LOST & FOUND: TWIN PEAKS – SEASON 1 PILOT EPISODE

• Also introduced at the Great Northern is Leland Palmer, Ben Horne’s Attorney and Laura’s father. He’s played by the estimable Ray Wise, who makes magic out of the scene where he discovers that Laura’s been killed. The image of a police car pulling in silently behind him as he talks to his wife, reassuring her about Laura, is genuinely haunting and his emotional response to the news of his daughter’s death, the way he drops the phone and leaves his wife screaming in denial, is so raw it hurts. Mrs. Palmer’s cries are, again, near-primal. Almost animal. And that quality is something that’s reflected and emphasized throughout this show.

• I love that Bobby’s quasi-“rebellious” song choice in the RR Cafe is part calliope and part choir. The kids in Twin Peaks aren’t big on Top 40. They seem to be privy to a whole world of kooky acid-jazz manufactured solely for them.

• Lara Flynn Boyle had a personality? And warmth? Why didn’t anyone tell me? The Lara Flynn Boyle I know is a cold mannequin of a woman, prone to ice queen roles and (probably) eating the hearts of children to stay young. THIS Lara Flynn Boyle is charming, low key, and warmly welcome. What happened? And when?

• I’m a big fan of Bobby’s walk-shuffle into the Principle’s office.

• (Principle Wolchezk is played by dependable character actor Troy Evans, who you might remember from The Frighteners, or Demolition Man, or Ace Ventura)

• Sherriff Harry S. Truman represents the kind of bedrock decency that America loves to mythologize in its small towns. It seems to me that much of Peaks is “about” the Utopian ideal that America projects upon itself versus the grimier reality of life in American small towns. It’s “about” the clash between a dream and a nightmare. I put the word “about” in quotes, because I don’t think Lynch approaches things that intellectually at all in his work, and because the show is “about” other things as well. But despite the fact that this kind of stuff may not be intentional on the intellectual level, it’s nonetheless there, and well worth identifying and talking about.

• Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States, and was the President during Lynch’s boyhood (Lynch was born in 1946, Truman served as President until ’53). He was, by some accounts, “a folksy, unassuming President” in his demeanor, not dissimilar in his down-home phrases (“If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen”) from Lynch himself. Both Cooper and Truman have something of that same homespun outlook, though Cooper’s is projected through an oddball G-man lens.

• One of the more interesting aspects of this show lies in the hypocrisy of the majority of its characters. When Bobby tells Sherriff Truman that he loved Laura he may be telling the truth, but he’s also a hypocrite. He is, after all, deeply involved with Shelly (the RR Café waitress).

Mrs. Palmer: “Who’s upstairs?!”

• Maybe it’s just me, but Grace Zabriskie’s performance as Laura’s mother in this episode is genuinely disturbing throughout. When she asks the question above, it’s with a blind, rising panic that brings that patented sense of Lynchian dread front and center again. It’s as though, throughout the episode, she is sensing/feeling/intuiting something in the air that is greater/darker/scarier than any of them.

And the kicker is…she’s right.

• The struggle for control of the fate of the Packard Mill – introduced here as a battle of will between Catherine Martell and Josie Packard – is the least-interesting 1st Season subplot for me as a viewer. But even in this show’s less showy hills, there’s gold to be found. Catherine firing one of the Mill’s workers for existing in her general vicinity while she’s pissed off is a fun moment.

• The appearance of a beaten, near-feral-seeming Ronette Pulaski has lost none of its impact since it aired, although the Television landscape has changed considerably since people first got a look at the rope binding Pulaski’s bloody wrists. When Peaks first aired, the matter-of-fact violence of this scene was a genuine shock to the system.

• I don’t particularly care about James, the “troubled bad boy with a heart of gold and a jacket of leather (and also one terrifically-of-its-time Mullet).” He never made much of an impression on me, and while I appreciate his genuine baby-faced innocence (surely a huge factor in Lynch’s having cast him) he’s typically the least interesting male character on the show to me. When he pops up and acts against someone interesting (as he’ll do at the end of the episode), or when something interesting happens to him, I’ll talk about him. Otherwise? Notsomuch.

And this is a good place in general to emphasize that this show has a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own stories and secrets and motivations and quirks. This is one of the ways in which Peaks resembles the Soap Operas it both satirizes and celebrates.

