Welcome to Twin Peaks! Population: 51,201. Oh, sorry, it’s actually population: 5,120.1. How can a town have .1 of a person? That’s just one of the many disturbing mysteries unfolding in this deceptively dangerous tiny town tucked away into the Washington forest. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks has been alternately called one of the greatest TV shows of all time and one of the greatest films ever made, and I’m excited to dig in and finally answer that question and definitively solve the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer.
What’s that? That mystery was solved a long time ago and this show is less a murder mystery than an existential treatise on death, suffering and violence? Shhhh, no spoilers. (Ok, just kidding, there will definitely be spoilers below).
I’m running through the series two episodes at a time, then wrapping things up with the prequel feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. (After I’m done, you can check out Jess Camacho’s excellent 2017 coverage of Lynch/Frost & the gang’s much heralded return to Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return). Here are five thoughts on its opening salvo and its follow-up, “Northwest Passage / Traces to Nowhere.”
1. Angelo Bad-ass-amente
This is a dense show and this article has a lot of ground to cover – the pilot is two hours long, meaning right out of the gate we’re covering 3 hours of content – but I have to sacrifice one of my points here to talk about the show’s stealth MVP: Angelo Badalamente, genius composer. His theme song perfectly sets not just the aesthetic of the show, but also its unconventional, sometimes impenetrable thematic arc. Dreamlike and peaceful, the comfort it evokes also feels sinister, like a great evil is simmering just beneath the surface.
Later in the pilot, the theme gets recontextualized when Julee Cruise performs it in its original form, complete with her haunting voice and actual lyrics, as the song “Falling.” She performs it to a rowdy biker bar, whose patrons all seem unperturbed by the dissonance between her ethereal stylings and their rough-and-tumble goings-on.
This type of musical contrast repeats frequently throughout the first two episodes, as Badalamente’s music cues often jarringly clash with the images on the screen. Carnival music accompanies a teenage girl’s acts of rebellion, eerie strings underscore the townsfolk learning about a brutal murder, and the theme song itself later is repurposed as a love theme. Badalamente leaves us clues that nothing, not even the sound reaching our ears, is quite what it seems in the town of Twin Peaks.
2. The Girl in the Plastic
We start with a basic premise – there’s been a murder in the titular small town where everyone knows everyone, and the murder victim is no exception. Dating one of the high school’s football stars, girl-about-town Laura Palmer is the cypher at the show’s heart, a representation of a quaint, charming ideal of a sleepy town. When the police find Laura washed up on the riverbank and wrapped in plastic, it sends mournful shockwaves through the entire town, shutting down the school and the Packard Saw Mill, the town’s biggest employer.
Everyone doesn’t just know Laura, it turns out – everyone was in love with her, or at least greatly benefitted from her in some way. At first Laura’s connections throughout the town seem wholesome enough. She goes to the Great Northern Inn twice a week to tutor the mentally disabled son of the Horne family, the Inn’s owners. She delivers meals for meals on wheels, tutors the new owner of the local mill in English, and carries on a secret, seemingly loving relationship with a sensitive biker boy. She has secrets, sure, but doesn’t everybody?
The first half hour of the pilot uses Laura’s death to introduce us to an increasingly byzantine web of characters: the diner owner Norma and her waitress Shelly; who is secretly having an affair with Laura’s boyfriend Bobby; while Norma is having an affair Big Ed, the owner of Big Ed’s Gas Farm; who often cares for his nephew James; who is having an affair himself with Laura and spends time with her and her best friend Donna Hayward; whose boyfriend Mike is best friends with Bobby; who has partnered with Mike to do some sort of shady dealings with Leo, Shelly’s abusive husband. That doesn’t even get into the goings on at the Packard Saw Mill, where Andrew Packard’s widow Josie fights for control of the mill with Andrew’s sister Catherine; who schemes to take over the mill with Ben Horne; whose daughter Audrey shares first period with Donna, James, and Laura.
Continued belowIf that seems overwrought, implausible, and difficult to follow, that’s the soap opera energy the show is drawing on tonally – more on that later. When the wheels inevitably fall off the bus and we start to get the sense that there was far more to Laura than meets the eye, it’s not coincidental that charming little town starts to feel corrupted, as well. Laura is the heart of the show, and when her good girl image begins to rot, she takes the whole place down with her.
