This is not a place you were supposed to find yourself in. We have had many coffee shop dates, you and I, but you must understand that I am an introvert at heart and sometimes I enjoy my solitude. I fully intended to come here on my own, drinking my coffee and eating my slice of cherry pie in the blissful loneliness that is a comfort to me. I say this not to imply that you have intruded upon that solitude. Far from it. It is the warm and kind gesture of a mentor and friend, speaking honestly and truthfully, which made me decide to invite you to join me for this particular coffee date. They happened to pass by my table as I muttered to myself, not speaking to you but to my own sense of self. In these casual whispers and mumbles they heard a spark of poetic bliss, a spark which burned like a crackling fire quite unlike any before. That spark, that praise, made me realize that I simply must invite you here. It will be a coffee date unlike any you have had before, but it is one that we will navigate together here in this strange ethereal diner of my internal landscape. Don't be scared of the flame. Place your order, take my hand, and come with me. It will not be a long journey, but I hope that I can capture that blazing flame and turn it into song.
Fire. Walk with me.
I want to share with you an honest experience, a hazy half-remembered dream that happened to me some 20 years ago. At the time, I was a teen living my blissful little life. Some neighbors of ours were clearing out a bunch of old books that they no longer had any use for. They invited me over to have any books I liked, to take them off of their hands. Voracious reader that I was, I accepted, and so found myself in a cool basement (how typical of me, my ideal environment in my most sacred of places) going through a bookshelf. 20 years removed from this, I could not tell you what books I took from that shelf. The memory of them has faded away into the irrelevance of history and the fog of a forgotten dream. All, that is, but one. In my mind's eye I can still see that little red book in my hands, and many others had the very same. That book?
I, a teen in the year 200X, had no idea what in the world Twin Peaks was. I, an adult in the year 2023, have no memory of what made me put this book into the pile to take home with me. More of the murky mists of memory. I took this book home and I read it, and in the warmth of a long-gone age, I was haunted by it. Laura Palmer, a girl who excitedly logs her life as a 12 year-old girl in the new diary she got for her birthday, bared her very soul into the book. The deep descent and loss of innocence of Laura, as she succumbs to the vices of sex and cocaine. The malevolent force which stalks her, which looms over her and makes her fear for not just her life but her very soul, a force known only as BOB. All her fears and insecurities built to a fever pitch as this monster comes for her, body and soul, and the final page lets us know with passive detail that this was Laura's last entry, and she was found dead, and that's it. It haunted me, and still haunts me now.
There's a nightmare I had once, years and years ago, and the final shot of it has such keen cinematography by my own unconscious mind that it has stuck with me years later. Picture the camera underneath the water of a pond, aiming upwards towards a steep cliff. Picture me, then, falling off of said cliff towards the camera, towards the water, breaking the surface with a violent splash, the last image before I wake up in terror. That's a real nightmare I had which so terrified me that it stuck in my head all these years later. The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer is another nightmare which stuck with me years later. Amazingly, I sought out more of the nightmare when I was browsing a satellite movie channel and saw they'd made a movie out of this Twin Peaks thing the book was based on. A movie called Fire Walk With Me. I taped it, and tried to watch it... but unlike the memory of that nightmare, this is lost to those murky mists again. I don't even remember if I finished the movie or not. In the foggy faded far-off expanses of my internal landscape, there did these half-remembered nightmares sleep for a long time.
Until now. Something possessed me, in December of 2022. Even this close to the present, the reason has faded away into the fog. Nevertheless, possessed and inspired I was to finally look at the show which was the source of these nebulous nightmares from all those years ago. I began to watch a little show called Twin Peaks. This morning, Jan. 22nd of 2023, I finished watching the original run of the show. I had stopped for a while during the holidays, but my friend Joe (about whom I will speak again in... let's say, a week) also coincidentally happened to pick up the show and start watching through it. He gave me the impetus to get back on it, and we both finished the original run within 12 hours of each other. I never intended this to be a thing I talked about on my blog, just a casual bit of conversation between Joe and I... but then, like I said, the blazing flame came to me and I knew I had to share what I thought here. Even my half-formed thought of a thesis seemed to suggest hidden depths to my friend and mentor, and so, here I am. I am going to talk about Twin Peaks, but not in the usual way.
