‘She’s dead, wrapped in plastic…” With those five words, drawled by lumberjack Pete Martell about murdered homecoming queen Laura Palmer, David Lynch transformed television. The opening scene of his drama Twin Peaks ensured that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of 1990 obsessed with uncovering who killed Palmer, the supposedly good girl with a whole host of bad habits.
Was it her boyfriend Bobby, the beautiful football player with a terrible attitude? Her other, secret boyfriend James, the brooding not-such-a-bad-boy biker? Her chain-smoking mother Sarah? Her weepy father Leland? Local businessman Ben Horne with his plans within plans? Or his daughter Audrey, a poor little rich girl with a nose for secrets and a talent for mischief? Not since Peyton Place had a group of small-town citizens had so many secrets to hide and we drank them all in as fervently as the show’s hero, the indefatigable FBI agent Dale Cooper, inhaled his damn fine cups of coffee, desperate to uncover the truth.
Even the slow-dawning realisation that Lynch was less interested in a traditional crime story than in melding a Blue Velvet-style excavation of small-town America with a supernatural mystery did little to dim the fervour of true believers (although the show’s ratings plunged dramatically, leading network ABC to pull the plug at the end of the second season). To its army of fans, Twin Peaks was impossible to predict and like nothing else on air. “It was the show that changed television,” says Rob Lindley, who has run the annual Twin Peaks festival with his wife Deanne since 2013. (The festival itself has run since 1993 in North Bend and Snoqualmie, Washington, where both the show’s pilot episode and the later Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk with Me were filmed.) “The first TV show that was intelligent, funny, spiritual, dramatic and mysterious.”
It has also only grown in reputation in the 25 years it has been off air. Practically every drama with a mystery at its heart, from Lost to Wayward Pines, has been branded as the new Twin Peaks, and its influence can be seen everywhere from programmes that began soon after, such as The X-Files, to classics such as The Sopranos (which borrowed its dream sequences and willingness to play with tone). Most recently, the second season of murky hacker thriller Mr Robot played out like an extended homage to Lynch, while the much-praised 80s-set supernatural drama Stranger Things deliberately modelled its opening titles on those of the earlier show. Yet for every show to reference Lynch successfully, there are hundreds that fail to hit the right note. “These days networks want something different that makes their programmes stand apart from the pack and break through popular culture, but it’s hard to do,” says Variety TV critic Maureen Ryan. “There have been a ton of shows that tried to create a singular tone or display a unique vision and failed pretty hard.”
Small wonder then that expectation is rising for the third series of Twin Peaks, which is due to hit screens in 2017 with Lynch, cowriter Mark Frost and much of the original cast and crew still on board. At Cannes last week, Kyle MacLachlan, who played the coffee-loving Cooper, teased fans by refusing to speculate on his character’s fate, saying only that “it was thrilling not only to revisit the character of Dale Cooper, but also to have the chance to work with people that, in many cases, I hadn’t seen for 25 years”. However, Sherilyn Fenn, who played the seductive Audrey, has been less complimentary, hinting on Twitter that the show’s much-loved female characters have been marginalised this time around. A deliberately vague teaser trailer, featuring only Angelo Badalamenti’s haunting theme tune and the image of Sheryl Lee’s Palmer in homecoming regalia, failed to provide a clear answer.
Until the truth is revealed, the terminally addicted will have to make do with Frost’s tie-in book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, which purports to provide “access to all of Agent Cooper’s files and tapes” and presents detailed backgrounds for many of the show’s best-loved characters, from perpetually weeping sheriff’s deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) to the log lady (Catherine E Coulson, who reportedly filmed scenes for the new series before her death last year). “I wanted to deepen the world of the show and place its origins in historical and mythological context,” Frost says, adding that it felt like the right time to expand on the show’s wider world.
