A Pilgrim's Peaks - Pilot
The journal of my Twin Peaks rewatch.
It’s easy to forget that all of this started with that title sequence.
There was no cold open, no preface, no Log Lady introduction - just that calm combination of pastoral and industrial images accompanied by the gentlest synthesized guitar sample to ever pass through a subwoofer, all of which smoothly transition into the first shot of the show proper. Most pilots would have some kind of cold open that throws you into the world without any context before its title sequence kicks in, if there even is one for the pilot (not always the case), and then it would bring you back into the drama afterwards. But not this one.
It’s hard to think of new things to say about Twin Peaks, picked apart as it has been in its journey through the strata of cultures from pop to cult to wherever it stands now more than 30 years after it premiered. Rewatching the pilot some 20+ years after first catching it on one of its late-90’s re-airings on Bravo as a teenager, I see it as differently now as I saw the world around me back then. Time and knowledge and experience have added new dimensions, the way they do with any work of art.
I see a town hanging on by a thread like so many in America have been and still are. Supported overwhelmingly by the last vestiges of a single industry that’s slowly abandoning its citizens to automation or obsolescence; the town of Twin Peaks could be said to be peak rust belt, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale than Detroit, Rochester or Cleveland. In addition to the historical forces, the sawmill that is likely the town’s biggest employer is also under attack from its greediest citizens. The wealthy owner of a local business is actively trying to close a deal that relies on insider information to effectively short the land that the mill is on and buy it cheap after the factory closes down within the year.
It’s a town where youthful mid century American archetypes like the the Homecoming Queen and the high school quarterback who’s subtly dressed in red, white and blue have already fallen into toxic, abusive, or loveless relationships which drive them to self-medicate with the cocaine and alcohol that were the demons of the era in which the show took place, a void that would almost certainly be filled by prescription opioids today.
But we know none of this as the title cards play out and the show starts on an overcast morning in the small, Pacific Northwestern town of Twin Peaks. The banality is torn by what is, at first, the barely noticeable presence of a body, wrapped in plastic, that’s washed up on a rocky beach.
What spirals out from there over the course of the feature length pilot is a famously singular mix of soap opera, comedy, horror and incalculable grief which more than earns every piece of praise that will continue to be laid at its majestically clad feet until the heat death of the universe. I cannot fathom what it must have been like to experience this when it first came out at the dawn of the 90’s. It’s no wonder it engendered such mania; there truly was nothing like this before it. While Lynch explored similar themes and places in Blue Velvet, that movie (aside from one scene (and, I guess, one line)) lacked an element of comedic camp which Twin Peaks has that, at least at the time, kept it from veering too far into the art house at the edge of town.
Since then, there have been other good, even great, pilots. Some who wore the influence of this show readily. But none have been able to replicate it, and I doubt they ever will, because I think Twin Peaks is a Platonic form of America. In its fiction, it captures a fundamental essence about the society in which it was made. The faces and behaviors we’re allowed to present, the faces and behaviors we’re not allowed to present, and the sadness, pain, terror and love that the friction between the two produces.
At the end, we’re left mostly in darkness with just a brief glimpse of further hidden revelations to come. The weight of the show’s legacy is still, after 94 minutes, waiting to fully take shape in front of us; the body, it’s plastic, exposing something previously unknown, like a small tear in the otherwise pristinely papered wall we put up.