It happens with a murder, a beautiful, young high school student. "She's dead, wrapped in plastic", says Jack Nance's Pete Martell as he discovers the body washed up on shore in the small quiet town of Twin Peaks, just five miles off the Canadian boarder. So begins one the strangest and compelling series in the history of television brought to life by one of the greatest surrealists of all time.
Many great films or series of films made there mark on television such as Kieslowski's "The Decalogue", or Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexaderplatz", and even today with shows like "The Sopranos" or "Mad Men" which continue the tradition. David Lynch decided to create "Twin Peaks" as a television series and in doing so, he created his masterpiece.
With "Twin Peaks", Lynch creates a world of mystery, and wonder, it's a world that seems to take place in a waking dream, and like a dream some of it cannot be explained, but we can't help but fall under its spell.
With "Twin Peaks" Lynch was able to flesh out similar ideas he dealt with in his film "Blue Velvet" which also took place in a nice small town that underneath lurked an even more sinister presence. I always thought the problem with "Blue Velvet" was Lynch concentrated too much on how phony everything seemed in the small town, but with "Twin Peaks" he does the same but never loses the humanity of the people living there. The advantage of doing it as a series is we are able to spend more time with the characters, and Lynch was able to make a much more compelling and intriguing story of good and evil than he did with "Blue Velvet".
The pilot of "Twin Peaks" starts off less as a mystery than it is about one town dealing with the death of one of their citizens. Everyone knew Laura Palmer and everyone is effected by her death in one way or another. Lynch has sympathy for these characters, and he is honoring them and their community by showing the dignity they have in their mourning.
I think Lynch himself is embodied by the show's main character F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan who has never been better) who is sent in to investigate the murder. Cooper is an outsider, but he feels very at home with the environment in the town people. "Do you wanna know why I'm whittling..." he asks the local sheriff Harry S. Truman. "Because that's what you do in a town where a yellow light means slow down instead of speed up." Cooper fits right in to the world of "Twin Peaks", he's a true blue hero if a bit unorthodox as the show progresses.
The center of "Twin Peaks" was always on Laura Palmer, she is the big secret that Lynch uses to unlock all the little secrets of the small town. We find that not everybody is as innocent as they look on the outside, but they each never lose their humanity.
The best films of David Lynch are like dreams, he's known mostly for grotesque and horrifying images, but he's also someone who can be poetic and beautiful. Take the scene in the Roadhouse bar as we see a woman singing a song, it's obvious that she is lip syncing, but the song and the image of her is so beautiful it's as if she lives out of reality which makes the scene work.
"Twin Peaks" is hypnotic, I fall under its spell each time I watch it. The failure of the series happened when Lynch lost creative control and was forced to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer's killer too soon. Lynch then lost interest and the show went embarrassingly off the rail. But everything leading up to Laura Palmer's killer is pure genius, the pilot set the stage for what is probably the best television that ever premiered in the 90s.
Years later, David Lynch tried television again with a pilot that would soon turn into its own feature "Mulholland Drive". Lynch would go on record he would not produce anything for television again. I suppose Lightening wasn't meant to strike twice, but for a brief shining moment, Lynch was able to ignite a spark, and for those of us who followed it loyally, we are still dreaming.
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