Twin Peaks, The First Season and Fire Walk With Me

The television show Twin Peaks perfectly illustrates the tension between originality and mass culture. Created by film director David Lynch and TV producer Mark Frost (who also helped create the hit cop series Hill Street Blues), Twin Peaks, part murder mystery, part soap opera, was made with cinematic production values and achieved ‘must-see' status after being talked up by critics and the network which broadcast it. Although briefly a cultural sensation in the United States and elsewhere, its uncompromising weirdness and increasing reliance on supernatural story elements, the fact that it was a serial in which each episode was not self-contained but an incremental advancement of an overall story arc, and the slow narrative pace (the events in each episode spanned a single day, and it took 14 episodes to reveal the murderer), soon whittled its initial audience to a stubborn core of die-hard fans. But don't let the show's latter-day cult status put you off: for the first 14 episodes, before supernatural silliness begins to overwhelm it, Twin Peaks was TV drama of the highest order, and it had a lasting influence on the cultural landscape.

More than ten years after the show's demise, Universal have released a DVD box set containing the pilot and seven episodes which comprised the first season (the second season, when the mass audience began to switch off in their millions, had a two hour premiere and 21 one-hour episodes). The story kicks off with the discovery of the plastic-wrapped body of high school student Laura Palmer on a river bank outside the small town of Twin Peaks, in the Pacific north-west. Local sheriff Harry Truman quickly arrests her boyfriend, Bobby Briggs, but then another young girl is found on old railroad tracks in a coma, the murder scene is discovered just across the state line, and FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is called in. Cooper soon realises that Laura's murder is linked to an unsolved murder of another young girl, Teresa Banks, and discovers that Laura Palmer, a beautiful High School Homecoming Queen renowned for her plethora of good works, was also deeply involved in drugs and prostitution. As the investigation deepens, it becomes clear that not only does Twin Peaks hide the multitude of interlinked secrets, affairs, and assignations common to all small town murder mysteries, but there might be something nasty stirring in the woods that surround it.

With its heightening of emotional affect, deadpan absurdist comedy, overt homages to classic TV shows, and playful tweaking of the tropes of police investigatory series, Twin Peaks caused a sensation in a more innocent time when the self-conscious irony of postmodernism was still novel. Although it's easy to see that Dale Cooper is Sherlock Holmes recast as an eccentric all-American boy scout, with the dependable and capable Sheriff Truman as his Dr Watson (Frost went on to write two novels, The List of Seven and The Six Messiahs, which involve Conan Doyle in mysteries which have a heavy dose of the supernatural and Theosophical elements usually attributed to Lynch), Cooper's naive enthusiasm for Twin Peaks's mountain air, big trees, good coffee and damn fine cherry pie, and his need to be instructed in rural ways by Truman, not only adds depth to relationship of the two men, but neatly inverts the cliche of the small town cop at large in the big city. And the rich tangle of murder mystery and soap opera plotting is supported by a strong theme of doubling, twins and dopplegangers, from the eponymous mountain peaks shown in the opening credits, to the two halves of the locket Laura Palmer wore, one half found at the murder scene, the other buried in the woods by James Hurley, the moody biker boy Laura was secretly seeing behind Bobby Briggs's back, and retrieved by her murderer. Not only did Laura Palmer have a dark half which overwhelmed her innate goodness, but she was also abused by ‘Bob', the ravenous and unkempt doppleganger of the murderer, and had an identical cousin, Maddy, who after arriving in Twin Peaks to help comfort Laura's parents, quickly falls in with James Hurley and Donna Hayward, Laura's straight-arrow best friend, who are following their own set of clues in a Nancy Drew style investigation that parallels Dale Cooper's.

Unusually for an American TV show, Twin Peaks was shot on film with wide lenses, and this newly remastered high-definition transfer, digitally remastered for the DVD release, looks fabulous, enhancing the carefully planned colour design that ranges from a palette of cool blues and grey to warm wood and blood red highlights, and revealing depth and detail in the shadow-filled lighting design favoured by David Lynch and echoed by the other directors. Presented in a fold-out case with a transparent sleeve printed with Laura Palmer's iconic Homecoming Queen photograph, the four-disc set is loaded with extras. With the exception of the pilot, each episode is accompanied by script notes and audio commentary, including contributions from series writers, directors, the director of photography and the set designer, as well as optional Log Lady introductions. A fourth disc includes ‘postcards' from the cast (mostly standard Electronic Press Kit material, but containing some genuinely interesting material), a brief lesson in talking backwards, interviews, and material culled from the official Twin Peaks Magazine, ‘Wrapped in Plastic'. While this ephemera is no doubt pleasing to hardcore fans, it doesn't quite add up to the solid ‘making of' feature neophytes might find useful, but overall the box set is an exemplary package that makes good use of the enhanced visual resolution and interactivity of the DVD medium.

If you can make it all the way through the first 14 episodes of Twin Peaks to the solution of the water-cooler question of the early 90's, ‘Who killed Laura Palmer', you might want to check out Twin Peaks -- Fire Walk With Me, available as a no-frills Region 0 DVD from Second Sight. Made for theatrical release by David Lynch immediately after the TV series was cancelled, compromised by studio-enforced cutting to about two-thirds its original length and Kyle Maclachlan's initial reluctance to play Dale Cooper again because he feared type-casting, in parts difficult to follow without an intimate knowledge of the TV series and because of Lynch's wilful refusal to resolve ambiguities, the movie failed to satisfy almost everyone. Yet I think it is one of Lynch's best works; after you scale away various bits of Lynchian obscurity, Fire Walk With Me has at its core an intimate psychological mystery that depicts the last seven days of a girl who has lost control of her life and knows that she's speeding towards her death, but who can do nothing about it – and because she's so deeply scarred by abuse, it's possible that she even welcomes it. As Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee gives an extraordinary, searing performance, and despite its graphic emotional violence, the movie is imbued with an aching tenderness that makes us care deeply for poor doomed Laura, and allows us to glimpse of a final hint of redemption.

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