LOST & FOUND: TWIN PEAKS – EPISODES 1 & 2

Traces to Nowhere & Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer (S1, eps. 1 and 2)

“He made us drunk with the joy of being with him, and of looking into the heaven of his eyes, and of feeling the ecstasy that thrilled along our veins from the touch of his hand.” – Mark Twain, the Mysterious Stranger

Laura: “I just know I’m gonna get lost in those woods again tonight…I just know it.”

As you may have noticed, we’re back at Episode One again. No, you’re not crazy. I unthinkingly labeled last week’s column as “Episode One” because that’s what it is – the first episode. Logical, right? What I’d forgotten is that a majority of “official” sources don’t do this. They list last week’s opener as “The Pilot,” and the next episode as “Episode One.” This makes weird sense given the strange way this show was initially distributed on DVD, but it still feels pretty bassackwards to me. Nevertheless, I’ve asked Chud’s own Eileen The Magnificent to edit last week’s column to reflect this appropriately Lynchian bit of weirdness.

As of this column I’m going to be stepping things up, covering two episodes a week. This’ll get us through the show faster. If you haven’t seen Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer just stop reading once you hit that section and come on back once you’ve watched it. That is, if you folks want to keep going. The time has come to indulge your gladiatorial judgment. Will Twin Peaks live, or will it die once more? Are you enjoying it enough to keep going? If you aren’t, are you nonetheless interested in hearing what I have to say about it? Or are you terminally unimpressed? Would you rather read about another show altogether? Vote “Renew” or “Cancel” in the comments below or in the Lost & Found thread and decide Twin Peaks’ fate. The virtual polls will remain open until Sunday night, at which point I’ll tally the results. Remember: every vote counts. If you’re enjoying the show/the column, it behooves you (I love that word) to vote for it, or it’s gone for good. No second chances here.

Are you writing recaps/observations about these episodes along with me? Shoot me an email and let me know. I’ll be putting together a Master List of L&F participants on Verbosity! and linking to your sites so that others can see your work.

Without further ado…..Let’s rock!

Thoughts on Traces to Nowhere:

• Here’s a marginally-interesting factoid: None of Twin Peaks’ episodes have actual titles. The titles I’m using here, and that you’ll see in use around the internet, originate from German TV. Danke, my German brethren!

• When I promised you that things would start getting weirder on this show, I’d been remembering the next episode, not this one. Traces to Nowhere spends its time continuing to build out the world of Twin Peaks, and laying down clues and red herrings regarding the identity of Laura’s killer. This episode was helmed by Duwayne Dunham, and it serves to immediately highlight how important Lynch’s touch is to the overall power of the show. Much of what feels enjoyably daft in Lynch’s hands comes across as flat when shown through another director’s lens. Dunham does capable work here, but he’s largely missing the Spark Of Madness that makes Lynch’s work so singular and special. With the exception of one brief, chilling moment toward the episode’s end there’s an overall lack of patented Lynchian dread here. That said, it’s still a solid, intriguing installment.

• The episode opens on Cooper, suspended upside down and rattling into his tape recorder to the absent Diane. He dismounts and non sequiturs into asking about Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, and the identity of the triggerman behind JFK’s assassination. At least, it seems like a non sequitur. It’s actually a thematic signpost, and its one that will hang around in the background of the show for the entirety of the series. More on this at the end of the column.

Cooper: “You know…this is, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee.”

• Peaks’ pastry and coffee obsession really comes into full bloom in this episode: donuts, fresh black coffee, and cherry pie that’s to die for. I don’t know about the cherry pie and donuts, but coffee is a certifiable obsession for Lynch, who actually markets and sells his own “Signature Cup” coffee. One horrible baby-thing in each and every bag of beans!

….well, no. Not really. Damn fine coffee, though.

• Cooper and Audrey (whose hair has miraculously sprouted overnight) have an immediate rapport, and there’s a clear flirtation happening here. That’s kind of…creepy, seeing as she’s in high school, and he’s a federal agent. Then again, she’s Sherilyn Fenn. So there’s that.

• There are a number of elements in this episode that have a strongly dreamlike quality to them, like the entire Sherriff’s Department stuffing their faces with donuts, mumbling or silent while Cooper rattles on like he’s had 20 cups of that damn fine coffee.

