The art of David Lynch made a lasting impression on me. In tribute to his life, which ended a year ago, I decided to jot down some personal recollections of his work. This is the second part of how I remember Twin Peaks.
Even though my interest was sparked years before, I approached Twin Peaks rather impassively when I first had the chance to see it. Most of the hype surrounding the show had passed me by unnoticed, so I didn't exactly know what to expect. I wasn't familiar with the previous work of either Mark Frost or David Lynch. I had no clue about any of Twin Peaks' storylines. When I started watching, the whole world knew exactly who killed Laura Palmer — it had been scrutinized, analyzed, opinions were formed. Had I been more careless in the years prior, chances are I would have ruined it all before I even started watching. But miraculously, for a whopping three and a half years after it initially aired, I knew practically nothing about the show.
I vividly remember first seeing the opening credits — especially the sudden shift in sensation I felt from reserved, somewhat aloof, see-what-happens, to a heightened sense of wonder in a matter of seconds. A single guitar pluck, a bird perched on a branch, smoke billowing from some distant chimney stacks. And then, the sharpening of a saw blade that sent sparks flying and drive belts shuddering. In real life, this little scene would have meant a thunderous, ear-shattering noise. In Twin Peaks’ opening credits, it meant bewildering serenity. The feeling crept in that I was watching something very different from what I was used to. And when the music swelled and the title faded in across those machines of death and destruction, I was mesmerized. These few minutes of music and moving images made an impression that is still with me to this day.
Twin Peaks' very first episode set the stage for the most devastating sadness the world of TV had ever seen. This too was something I wasn’t used to experiencing: in most shows, grief was kind of dispensable, easily overcome. In the first few scenes of Twin Peaks, the sadness was almost unbearable: a phone call from your distressed wife, when at the same time a policeman, urgency beaming from his face, turns his head to look straight at you. The sudden pang of fear when seeing the chair at school that wasn’t supposed to be empty. And when there's nothing else left to conclude, trying to hold on to yourself, before giving in, gasping for breath, shoulders shaking, the sheer uncontrollable ugly sobbing, the rivers and rivers of tears. TV I knew always avoided strong emotions like these.
Just as the excessive crying was something I'd never seen before, so were singing Icelanders, a dreamt-up dwarf bringing some very good news about chewing gum, a llama in the vet's waiting room, an FBI agent hanging upside down talking into a memo recorder, a lady carrying a log. Every scene seemed to evolve into something utterly, completely and wholly new. Hardly a few episodes into the show, in walks a black-haired Laura Palmer — wasn’t she supposed to be dead? Which cable network would ever approve a mouthful-of-food conversation like the one between the Horne brothers? What idiot of a protagonist finds out who the murderer is, only to forget it the next morning? What is a "smiling bag" supposed to mean? Why did Hawk need to wear the oven mitts? How on earth did the fish get in the percolator? In most crime procedurals the murder and its resolution were neatly wrapped into one single episode. Not so in Twin Peaks: we weren't a single step closer to solving the murder when after seven episodes the main investigator was shot down — spawning a second investigation when the first one wasn't even concluded.
Out of all the scenes that left you wondering what the hell you were watching, there’s a scene that might be cast aside as mildly amusing, maybe somewhat annoying, but mostly just pointless: in what might be the what-the-fuckest of moments ever on TV, James, Donna and Maddy happen to be sitting at home, on the floor, singing a song. It's a scene dear to my heart. And of course Twin Peaks would never rush a point across, so instead of a quick flash of amusement, this scene easily spans several minutes.
Little scenes like this and many others unveiled a show that could almost be felt, as if Twin Peaks possessed some sort of radiating glow within that made it feel magical. But it also had a way of shifting the balance so suddenly it could completely take you off guard: seconds after the cute singalong ended in an argument between Donna and James, the killer revealed himself to Maddy, abandoned in the living room, in a hallucination so devastating it left you gasping for breath.
More to come in the next part
Movies, Thoughts