‘I have no idea where this will lead us. but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange…’
Sometimes, something comes along that changes everything. Historically, television was always seen as cinema’s less prestigious, more trashy cousin. That all started to change in the ’90s with The X-Files, The Sopranos and Oz. But before that first era of peak TV, there was David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. There has still never been anything like it before or since…
Twin Peaks is the story of the murder of girl-next-door Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and the investigation into her death headed up by Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). Despite containing many of the tropes and motifs of a soap opera, Twin Peaks is also a surreal and often terrifying treatise on the evil that men do.
Launched in April of 1990, Twin Peaks was an instant pop culture phenomenon, and while the second season dipped massively in turns of both quality and viewership, the influence and legacy of the show can’t be denied. Cooper’s dream sequences in the red room, the bizarre pronoucements of the log lady, the tragedy of Shelly Johnson… all of these moments and more have become so enshrined in pop culture that Lynch, and his co-creator Mark Frost, have ensured that Twin Peaks will echo throughout pop culture history forever, and that’s without mentioning Angelo Badalamenti’s absolutely stunning score – surely one of the best television scores of all time.
The first season of Twin Peaks, at only eight episodes, is utter televisual perfection. It stands with any other achievement in the medium before or since. Season two starts off well, but the latter half of the season oscillates between the bizarre and the just plain bad. It’s almost worth sitting through the worst of it, however, to get to the final two episodes (in which Lynch returns having been absent for much of the season two), and the subsequent season finale is as unnerving as it is baffling. If anything sums up Lynch’s singular vision it is the image of Cooper smashing his head into a glass mirror as the credits roll.
Twin Peaks is one of those shows that everybody should be forced to watch (or at least the first season). It is the kind of work that changes the way that you look at the world. There aren’t many television shows that can say the same. David Lynch – you were a genius.
