Twin Peaks: a love letter

[truepenny]

I made a deal with tzikeh: she'd make me a Twin Peaks icon, and I'd post about why Tw.P was my first fandom. Well, she made the icon (actually, she made two, and I have another from katallison), and I'm making the post.


The two season run of Tw.P coincided with my last two years of high school. It wasn't the first show I'd enjoyed, but it was the first show about which my level of obsession reached the heights currently occupied by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I did not miss a single episode of Tw.P; I speculated and theorized; I cut pictures of Kyle Maclachlan out of the newspaper. I was and remain deeply traumatized by the series finale, the most viscerally upsetting five minutes I have ever seen on a television screen. (Somewhere in this LJ I've posted about that, but be damned if I can find it. Or maybe it was in a reply in someone else's LJ? *sigh*)

So why did I love Twin Peaks?

1. Crush the size of Montana on Kyle Maclachlan.

2. Tremendous fondness for the particular brand of morbid/goofy humor that Tw.P specialized in.

3. The cast. Everybody. The way they delivered their lines--the lines they had to deliver.

4. Plot. Like BtVS only more so, because more tightly. almost incestuously interconnected. Nothing ever gets forgotten; nothing ever disappears quietly never to be seen again. It all comes circling around and back around and back around again.

5. The way Lynch handled his ensemble cast, where not every episode featured every character, but over a span of episodes, you'd get to check in with everyone and find out what Donna was up to and what twisted thing Leo was plotting, whether Josie and Harry were going to get it on or not, the fucked-uppedness of James ... All interweaving in this completely fascinating fugal fashion.

6. The idea of the Black Lodge and the way it gets handled.

7. Dale Cooper. There's nothing quite like him in anything else I've ever seen.

8. For its entire two year run, the show just kept getting weirder and weirder. Every time I thought, Well, that's it, there's no more weirdness left to find, be damned if the next week David Lynch didn't prove me wrong. And the sensation the development of the plot gave, that we were diving deeper and deeper. Every time you thought you thought things were the worst/weirdest they could get, you discovered you were standing on a trap door, and Lynch was about to drop you down to a whole new level. The series finale is of course the ultimate example: just when we thought we were out of the woods (so to speak), Cooper goes into the bathroom and looks in the mirror.

9. The way that nobody (not even Cooper) was entirely transparent. Men and women alike, everybody was hiding something, everyone had motives they didn't want to talk about.

10. The mood. Tw.P was, I think, the moodiest show I've ever watched--not in the sense of melancholy, but in the sense of every scene being permeated by this absolutely recognizable feel. Like prose style. The X-Files came close, but it didn't have the consistency that Tw.P did. BtVS also has a style, but that style isn't quite as off-kilter and distinctive as Tw.P's.

11. Following on from #9 and #10: The simultaneous sense of alienation and passionate empathy. The characters on Tw.P were all remarkably opaque, and yet I loved them. Not all of them, but even the completely hateful, dysfunctional triangle of Bobby-Shelly-Leo was something I cared about.

12. The constant fascination of what was going to happen next. Narrative tension like no other.

13. Nobody was safe. Nothing was safe. The territory was treacherous.

Comments

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

For me, the most amazing thing about TP was how *unsettling* it was. I remember watching the pilot movie, watching Mrs. Palmer break down upon hearing that Lauar was dead, and it just sort of ... went on. Television shows don't just put the camera on an actor and let her cry - not *really* cry, not like that scene. And they held the shot too long - which is something that Lynch is an expert at. It's unsettling, rather than being tiresome, which is quite a feat. He purposefully goes beyond the rhythms of television - when Dale was shot and the Giant would come to the door and give him the thumbs-up, that happened four times. Three is the rhythm we're used to. Set-up, repetition, punch-line. And then... he came back *again*. And that's when you get queasy. It feels wrong, and off, and you can't quite tell why.

It was really the first frightening show that didn't get there by going for the cheap scare. And I should have known to expect that from David Lynch, but it was on television - and television lulls you into a sense that whatever it is you're going to see, it's going to be *television*. Not so with Twin Peaks.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes, also a good point. I haven't watched Twin Peaks since it aired (we wantssssss the DVD box set, preciouss, yessss, gollum), so my memory of details is a little vague, but that's one of the things I do remember distinctly about the Black Lodge: the way that everything was wrong ... but only slightly. Or that incredible effect of Josie's face in the doorknob (if I'm remember right) after she died. Or that damn traffic light.

But, yeah, very few overt effects. Just things being wrong.

The owls are not what they seem.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Or that incredible effect of Josie's face in the doorknob

Drawer-pull, but yes. I remember that completely freaking me out. Of course, special effects have come *so* far since then, but I think we jumped off the couch.

Damn fine coffee. And hot!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Yes! I could remember it was round, and I knew it was a handle-type of ordinary object such as one might find in hotels, but doorknob was as close as I could get.

And then of course there's the absolute heart-pounding terror generated by the mere fact of having Bob on the screen. No special effects even needed.

And, of course, the more I talk about the show, the more I want the DVDs. Damn. *g*

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

And I agree with you about the last fifteen minutes of the series.

AAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Still gets me, just *thinking* about it.

Hey - have you seen Judy Chien's TP vid?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I've never seen ANYTHING that has stayed with me in quite the same way that ending has. It's not the ending I wanted, goodness knows, but it is a tour-de-force--and it isn't WRONG in any way. It's perfectly consistent with the progress of the show.

I don't so much watch vids, despite living downstairs from vidder extraordinaire, heres_luck. So I didn't even know there WERE Tw.P vids, although I'm not at all surprised.

[tir.livejournal.com]

Hi. Just thought I'd say that you summed up really well here so many of the great things about a show I love. Thanks.

Also, those last few minutes? I remember quite clearly stomping around the house ranting for days. Once the shock wore off, that is. I can still get pretty worked up about it if you get me started. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I love your icon. And I'm glad this resonated with you.

I don't think I've ever seen anything as traumatizing as the end of Twin Peaks. Which, all in all, is probably a good thing, because I don't think I could stand it.

[tir.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And yes, it definitely did.

Another show ending like that might well be fatal. :) But I'm not sure that another show ending could shock/horrify/traumatize me as much as that did. It was a loss of tv innocence, in a way. Networks screwing things up, unplanned cancellations... Twin Peaks wasn't my first fandom, but it was my first fandom heartbreak.