Twin Peaks
I spent a rainy Sunday waiting for the triumphant return of Terri reading the I Ching and watching four episodes of Twin Peaks. (Yes, still getting through last year’s Christmas presents).
You can never be as obsessed with something as you are when you’re 17, so I had been wondering what I’d still think of it. It seems much less of an oddity now, probably partly because it was so influential; careful cinematography and quirky characters are all over TV, well at least the remaining fiction series on TV. It’s more of a soap opera than I remember. I had forgotten about “Invitation to Love” the soap-opera-within-a-soap-opera the denizens watch; self-conscious or not, it’s still a soap opera. The characters are quirky but they are still pretty cardboard, there are identical cousins, plots and double crossings, affairs, generic town institutions (”the diner,” “the mill,” “the hotel”). Even the theme song could be for a soap opera. But I don’t have to suspend my critical faculties too hard to get swept up in the mood again.
Terri came home while I was 3/4 of the way through Episode 6. She was saying that she could never figure out when it was supposed to be happening. This led to a small epiphany. Part of what helps establish the creepy mood is the stuck-in-the-50’s clothes and sets and the score. But there’s no rock music in Twin Peaks. Not really. There’s some reverby 50’s twangy guitar in some of the songs. But the whole thing happens in a parallel universe where Elvis was never born. I think it really does give it a timeless quality which is really part of the appeal. I don’t think I’d mind living in a world where rock never existed.