When I wrote my review of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, I made some allusions to Twin Peaks in that review, as I was in the process of watching it. Well, now I’ve finished watching the first two seasons, so now is as good a time as any to give my thoughts.
When I was a kid, Twin Peaks was a major cultural phenomenon. It got referenced in The Simpsons, Sesame Street, and numerous other avenues. Also, my parents weren’t particularly into watching TV (my dad worked on TVs at the time), and even if the did watch TV, I would have been too young for it. Both in terms of the subject matter being too much for me, and also it would have gone well over my head. With the Anime Explorations podcast approaching Diamond is Unbreakable (the arc of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures that’s closest to Twin Peaks), I felt that it was the right time for me to watch the show.
It was interesting going into this with very little history with David Lynch. I’d seen Dune, but I hadn’t seen much beyond that – not Wild At Heart, not Blue Velvet, not Mulholland Drive, not even The Straight Story. So, I knew David Lynch’s reputation as a “weird” director, but not much beyond that. Similarly, I’d been aware of the more surrealistic elements of Twin Peaks – the backward talking, what is later revealed to be the Black Lodge, with its tiled floor and red curtains. However, I assumed all of that played a larger role in the series.
So, I was tremendously surprised that, while that shows up in the first episode, and occasionally pops up a couple times later in the first and second seasons, that’s a relatively small element in the series. Much of the early portions of the series is, frankly, a pretty straightforward (on paper) mystery. A teenage girl, Laura Palmer, is found dead – a clear victim of murder – and the MO ties her death to other murders, which brings in the FBI and agent Dale Cooper to the otherwise sleepy small town of Twin Peaks, WA.
What makes the series work, and I think gives it that undercurrent of actual surrealism, is that a lot of the cast is depicted as varying degrees of eccentric, not the least of which being Agent Cooper himself, and it’s played with absolute sincerity. There’s no sense of irony in the show. With the exception of Deputy Andy, nobody is written to be the subject of mockery. It’s only in the back half of the second season, after the reveal of Laura’s killer (and the killer’s own death), and Lynch checks out of the series for a while, where the series starts actively playing characters for comedy, and that sense of sincerity is lost – what I referred to in the Nadia review as The Long Dark Coffee-Break of the Soul.
Probably the sole exception to this, in a place where sincerity is kept, but the story otherwise drags is the plotline involving the character of James (played by James Marshall), after he leaves town following a second murder and ultimately the death of Laura’s killer, where he pops into basically a small wanna-be neo-noir plot (complete with a femme fatale). Some of this falls on limitations of Marshall as an actor at this point in his career. Some of this also very much falls on the scripts and arguably Lynch’s lack of involvement. It feels like there’s an interesting idea here (like the writers and directors are trying to take a cue some of Lynch’s other work – specifically Blue Velvet), but nobody involved could quite figure out how to stick the landing with that particular plot, and Lynch wasn’t available or wasn’t interested in providing guidance.
That said, there is stuff in that weak area of the series that forwards the larger plot, and which all pays off at the end of the series, when Lynch gets back involved, and provides a cliffhanger which, very unintentionally, ended up not getting resolved for 25 years (which also unintentionally fits with some dialog from that episode). It makes for a series that feels tremendously uneven, with some astronomically high highs, some very dire lows, but with points in the middle that are generally above average. It’s enough for me to recommend the show, but not without caveats. I’m tremendously glad I watched this series, and at some point I might even watch it again, but it’s not something where I necessarily wish I’d gotten to this show earlier either.
Twin Peaks is available for streaming on Paramount Plus, and there’s a really nice boxed set on Amazon (Affiliate Link).
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