Ill See You Again in Twenty Five Years
In the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks (1990-1991), "I'll run into you again in 25 years" were the words spoken backwards past Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) to FBI Special Amanuensis Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), the detective who had spent more than than a flavor investigating her death.
Following Laura's promise to Cooper she assumes the frozen pose of a statue earlier disappearing entirely from view. For those who had watched Twin Peaks during its initial run, this was nothing new. Unexplained deportment, surreal figures and constant non-sequiturs had appeared throughout but they remained no less eerily transfixing.
Laura's promise, within the context of the evidence, occurs inside the Black Lodge. This is a liminal zone that exists between the minor town that the series is named later on, its surrounding Douglas fir forests and that which lies "across", a metaphysical crossing-point between life and death, good and evil.
It is visualised as a room of zigzagged floors, black couches, white statues and gently swaying cherry-red curtained walls wherein time is fluid and speech is spoken backwards. Long earlier Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) intoned about time being a flat circle in True Detective (2014), Twin Peaks abounded in existential enigmas.
In the Blackness Social club, bodies appear and disappear; fourth dimension loops; lights flicker and wrenching screams fill up the air. Like the feel of watching Twin Peaks in general, the Black Lodge scenes are and then aesthetically atypical, so highly stylised, and at times so frankly terrifying that it is hard to imagine how David Lynch and Marking Frost's co-creation was greenlit by and aired on prime number time US network television.
At a time in which network rather than cable TV programming held clout, Twin Peaks was, initially at to the lowest degree, commercially and critically successful, garnering fourteen Emmys and some of the highest ratings that ABC had netted in years.
Looking back, Twin Peaks had no shortage of ardent supporters and fans.
Its riddling, quixotic sensibility spread out far beyond the textual confines of the show and into a range of concurrent popular civilisation forms. In The Simpsons, for instance, Homer is seen laughingly watching a mock Twin Peaks episode before exclaiming: "I take absolutely no idea what is going on."
There was a Saturday Nighttime Live parody, cross-media spin-offs (The Cloak-and-dagger Diary of Laura Palmer, penned by Lynch's daughter Jennifer Lynch, or The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes), coffee ads too as endless magazine covers with the cast.
Furthermore, as media fandom scholars such equally Henry Jenkins accept observed, Twin Peaks was ane of the starting time shows to launch nascent forms of Television set/net fandom. Its first audiences took to online bulletin boards and forums, together with VCR recordings and fanzines to collectively try and make sense of a deliberately obtuse bear witness.
When the network placed the show on hiatus afterwards the first season, the fans passionately rallied around the show imploring the network to "Give Peaks A Take a chance".
What went wrong? Arguably, the downfall of Twin Peaks actually had very little to do with the quality of the show or with Lynch/Frost. Sure, there were plot lines we could all take lived without. For myself, that involved anything to practice with the town mill or the seemingly countless and ill-fated Windom Earle storyline that dominated the cease of season two.
The real "problem" with Twin Peaks was that it but did not cohere with the conventions, demands and audience expectations of network TV during the early 90s. When audiences dropped off considering the question of who killed Laura Palmer still had not been answered, ABC responded by changing programming days and times and then cancelling the show.
Lynch himself (unlike the more than Television set-schooled Frost) has made no secret of the fact he never wanted to reveal who killed Laura. He would accept preferred, instead, to leave that question unanswered so that it might generate still farther enigmas. When network pressures forced the show to reveal Laura'due south killer, Twin Peaks provided an answer while defiantly opening upward other existential questions. The Black Lodge, aliens, doppelgängers. Killer BOB.
The existent legacy of Twin Peaks is non who killed Laura or any of the other narrative mysteries that followed. It is how this show managed to be (and however is, upon reviewing) so powerfully and affectively mysterious. From the oneiric opening credits on, yous felt similar its seemingly innocuous, small town, beige carpeted reality could, at any moment, give way to an entirely different, unnerving world.
The click of a record player, BOB steadily itch over the lounge room burrow, the motility of the ceiling fan, the sway of a traffic light or that low humming drone that resonated throughout. The use of images and sounds in Twin Peaks become the stuff and substance of nightmares.
To date, I can just think of one Television show that even comes shut to achieving that kind of surrealist altercation whereby i reality subtly and seamlessly enfolds into another – Hannibal (2013-).
This week it was announced that Twin Peaks is fix to return for a third season on Offset in 2016 – 25 years later Laura promised she would see Cooper again. Purported to be a directly continuation of where the last season left off only set in the present 24-hour interval, there has already been much apprehension, speculation and hesitation.
Social media is rife with different generations of Twin Peaks fans trading those quondam but familiar quotes ("it'south happening again"; "that glue you like is going to come back in fashion"), enervating to be the new Log Lady, and wondering whether or non nosotros volition know Cooper's fate.
With Lynch/Frost at the helm one time more and Lynch set up to straight all of the nine slated episodes, questions abound. How volition the new Twin Peaks stack upwardly against its slick, stylish and nightmarish cablevision brethren? Will information technology be equally agonizing, as hilariously funny and equally wildly multi-generic equally the original? There is some fourth dimension yet before whatsoever of those questions can be answered.
Let us promise that the contemporary age of "quality TV" and "narrative complexity", particularly on cable, volition finally give Lynch/Frost room plenty to play.
lipscomberaingerred.blogspot.com
Source: https://theconversation.com/ill-see-you-again-in-25-years-the-return-to-twin-peaks-32624
0 Response to "Ill See You Again in Twenty Five Years"
Post a Comment