Spotlight 9 / 1991, Das aktuelle Magazin in Englisch, September, p.26-28

Peaks freaks

Diesen Monat kommt eine neue Serie aus den Staaten ins deutsche Fernsehen. Nicht schon wieder! Aber von Twin Peaks werden sich viele Verächter von Dallas angezogen fühlen.

Who killed Laura Palmer? That´s the big question that has had millions of Americans, Canadians, Britons and Australians rushing home once a week to watch the latest episode of a TV series. From September onwards, many Germans will be joining them.

The phenomenally popular series is called Twin Peaks. Created by cult director David Lynch, it is the story of an obsession. That will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with Lynch´s bizarrely surreal films Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart. But what I find fascinating is not Lynch´s sweetly perverse obsession. It´s how you and I can get hooked on a weekly TV series. Last Christmas it went so far that my mother and I - two full-blooded Brits - actually baked a Twin Peaks cherry-pie with the logo of the "Double-R-Diner" on top. Now would you do that for Dallas?

The Double-R-Diner, famous for its pies and coffee, is the life and soul of the little town of Twin Peaks, located in America´s north-west in the lumbering state of Washington. It´s a quiet town where nothing much happens and where people wear plaid lumberjack shirts. The Packard Sawmill provides most of the employment, and the few tourists who pass through stay at Benjamin Horne´s Great Northern Hotel. Until one morning ...

A lot of strange things

"She´s dead - wrapped in plastic," says Pete Martell, calling the sheriff to report the discovery of a body by the lake. The victim is Laura Palmer, young and beautiful, the wholesome high school homecoming queen. Who killed Laura Palmer, and why? If you know David Lynch, you´ll know that there is one big can of worms about to be opened in Twin Peaks.

As Lynch himself says, "A lot of strange things happened in the woods. People only told me 10 per cent of what they knew, and it was up to you to discover the other 90 per cent."

Not many people in the TV business thought Twin Peaks would be a success. but the show opened in the USA on 8 April 1990 with a 33 per cent share of the audience, and it also received 14 nominations for the American Emmy awards (television´s version of the Oscars) - more than any other show last year.

According to a US journalist interviewed in Newsweek, "It´s only a TV show, but you feel like a cultural idiot, if you can´t quote it on Fridays." "Peaks freaks" cancelled appointments on Thursday nights to watch the show together while eating cherry-pie and doughnuts or imitating other aspects of American family life.

As a series, Twin Peaks is a parody of all the other soap operas. It adores and emulates them, but at the same time it uses satire to peel away the surface of life itself and the way we like to see it reflected on television. Twin Peaks is even more ridiculous than Dallas - and even more artful. The TV critic of the Los Angeles Times wrote that one must be thankful for small pleasures, as "so much of television is so rigidly mainstream as well as simplistic, transparent and without mystique that one does a double take when sighting a series as gratuitously bizarre as Twin Peaks".

From Laura Palmer to "The Log Lady", the cast list of Twin Peaks is also a catalogue of all-American weirdness. The star of the show is FBI special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). Straight as a die and always dressed in a black suit, Cooper uses his remarkable deductive powers to confuse and manipulate everyone. He has the naive charm of a boy scout, but an intellectual passion for oriental philosophy, which he puts to good use in his investigations. It is Cooper, as a connoisseur of American cuisine, who made cherry-pie famous again and coined the phrase much imitated by Peaks freaks every morning over breakfast: "That´s a damn fine cup of coffee!"

The Dr Watson to Cooper´s Sherlock Holmes is the local sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean). Honest and down-to-earth, Truman gains Cooper´s respect and they become a good team. But not even Truman can hide a secret from Cooper. He has been having an affair with the young sawmill heiress Josie Packard, played by Joan Chen.

Spoilt, sexy

Josie is one of the several beautiful women who live in Twin Peaks. Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the spoilt, sexy daughter of hotel owner Benjamin Horne, falls in love with Cooper. Her schoolmate Donna Hayward had once been Laura Palmer´s best friend, but now feels guilty about her feelings for James Hurley (James Marshall), Laura´s boyfriend. Both are determined to solve the riddle of Laura´s death. Meanwhile, back in real life, Lara Flynn Boyle, who plays Donna, has become "happily involved" with Kyle MacLachlan, who, if you remember, plays special agent Dale Cooper.

Confused? We´re talking about soap opera here, and we´ve only just begun. Now, in my own fantasy world, if I can´t get "happily involved" with Lara Flynn Boyle (she´s taken), there is always the girl with the wonderfully unusual name of Mädchen Amick. Mädchen plays Shelly Johnson, who serves cherry-pie at the Double-R under the direction of its owner Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton. Both have criminal and violent husbands, and Shelly´s had been having an affair with Laura Palmer before her death. Laura, by the way, was a nymphomaniac and a cocaine user.

A number of more or less well-known actors appear - or reappear - in Twin Peaks. Jack Nance, as Pete Martell, is a veteran of numerous movies by David Lynch and Dennis Hopper. His adulterous wife Catherine is played by Piper Laurie, one of Hollywood´s hottest sex symbols in the 50s. The one-time stars from West Side Story are reunited in the series. Russ Tamblyn plays the erratic psychiatrist Dr Jacoby, who treated and loved Laura Palmer. Richard Beymer plays Benjamin Horne, the hotel owner who runs a brothel on the other side of the border in Canada, where - as you´ve probably guessed - Laura Palmer once worked.

In a soap opera nothing is more difficult to explain than the plot. It would take pages to unravel the complications of who is sleeping with whom, not to mention who shot whom, in Twin Peaks. But it was not the plot of Twin Peaks that confused millions of viewers accustomed to more mainstream shows such as Dallas or Dynasty (Denver Clan). The difference was on the conceptual level. Twin Peaks is a satire that loves the pure Americana it takes apart. Can our wholesome high school homecoming queen be a drug user and a nymphomaniac? Beneath the prim facade everyone has a dark and violent secret - far more disturbing and unsettling than anything J.R. ever did. And the hilarious way it is told gives pleasure to the millions who can tell themselves: "This is only television." Let´s face it, Peaks freaks are sophisticated.

Ratings, however, are not. The audience of Twin Peaks fell off, once it was revealed in the second series who had actually killed Laura Palmer. While playing with the conventions of soap opera, the makers of the series had conceived it with one big flaw. Twin Peaks has, essentially, only one mystery: the death of Laura Palmer. Once that crime was solved, the series lost its motivation. It closed after the 28th episode. But even after the show was over, its memorabilia remained. Twin Peaks appealed mainly to an educated, cosmopolitan audience. The theme tune to the series, Falling, composed by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti and performed by Julee Cruise, became a hit in the USA. Lynch´s daughter Jennifer wrote The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (Penguin Books), a fascinating, frightening study of a young girl´s sexual awakening. Obsessives like me also possess Diane... The Tapes of Agent Cooper. Cooper is not only a friend of cherry-pie but also of the portable dictation machine with which he records countless messages to the mysterious Diane - his secretary, his lover? We never find out, but the tape offers some wonderful examples of Cooper´s wit and wisdom, such as: "Two things continue to trouble me - and I´m speaking here not only as an agent of the Bureau but also as a human being. What really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys ... and who pulled the trigger on J.F.K.?"

You can get Twin Peaks coffee mugs, plastic logs, doughnuts and probably even chain-saws. There are also T-shirts bearing the logo: "I killed Laura Palmer". I found one that´s even better. It reads: "I killed Laura Palmer - and Bart Simpson´s next!" And that, dear readers, is the next American TV series you´ll simply have to get interested in.

David Marsh

[word translations German/English omitted]