Twin Peaks, you see, is a show that defies the sort of explanation that I have (regrettably) fallen into on this blog. It is not a show you can summarize and then go "and this is how I feel about that". Twin Peaks is not a show about what happens. Twin Peaks is a show about what it stirs up inside you. I give this preamble, as I always do, to let you know my headspace going in. To let you know how I am, and to help you understand me better. Apparently, doing things like this help me convey that strongly and clearly, and so that is why I am doing it like this. Like so many other things in my life, I have stumbled upon the seemingly perfect way to express my internal landscape completely by happenstance and accident, without trying to. I didn't go in to Twin Peaks with the expectation of finding a project to express myself, and so I found it without even looking for it. It's such a simple truth, too.
Twin Peaks is exactly what I remembered it as in 200X, with the diary and the hazy memories of the movie. Twin Peaks is a dream. A scattershot collage of images and sounds created by an unconscious mind, evoking a mood and several half-forgotten memories at once. Like a dream, over its 30 episodes I encountered several beautiful collages of images. A roaring waterfall. A home away from home in a hotel. Yes, even a diner with plenty of coffee and pie at hand for the traveller on a date. More than that, it shows the beautiful dream of ordinary people living the best they can in a small town. It lets you get to know them, to love them, to invest in them and hope for nothing for the best from them and their odd little lives. Twin Peaks is also a nightmare, a macabre medley of the worst and darkest impulses of the human soul, all the worst your subconscious can conjure up. Its inciting incident, of course, is the murder of Laura Palmer and the pilot does not shy away from how this nightmare tears upon the dreamlike psyche of the town, shattering dreams and darkening lives. The dark underbelly Laura hid her true self in, a world of sex and drugs and violence, slowly crawls out into the sunlight to be revealed. The thing known as BOB is a terrifying beast, a primal id which lurks within the very darkness of the soul and knows only murder and death.
Twin Peaks is a dream, and much like a dream a lot of it doesn't make a lick of sense when you wake up and think about it with a clear head. The dream fades to hazy memory, and you wonder just what the fuck the show is doing. That happens in the midpoint of season 2, when the show devotes three episodes to actually solving the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer, and the killer finding redemption and justice before dying. From what I can gather, actually explaining this was an executive decision, and co-creator David Lynch walked off for a while. David Lynch, if nothing else, is a master of this ethereal dream state. The other film of his I've seen, Mulholland Drive, trades in the same strange imagery and fractured reality. Lynch, I feel, always added a purpose to the strange dreamlike quality of Twin Peaks. In his absence, several storylines crop up, all of them strange... but in the wrong way. Whereas Lynch's weirdness has an essential feeling to the tone, these plotlines feel like they were cooked up to be weird for weirdness's sake. They exist to be something to pay the actors to do, they happen, and they add little to the tone of the show. Another macabre murderous plot pops up at around the halfway point of Season 2, and the show quickly gets back to its original tone, thankfully.
And then it ends. It ends almost like the end of Quantum Leap, an introspective journey through the psyche, but filtered through Lynch's dreamlike hazy reality. We wander through a nightmare world of everything we've seen before, into the pure dark id that is BOB and his world... and something of it escapes into ours. This is how the show ends. It ends just like the nightmare I had of falling into the pond, of any nightmare you've ever had. You get that shocking image, so horrifying that it shocks you out of your sleep and back into the reality of your warm bed, a little wary of what your own thoughts just constructed to torment you. Twin Peaks, in its original form, ends on an utter shock of an image, and then you wake up from the dream. For 25 years there is no more Twin Peaks. There is a Return, but I'm not ready for that yet. No, I know the next part of my journey. I've always known. I didn't expect to tell you it, but here we are. I'm going back to the half-remembered nightmare of 200X. I have in my possession the audiobook version of The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer read by no less than Sheryl Lee, the actress who played her in Twin Peaks. I will hear Laura herself read those words I read in a hazy nightmare, and relive that nightmare. I will go back to the movie, and experience a nightmare so vivid and terrifying that I don't even remember if I had the dream or not.
Wish me luck, my dear coffee date, as I part the red curtain and walk backstage into a part of my internal landscape that even I don't have the chart for, ready to engage in archaeology of my own half-forgotten memory. I was to do this all alone, in my introverted solace... but I am glad you stuck around this far with me. If you're still here with me, on the boundary between dream and nightmare, then I urge you to check out Twin Peaks for yourself. At 30 45-minute episodes, it is not the biggest television investment. You can bang it out in a month at a leisurely pace, and then you too could find yourself before such a curtain as this. You, too, can have a dream as awe-inspiring and as terror-inducing as Twin Peaks.
Like the very best of dreams and the very worst of nightmares, I guarantee you that it's something you'll never forget, even after waking.
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