In 1990, I was hot. Fresh out of high school, curvy, grunge-haired in an Ione Skye kind of way, able to down 12-packs of Milwaukee's Best in a single sitting. I lived with two other girls, one who played bass in a band and one who painted our kitchen lavender, bright orange, and black. Working at both a record store and a bar, I had already gone through my Bukowski and Beats period in junior high and had moved on to Tom Robbins and Roald Dahl's short stories for adults. Existing on the outer periphery of the Illinois Steve Albini/Touch and Go scene, I naturally eschewed anything on a major label but gave in to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. This was the beginning of an obsession with retro anything, mostly from the '70s, and TV was no different. Snippets of What's Happening!! could send me and my friends into some sort of shamanistic ecstasy.
Amid all this arrived Twin Peaks, David Lynch's surreal TV show. We were immediately entranced. I suppose it was the same feeling that people got in the early '60s when The Twilight Zone showed up. It had everything going for it — a retro-ish look; sly humor gliding underneath the drama, so sly we were sure that only a few of us were in on the jokes; bursts of total strangeness out of nowhere, like a midget recorded dancing "backwards" and then played forward; and the Log Lady. Better still, people who we had tried so hard to separate ourselves from, like Midwestern Republicans and our parents, didn't get the show at all. In fact, they freaking hated it. Score.
"Let's have a party!" we screamed. We constantly had theme parties, usually around Fat Albert characters or something. This one was going to be epic though. Doughnuts, coffee, cherry pie, logs. Dressing up like whores. Red light bulbs. Angelo Badalamenti on the CD player.
When Twin Peaks came out on DVD years later I was tempted to throw another party, but channeling that same enthusiasm proved elusive. Then of course I sat down and watched both seasons, and sadly the defects of the show seemed pretty blaring. David Lynch has a habit of deciding to change directions in the middle of a project, not caring if the new one related to the other. In Mulholland Drive I found that bewitching when I first saw it, but after subsequent viewings it started to just seem lazy. Twin Peaks fizzles out the same way in season two. I was too stoned and steeped in post-punk in the 1990s to notice that Laura Palmer's murder was possibly never going to be revealed. I still revere the show though, despite its imperfections.
It's just been announced that Lynch will be bringing Twin Peaks back for Showtime. My initial response was "wow," but then it slowly dawned on me that so much has happened since 1990 on television that he will have to really amp up the weird to make an impact. Look at this season's American Horror Story: Freak Show. It could very well have been written by Lynch and shows the impact Twin Peaks had on TV. There's a two-headed lady with dueling personalities, strange ancillary characters that lurch about in the background, and in the first episode Jessica Lange's character even sings a slow, cabaret dirge (of a Bowie song, incidentally) that reminded me of the "Llorando" scene in Mulholland Drive. AHS also has some twisted sexual shit that makes Blue Velvet look like The Sound of Music.
The original Twin Peaks set the stage for genre-benders like The Sopranos and even Breaking Bad, but those shows had airtight plots. We like plots. We are spoiled. We don't like shows that veer off into ... whatever. Remember when season one of The Killing left everyone feeling like they'd been stood up for prom?
Here's hoping the new season of Twin Peaks will be fantastically strange yet highly plot-driven. If Showtime can rein in Lynch while still allowing him to be a maniac, I'll be psyched. I might even throw a party.
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