He’s right that if ever a show was made to be obsessively pored over, it is Twin Peaks. Savvy and self-referential, Lynch was a master of the “Easter egg”: the small, clever moments aimed at rewarding devoted fans. From witty jokes linking Twin Peaks’ kindly Sheriff Harry S Truman to his presidential namesake, to Frost’s brief cameo as a news reporter and nods to everything from noir classics Double Indemnity and Laura to Lynch’s own Eraserhead, Twin Peaks set the standard for today’s pop culture-driven TV. “It’s hard to create a truly surreal tone that works for week-to-week TV storytelling, yet for a while Twin Peaks somehow did that,” says Ryan. “It reflected a unique sensibility and was happy to stand apart from the crowd – something not many shows did back then.”
Indeed to viewers raised in the era of peak TV, where any and every kind of show is available at the swipe of a screen, it’s hard to explain just how different Twin Peaks felt when it aired on BBC2 to just over 8 million viewers in October 1990, six months after its launch in the US. From Badalamenti’s shiver-inducing opening theme to the way in which Lynch’s camera slowly directed our gaze to Laura Palmer’s plastic-encased body, forcing the audience into the role of voyeur, it was instantly clear that this was not your ordinary murder tale. “The first season was absolutely riveting in its strangeness,” says Ryan. “The show created a world that felt complete and perfect and also perfectly weird. In season two it began to fall apart but the first season holds up to this day.”
That it does so is largely because of three things. First, Lynch and Frost’s wonderfully deadpan script, packed full of quotable one-liners. Second, the cast’s ability to play the most surreal material absolutely straight, ensuring that fans not only went along with but endlessly picked over the most seemingly innocuous sentences. And third, and most important, Frost and Lynch’s absolute commitment to the world they created, a place where middle-aged women share psychic connections with logs, one-armed men hunt demons, besuited dwarves drop clues while talking backwards, and even the owls are not what they seem.
It was the sort of show that inspired real devotion – something that happens regularly in today’s social media-driven age but which was less common in an era when conversations about popular culture took place in real life. There were parties, in which fans ate cherry pie and drank coffee, best-selling tie-in books, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper, and even a board game. “I think the biggest reason fans responded so strongly was the quality of the writing,” says Lindley. “It was brilliant TV that never insulted your intelligence – also there were many elements within the show that fans can relate to on a deeper level.”
Yet is it a mistake to return after all this time? Ryan singles out the recent “frankly wretched” X-Files reboot as an example of the pitfalls of returning to once-loved material, and it’s certainly arguable that Lynch has already drawn from this well once with less reward in 1992’s muddled movie. “One of the great things about Twin Peaks was that it was so singular for that time,” says Ryan. “This year alone American TV will have almost 430 primetime scripted shows on the air. We’ve watched TV explode with an array of treatments, approaches, themes and atmospheres. Twin Peaks will not be a singular presence and, given that, will it be able to recapture the magic it once had?”
In other words, the very culture that Twin Peaks helped to create has evolved and moved on. Has Twin Peaks moved with it? Lindley for one doesn’t care. “The final scene was the greatest cliffhanger of all time and many of us have hoped and dreamed for years that Twin Peaks would continue in some way, so we’re beyond excited,” he says. “I intend to savour every episode like a fine wine.”
The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost is published by Pan Macmillan, £19.99. The new series will air on Sky Atlantic in 2017
INSPIRED BY LYNCH
Lost (2004-2010)
Complex storylines, a large cast of characters, mystical overtones and meandering plot lines, JJ Abrams’s island-set drama stole both the good and the bad from Lynch’s playbook.
Veronica Mars (2004-2007)
Over a decade after Lynch’s show ended, this teen noir payed homage, posing the question Who Killed Lilly Kane? and making it’s vibrant victim a good girl with bad habits.
Hannibal (2013-2015)
From its surreal visual images to its unsettling atmosphere, this horror drama from Bryan Fuller almost out Lynch’s Lynch.
Mr Robot (2015-now)
Pop culture magpie Sam Esmail played homage to Lynch with a woozy second season in which nothing was quite what it seemed.
Stranger Things (2016)
It’s impossible to link all the references to Twin Peaks in this excellent supernatural small-town story without spoiling it, but suffice to say that the storyline knowingly nods to Lynch’s masterpiece.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion