Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I actually wrote two different versions of this article but wasn't happy with either one and decided to merge the two to something approximating what I wanted to convey.


The year is 1992 and David Lynch has just come off of, arguably, two of the most successful years in his career. Twin Peaks was a critics darling, revered as one of the most groundbreaking television shows in recent memory. Concurrently, Wild at Heart (1990) received the coveted Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Then, things started to go wrong. ABC canceled the show after the ratings sharply declined in the second season after the murder of Laura Palmer was solved. Two other shows that Lynch worked on, American Chronicles and On the Air did not even last a full season. The proverbial icing on this rancid cake was the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), which debuted at Cannes Film Festival in 1992 to a hostile reaction from the audience and received an unholy critical ass-kicking. It went on to commercial and critical failure in the United States. How did Lynch go from media darling to media pariah with overwhelming negative reaction towards Fire Walk With Me from even fans of the show?


Lynch ended the T.V. show with multiple cliff hangers – most significantly, Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) was possessed by the evil spirit, BOB (Frank Silva), while his good self was trapped in a supernatural realm known as the Black Lodge. Instead of resolving this storyline (and many others), Lynch decided to make a prequel to the series. The filmmaker remembers, "At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn't get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move and talk." Fire Walk With Me focuses on the murder investigation of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), who was killer BOB's first victim, and with the emphasis on the last seven days of Laura's life.


The 1990s have become known as the age of irony for the horror genre. Self-reflexive humor, as epitomized by the Scream trilogy, replaced formulaic slasher franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street during the 1980s. One of the few films that went against this trend was Fire Walk With Me. Lynch’s film is not usually regarded as a horror film per se, but if looked at closely, does contain many conventions of the genre (i.e. the final girl against the malevolent monster). However, the veteran filmmaker pushes these rules as far as they can possibly be stretched. Film critic Kim Newman observed in his review for Sight and Sound magazine that Lynch’s movie “demonstrates just how tidy, conventional and domesticated the generic horror movie of the 1980s and 1990s has become.”


Right from the opening credits, Lynch establishes that this film will not be like the T.V. series and also it’s horror genre credentials. A television is set to an abstract, white noise image with ominous sounding music provided by Angelo Badalamenti playing over the soundtrack. An axe comes crashing through the T.V. followed immediately by a woman’s piercing scream. This opening sequence establishes the dark, foreboding mood that will permeate the entire film. This also feels like Lynch's statement on the unfair cancellation of his show. It is easy to see why Fire Walk With Me was a shock to some fans of the show. The first third of the film sets up a sharp contrast to the series.

Like the beginning of Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (1971), the events of Fire Walk With Me are set in motion by the murder of a woman. Lynch also presents an inhospitable world: FBI agents Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) encounter resistance at every step of their investigation. They are given a cryptic briefing by their superior Gordon Cole (David Lynch); they are forced to deal with a belligerent local sheriff and his deputy (when they ask for the dead girl’s ring, the sheriff replies, “We’ve got a phone. It has a little ring.”); and the locals offer little help (“I don’t know shit from shinola!” says a man at the local diner). By and large, the detectives are unable to figure out the identity of the killer. This is certainly a far cry from the upstanding Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) and the friendly townsfolk of Twin Peaks.


One of the criticisms leveled at Fire Walk With Me was the lack of humor. However, the first third of the film is one of the best examples of Lynch's wry, absurdist comedic sensibilities. The first appearance of Agent Desmond has him and several other agents busting a school bus full of crying kids. It is a classic, surreal Lynchian image. Other examples of his dry sense of humor are Sam's estimation of how much the sheriff's office furniture is worth and how Desmond deals with the belligerent deputy. It is not what they say rather how they say it that makes these moments funny.


Donna: Do you think if you were falling in space that you'd slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?


Laura: Faster and faster, and for a long time you wouldn't feel anything, then you'd burst into fire, forever. And the angels wouldn't help you because they've all gone away.


Once the film goes back to Twin Peaks, the mood becomes noticeably darker and foreboding as the last week of Laura's life plays out. Lynch shows an unflinching depiction of a young woman consumed by drugs, sex and, most harrowingly and disturbing of all, a victim of incest by her father, Leland (Ray Wise) under the guise of being possessed by a malevolent supernatural force known only as BOB.


Twin Peaks is a particularly atmospheric setting with indications that something ominous lurks out in the woods. Laura not only meets her demise among the trees but a grove of trees also serves as an entry point into an otherworldly dimension where the killer resides. The film's most impressive, show-stopping sequence is Laura and Donna's (Moira Kelly) trip to a Canadian roadhouse with two men. This sequence is an intense audio-visual assault on the senses. The entire frame is saturated by a hellish red color scheme, punctuated by a pulsating white strobe light. Over the soundtrack is a deafening bass-heavy song with a rockabilly guitar twang cranked up so loud that the characters have to yell over top of it. This powerful audio-visual combination fully immerses the viewer in an unpredictable setting that echoes the scene at Ben's in Blue Velvet (1986) and the introduction of Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart.