• Laura’s death is attributed to loss of blood. Her wounds include bite marks – another animalistic detail glaring up at us. We also learn that she’d had sex with “at least” three men in the space of twelve hours, all of this implying some incredibly grisly things about the oblique events inside that train car.

• Leo Johnson, aka “Mr. One-Note Abusive Boyfriend Guy,” has some serious suspicion thrown his way in this episode. Dunham cuts from Hayward’s searching question, “who would do a thing like that,” directly over to the “Big Pussycat” decal on the door of Leo’s truck. We also get a bloodied shirt which Shelly, enterprising Nancy Drew that she apparently is, hides away when she discovers it. Leo may only have one note in his repertoire, but the guy plays that note pretty effectively.

Laura: “James, guess why I’m so happy today.”
James: “Because your skin is so soft and you smell so good?”

• The James/Laura flashback is hella cheesy (again highlighting the Soap Opera aspects of the show – something that operated, in part, as a commentary on other popular soaps of that era like Falcon Crest and Dallas), but Cooper’s interrogation of James highlights again for us the increasing sense that Laura’s life was spiraling out of control before she died. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the show at this point lies in how we see Laura defined by the people who knew her, and how each person seemed to see her slightly differently. In death, as well as in life, Laura Palmer is/was a mirror of sorts, reflecting back what people wanted to see. It’s not until Fire Walk With Me, the film that acts as a prequel to this story, that we actually spend time with Laura as a person, and not as a kind of human MacGuffin. Whereas this might be a detriment in the hands of lesser creative types, Laura’s essential reflectiveness serves Lynch and Frost’s preoccupations remarkably well.

• Back with Bobby and his buddy in prison we learn that Bobby owes Leo 10 grand, and that it’s the 10 grand that Cooper and Truman confiscated from Laura’s safety deposit box in the Pilot. Factor in the fact that Leo makes regular trips across the border into Canada and the Cocaine residue found in Laura’s diary, and you have the outlines of a fairly straightforward drug trade taking place in and around Twin Peaks.

Voice: “Help me.”

• Shivers.

Between scenes we cut back to the video of Laura and Donna frolicking weirdly together. This time, as Laura’s face fills the screen, an eerie voice asks for help. Is that Laura’s voice? It sure doesn’t sound like it. Are we meant to take this strange aural intruder as literal reality? Or is this simply an odd, surrealist/symbolic touch? It’s impossible to tell. You may ask: Either way, how can Cooper help Laura now? She’s dead, after all. That’s a good question, I say. A very good question. You keep that question firmly in mind, y’hear?

Lucy: “It has that open air sound, you know, where it sounds like wind blowing, like wind blowing through trees.”

• When Lynch and Frost first sold ABC on the idea of Twin Peaks they used the visual of wind blowing through the trees to try and summarize the essential atmosphere of their proposed show. I quite like the image of David Lynch standing in a polished-and-posh boardroom somewhere, making wind noises and waggling his fingers in front of bewildered, besuited Men of Business.

• Albert Rosenfeld gets his first mention in this episode. I cannot wait until he arrives. Neither can you. Trust me.

Nadine: “Cotton balls! By God – those things’ll be quiet now!”

• WTF?

• James gets released from police custody, and tells his Uncle Ed that he’s going to “need a hand from the Bookhouse Boys.” That weirdly-named group will be coming up again soon, and they’ll be helping to usher in some vague-but-very-intriguing history for all of us. You think you understand this town? This mystery? You’ve only scratched the surface.

Truman: “I think I’m gonna start studying medicine.”
Cooper: “Why’s that?”
Truman: “’Cause I’m beginning to feel a bit like Doctor Watson.”

• Hahaha…ZING! The line’s a little lame, but I appreciate that they’re linking Cooper and Truman with Holmes and Watson. The comparison is apt. Cooper and Truman serve as Funhouse mirrors for those two classic literary characters. Where Holmes used logical deduction and hard evidence alone, Cooper employs far more…eccentric techniques. Then again, Holmes was an undeniable “eccentric” to his contemporaries. The Holmes comparison is reinforced bluntly for us when Josie Packard is questioned and Cooper is able to effortlessly deduce the romantic link between Josie and Truman.

