Wrapped in Plastic

Space Time Visualiser: 10th June 1991

Today the Space Time Visualiser looks back twenty years, to the final broadcast of David Lynch’s masterpiece, Twin Peaks.

The title sequence of Twin Peaks gives scant indication of events to follow, yet sets the style of the series perfectly. The slow rise and fall of the sawmill’s machinery, the stillness of a bird in the Douglas Firs, the majestic flow of Snoqualmie Falls: we’re in small-town Washington, near the Canadian border. Twin Peaks, population 51,201. This peaceful picture-perfect postcard town hides secrets…

“She’s dead… wrapped in plastic…”

At the heart of Twin Peaks is the murder of local homecoming queen Laura Palmer. In many ways, that is its success: and also its downfall. People like mysteries, and keeping the identity of her killer a secret for so long entwines people into the series: they want to work it out for themselves. It’s a genuine mystery, too: all the clues are there – letters hidden under fingernails, a one-armed man selling shoes, “Sometimes my arms bend back”, Bob, two similar attacks on young women -- strange as they are, and they do make sense and are resolved.

Laura’s murder is in essence merely a catalyst in Twin Peaks, the key that opens up the town and finds that it really isn’t as perfect as the titles suggest. Laura, the ideal, blonde, popular teenager, was mixed up in some serious vices -- drugs, prostitution -- and so are a lot of the other characters. The series, like much of David Lynch’s work, revolves around the dirtier side of life hidden beneath small-town respectability. The residents of the town engage in affairs, dodgy business deals, running brothels, ordering murders, arson, drug-running, wife-beating (“Leo needs a new pair of shoes…”), and in one case successfully hiding their own insanity. It takes the introduction of brilliantly clean livin’ FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to gradually uncover their intricate backgrounds and secrets. It seems at times that everybody in Twin Peaks has some intimate hold over everybody else.

Only a pilot, two series, and later a film, of Twin Peaks were made. Each episode takes place (more or less) over the course of a day, following the investigation into Laura’s murder. The pilot and first series are widely regarded as masterpieces. The second series starts off along similar lines, but takes a turn for the worse halfway through. It was a longer season – 22 episodes to the first season’s seven (plus the pilot), and network pressure to reveal the identity of Laura’s killer earlier than planned was, as Lynch has admitted, something he should have resisted. Once the killer is revealed (I’m not going to spoil it here), the series has nowhere left to go.

“There was a fish… in the percolator!”

Yet it’s the oddness which remains, long in the memory. The Log Lady, Nadine’s desperate attempts to create silent drape runners (“cotton balls!”), a talking bird that witnesses a murder, Lynch himself turning up as Cooper’s FBI boss with a hearing aid and a shouting voice (“COOPER, YOU REMIND ME TODAY OF A SMALL MEXICAN CHIHUAHUA!”); and most notably, the red room, with the backward-talking dwarf, The Man from Another Place (Michael J Anderson). Twin Peaks survives largely on its visuals and memorable scenes, from Audrey tying a cherry stalk into a knot with her tongue to get a job in a whorehouse, or Cooper throwing rocks at bottles to determine who killed Laura. Just when you think it can’t get any odder, David Warner turns up. There’s also an odd sense of the past in Twin Peaks. The town itself is slightly outdated in the way that small towns in the country can be – one of the main sets is the 50s-style diner -- and the effect is enhanced by the use of actors known for their work in that decade, such as Piper Laurie, Richard Beymer, and Russ Tamblyn.

The later episodes feel like they’re trying too hard to be quirky. An accident causes Nadine to lose her memory, and she believes herself to be high-school age again. She goes back to school with a new-found superhuman strength. James leaves town on his motorbike, and spends three episodes in a dull subplot about a middle-aged woman threatening to leave her husband. Cooper’s insane former partner, Windom Earle, arrives in Twin Peaks, searching for the Black Lodge, part of the other world that The Man from Another Place comes from. There are moments of the old Twin Peaks -- one actor spends much of the second season in a vegetative state, yet still steals every scene he’s in – but generally lack of attention from Lynch, as he went off to make Wild at Heart, suffocates the programme.

Music is a vital part of the series, and often the same songs play both diagetically and incidentally. The core of this is Lynch’s regular collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti employs an eerie sort of fugue to the score, with repeating, echoing melodies signifying dark forests, coupled with dream-like 50s rock ‘n’ roll melody; and it’s brilliant. The vocal parts of the score are performed by dream-pop singer Julee Cruise, whose first two albums were written by Badalementi and Lynch and feature many of the songs in the series and film. In particular, the album Floating Into the Night is a masterwork, and the song Falling became the most successful dream-pop song ever recorded. Due to this key triumvirate of Lynch / Badalementi / Cruise, Twin Peaks sounds like nothing else on Earth, and the sound of the series is one of the reasons it’s so successful and familiar. The music takes you to another place.

At its core, Twin Peaks is a show about characters. Even relatively minor roles are fleshed out with good characterisation, like Lucy Moran: “Sheriff, it’s Pete Martell up at the mill. I’m gonna transfer it to the phone on the table by the red chair, the red chair against the wall. The little table, with the lamp on it -- the lamp that we moved from the corner. The BLACK phone, not the brown phone.”

Oh, and then there’s Albert:

“Well I’ve had enough of morons and half-wits, dolts, dunces, dullards and dumb-bells, and you chowderhead yokel, you blithering hayseed, you’ve had enough of me?”

But what’s most notable is that when the series ends, the most well-characterised person in the town is Laura herself, despite her being dead before the first episode begins. The revelation after her murder that the series proved all along to have been about child abuse is significant, and surely one of the reasons the subsequent film was made: the nature of the central mystery of the series meant this vital dramatic element of the programme couldn’t be fully explored until it was too late.

Fire Walk With Me, the prequel / sequel film, suffers from only having Kyle MacLachlan for five days’ shooting and losing other cast members to indifference or fear or typecasting. The worst is the recasting of Donna, in many ways the key female part of the series, with a new actress. It just doesn’t work. That said, the film does get better as it goes on, and we get closer to events in the series and the tone becomes more recognisable. We get some new music, including Julee Cruise’s best track, Questions in a World of Blue, and the gaps in the background of the series are roundly painted in. At the last, we see Laura being abused, murdered, before her terrible, sad life is redeemed by an angel. A fitting end.

What remains is hot coffee (‘black as midnight on a moonless night’), traffic lights, the smell of pine, and the best damn cherry pie in the county.

“Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair or two cups of good hot black coffee.”