Twin Peaks at 20

It’s been 20 years since the body of local homecoming queen Laura Palmer washed up on the shores of the bucolic logging town of Twin Peaks, setting in motion a surreal and intricate whodunit/whatthefuck mystery at the centre of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s two-season, 30 episode TV saga. A one-time contender for the highest TV ratings in the United States, Twin Peaks had almost everyone in the 18 to 40 demographic scratching their heads post-episode and excitedly ruminating on that all-important question: who killed Laura Palmer? Critically lauded as one of the most innovative - and for some, the greatest - TV series of all time, while raising the bar for TV writing and production, Twin Peaks changed the rules of American serial drama. As ‘Peaksmania’ receives a welcome birthday revival here in the UK starting with a marathon screening at Battersea arts centre this weekend, followed next month by the first UK Twin Peaks festival at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, now would seem like a good time to revisit this strange, enchanting and wildly popular phenomenon.

Perplexing, horrific and darkly funny, Twin Peaks was unprecedented in the sheer variety of its styles and tones. Crime thriller, soap opera, supernatural chiller, film noir and comedy came together as Kyle MacLachlan’s delightfully oddball FBI Agent Dale Cooper collaborated with the small-town police force to identify Laura’s killer, employing investigative methodologies involving Zen mysticism and dream analysis. The show’s unfurling network narrative of drug-dealing, corporate corruption, prostitution, familial breakdown, madness, clairvoyance and spiritual possession offered a smorgasbord of generic tidbits. Take the dark domestic melodrama of Laura’s parents dealing with their grief; the Chaplinesque pratfalls of dumb deputy Andy; the hallucinatory arthouse-horror appearances of giants and murderous spirits; the femme fatale wiles of Audrey Horne - all enveloped in the noirish strains of a skulking, finger-clicking jazz score from Lynch’s longtime musical collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Given the constrained stylings of contemporary serials - Law and Order, Northern Exposure, Beverly Hills 90210 and Cheers - Twin Peaks stood alone in its kaleidoscopic homage to sundry televisual and cinematic forms.

Twin Peaks boldly blurred the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, blazing a trail for The X-Files, Eerie Indiana, Lost, and True Blood. It juxtaposed the quotidian (the frequent partaking of “damn fine coffee”, cherry pie, donuts and fried breakfasts; suburban white picket fenced homes and traditional diners) with the downright bizarre (a parallel dimension populated by demons, doppelgangers and reverse-speaking dancing dwarves), and thereby offered a radical departure from the mundane concerns of popular serials broadcast during 1990 and 1991 (Dallas, Rosanne and Frazier, I’m looking at you). Indeed, Agent Cooper’s otherworldly visitations and dimension jumps positioned the show somewhere closer to the more offbeat specimens of cinema - Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Lynch’s own Eraserhead and Blue Velvet - than anything else on television. So not only was the TV rulebook decisively out of the window; it was on the street outside, flattened by a 44-tonne Lynchian juggernaut.  

Make no mistake: Twin Peaks had its flaws. Ratings plummeted midway through season two as the writing team revealed Laura’s killer early, apparently under network duress. Lynch then relinquished the creative reigns as plotlines involving UFOs and a literally deadly game of chess - absurd even by the show’s eccentric standards - wandered off as inconsequential MacGuffins. Toe-curling production quirks - a visualised thought bubble; a roaming point-of-view angle from a marauding pine weasel let loose at a fashion event - all indicated that the show was in weary decline. But the final episode, which saw the return of Frost behind the typewriter and Lynch in the director’s chair, provided the last hurrah and a piquant reminder of the show’s beguiling and terrifying strengths. Cooper’s dizzying confrontations with the destructive entities at the heart of Twin Peaks would roll towards an agonisingly unresolved cliffhanger. Unfortunately it was the show’s cancellation rather than its teasing narrative spirit that ended things this way.

Despite achieving lasting appeal and making its mark on popular culture (from a send-up on The Simpsons to self-parody on Saturday Night Live), it took a staggering 20 years for Twin Peaks to emerge in full on DVD in the UK. Taken with other ‘Peaks related celebrations emerging in the coming weeks, it is perhaps time to take another stroll through the mountainside firs and come back to that coffee and cherry pie. No doubt it will be worth the wait.