Wider Reading | Let's Watch Twin Peaks: Pilot

Good evening, Diane. Find a comfy chair, fetch yourself a present for the day (I recommend a slice of cherry pie or a damn good cup of coffee), and settle in for the pilot episode of the seminal TV series created by David Lynch and Mark Frost. We’re going to be commenting on the characters, the themes, and – most importantly of all – those essential recurring elemental symbols, fire, water and glass.



Spoilers are to be expected. Commentary is in order.



1) And here we go. I have the Gold Edition, so every episode comes with a slightly tedious introduction featuring the Log Lady, clearly filmed later on a cheaper budget. This time around, she’s telling us that there are many different kinds of stories. Some are funny, and some are sad. Damn it, Lynch, will you stop tinkering with your opus after the event? Next you’ll release a special edition where Andy doesn’t shoot Jacques first.


2) The titles roll. I could expand upon these almost frame-by-frame, but, for now, here’s a shorter list of the key devices; nature and industry, shot side-by-side to the same gentle, mellifluous soundtrack, as if the two are in total harmony. The theme music belies the darker edge – the logging mill which destroys nature, the bird which is both an innocent witness to murder and a fiend that attacks Laura Palmer’s corpse. And note that opening fiery spark from the mill machinery at the start of the sequence, and the importance of water towards the end, flowing and reflective – pure. If fire is the devil, then what is water?

3) The first shot we see beyond the title credits is a reflection – the reflection of Josie Packard. At first it may seem an odd character to focus on for the very opening of the series, but consider her extremely androgynous beauty, and she’s not a bad poster girl for the duality of Twin Peaks. And, veterans of the show, recall that the last time we’ll ever see Josie will be in a reflection.


The body of Laura Palmer is found. “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.”

4) Worth noting are the psychic, intuitive reactions of Laura’s mother Sarah and her classmates, as the news spreads that she’s been washed-up, murdered. Audrey appears to have no such reaction – or is it simply a lack of empathy?

Audrey reacting to the news of the murder and probable rape of her classmate.

5) FIRE! THERE IT IS! FIRE! And it’s shown for the first time in the Great Northern Hotel as Benjamin Horne, the hotel owner, elects to manipulate his Norwegian guests.


6) The emotional breakdowns of Laura’s parents Leland and Sarah Palmer are intriguing not simply because they are tragic, but because they will repeat themselves over the first series, becoming less tragic to us and closer to soap melodramatics with every time – Sarah’s sob-shrieks and Leland’s screwing up his face and caving in on himself.


7) Another FIRE reference as Shelley, the beaten-down diner waitress, flirts with her illicit boyfriend, Bobby, telling him she’ll “light his fire”. Interestingly, as Bobby, panicking at the realisation that Shelley’s brutal boyfriend Leo has returned home early, turns his car around and speeds away, the noise of the engine is cut with the noise of a saw grinding into wood.


8) Sarah Palmer, being questioned by the police, has a sudden attack of unexplainable horror brought on by *something* upstairs – or, perhaps, just the sight of a ceiling fan.

“Who’s upstairs?”

“Your husband, and one of my men.”


9) Josie and Catherine Martell are arguing; apparently Josie wants to shut down the woodmill because one of the workers has a daughter, Ronette Pulaski, who’s suspected to have gone missing along with Laura. Catherine disagrees – and while Josie’s motives seem odd to us, Catherine’s presented as being so unpleasant that we don’t mind a great deal. The tension between these two characters will be important.


10) And we finally see Ronette Pulaski, staggering in a daze across a bridge, having clearly suffered abuse of some kind. Ronette is key to the entire puzzle – or, at least, she would be key in another show. Here, the characters and creators forget about her to such a great extent in comparison to Laura (she’s even plainer, with a name that’s hard to pronounce and not all-American in the same way as the murdered girl) that a distressed bird will be seen as a more vital witness than her later on.

She looks normal, is what I mean to say. Normal, in a town filled with unrealistically attractive women.

11) And we meet Special Agent Dale Cooper, our de facto hero and iconic character, who, in typical fashion, is dictaphoning obsessively his trivia of the day for the benefit of someone called ‘Diane’. He also gets across an almost hilarious amount of direct plot exposition by the same method.


