Northwest Passage  (S1, Pilot)

Cooper: “Diane, I’ve just opened Laura Palmer’s diary. This is the last entry, dated February 23rd.”

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.” – Baltasar Gracian

When Twin Peaks first appeared back in the Ancient Year Of 1990 it became an instantaneous cultural phenomenon. If you were alive, sentient, and within range of a water cooler/school locker, then the question of “Who killed Laura Palmer” was, for a brief moment in time, largely inescapable. David Lynch graced the cover of Time magazine. Kyle MacLachlan hosted Saturday Night Live for the first and last time in his career (and those of you who rent/buy the Gold Box containing all of the episodes will also get a skit from that show featuring a very, very funny Phil Hartman as Leland Palmer). T-shirts bearing Laura Palmer’s face/”Who killed Laura Palmer?”/Agent Dale Cooper sold like hotcakes. There were several spin-off books, including The Autobiography of Agent Dale Cooper: My Life and Tapes, and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. The show was critically-acclaimed almost across-the-board, leading to cover stories like this one:

None of this was business as usual.

Twin Peaks entered a Primetime Network landscape that had carefully, rigorously defined audience expectation over decades and proceeded to gleefully, chaotically subvert and destroy those expectations; Long-standing television conventions were twisted, changed, made unfamiliar and strange. No one had ever seen anything quite like it, and no one’s seen anything like it since, although it’s served to inspire a host of subsequent creative types in all areas of the arts, from Television to film to Black Metal, and on and on anon. Oddball/cult/genre shows sprouted in its wake, with shows like The X-Files, Northern Exposure, Carnivale, and Lost (to name just a few) all carrying obvious indebtedness to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s weirdo-epic. Some of what Twin Peaks does, stylistically and narratively and etc., has become increasingly common in the time since then – enough so that it might be hard for some of you to fully appreciate just how singular and bizarre the show seemed when held up against its competition and the arguable entirety of past Network programming. But once we get a little deeper into the series (like, say, the next episode) you’re going to realize that this is still, 20-plus years later, the strangest Network show you’ve ever seen.

Twin Peaks is both parody and melodrama, wielding a potent combination of wry irony and bone-deep sincerity that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely successful. This strange mixture of eccentricity and normalcy, of artificial-seeming behavior and raw, real emotion, of quirky character piece and horror show defines Twin Peaks from the start and helps mark it out as a singular creation. This is a place where florid clichés and uncomfortably-organic passions, sincerity and irony, kindness and violence abide so closely together that it becomes difficult to identify where one ends and the other begins. Which is, I think, very much a point (though not the point).

Enough with the rambling introduction. If this is your first time among the wind-tossed Douglas Firs, welcome. If you’re returning to this town for another trip on Lynch’s Scary-Go-‘Round, welcome to you as well. We’re going to have a lot of fun exploring this weird world together. As was the case in the Lost columns, I’m sure I’ve missed things here that you think are important/interesting. I invite you to point this stuff out in the comments and to share your thoughts on the episode. I ask you to please keep spoilers to yourself, both in the comments, and in the Lost & Found thread. If you know what’s coming don’t ruin it for those that don’t. If you want to talk about that stuff you’re invited to create a Message Board thread and discuss them there. I’ll hint at future events in these columns from time to time, and I’ll discuss general themes in ways that will hopefully help to shade future episodes more finely, but I won’t be giving anything away on a character or narrative level.

Thoughts:

• The show’s quietly winding opening credits set the tone for us straightaway – composer Angelo Badalamenti’s main theme flows along with a kind of aching, shadowy beauty and the long, static shots of a Mill’s machinery at work are vintage Lynch. The whole thing, including the amazingly-long list of actors that strobes past us, serves as a kind of overture – a scene-setting that functions for me the way that, say, Lawrence of Arabia’s overture served David Lean’s intention to dip his audience into an immersive, lengthy experience. It’s difficult to imagine a Network giving the thumbs-up to this kind of lugubrious/languid sequence in this day and age. Lost’s entire “opening credits” consisted of them shoving the title at you as if contractually-obligated to do so. Much as I appreciate the whiff of nostalgia that these credits invoke I’ll probably be FFing through them from this point on.

• A couple of people have commented that the pilot was slow and/or boring for them – a comment that I think is worth addressing up front, because it’s a subjectively-valid one.

