Why, hey all. I’ve been neglecting this dusty corner of the interwebs, I really hope some of my followers aren’t too angry that I haven’t posted any awesomely insightful thoughts on the state of horror lately. Last week found me picking up the newest Rue Morgue magazine which featured a Twin Peaks retrospective. Let’s see… Eraserhead, Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire. I’ve seen all of those, but somehow have completely neglected the saga of Twin Peaks. This is a show that’s been at the edges of my consciousness, but never fully explored. I knew there was a red room of dreams. I knew there was a dancing dwarf and a giant in this room that talked backwards. This was all second hand information to me. As I began the marathon, I was immediately hooked. The series pilot was directed as a movie, with a nice thorough explanation of everybody in town. A teenage beauty queen is found rapped in plastic, cuts all over her body, left in the woods to rot. Sheriff Harry S Truman finds her and soon a full scale investigation is launched that finds FBI agent Dale Cooper arriving in town. Ever the optimist, Cooper as played by Kyle Maclachlan is at moments awkward and hilarious.
Scenes with vaguely dreamlike qualities start to sneak into the nice, 50’s-esque town of Twin Peaks with the coroner finding letters deeply embedded in Laura’s fingers. It’s kinda painful to watch those tweezers sink into the flesh. To get into the quirky characters would be quite a long blog post, but I will highlight a few things. Lynch has a way of channeling a weird kind of energy to his shots, and as we delve deeper into the Laura Palmer mystery, we find she was involved in the sex trade and tons of cocaine. And also, delivering Meals on Wheels to the elderly and the shut ins. The series moves ever more swiftly into truly strange territory, as the character’s lives all intersect in strange and scandalous ways. Personally, I wish that the Log Lady was real so that i could consult her as an Oracle.
At the conclusion of Season 1, it’s revealed that there is an evil entity named Bob who lives in the woods. As wind blows through Sycamore trees, things begin to get strange. Cooper begins to get prophetic visions, telling him cryptic hints to the Laura Palmer puzzle. In a truly horrifying scene, it turns out that Laura’s father Leland Palmer is the culprit. He was possessed by Bob the whole time, being used as a conduit for pure evil. Leland becomes possessed again and brutally beats Laura’s cousin, who looks exactly like her, only with black hair. It’s a shocking act of violence. The last shot of the season is Bob causing the sprinklers to go off in the jail where Leland is being held, and the water looks like a scene in the rain as Leland slowly dies, his eyes filled with tears, remembering Laura and dying with a black mark on his soul. It’s incredibly emotional. No other director could conjure up a vision like that.
Season 2 is widely criticized as being dumb. I don’t really like to blaspheme against Lynch like that, but I can see where people are coming from. After the Palmer murder is solved, a character named Windom Earle enters the scene. Cooper’s former FBI partner, Earle is batshit crazy and obsessed with a place called the Black Lodge. Years ago, Cooper was in love with Earle’s wife Caroline. According to the story, Caroline died in Cooper’s arms. The emotional scars of that never quite go away. Earle is a little bit of a wacky guy, and he basically makes this guy named Leo into his personal Frankenstein’s Monster using electroshock and other forms of psychological manipulation. He wire taps Sheriff Truman’s office using a bonzai tree and in a hilarious cameo, David Lynch appears as a deaf FBI agent and screams into the Bonzai tree, and Earle takes off the headphones quickly from the loudness of Lynch’s voice. Earle’s the kind of guy who revels in his own diabolical nature, and loves to dress up in different costumes to stalk the girls of Twin Peaks.
The series ends abruptly. Agent Cooper makes his way into the Black Lodge. He encounters pure nightmare fuel in this place. I’ll leave it at that. It truly chilled me to the bone. If you’re a Lynch fan who never dedicated your time to this series, I highly recommend it. Although, to be fair, it is a frustratingly incomplete work of art. The series ends on a cliffhanger, and it never got a third season. CBS or whatever ultimately lost interest. But what a beautifully flawed piece of art it is.
It's a Gory World Out There! 