• We’re introduced to Ed, owner of the local gas station, and Nadine, his Mad Pirate wife. Nadine’s drapes obsession is one of my favorite WTF touches in these early episodes. I mean…WTF?

• Special Agent Dale Cooper, timeless Man of Cool, enters Twin Peaks.

When I revisited the show last year I wrote that Cooper comes across to me as a kind of Hardboiled Optimist. He can be disarmingly goofy and he’s a man with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of goodwill but he’s also disarmingly tough, straightlaced; G man meets gee whiz. Cooper’s complications and quirks make him, as mentioned, my favorite Televisual character. He amuses me, interests me, and frankly, kinda inspires me. There’s something deeply admirable to me about his oddball enthusiasm and the way it seems to fuel his deadly-earnest commitment to ideals of justice, goodness, the open heart.

Blah. Blahblahblah. You get the idea.

• Dr. Lawrence Jacoby pops up to talk with Cooper and Truman at the hospital, and succeeds at making himself seem super-creepy. Have you noticed that as he’s talking to them he’s also conspicuously fingering his tie in such a way as if to look like he’s….well…touching the Hula Girl lasciviously in her special naughty place? No? Just me? Well, its true. He is. See above. And that’s the kind of bizarre and subtly-obscene detail that hints at the seedy, rotten side of Twin Peaks, a side that comes further to the fore in this episode.

• This is just gross. Cooper locates the letter “R” shoved under Laura’s fingernail, a detail that will eventually make sense. I think.

• The attendant on duty during Cooper’s examination of Laura’s body tells them that he thinks there’s something wrong with the transformer, making the lights in the morgue flicker like strobes. It’s a funny, weird detail and it adds to the overall spookiness, but this is also a detail that’s worth remembering.

• Having visited and spoken with Laura’s parents, Cooper and Truman proceed to look through some of Laura’s personal effects. Among them is her newest diary (I think Cooper says its got 18 days’ worth of writing in it), which contains a safety deposit key that’s taped to one of the pages in a clear plastic baggie – a baggie with Cocaine residue inside. It’s the first hint that Laura’s fate might be more complicated than it seems. The next bit of small, seedy evidence that implicates Twin Peaks as also being more complicated than it seems, to Cooper, to its residents, to us.

Great Cooper Line: “Diane, I’m holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.”

Andy: “Tell Harry I didn’t cry.”

• Deputy Andy’s habit of crying at murder scenes plays, at first (at least to me), as a kind of jet-black comedy. That’s not to say that he’s not genuinely weeping, or that the scene becomes comic, it’s just to say that it’s weird and uncomfortable and inspires a kind of nervous laughter in me. But as the police find the location where Laura and Ronette were tortured/raped, Andy’s tears suddenly don’t seem even remotely comic, even in the nervous uncomfortable way. It’s moving. Andy, who seems like a sweet, gentle soul, has stared Evil’s handiwork deep in the face, and it’s shaken him. It’s very easy to feel for him in that moment. For all its secrets, its sins and eccentricities, Twin Peaks is still a small town with certain innate ideas, collectively speaking, about itself and what it represents. Those idea(l)s are embodied in characters like Deputy Andy, the sorta fella you imagine would walk an old woman home on his way to pick some flowers ‘fer his sweetheart. And those idea(l)s are shaken, the embodiments of those idea(l)s are shaken, by the perversity and opaque violence of the abandoned train car.

Cooper: “Bobby, here’s how this works: we ask the questions, and you answer the questions that we ask – briefly, and to the point.”

• Here we get our first real indication of how Dale Cooper deals with his suspects. The cordiality is there, but its founded on a curious steel. Cooper’s friendly, but he’s a no-bullsh*t-on-my-shift hardass when he wants to be. Again, that’s a fascinating combination to me. He treats Bobby with a firm hand, but is always polite, always upbeat, and yet he ends their interrogation by telling Bobby, in a surprisingly mocking tone of voice, that “you didn’t love her anyway.”

• Voyeurism is one of those running themes in Lynch’s work – Jeffrey’s peeping tom act in Blue Velvet, the mysterious videotapes of Lost Highway, and in this instance, the act beginning to sift through the memories and effects of the dead.

ONE MORE PAGE BREAK? DAMN FINE!