Laura Palmer is the final girl archetype but deeply flawed. She is arguably one of Lynch’s most complex and fully realized characterizations. She immerses herself in all of these vices, which distracts from the painful incestuous relationship with her father and BOB’s desire to possess her. The push and pull of these opposing forces are too much for her and this only increases her self-destructive impulses. Sheryl Lee does an incredible job conveying Laura’s overwhelming sadness at the realization that the sweet girl she once was is rapidly disappearing and try as she might there is nothing she can do to stop it. Lee is able to show the different sides of her character. There is the confident, aggressive side that picks up strangers and has sex with them. There is the scared little girl that is dominated by her father. And there is the sweet high school girl whose reserves of inner strength — that she uses to fight off BOB — are gradually being depleted. It is an intricate portrayal that requires Lee to display a staggering range of emotion.


BOB is ostensibly the monster of the film. With his disheveled, unshaven look of a dirty drifter, he is the evil side of Leland and a frightening metaphor for the incestuous relationship between father and daughter. BOB is a demon of some sort, a serial killer who delights in taking on hosts, such as Leland, and using them as instruments of evil and to indulge in his depraved appetites. Kim Newman observed that, “In the monster father figure of Leland/BOB, Lynch has a bogeyman who puts Craven’s Freddy Krueger to shame by bringing into the open incest, abuse and brutality which the Elm Street movies conceal behind MTV surrealism and flip wisecracks.”


There are some truly frightening and unsettling set pieces in Fire Walk With Me. Laura comes home for dinner and her father scolds her for not washing her hands. The scene goes from being one of typical domestic strife to one of unsettling horror when he starts questioning her about a necklace with an intensity that is not the sweet Leland Palmer we know and love from the T.V. series. It is an uncomfortable scene that is beautifully played by Ray Wise who never goes over the top with his performance. The next scene shows Leland getting ready for bed with a menacing look on his face — he is clearly under the thrall of BOB. Then, something happens. It is like something washes over him as his expression shifts to one of sadness and he starts to cry. BOB has left him temporarily and Leland is back in control again but with the knowledge of how badly he treated Laura at dinner. He goes into her room and tells her how much he loves her. It is a touching moment, one of love and compassion, in an otherwise bleak and cruel film. Wise does an incredible job at conveying the subtle shifts of personalities, from the menacing BOB to the sweet Leland and the inner turmoil that exists in his character.

There are little touches, such as the twisted wife (Grace Zabriskie) who is driven crazy by her evil husband a la Cry of the Banshee (1970) where an equally evil husband (played by Vincent Price) also drove his wife insane. There is the truly frightening moment where Laura goes to visit Harold Smith (Lenny Von Dohlen), a kindly shut-in to whom Laura delivers Meals on Wheels. She also confides in him and tries to convey the divided nature of herself and for a brief, startling moment, her evil nature makes itself visible to Harold, shocking both of them.


Even the birth of the film was beset by problems. The T.V. show had only been canceled for a month when it was announced that Lynch would be making a Twin Peaks movie. On July 11, 1991, Ken Scherer, CEO of Lynch/Frost Productions, said that the film was off because Kyle MacLachlan did not want to reprise his role as Agent Cooper. A month later, the actor changed his mind and the film was back on – albeit without cast members Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn due to scheduling conflicts.


In a 1995 interview, Fenn revealed why she really opted out of the film. "I was extremely disappointed in the way the second season got off track. As far as Fire Walk With Me, it was something that I chose not be part of." As a result, her character was cut from the script and Boyle was recast with Moira Kelly (With Honors). MacLachlan also resented what had happened during the second season. "David and Mark were only around for the first series...I think we all felt a little abandoned. So I was fairly resentful when the film, Fire Walk With Me came round." Even though MacLachlan agreed to be in the film, he wanted a smaller role (he only worked for five days on the film), forcing Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels to re-write the screenplay so that Agent Desmond investigated the murder of Teresa Banks instead of Agent Cooper.


To make matters worse, Lynch's creative partner in the series, Mark Frost opted out of the film as well. The relationship between the two men had become strained during the second season when Lynch went off to make Wild at Heart; leaving Frost with what he felt was most of the work on the show. Frost was busy with his directorial debut, Storyville (1992), but one can read between the lines. His absence on Fire Walk With Me was his way of voicing his displeasure with Lynch.

Fire Walk With Me debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992 to a hostile reaction from both audiences and critics. Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Lynch's taste for brain-dead grotesque has lost its novelty." Her fellow Times reviewer, Vincent Canby agreed: “It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.” USA Today gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it, "a morbidly joyless affair.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “In a strange way, Fire Walk With Me is tipped too far toward the dark side. What's missing is an organic vision of goodness. The movie is a true folly-almost nothing in it adds up-yet it isn't jokey and smug like Lynch's last film, Wild at Heart.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, "And though the movie ups the TV ante on nudity, language and violence, Lynch's control falters. But if inspiration is lacking, talent is not. Count Lynch down but never out.” The film's editor, Mary Sweeney, commented on why it was on the receiving end of such hostility: "They so badly wanted it to be like the TV show, and it wasn't. It was a David Lynch feature. And people were very angry about it. They felt betrayed."