• Do you know what this show needs? More secretive sexual shenanigans. There isn’t nearly enough of this. I mean, only Bobby and Shelly and Ed and Norma and Laura and James and James and Donna and Josie and Truman are carrying on quiet affairs. What about the other 3 people in the town? Luckily, Ben Horne and Catherine Martell are also indulging in illicit snugglebunnies. And plotting to set fire to the Packard sawmill. And really creeping me out with the whole toe-kissing thing. Stop it, Horne. This whole scene is something that could literally have been plucked from Falcon Crest. It’s not even particularly exaggerated, as is the case with most of the soapier elements on the show.

Sarah Palmer: “I miss her so much…I miss her so much…I miss her so much…”

• So you know: This was an era before Computer Generated Imagery – an era reliant on in-camera trickery and practical effects to achieve what would now be rendered via CGI. The resulting effect here is undeniably cheesy, but it’s also curiously effective.

• The sudden appearance of Laura’s face, superimposed over Donna’s features, raises the question for the audience of whether Sarah Palmer might be going crazy in the wake of her daughter’s death. This kind of projection is, to my understanding, somewhat “normal” in that grieving parents sometimes befriend the friends of their lost children as a way to deal with their pain, but the effect is no less creepy/unsettling for that. I like that there’s a sense of uncertainty to the proceedings here. There are hints of something almost paranormal in this scene, but those hints are so jumbled up with Mrs. Palmer’s raw grief that they become entirely uncertain. Her repeated words (“I miss her so much”) take on the quality of an incantation, and the direction in this scene furthers that impression. There’s, again, a kind of ritualistic feeling to this, and so its entirely appropriate that it leads directly to what is, without a doubt, one of the more unsettling moments I’ve experienced with a television show.

…namely, this: the sudden and utterly inexplicable appearance of a man we’ve not met, crouched behind the bars of a bed (a bed that’s not even in the same room that Donna and Sarah are currently inhabiting and a location that has seriously disquieting implications on a number of levels, levels that we’ll discuss as we go deeper into these woods) staring directly into the camera, directly into Mrs. Palmer’s eyes, directly into OUR eyes, without explanation or reason.

It’s the music at this moment – a droning, Eastern-sounding, holy/unholy noise – that rockets this surreal touch from weird/creepy to terrifying. I’m not afraid to admit to you all that this scene made me shout out loud in fear when I first saw it as a teen, nor that it made me jump again, just as effectively, when I watched it this week. There’s no real reason for this kind of fright. I mean, it’s a guy in a jean jacket crouched by a bed. What’s so bad about that, right? And yet, it IS bad; it’s horrifying in some unspeakable way. The nightmare logic of the moment (why is there a bed there now? Who is this guy? What is that music???) just works on me, and I don’t know why. As I’d warned you initially: it won’t happen for all of you, but for some of you Twin Peaks is going to crawl under your skin and slither there. It’s gonna creep you out. And this, right here, is a primo example of that in action. If you were paying close attention during the Pilot then you’ve seen this figure once before – reflected in the mirror at episode’s end as Sarah Palmer screams in fright (you can see this moment in the final screencap from last week’s column). This man, who we’ll be formally introduced to in the next episode, personifies the spiritual black hole that is gradually revealing itself in this town. I’ll talk much more about him, and about what this “means” further down in the column.

• The one-armed man that we glimpsed briefly in the pilot returns here for another spooky cameo. A one-armed man on a show with a murder mystery at its heart? Nah….that can’t be significant at all. Twin Peaks initially intended to keep the question of who killed Laura Palmer unanswered throughout the show, branching off into other aspects of the town and of life inside it, just as the classic (read: old) program The Fugitive centered on a series-long mystery involving the One Armed Man responsible for Dr. Richard Kimball’s status on the show. Lynch intended this as homage to a show he’d admired, and we’ll see that this is explicitly-meant when we learn the man’s name.

• I loved that when Ben Horne walks in on Audrey at the Great Northern she’s just standing there, grooving to the trippy bass lines of Badalamenti’s score, and that we see Horne go to the radio and shut the music off – again implying that the teenagers in Twin Peaks all listen to avant-garde freakout jazz for their kooky dance parties.

• This is some soapy stuff, yeah? Donna’s confession to her mother, and Ben Horne’s confrontation with Audrey, manage to have both the overwrought language of my grandmother’s ‘stories’ and their awkward sense of timing, acting-wise. It can sometimes be difficult to tell whether the awkwardness is calculated. Are Lynch, Frost and the cast commenting on soap operas at this point? Or are they unabashedly making one without irony? The answer is “both.”

