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David Lynch?s Twin Peaks
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Twin Peaks (1990–91)
The Definitive Gold Box Edition
(Paramount)
Reviewed by Mark Asch
During the spring semester of our junior year of college, while most of our friends were studying abroad, my girlfriend and I watched the entirety of Twin Peaks in Friday night marathon sessions, spanning the course of five or six consecutive weekends. This was a few years ago, when only the first season of the show was available on DVD — to see the pilot (then in general circulation only as VHS tapes of the European version, with the infamous tacked-on ending) and the second season (sitting in limbo, waiting for the tide to turn), we sought out foreign region discs and DVD-Rs of dubious legality, and flaunted this feat as a sign of our dedication, of our cultural savvy.
On air, Twin Peaks was a water-cooler phenomenon; for a decade and a half, it was a cult object; now, with Paramount’s release of the “Definitive Gold Box Edition,” containing both seasons (the second was released separately this spring) and the pilot (in both versions), it’s a cultural artifact. This week, eulogizing Twin Peaks-the-members-only-club, I told a co-worker (also a member) about those initial, fevered Friday nights. He responded, “I seem to remember doing that with two different girlfriends, actually.” I asked if he made the second girlfriend wear a wig.
That Sheryl Lee plays both the exquisite blond corpse Laura Palmer, and her brunette cousin Madeleine Ferguson — the latter, in keeping with her Vertigo-goofing name, reluctantly dresses up as the former, and is eventually killed off in an echo of her deceased doppelganger’s murder — is the most obvious instance of doubling in Twin Peaks, but far from the only. To say that David Lynch chips at the enamel of cheery American institutions (suburbia, the movies, the nuclear family) to reveal subterranean rot — this is a revelation on the level of the Pope’s Catholicism. But what Twin Peaks reveals anew is the particular narrative device by which Lynch pits lightness against dark: the show is double-jointed all over the place.
Sometimes it’s point/counterpoint: After the murder of Laura Palmer is solved in Season Two, Special Agent Dale Cooper acquires a shadow, the better to play out his own Lynchian-Manichean struggle: his crazed ex-partner Windom Earle. Their adversarial relationship takes the form of a literal chess match — though, curiously, Cooper plays black. Or perhaps not so curiously — in the series finale, Cooper enters the Black Lodge, primal locus of the evil plaguing Twin Peaks; in the episode’s dying seconds, we learn that it is not Cooper who has returned, but his own evil double. By then, we’ve already learned what evil lurks in the hearts of men. It’s said that Lynch and company didn’t, initially, know the identity of Laura Palmer’s murderer, but it could scarcely have been anyone else.
That it’s not just the family, but the family man himself, that’s corrupted from within, seems in hindsight to portend the rupturing sense of identity that’s come to dominate Lynch’s recent work — Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and, most extravagantly, Inland Empire. And the obvious reference of Madeleine Ferguson should be a clue to look deeper in Twin Peaks for Hitchcock’s silhouette — not just Shadow of a Doubt’s exposed middle-American underbelly, but also the naughty-boy schizophrenia of Psycho: Leland isn’t quite himself today. The central mystery shaking Twin Peaks, and Twin Peaks, hinges on the double life of Laura Palmer: homecoming queen and Meals on Wheels volunteer by day; cocaine-addicted prostitute with a death wish by night. Could a show about simultaneously coexisting moral poles have been more accurately titled?