To this day, Fire Walk With Me remains Lynch’s most maligned and underappreciated film. Fans of the show missed the folksy humor but that is not what the film is about — it is Laura’s last dark days. By paring down many of these elements that made the show endearing to its fanbase, it ended up alienating many of them. The film has aged well and is starting to enjoy a reappraisal of its merits. Sheryl Lee is very proud of it: "I have had so many people, victims of incest, approach me since the film was released, so glad that it had been made because it helped them to release a lot." To his credit, Lynch looks back on his film with no regrets. "I feel bad that Fire Walk With Me did no business and that a lot of people hate the film. I really like the film. But it had a lot of baggage with it.” The director may have upset fans of the show but for fans of his feature film work, Fire Walk With Me is more consistent with their much darker tone. Once the film shifts focus to Laura’s descent into darkness, Lynch is relentless in his depiction of her downward spiral — one of the most harrowing depictions of a person coming apart at the seams. As a result, Fire Walk With Me is one of the best and truly terrifying horror films ever to come out of the 1990s.


 

John Carpenter Week: Vampires

With his self-professed love for westerns and his reputation for making legendary horror films during the 1970s and 1980s, anticipation was high when it was announced that John Carpenter would be directing a western-flavored vampire film. Based loosely on John Steakley’s novel of the same name, Vampires (1998) tears down and stomps all over the brooding gothic bloodsucker cliché in order to portray them as vicious killers hunted by men who aren’t that much better. Even though the film takes place in a contemporary setting – the American southwest – it looks and feels like a western right down to James Woods as a no-nonsense gunslinger-type vampire hunter. Vampires turned out to be one of Carpenter’s most commercially successful films in years despite the mixed critical reaction. To be fair, the film has its flaws, as a lot of later of his work does, but Woods’ ferocious performance, unapologetic politically incorrectness and the use of vampirism to expose the hypocrisy of organized religion, makes Vampires an entertaining horror film.


The film starts off promisingly as Carpenter’s brooding score plays over a montage of desolate New Mexico landscapes before the camera swoops over an abandoned farmhouse. Observing it from afar is Jack Crow (James Woods) and his right-hand man Montoya (Daniel Baldwin). They assess the situation and deduce that the house is a nest for vampires. Carpenter’s heavy, twangy spaghetti western-flavored score kicks in as Jack and his group of badass vampire hunters move in. The director sets just the right no-nonsense tone as we see this heavily armed motley crew get ready to wipe out a nest of bloodsuckers like an exterminator would take out a hive of troublesome insects.

The build up and then actual extermination of said nest has a The Wild Bunch (1969) by way of Walter Hill vibe to it as Carpenter shows professional men of action plying their trade. This scene not only establishes Jack and his team’s tough guy credentials but also presents the vampires as very strong, almost feral creatures. There is nothing elegant or romantic about these bloodsuckers. More importantly, we also see the efficient way Team Crow works: one by one the vampires are dragged out into sunlight where they burst into flames. In the end, nine vamps, or goons, as they are referred to by Jack, are destroyed but they don’t find the master, the leader who always protects its nest.

Team Crow not only works hard but they also play hard, taking over a motel loaded up with alcohol and hookers. Yet the lack of a master still gnaws away at Jack, that is, until a beautiful prostitute named Katrina (Sheryl Lee) distracts him with an invitation for sex. While he gets her a beer she waits for him in his room. However, a master vampire is already waiting in what is probably the film’s most striking visual as the camera pans up to show the bloodsucker hovering at the height of the ceiling, unbeknownst to Katrina. He quickly seduces and bites her on the inner thigh in a very sexually-charged scene. The master then proceeds to crash the party and kill Jack’s entire team. His assault starts off promisingly as he brutally splits one hapless vampire hunter (Mark Boone Jr.) in half! But then Carpenter makes the unconventional choice of depicting the hotel room massacre through a series of dissolves, which robs the sequence of its visceral impact. We are supposed to be awed by this master’s power as he easily dispatches Team Crow but much more of an impact could have come from quick edits and hand-held camerawork to convey the chaos of the scene, not a montage of dissolves which lessens the shock of the vampire’s attack.

Fortunately, Carpenter recovers in the next scene as Jack and Montoya with Katrina in tow make a break for it in a pick-up truck. Despite flooring the accelerator, the master vampire amazingly catches up to them with scary ferocity. However, they manage to distract him, by shooting him in the face, long enough to get away. Jack decides to keep Katrina around because now that she’s been bitten by a master she will develop a telepathic link with him which will allow them to find him. More troubling, however, is that the vampire knew who Jack was. Someone must’ve set them up, but who?

Backed by the Vatican no less, Jack meets with his superior, Cardinal Alba (Maximilian Schell) who assigns him church archivist Father Adam Guiteau (Tim Guinee), a well-intentioned if not hopelessly inexperienced priest. Father Adam tells Jack that the master who wiped out Team Crow is named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), a 600-year-old vampire – the first and most powerful, accidentally created by the Catholic Church.

Jack grudgingly takes Father Adam along and quickly lays down the law with the young priest as he gives him a crash course in vampires: “First of all, they’re not romantic. It’s not like they’re a bunch of fags hopping around in rented formal wear and seducing everybody in sight with cheesy Euro-trash accents. Forget whatever you’ve seen in movies.” This doesn’t just apply to Father Adam but to the audience as well. Carpenter is saying that the bloodsuckers in Vampires aren’t going to be the angst-ridden vampires we see in films like Interview with a Vampire (1994) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Woods delivers this monologue with the consummate skill of a pro but with the enthusiasm of an actor having fun with the role as he can’t resist adding a little zinger in the end which causes Father Adam to get flustered. Being a fan of both Woods and Carpenter for years, this is a dream pairing and it is great to see the actor playing a man of action. Woods is known for playing pragmatic protagonists and his portrayal of Jack Crow is a great addition to Carpenter’s roster of uncompromising heroes.

James Woods plays Jack Crow as a tough-as-nails vampire hunter not above beheading and burying his slaughtered teammates and the hookers that were unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. Carpenter uses the dissolve montage technique here again only much more effectively. And to show what a tough guy Jack truly is, he torches the motel for good measure and Woods looks cool as he fulfills and tried and true action film cliché of walking away from a gigantic explosion. Woods displays intense steely-eyed determination, especially after his team is killed as he makes it his mission to find out why it happened and track down the vampire responsible.

Carpenter also sets up the mercurial Howard Hawksian relationship between Jack and Montoya who doesn’t approve of his boss burying the team on his own. You can see Carpenter trying to set up the same kind volatile thing that we saw in previous male-dominated films like The Thing (1982) and They Live (1988) but he’s just not as successful here because in those films you really felt that those guys were a legitimate threat to each other. In Vampires, you never get the impression that Montoya would really truly challenge Jack and so their friction, at times, feels forced, or in one scene where they are actually about to get into it, Carpenter pulls things back. Daniel Baldwin brings a beefy physicality to the role of Montoya and acts a decent foil to Woods’ hard-nosed head vampire slayer. He has the look and demeanor of a classic Hollywood tough guy.

Tim Guinee is also well cast as the by-the-book Father Adam who attempts (not too successfully) to keep Jack in line. He has a good scene with Woods in a hotel bathroom where Jack forces Father Adam to reveal Valek’s true intentions. He is looking for an ancient relic known as the Cross of Berziers that will allow him, through a ritual, to live in the daylight. Carpenter is so good at filming scenes with expositional dialogue and this is because of good writing and the right actor saying the words (think of Donald Pleasence in Halloween or Dennis Dun in Big Trouble in Little China). Guinee does a wonderful job imparting this crucial information in an engaging way that takes us deeper into the film’s mythos.

Carpenter is less successful at depicting the relationship that develops between Montoya and Katrina. It starts off very antagonistic as he views her as nothing more than a tool, an end towards a means, but I just don’t buy how, over time, he begins to care for her. This aspect of the film is one of the things that makes it unapologetically politically incorrect. Katrina is thrown around by Jack and Montoya like a rag doll. When Montoya and her take refuge in a hotel, he bounds and gags her naked to a bed. I understand the restraints – so she doesn’t escape – but naked? I certainly don’t have a problem with Sheryl Lee’s gorgeous body but it doesn’t make much sense. The actress doesn’t have much to do initially as she gets slapped around by Woods and Baldwin, but once Katrina develops a telepathic link with Valek she becomes an important conduit of information. However, it’s not until the climactic showdown when Katrina finally becomes a vampire that Lee gets to cut loose and have some fun with the role.

Nine days after John Steakley submitted his book Vampire$ to his publisher, the film rights were sold in January 1990. Several directors were attached to the project over the years where it languished John Carpenter was approached. He had just finished making Escape from L.A. (1996) and was contemplating quitting the movie business for a while because “it stopped being fun.” However, Largo Entertainment offered him with the project. They had two screenplays, one written by Don Jakoby and the other by Dan Mazur. Carpenter took the book, the two scripts and read them. Afterwards, he thought, “it’s going to be set in the American Southwest and it’s a Western – Howard Hawks.” For years, he had thought about vampire films but never wanted to make one because he didn’t think there was a new way to do it: “They’re just such generic creatures, and they’ve been done so many times.” He was drawn to the western elements in Steakley’s novel: “I’ve always loved westerns and one of the reasons I’m doing this movie is that this is the closest I’ve come to being able to do a western.” He ended up combining the two scripts, utilizing elements from both, a little bit from the book, and some of his own stuff.