Cooper, as the show goes on, will become the series’ symbol of goodness – a less worldly Marge Gunderson. Both characters are eccentric and positive in their outlooks when faced with a great evil, to the point that they could be considered naive, even immature, but whose positive energy is hinted to be their most useful quality. (Compare this to Andy, a good man hindered by sorrow at the horrors he has to face, who cries at the sight of Laura’s body and who is later revealed to be very literally impotent – and to that other Coenian cop, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, equally good, equally melancholy and equally powerless.) A great deal of this is suggested by his appearance, boyish, clean-shaven, and often wearing a coat that looks a size or two too for him. He looks like a cool version of one of the Milibands.

Don't tell me you can't see it.

12) And, as he encounters his local liaison, Sheriff Harry Truman, we get a bit of playfulness; Cooper starts out giving a generic ball-busting speech about how the FBI is in charge now...but his own charm and enthusiasm burst through in the form of an excited query about the wonderful pines he saw on the road.


13) Ronette Pulaski, from her comatose state, whispers a warning to Cooper – “Don’t go there.”


14) More complicated soap-ish shenanigans with a sly twist; teenage douchebag Mike yells at his girlfriend Donna, but he’s warned off by the apparently benevolent gas station owner Ed Hurley...who is then yelled at by his own eye-patch wearing wife Nadine.


15) After some FBI interrogations, we return to Audrey, who is causing precisely calculated trouble in the hotel, poking a hole in a coffee cup and spilling the liquid across a secretary’s work, bursting into the Norwegians’ meeting and announcing that her best friend had been found murdered...it’s a little annoying, especially with the sit-com-ish music, but it performs a valuable task. While all of the other lying citizens of Twin Peaks only get found out gradually, Audrey’s malicious streak is on full display from the start.


16) A double-theme whammy; the reflection of a motorbike in the reflection of Laura Palmer’s eye in a home video is an important clue. And then Cooper discovers that important, sinister message; a heart broken exactly in two, and four scrawled words - Fire Walk With Me.


17) We get to meet Shelley’s beau Leo, who is appropriately, near-absurdly loathsome, threatening her with death for having more than one cigarette brand in her ash-tray. Sure, he’s completely on the money that she’s having an affair, but he’s still a suspicious dickhead.

18) Cooper’s town meeting provides some more exposition and gives us the first real sighting of the Log Lady. It’s often been said that she’s one of the series’ worst/best examples of weirdness for weirdness’ sake, but I don’t know. Logs burn. Burn in FIRE.


19) In between shots of the youngsters drinking and getting angry, we see an oddly-shaped red light in the pitch black. Is it James’ motorcycle, or something else? We also seem to hear owls hooting. It will appear again.


20) As Donna sneaks out to meet James, her younger sister Harriet asks for her advice on a poetic question – “blossom of the evening”, or “full flower of the evening”? Only one of them’s a correct metaphor – but, all the same, adolescent or adult?


21) A barfight breaks out at the Roadhouse; James and Donna escape. James gives a long monologue about Laura’s sexual desires – he mentions almost thinking that she was possessed.


22) Interestingly, all four of the ‘young’ male characters – Mike, Leo, James and Bobby – seem to be playing variations on two stereotypes defined by their womenfolk. Mike and Leo are abusive and controlling; Bobby and James are freedom-embracing ‘rebels’.


23) As James is arrested, Donna’s adorable old father picks her up from the Sheriff’s office. He instantly forgives her for breaking Cooper’s curfew and makes a detour to pick up her sister’s bicycle. Unlike most of the characters, his decency is apparently not a cover for dark secrets. Meanwhile, Mike and Bobby, also incarcerated for their part in the barfight, taunt James by barking like dogs.


24) Okay, so it’s been a perfectly ordinary, if very slightly odd mystery-soap-drama so far. And then, just like that, the tone changes completely. Sarah Palmer is sitting alone in her living room when – oh, shit, she’s just caught sight of that evil ceiling fan, and – AAAGH!

I remain torn about BOB. For those of you who don’t know the story, that frightening, straggly-haired man was a set-dresser who was caught on camera accidentally. Lynch decided to incorporate the figure into the series – and thus, BOB (and presumably all of the overtly supernatural details of the series) were born. Is this brilliant creativity or just the hackery of a show that was – like many soaps – altered and twisted on the fly?


And so we end the first episode, appropriately, a little freaked-out and very little wiser.

Swamp | Music | Somebody saaaaaaaaaaaave me from Remy Zero's other songs

So, True Blood eh, eh, pretty sexy right? Pretty naughty? Pretty fucken outrageous? Move over Twilight, let’s have the grown-ups come and play for a bit, eh? Who needs vampires as symbols of 19^th century Christian (or, indeed, 21^st century Mormon) sexual repression when you can have sexy vampires doing sexy stuff through a veil of HBO production values, eh, beautiful lighting and a script so knee-deep in irony and literary camp it springs a boner you can be proud of, eh, a boner to talk about in seminars, eh, eh, know what I mean, more like semi-nar, know what I mean, eh?