This is a strangely stately show in terms of its overall pace, and it’s definitely of another era in a number of ways. This episode in particular has the feeling of an extended requiem, and that might be off-putting to some of you. Some people can’t watch older films or read older books because the disconnect between the way that people live and speak and make entertainment now, and the way that older entertainment was created/presents the world of its own time, is just too much for them. If you came of age after Twin Peaks aired, you’re used to a much different style of film/TV-making than the one presented in this show, in the same way that I’m used to a different style than my parents were. Then there’s the objective fact that David Lynch is ultimately not a “television guy.” He’s an indie/avant-garde film guy, and his goals and interests as an artist are different than you’re/we’re used to. He’s interested in slowly dipping you into this fictional, off-kilter world in his own way, and at his own pace.

• Twin Peaks is radically obsessed with Twins and twinning, right up to and including its titular mountains (hidden dirty pun!). People and places and objects and ideas have opposites, doppelgangers, mirrors (Lost fans, we’re clearly not done with mirrors and mirroring). But, where Lost highlighted the themes of twinning/mirroring/Othering in ways intellectual and philosophical and sub/textual, Twin Peaks illustrates those themes in ways emotional and primal and sub/conscious.

• The words “Directed by David Lynch” will remain a reliable indicator of quality in the episodes to come. There are other directors on the show who manage to pull off an impressive approximation of Lynch’s weirdly-singular combination of style and tone, but there’s nothing like getting a hit off of Lynch’s radioactive creativity straight from the source. I don’t believe that there’s a dud among the installments he helmed.

Pete Martell: “She’s dead – wrapped in plastic.”

• The discovery of Laura Palmer’s body sets off a chain reaction of emotion that seems to stretch out to nearly every person in the town. It’s a seismic event, and the show’s pilot is largely dedicated to showing us the immediate fallout. Her death is like dynamite thrown into a lake. The emotional explosion that follows causes the dead, the buried, the hidden to rise up, exposing secrets hidden by a darkly placid surface. It’s interesting to see how the knowledge of Laura’s death seems to pass without word to so many people. Characters like Donna and James don’t need to be told what’s happened to understand, in the larger sense, exactly what has happened. It’s as though this fate was expected on some level, and that’s an aspect that the show will dig deep into over the course of the series, beginning with this episode.

• Laura’s unveiling, and the gruesomely-realistic condition of her body is the sort of thing that’s common nowadays on CSI but by and large, at this point in time, you didn’t see this sort of thing on Television. It’s clear from the start that the Twin Peaks police force is fundamentally unprepared for the level of violence it investigates here.

• (Pete Martell is played by Jack Nance, who also starred in Lynch’s Eraserhead)

• Lynch’s weird mastery of everyday dread first raises its head fully as Laura’s mother walks through her house looking for her daughter. She does nothing more than stroll from room to room, and yet the screen seems to somehow pulse with unease. For me, the scene evokes the same kind of gut-level tension that I usually experience in horror movies in the moments before something unseen jumps out to frighten us. But nothing jumps. Instead, the dread simply remains, somehow summarized and made manifest in the form of a ceiling fan (Lynch has the uncanny ability to invest everyday objects with palpable menace). The fluttering panic that Grace Zabriskie plays in these scenes is horrifyingly real to me.

• Enter Audrey Horne, ethereally essayed by Sherilyn Fenn, who ferried many a young man into puberty when this show premiered. Fenn is unconscionably attractive, although she won’t reach the near-blinding pinnacle of Yowza she’s capable of until the next episode, when her hair miraculously lengthens. David Lynch possesses an unerring ability to cast uncannily beautiful women in his projects – nearly all of the main female characters on this show operate as degrees on the Stunning scale. Madchen Amick especially.

• The Great Northern, a hotel and conference center meant to serve customers of the Packard Saw Mill remains a wonderfully incongruous setting. I’ll talk more about it in future columns.

• Benjamin Horne, Audrey’s father, is introduced to us in the process of selling some “Cheese-eaters” (aka, non-English speaking Norwegians) on what he calls “The Ghostwood Project,” an effort to purchase and develop the Ghostwood forest into a country club. The Ghostwood forest will become increasingly important in the world of Twin Peaks, and the struggle to possess it is arguably waged on multiple levels throughout the show.

• Richard Beymer, who plays Ben Horne, played Tony in the film version of West Side Story. Interestingly, Russ Tamblyn, who played Riff, the leader of the Jets in West Side Story, was cast by Lynch to play the role of psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Jacoby. Lynch loves musicals!

• Want some more weird and useless trivia? Ben and his brother Jerry are named after Ben & Jerry, of Vermont Ice-cream-making fame.

Great, Bizarro Ben Horne Line: “My air sacs have never felt so good!”

GO DEEPER INTO THE WOODS AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!