The Patreon Letters - August 2, 2017

Good morning, everyone. M here, writing to you a letter that will arrive on the eve of the finale of Twin Peaks: The Return, the long awaited third season of David Lynch's iconic television show. I'm something of a neophyte fan, but I'm incredibly excited about this finale. I figured, what better place than in these letters than to write about this excitement, and share with you something I think is very special. 

This isn't meant to be spoilery, for season 3 or for the original two seasons of Twin Peaks either. I mostly want to talk about the show broadly, and the ways in which I enjoyed it and how I recommend enjoying it if you yourself haven't watched it or haven't yet gotten in on season 3. After tomorrow, the think pieces will be written and the dust will settle and Twin Peaks will once again be a show that's talked about in retrospect from now until probably the end of time. That doesn't mean that it won't be worth watching. In fact, I think in retrospect there can be much to gain by enjoying the show on your own terms away from the twitter fervor and rampant speculation. 

I tried to get into Twin Peaks multiple times over the years, always bouncing out a handful of episodes into the short 8 episode first season. It was too old, too slow, just not really a thing I felt I could focus on. I didn't really care about Laura Palmer, or her killer, and everything else seemed so incongruous to that core selling point. The Palmer murder is a sober tragedy, dark in the Lynchian Americana mode a la Blue Velvet. Everything else is a wild melodrama of small town cartoons bouncing against each other in a straight-faced parody of soap opera writing and pacing. It can be a lot, and I don't think it'll ever get any easier to digest with time.

What got me to stick with it, finally, was a podcast. If you're ever to watch Twin Peaks (and you should) I recommend listening along with the Twin Peaks Rewatch Podcast, starting from the first episode, which is on the Idle Thumbs network and is a very beginner-friendly episode by episode trek through all of extant Twin Peaks. (Note: do not watch the European pilot, if you have it available via whatever means you're watching the show. It was basically other material re-edited into a movie that will really upset the 'canon' experience.) The episodes shunt spoilers of what's going to come before off to the last few minutes of each podcast and handle each episode as they come, and was recorded before anything of the new show was known so doesn't engage in any sort of forward-thinking speculation until the very end. It's smart, it's funny, it's good.

This is how I feel about the show too. Twin Peaks is a show of extremes, a place where awful things can happen and then the show veers directly into an amnesia subplot that involves mysterious super strength, or a secret identity predicated on the most unfortunate of disguises being the prelude to a relentless fall into oppression and self-damnation. It doesn't all work, and when Lynch becomes more hands off and the plots settle the Laura Palmer mystery and head into the woods the whole thing takes on a farcical quality that definitely is more entertaining than good. But that has its own charms. I am a self-avowed season 2 lover, and while it might be a mess it's a glorious mess the likes of which shows rarely indulge in. Drink it up. Enjoy the ride. The ending comes around in a really stellar way.

After this you should watch Fire Walk with Me. It's a film David Lynch made after the show was cancelled, but is a prequel about Laura Palmer's last days. Don't get cute and try to watch it in chronological order with FWWM first. It doesn't work that way. It's meant to be, at least up until this year, the final word on Twin Peaks. It's ugly. It's uncomfortable. I cannot attach enough content warnings for sexual assault and a parade of other nasty things to it. But also it's an incredible movie, the sort of soul-rending trial that you come out of changed. I cannot recommend it enough, but I hate it. It's also the (forgive the word choice) linchpin around which all of Twin Peaks past and present revolves. 

With that you have to fast forward all the way to this year. Sure, there are some strange Japanese commercials with Dale Cooper, there are numerous cut scenes from FWWM of dubious canon, there's a really messy book about UFOs and the founding of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost (Lynch's co-writer on the show) that will make you fantastic at trivia. But by and large, there's nothing but the gulf of 25 years until Twin Peaks: The Return happened. I'd say if you're watching it all, maybe take a bit of a break. Go find another thing to get into. Then, after some life has passed, come back. Twin Peaks will wait. 

Twin Peaks: The Return is right now exclusive to Showtime, but I'm sure it'll shortly be available on Blu-Ray. It's 18 episodes all directed by Lynch and written by Lynch and Frost. It is dense and mostly eschews a lot of the trappings of soap opera parody in favor of a cinematic density that renders the whole thing into a long waking nightmare of beauty and love and terror. While I continue to recommend listening to the Rewatch podcast (which I guess is just a watch podcast now, though the name remains the same), I also think it would be entrancing and exhausting to just shove all of The Return into your brain in one go if you're up to it. Make sure you take proper breaks to walk around, take care of yourself. 

Twin Peaks is special, it was special in 1990 when it premiered and it's even more special now, a vision of a world that spans literal decades to become a singular testament to a dark vision of Americana and the rot that lurks within it. Whether it's the comedy of seeing our neighbors and parents and schoolyard acquaintances parroted back to us in gross caricature, or the horror of recognizing the quiet menace that exists behind any closed door of any house on any street, Twin Peaks speaks to the character of people unbound by any one era. Twin Peaks is about a truth, shouted loudly in volume and taste, offered for you to cherish and quake before in equal measure.

So yeah, you should watch the show.

Until next time, friends,

M