In casting Team Crow, producer Sandy King “tried to cast men who have a certain kind of charisma.” Actor James Woods concurred: “These are really dangerous vampires, and you like to know that they’re hiring real men for the parts – not the sort of ‘Hollywood’ version of men out hunting vampires.” He was drawn to the film because it gave him the opportunity to play an action hero. When the actor accepted the role, he told Carpenter, “I want to make this hero the baddest guy ever.” Woods has a reputation for being difficult to work with but Carpenter had an agreement with him that he could improvise a take if he did another one as it was written in the script. Carpenter had not seen Daniel Baldwin’s television work (he had been on Homicide: Life on the Street) but when they met, he “loved his whole nature and personality.” The director cast Sheryl Lee based on her work on Twin Peaks while Thomas Ian Griffith was chosen based on several action films he had done, including one called Excessive Force (1993).

The production shot on location in New Mexico over eight weeks and utilized authentic pueblos, a 200-year-old mission and a small western town where the filmmakers took over a square city block to build an old adobe prison. Production designer Tomas Walsh and his team built the interiors of the farmhouse, jail, hotel, motel, and the jail elevator shaft on soundstages at Garson Studios in Santa Fe.

Carpenter’s keen visual sense is still as strong as ever in Vampires. There’s a great shot of Valek and seven master vampires coming out of the ground, like zombies, at dusk. The lighting and Carpenter’s minimalist score create just the right atmosphere of dread. For this scene, the actors were buried under about a foot of sand and had to wait until they were called to rise from their graves. Stunt coordinator Jeff Imada devised a breathing system whereby each actor used a small box placed over their mouth to provide a short supply of air as they waited to be called to rise from the ground.

Not surprisingly, Vampires was not well-received by critics – par for the course for a Carpenter film. In his review for The New York Times, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote, “ridiculous without being awful enough to be hilarious, Vampires is chock full of exhausted lines.” USA Today gave the film one-and-a-half stars and wrote, “making a cowboy yarn should mean more than just setting the carnage amid adobe buildings.” In his review for the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan wrote, “the story itself can’t seem to decide whether it’s Rio Bravo or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another.” Sight and Sound magazine’s Kim Newman addressed the film’s treatment of women: “The treatment of women – we only see whores and vampires, and the ‘heroine’ gets to be both – is especially reprehensible.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C-“ rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “After a promising opening … this gummy mix of fake-Catholic mumbo jumbo and teeth-in-neck horror goes limp.” The lone dissenting voice came from the Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey who gave it three out of four stars. He said it was, “deliciously twisted throughout, adding some fresh kinks to a well-worn old movie fetish.”

Vampires expertly cruises towards the inevitable showdown between Jack and Valek where we find out just how culpable and complicit the Church is in all of this. Towards the end it feels almost like Carpenter ran out of steam or money or both as the finale is strangely anticlimactic. He leaves the antagonistic relationship between Jack and Montoya tantalizingly unresolved in a tribute to Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), begging for a sequel that was eventually made but without Carpenter’s direct involvement and with it the film’s stars as well. Vampires is certainly not without its flaws and not up to par with his classic films from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but the film does have its merits. Over the years I enjoy it more with every subsequent viewing.

 

Twin Peaks Tribute Week: April 4 - April 10th, 2010

Twin Peaks holds a special place in my heart because it was responsible for getting me seriously into film. I had always enjoyed watching them but once I saw the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, directed by none other than David Lynch, I had to track down and watch everything else he had made. This led to Blue Velvet (1986) which immediately became my favorite film of all-time and made me realize, for the first time, that a film could be so much more than just entertainment. What struck me about Twin Peaks is that Lynch took a lot of the themes from Blue Velvet (evil hiding under the facade of small-town innocence, voyeurism, a woman in trouble, etc.) and brought them into mainstream television, changing the medium forever. The show began with the murder of Laura Palmer and explored the ramifications of this incident over 16 subsequent episodes. As a result, Twin Peaks demanded much more of the viewer than the average weekly drama. One could not simply watch the occasional episode and expect to understand what was going on. Many details and clues to who killed Laura were buried throughout the 17 episode story arc so that watching every one was crucial to following the narrative.

What Lynch and his collaborators did was create mini-movies that lasted just under an hour every week, drawing us into a strange and engaging world that nobody had ever seen before. The show debuted on April 8, 1990 with an estimated 35 million audience. ABC helped fuel a media blitzkrieg promoting the pilot episode as a television event and trumpeting the show as a hit with advanced praise from the critics. Twin Peaks became one of the first pop culture events of the 1990s. Intense interest around who killed Laura reached a fevered pitch with articles appearing in major periodicals like Time and Newsweek while Lynch made appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Unfortunately, the quality of Twin Peaks declined rapidly after the Laura Palmer storyline achieved closure. The show was never able to regain momentum and the series was cancelled after its second season. For a brief while it became a pop culture phenomenon and marked one of Lynch’s most prolific periods of his artistic career where he managed to bring his unique worldview into the mainstream.