3. A Damn Fine Cup of Coffee
We don’t meet the show’s protagonist until 35 minutes into the show, and he sure is an odd bird. FBI Agent Dale Cooper drives onto the scene after another victim is found wandering along the train tracks, a now-catatonic girl named Ronette who was in Laura’s class. Cooper is a fascinating person, played with an earnestness and unique joy by Kyle MacLachlan in a performance that defies categorization. Just like the show itself he’s tough to pin down, in one breath musing on the great coffee served at the Great Northern and in the next coldly requesting the details of the autopsy.
He meets up with local Sheriff Harry S. Truman (no relation), who becomes Cooper’s ally and guide through the workings of Twin Peaks. Cooper is a true wild card – he quirkily recites his case notes into a tape recorder for his assistant Diane, then spontaneously muses on who really killed JFK – and his perplexing gaze quickly pierces the town’s veneer of respectability.
He discovers Laura’s safe deposit box, filled with thousands of dollars and a touch of cocaine. His investigation spooks Mike and Bobby, exposing their – and Laura’s – drug dealings with Leo to the audience. He quickly comes across Lawrence Jacoby, Laura’s secret psychiatrist, who implies that Laura was troubled. He’s a good detective with a preternatural nose for facts, multiple times correctly separating truth from lies with perfect accuracy during his interviews of the townsfolk. It will be interesting to see how his investigation evolves over the show, as the town’s gentle facade slips more and more.
4. What Genre is It, Anyways?
Throughout both episodes, the tone and styling of the show is in flux. Just like its characters’ motivations and the nature of the central crime, the show is difficult to pin down. That seems intentional, as many times it slips into genre tropes, only to rapidly jump to another genre as soon as you blink.
The two most prominent genres the episodes inhabit are mystery and soap opera. The way Twin Peaks lays out its sprawling ensemble in its early minutes is reminiscent of prime time soap operas like Dallas or Falcon Crest, only transposed onto all the residents of this quiet village rather than exclusively concerning itself with the wealthy. At times the show even has the upstairs/downstairs energy of something like Downton Abbey, as the political squabbling at the Saw Mill stands in contrast to the domestic troubles of Shelly the waitress and her abusive husband.
To play into the show’s mystery, it casts several characters in classic detective fiction roles. Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman fit into a Sherlock and Watson archetype (Truman openly calls himself Watson towards the end of the first episode), Audrey Horne is shot, written, and sometimes scored like a femme fatale, and the sinister Leo looms like a big giant red herring for the detectives to finger for the crime. (As an added bonus, Cooper even slips in a classic Columbo “…and one more thing” in both episodes).
Cooper reveals James and Laura’s secret relationship, sparking a brawl between several of the show’s ensemble members at the biker bar and leading to the arrest of both James and Bobby. He questions them both, then quickly rules them both out as the killers. The dramatics of the day also drive James and Donna into each other’s arms, offering a pair of young lovers to root for and another wrinkle in the soapy drama.
5. Spooky, Scary
If you couldn’t work it out from the show’s reputation, this is also a supernatural horror show. There are unnerving moments at the beginning and the end of the first episode, both involving Laura’s mother, Sarah. As Sarah searches her house for her missing daughter, we follow her at a bizarrely canted angle, like a point of view shot from a lurking creature crouched on the ground. Then again, to close out the pilot, we see Sarah having a nightmare of an event happening in real time at the other side of town, as a shadowy figure unearths Laura’s buried necklace from the dirt.
Continued belowSuddenly and savagely, just before the end of the second episode, Donna Hayward visits Sarah to attempt to express her condolences, and maybe to ease her own guilt about immediately hooking up with her best friend’s boyfriend after she dies. Eerie music breaks open into a blaring score as Sarah violently screams at the sight of a creepy man crouching underneath her coffee table. Donna can’t see him, but the music and the fear in Sarah’s eyes tells us this invisible man isn’t someone to be taken lightly.
The episode ends by closing off the thread left dangling at the end of the pilot, revealing that Dr. Jacoby was the one to pull Laura’s necklace from the dirt. He pulls out the necklace as he listens to recordings he has of his and Laura’s sessions, revealing that he has a much deeper obsession with Laura than had previously been implied.
That doesn’t cover everything in the episodes – I didn’t even mention the log lady! She’s a lady who has a log! – as both episodes are dense beasts and it’s tough to identify how much is important for the larger, more abstract storytelling to come. It’s interesting that for a show with a reputation for being difficult to parse due to its oblique narrative and obscure themes, these first two episodes are difficult to parse for the opposite reason. A lot of straightforward narrative was packed into these 3 hours, but how much will any of it matter?
