the degree to which
they successfully implemented the elements of transmedia way before it was a
popular notion. I’m not the first person to
notice this, but this aspect of the show remains quite impressive 20 years
later, when almost everyone still struggles to do transmedia correctly.
This is already tl;dr, but
I have two concluding things. The first is that the Twin Peaks parody on Saturday Night Live was actually funny. I’m
sure people in 1990 were already saying that SNL had stopped being funny years
ago, but that sketch remains pretty airtight. It even features Conan O’Brien as
Officer Brennan (Andy). The second is that the Sesame Street parody is almost
as funny as the SNL skit. That being Twin Beaks.