The show was kick-started by the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the beautiful teenage high school girl and homecoming queen found washed up on a beach, naked and wrapped in plastic. The outpouring of grief throughout the town is emotionally gut-wrenching as we see how news of her death affects her family, her friends, and even those who barely knew her. In some way, she touched everyone’s lives – good or bad. To save on money, Lynch intended to cast a local girl from Seattle "just to play a dead girl.” The local girl ended up being Sheryl Lee. "But no one – not Mark, me, anyone – had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead," Lynch said in an interview. Indeed, the image of Lee wrapped in plastic became one of the show's most enduring and memorable images. And then, while Lynch shot the home movie that  Laura’s best friends James Hurley (James Marshall ) takes of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Laura, he realized that Lee had something special. "She did do another scene – the video with Donna on the picnic – and it was that scene that did it." As a result, Lee became a semi-regular addition to the cast appearing in flashbacks as Laura and becoming a re-occurring character – Maddie, Laura's cousin who also becomes another victim of BOB (Frank Silva), the demonic presence from another dimension.

When another girl from her school, Ronette Polaski (Phoebe Augustine), is found wandering along a deserted stretch of railway tracks, beaten and raped, the FBI is called in to investigate. Enter Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), an eccentric fellow who records his every thought and the minutest details into a tape recorder to his unseen assistant Diane. He meets with Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), a plain-spoken man who begins to feel a little like Dr. Watson to Cooper’s Sherlock Holmes. The FBI agent relies on his intuition and most intriguingly, his dreams to provide clues into the possible identity of the killer.

This culminates in a fantastic episode (directed by Lynch) where Cooper dreams of meeting Laura in an otherworldly dimension known as the Red Room where she whispers the killer’s identity into his ear while a backwards talking dwarf (Michael Anderson) dances to groovy jazz music. While making Eraserhead in 1971, sound designer Alan Splet taught Lynch how to say words phonetically backwards. Lynch planned to record some dialogue this way and then reverse it in a scene that was never shot. "When I got the Red Room idea this must have been coming back to me. Then the idea followed that the visual would all have to be done backwards as well." When this episode aired it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen on T.V. Lynch’s avant garde sensibilities were harnessed by co-creator Mark Frost’s sense of structure and storytelling and the result was some of the most compelling television as the nation became swept up in the mysteries of the show.

A producer at Warner Brothers wanted Lynch to direct a film on Marilyn Monroe based on the book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers. Lynch remembers that he was "sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story.” Veteran television producer/writer Mark Frost was hired to write the screenplay. Lynch's agent at the time, Tony Krantz suggested that he work with Frost. Even though this project was dropped by the studio, Lynch and Frost became good friends and wrote a screenplay entitled, One Saliva Bubble with Steve Martin starring in it. However, this film was not made either.

Krantz had been trying to get Lynch to work on T.V. since Blue Velvet but the filmmaker was never really that interested in the idea. One day, they met at a Los Angeles restaurant and Krantz told Lynch that he should do a show “about real life in America – your vision of America the same way you demonstrated in Blue Velvet.” Lynch got an idea of a “small-town thing” but he and Frost were not too keen on it but decided to humor Krantz. Lynch remembers, "so one day Mark and I were talking at Du Pars, the coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, and, all of a sudden, Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake." Frost wanted to tell “a sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go on perpetually.” Frost, Krantz and Lynch rented a screening room in Beverly Hills and screened Peyton Place (1957) as a source of inspiration for the kind of town they wanted to create.

They pitched the idea to ABC in a ten-minute meeting with the network's drama head, Chad Hoffman with nothing more than this image and a concept: "The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was the foreground, but this would recede slightly as you got to know the other people in the town and the problems they were having ... The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters," said Lynch. At the time, ABC was in last place among the T.V. networks and were looking for something that would get them out of the basement. ABC liked the idea and asked Lynch and Frost to write a screenplay for the pilot episode. Originally, the network didn’t think Twin Peaks would be made into a series and might run as a seven-hour mini-series that would appeal to college students.

The first thing Frost and Lynch did was draw a map of the town. According to Frost, “we knew the town had a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” They talked about it for three months and then wrote the script in ten days. Frost wrote the more verbal characters like Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer) while Lynch was responsible for Agent Cooper, writing most of his monologues. Originally, the show was entitled Northwest Passage and set in North Dakota, but the fact that a town called Twin Peaks really existed (much like Lumberton in Blue Velvet), prompted a revision in the script. Frost and Lynch went on a location scout to Washington state and a friend of Frost’s recommended Snoqualmie Falls. They drove there and found all of the things they had written about in the pilot. ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard ordered the two-hour pilot for a possible fall 1989 series. He soon left the position in March 1989 as Lynch went into production. The director shot the pilot on location near Seattle in 24 days and on a budget of $4 million (subsequent episodes averaged $1 million and took a week each to shoot). Robert A. Iger and his creative team took over, saw dailies and met with Frost and Lynch to get the “arc” of the stories and characters. Iger saw a rough cut of the pilot by late May and ordered seven episodes.

However, even though Iger liked the pilot, he had a tough time persuading the rest of the network brass. "I was baffled by it," admitted then ABC president Mark Mandala, "but we were all 50-plus white males." Iger suggested showing it to a more diverse, younger group. "Unanimously, they loved it," Mandala remembers. Some executives figured that the show would never get on the air. However, Iger planned to schedule it for the spring. The final showdown occurred during a bi-coastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives – Iger won and Twin Peaks was on the air.