That soapy lens we’re looking through to watch these characters already feels as if it’s disintegrating. The discovery of Laura’s body, while rife with overwrought moments from pretty much every cast member, was still shot through with an almost voyeuristic naturalism. Andy’s crying at the scene, and Laura’s parents’ total breakdowns, were uncomfortable in their immediacy as much as they were giggle-worthy in OTT intensity. Subsequent violence (the woman in her nightgown walking, shivering, down the tracks, and Shelly’s fetal pleading) only augmented that sense of peeking in on something terrible. It’s as though the show is attempting to push through the melodrama – pushing it to see how far it’ll stretch ‘til it breaks – in search of something rawer and more visceral. There’s nothing ‘classy’ about that acting. It doesn’t have the refined, painterly quality of Oscar-worthy weep-fests, and it doesn’t remain in the realm of over-the-top B-movie chest beating. It goes past that point, and ends up horrifically close to actual emotional agony.

• Major Briggs’ speech to Bobby is both pitiable in its emotional distance and warmly admirable in its openness. I love that Briggs is so understanding in his words, but that his professionalism gives them an airless, pokey/hokey quality. It underlines very well the gulf that opens between parents and their children as they both age, and it does so in a way that feels at once organic and off-center.

Cooper: “Can I ask her about her log?”
Truman: “Many have.”

• How are you feeling about the Log Lady? Is she too whacktastic for you? She’s so peripheral to these episodes, and so strikingly, specifically strange, that she remains on the good side of quirky for me as a viewer. The dreamlike quality of the show gets heightened again when she enters the scene and gives Cooper his first chance to speak with her log – this quality is one I’ll discuss at length at the end of the column.

• Leo, while younger than remembered, is also more brutal than remembered. When he slips the soap into the sock at the sink (hooray for alliteration!) it’s a moment that, nowadays, might be cut away from immediately. Not in Twin Peaks. We get to watch the wind up, the cowering of Shelly in the corner…..and that THWAP sound right after the screen goes black feels a lot like Lynch giving me the finger. It’s rightly sickening.

• Let’s discuss violence against women. So far, we have a murdered prom queen, a second, mentally and physically violated female victim, a classic domestic abuse case of a housewife, a threatened daughter….and we’re just finished with ep. 1. I’m familiar with Lynch’s fondness for putting women in horrible situations but this aspect of his M.O. feel extra-highlighted to me in this show. Is Lynch using femininity destroyed/degraded as a way of commenting on the corruption that seems to be a grand theme of the show? Is he engaging in a long, inglorious tradition of women-in-peril for more mundane reasons? Because it suits the story?

• We hear/see Laura twice in this episode: Once, as James is remembering how he got his half of the locket, and once at the end of the episode, where Hawaii Doc listens to creepily-private sounding tapes of Laura talking to him, and where its revealed that somehow, he’s got a half of the heart necklace (in a coconut, no less). Does this mean he was following and watching Donna and James in the Pilot episode? Dramatically speaking, Laura’s first appearance, which is visual as well as auditory, serves to shore up our impression of Laura as a slightly-off, sweet girl. There’s again a seriously soapish quality to the moment between her and James, but that quality is undercut by a strange flatness in her eyes. Her second appearance, in which we hear but do not see her, is more revealing – as if by stripping away her image, we’re getting closer to the truth of what she is/was. We hear that she loves James’ sweetness, but that he’s so very dull – and that she knows ‘she’ll get lost in those woods again tonight.” It’s a sad, eerie moment. Self-destructive people often seem to be aware of both their capacity for self-harm, and their inability to do anything about it. The woods on this show are as much figurative as they are literal.

• Jacoby’s office is awash with Hawaiiana – he seems as obsessed with the Tropics as Cooper is with damn fine coffee. This isn’t just some meaningless quirk as far as I’m concerned. For one, the character was reportedly inspired by Terrence McKenna, also a nut for Hawaii. For another, Keith Phipps astutely noted in his recaps for this show that Jacoby’s passion for the Islands is reflective of Cooper’s passion for Twin Peaks – both are “far off lands” exotic to those who’ve never visited. Both are Utopias of different sorts, when viewed as concepts and not as reality. Both offer the promise of a new life, a different life, where your cares and worries can be swept away by a slice of cherry pie or the sounds of the ocean.

ZEN OUT, AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!