Welcome to Twin Peaks
As part of planning and preproduction for National Novel Writing Month coming up in November I’ve begun revisiting the things that I find inspiring that fit in with my planned novel’s genre and tone. I’ve started with Twin Peaks. Since the original series ran, I’ve rewatched this many times, but this will be the first time I’ve rewatched it in its entirety since the Showtime series ran.
Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, Twin Peaks is one of my favorite series ever. At its worst moments I feel like it’s a noble effort and I’m glad they had the freedom to try something different even if it didn’t work. At its best moments it strikes a level of joy and satisfaction so overwhelmingly pure, there are few if any comparisons.
My main goal in watching it for NaNoWrMo prep is for the characters. The Twin Peaks creators managed to make their characters so wonderful that I think I’d enjoy seeing them go about their days even if the plot weren’t as stellar. I’d like to put my finger on what makes them so engaging. Some of it is the quirkiness sure, but that can’t be it entirely.
My secondary goal is to discover what creates the tone that the show achieves. In the second episode Donna describes that she’s in what feels like, “the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.” I feel like that is an apt description of the show’s tone, and oh wow what I wouldn’t give to achieve that in my writing.
At the same time, I’m interested in the structure and the plot. My memory is that after the Laura Palmer story was told, they kind of had too many characters and didn’t know what to do with all of them, but up until that point the story is beautifully constructed, and I would like to better the structure of my stories as well.
The pilot is an amazing piece of television. More so when one considers what television was at the time, but ignoring that context I’ll focus on what I saw seeing it again in the here and now. In an hour and half, the pilot establishes almost all of the characters. It establishes the plot in the first minutes, the body washed ashore. It then spends a few minutes showing us how people find out that Laura Palmer has been killed and it does so with essentially no dialogue. My friend Djordi called this bit “a masterclass in implied story telling,” and I think that’s spot on. Laura’s mother knows she’s not at home, so she calls her husband at work. All he says is “Sheriff Truman,” and both parents know. No one said to them that their daughter is dead, but they know. Meanwhile there are cops at the school, a girl runs through the quad screaming, and Donna and James look to Laura’s empty desk, to one another, and Donna starts to cry. It’s incredibly moving. It informs us about these characters and sets up the plot all at once and all with barely a word spoken.
Still, watching it again I wondered what makes the characters so endearing. The pilot spends much of its time developing them, but it’s not direct about it. Much like learning of Laura’s death, it accomplishes this with little dialogue. From the opening minutes, Pete is so visibly upset by finding this young victim, that it’s easy to empathize with him right away. In addition to being upset by seeing Laura, the writers make Doc Hayward sympathetic by showing us how understanding he is of his daughter. When she sneaks out, with all that has happened he doesn’t overreact and punish her, instead he tells her that he trusts her and loves her. Lucy is quirky from the moment we meet her. The Lynchian quirkiness is at its best when it’s telling a straight story just a little warped, I feel. When Agent Cooper is brought in he’s quirky from the get go, but then he has an almost instant rapport with the sheriff and through that rapport it’s smooth for us to instantly latch onto Cooper as the main character, despite the fact that he comes into the hour and a half pilot episode over a quarter of the way in.
One thing that didn’t occur to me while I was watching but occurs now is that the villains are enjoyable to watch. Being a writer of prose, I worry about point of view, and I don’t usually have chapters or sections in the point of view of the villains. This is different for television and movies of course. The villains in Twin Peaks are pretty two dimensional, or at least start out that way, but then that works for the story, and because they’re truly bad we’re rooting against them from the start. This makes us root all the harder for the protagonists. We want Cooper to get Leo Johnson in part because we’ve seen Leo behave monstrously.
The show does a remarkable job of foreshadowing and laying out the plot in clues. It would make a fantastic Roleplaying Game. I think Game Masters of any game could learn a lot from it, but particularly Keepers for Call of Cthulhu. The methodical means of a seed is planted foreshadowing something ominous in one episode, then a clue leads to a place where some other clues will in turn lead to where that seed will payoff in fruition, is achieved repeatedly.
It also fits in with the tone of Call of Cthulhu. The Secret Society the Bookhouse Boys guarding against the ancient evil that lies in the woods, the radio gibberish from galaxies outside our own that suddenly decodes to words being spoken to Cooper in his dream, not to mention the way magic works… It all has a distinct feel to it, as if the Call of Cthulhu RPG were set in the northwest instead of the northeast. Come to think of it, the series and the Fire Walk With Me movie seem like they must have had a significant influence on the Delta Green campaign world.
Another way in which I think it’s useful to study this show for storytellers is the show’s usage of dream sequences and visions. It gives the writers a great freedom to be able to bring the scary with a vision, such as a blood stain spreading across carpet where there isn’t any a moment before, or crazy looking Bob crawling over a couch. It gives Lynch the chance to bring the weird with dancing dwarfs and prophetic giants. I think that Lynch in this series channels the weirdness well to show us things that can’t really be shown. I got a similar vibe from the show Legion when they used a dance off to demonstrate a psychic combat. There are things that just can’t be expressed easily, the best that can be done is something approaching an expression of them, and I think Lynch uses weirdness to get as close as can be hoped for.
Everyone thinks of the weirdness when they think of Lynch in general and Twin Peaks in particular. Some remember the sheer terror that Lynch manages to invoke. But it’s easy to forget how funny the show could be, and I think it’s the mix of these three that make the show so good, but it’s the humor that’s a big part of why I like the characters so much. Cooper’s rock throwing experiment is both weird and funny, and it’s a great scene that furthers along the plot while giving us an early glimpse into the characters. Agent Albert’s jokes border on a little mean, but they’re still funny and they serve the purpose of airing the skepticism that much of the audience must be thinking.
All in all it’s an amazing run and I can’t wait to watch the rest of the show even if I know it’s not always as close to perfect going forward.