Frost and Lynch wanted to create a timeless quality and achieved this by mixing styles from several different eras. Lynch said, “this started happening on Twin Peaks when we were shooting in the school which was built in the fifties. Something from the era just started floating around in the present day and influenced a lot of things that took place on the set.” Surprisingly, Lynch encountered very little interference from the network. Standards-and-practices only had a problem with one scene from the first season: an extreme close-up in the pilot of Cooper’s hand as he slides tweezers under Laura’s fingernail and removes a tiny “R.” They wanted the scene to be shorter because it made them uncomfortable but Frost and Lynch refused and the scene remained.

Before the pilot episode premiered on T.V., a screening was held at the Museum of Broadcasting in Hollywood. Media analyst and advertising executive Paul Schulman said, “I don’t think it has a chance of succeeding. It is not commercial, it is radically different from  what we as viewers are accustomed to seeing, there’s no one in the show to root for.” The two-hour pilot was the highest-rated film for the 1989-1990 season. Initial episodes were well-received by T.V. critics. The Washington Post’s Tom Shale wrote, “Twin Peaks isn’t just a visit to another town. It’s a visit to another planet. Maybe it will go down in history as a brief and brave experiment.” In his review for The New York Times, John J. O’Connor wrote, “Twin Peaks is not a sendup of the form. Mr. Lynch clearly savors the standard ingredients ... but then the director adds his own peculiar touches, small passing details that suddenly, and often hilariously, thrust the commonplace out of kilter.” Entertainment Weekly gave the show an "A+" rating and Ken Tucker wrote, "Plot is irrelevant; moments are everything. Lynch and Frost have mastered a way to make a weekly series endlessly interesting." Time magazine said that it, "may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV.”

What makes the first season so strong is the strength of Frost and Lynch’s vision for the show. They hand-picked every director and writer for the episodes they didn’t do themselves and this resulted in a solid consistency. Many of them were directors that Lynch had known from his days at the American Film Institute (i.e. Caleb Deschanel and Tim Hunter) or referrals from someone he knew. Lynch and Frost maintained tight control over the first season, handpicking all the directors. "They have a script and they chat with one or both of us and away they go. And then I'd see their shows at the sound mix. If something was completely wrong there would be time to fix it. But I can't even say that that ever happened," Frost said in an interview. After directing the second episode, Lynch went off to complete Wild at Heart (1990) while Frost wrote the remaining segments. The Lynch-directed pilot episode was the series blueprint in terms of style and tone that everyone else adhered to. It’s not surprising that the weakest episodes are the ones that diverge too far from this template.

One can’t talk about Twin Peaks without mentioning the unforgettable music by Angelo Badalamenti. He had worked previously with Lynch on Blue Velvet and really stepped it up on the show to provide rich, atmospheric music that enhanced every scene it was used. The music is so distinctive that is almost another character on the show. Who can forget the haunting theme for Laura Palmer or the jazzy score for the Red Room? And, of course, there is the show’s theme song that is instantly recognizable. Every time I hear the opening strains, it gets me every time. In the fall of 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch created the score. Lynch would often describe the mood or emotion he wanted the music to evoke and then Badalamenti would begin to play the piano. In 20 minutes, they produced the signature theme for the series. Badalamenti called it the “Love Theme from Twin Peaks.” Lynch told him, “you just wrote 75% of the score. It’s the mood of the whole piece. It is Twin Peaks.” Truer words were never spoken.

The show featured a fantastic cast of actors that ranged from Lynch regulars like Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet) and Jack Nance (Eraserhead, Dune, Blue Velvet), to Hollywood veterans like Piper Laurie (The Hustler) and Richard Beymer (West Side Story), to newcomers like Sherilyn Fenn (Two-Moon Junction) and Madchen Amick. They inhabit their eccentric characters so well and really make you care about them, like the pure of heart Agent Cooper, or hate them, like the wife-beating truck driver Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re). While these characters are either on the side of good or evil, they have plenty of layers (and secrets) that are fleshed out over the course of two seasons.

The problem with the second season is that after the murder of Laura was solved, the show lost its way for a spell as the writers struggled to create a storyline just as compelling. This is evident in brooding teenager James Hurley’s clunky film noir storyline or Nadine’s (Wendy Robie) bizarro regression to her teenage years albeit with a steady supply of adrenaline. Cooper even started wearing flannel shirts – a flagrant betrayal of the spirit of his character and symptomatic of how the show faltered with the absence of Frost and Lynch’s guiding influence. Twin Peaks improved significantly once Cooper’s ex-partner Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh) arrived in town to play a deadly game of cat and mouse (and an actual game of chess) with Cooper that builds to an unforgettable final episode that infuriated many viewers but remains one of the most exciting and unpredictable swan songs for a series in television history.

Several problems plagued Twin Peaks that became readily apparent during the second season. There were the restrictions of the medium of T.V. According to Lynch, "the power of most movies is in the bigness of the image and the sound and the romance. On TV the sound suffers and the impact suffers." The network was also an issue for Lynch who said, “there were a lot of good people at ABC, but I really still got the feeling that what motivated their decisions had nothing to do with the show. And that's where I think they go wrong. The show is the least important part of their plan." The change from Thursday to Saturday night really hurt the show by diminishing its viewer audience. Lynch said, “I don't think the TV executives are as loyal to any one show as they are to an overall thing against the other networks. There's no way I can talk about what they did because it made zero sense to me. All I know is that they killed it by changing nights and then forcing the solving of 'who killed Laura Palmer.'"

As a result in the change from one day of the week to another, they lost a large chunk of their audience. "It's nice when people like something that you've done but it's sort of like love that seems inevitable that the people reach the point when they've had enough of you, and they fall for the next thing. You're helpless to control that process and awareness of it is like a dull ache,” Lynch said in an interview. There was also the public's desire to know who killed Laura Palmer. "And one thing led to another, and the pressure was just so great that the murder mystery couldn't be just a background thing any more." Once the murder was solved, the show lost its focus and struggled through several sub-plots and declining ratings. Lynch also didn’t like what happened to Agent Cooper over the second season: "Cooper ceased to be 100 per cent Cooperesque for me. He got these flannel shirts and stuff! Some people maybe liked it. So you say, ‘Yes, I'm glad in a way, and in another way I'm really sorry because a guy that's too much like me cannot sustain that intense interest or dream.’ He's got to be specific. Cooper is a certain way. It's necessary."

During the course of the second season Lynch and Frost had a falling out. While they worked closely together during the first season of the show, when Lynch went off to do Wild at Heart, Frost says that, "David left me alone." Frost elaborates further in an interview: "When he [Lynch] got on the set, very often he threw out the script – which didn't please me all that much. But he would go off and do his own thing. He wasn't showing up all that often. He'd come in and direct an episode every once in a while. He wasn't really involved with the scripts. Then he'd go off on his own thing and leave us hanging." Clearly, Frost did not like or approve of Lynch's methods on the set but it is abundantly clear that Frost has his own agenda. In a 1991 interview, he said that he and Lynch worked closely on the first seven episodes but in a Wrapped in Plastic interview he says, "David's not really a writer by nature. He's a wonderful director and a great visual stylist, and he can write in collaboration with somebody. But it's good if the person he's working with has a strong sense of narrative and story, because those honestly aren't David's strengths." It seems that Frost was quite resentful of the amount of attention Lynch received about the show, while he did not get nearly the amount of press or recognition for his contribution.

Looking back, Frost wished they had “worked out a smooth transition” and that the Laura Palmer storyline was a “tough act to follow.” In regards to the second season, Frost felt that “perhaps the storytelling wasn’t quite as taut or as fraught with emotion.” At its best, Twin Peaks surpassed the safe confines of generic T.V. The first appearance of the Black Lodge, an otherworldly dimension populated by cryptic supernatural figures, in the third episode is a prime example of when the series defied genre categorization. Agent Cooper has a dream where he finds himself in the Red Room, a place within the Lodge populated with backwards-talking dwarves, op-art floor design, and distorted spatial relationships. Lynch described the Black Lodge as a place where "there is no problem with time. And anything can happen. It's a free zone, completely unpredictable and therefore pretty exciting but also scary.” Cooper's dream is a brilliantly constructed sequence that echoes Lynch's experimental debut feature film, Eraserhead (1977).

Lynch went one step further when he revisited the Black Lodge in the final episode of the show. At this point, Twin Peaks was on the verge of cancellation. Lynch had returned from working on other projects and was surprised at what had happened to the show. Instead of only offering a tantalizing glimpse of the Black Lodge, as he did in episode three, he adopted a go-for-broke attitude by re-writing the script as he shot the episode and proceeded to set almost half of the show in this environment. As Agent Cooper wandered through various rooms searching for his true love, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), the conventions of generic T.V. disappeared. Cooper's actions followed a dream logic that seems confusing at first, but makes sense if you remember what was said about this place in previous episodes. The final result is a wonderfully surreal exercise as Lynch regained creative control to end the series with a shocking conclusion – good does not triumph over evil as Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge while BOB takes possession of his body in the real world. Lynch brings Twin Peaks full circle by thumbing his nose at convention and once again subverting our expectations.

Twin Peaks paved the way for quirky, unusual fare like Northern Exposure, American Gothic, The X Files in the ‘90s and continues to do so with shows like Wonderfalls and Lost. It has been 20 years since the pilot episode aired on T.V. and the show has lost none of its power or ability to enthrall with its intriguing mysteries and engaging characters. Lynch and Frost’s show broke through and proved that challenging, cinematic, serialized T.V. could find a mainstream audience if even for only a brief time.


For more Twin Peaks, check out the Twin Peaks Archive blog which is also celebrating the show's 20th anniversary. Jeremy Richey also paid tribute to the show at his wonderful Moon in the Gutter blog. There's also the episode guide blog, props blog, and exhaustive In Twin Peaks site. Joining the fun is Edward Copeland's in-depth look back at the show over at his blog and Christine Hadden's excellent celebration of the show over at her Fascination with Fear blog.