Maybs. The one thing we can all agree on, however, is that the True Blood title-sequence is the tits, an intent-laden feast of well-chosen filters, asymmetrical fonts, and impeccably cut (see, say, the superspeed rotting fox) flashes of ridiculously atmospheric footage both reliant upon and inverting Louisianan cliché – y’know, hicks, gospel churches, SWAMPS, that sorta thing. Along with Jace Everett’s rattlesnake-flecked crooning on ‘Bad Things’, a song we’re all pretty sure is as rad as the cinematography it accompanies, because both halves gel so well. A sultry, dirty, swampy song representative of all of the best things about naughty, sexy, exotic True Blood, then.

Maybs. Listen to one of the three Jace Everett albums on Spotify, though, and you might, like me, begin to suspect something different. Because they’re just not very good. His tracks have names like ‘More to Life (C’Mon C’Mon)’ and ‘Lean into the Wind’ and sound like a cross between Louis XIV, mid-noughties strutting tweeny gimps Rooster and (the admittedly achingly romantic) Chris Isaak. (Chris Isaak, it should be acknowledged at this point, puts in a sparkling turn in the otherwise mediocre Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk With Me, a fact which might become more relevant a few paragraphs down, but that I mention now in order to scream the following from Rooster’s proverbial rooftops: PEOPLE SHOULD TAKE CHRIS ISAAK’S ACHIEVEMENTS MORE SERIOUSLY.)

Which makes me think that perhaps ‘Bad Things’ isn’t very good either. It makes me think that ‘Bad Things’ was, in fact, an excellent choice for a show that endeavours to cartoonise Louisianan culture (albeit ironically, amusingly, sexily and so on) because it is, in fact, a cartoon, synthesised and soulless version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival swamp-rock and low-slung blues influence that it wouldn’t exist without.

But it’s become so jumbled up with the content that it parenthesises – content far better, in many ways, than it – that we listen to it differently and, more important, hear it differently. People assume the relationship that exists between a title-sequence track and a show/film/whatever is almost entirely an issue of establishing mood, of utilising the atmospheric power of music (and, invariably, visual bricolage) to do what would require mindblowingly good writing if it were to be similarly done with dialogue or action in an equivalent thirty seconds (see Generation Kill, a title-sequence-less piece that did just that). And certainly, when only a fragment of Everett’s song appears in a context that means one doesn’t ever really listen to it properly, it does, as ‘arry Redknapp would have it, a job.

But the relationship is, surely, just as much about a show/film/whatever’s plot, and an individual’s response to slash memories of it, imprinting themselves upon the title-track to the extent that they begin to read it as much as they listen to it. It goes, I think, both ways. Indeed, such songs as Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ strike me as an important example of Music As Reading occurring without Music As Readers being aware that they're even doing it. With that in mind, this week’s mixtape will be a collection of tracks so well-suited to their show/film/whatever that this process can only occur. But before constructing that, let’s break this idea down a little further.

The OC is a perfec example, a fact attested to by the Simpsons’ curious take on the show what aired as part of another just-not-quite-right new(ish) episode last night. One wouldn’t have actually known that it was supposed to be a satirical reference to the show if it wasn’t for the music, such was the sequence's arbitrariness – Wikipedia seems to think it features a guy dressed up as Snoopy because Ryan Atwood played Snoopy in a school play once or something. To be honest, maybe it wasn’t about all this at all, but with the opening chords of Phantom Planet’s ‘California’ such a tidal wave of OC connotations flood one’s consciousness that, assuming one spent their mid-teenage years caring about such things like me, it’s impossible to think of anything else.

Dreadful song though. By a dreadful band – like Mr Everett, one need only listen to an entire Phantom Planet (I mean, really, ‘Phantom’ fucking ‘Planet’, who thought that was a good idea) record to realise that. But I can’t bring myself to despise it. See also Remy Zero’s ‘Save Me’ off-of Smallville, a show I don’t even like that much. Sounds like somebody emphasising, in song-form, all the worst things about U2 but again, one can’t help but read it differently to other music. It’s this, I think, rather than the ‘burden of having one song everybody knows’ that's usually discussed, which makes the rest of bands like Remy Zero’s music unlistenable. It is, in fact, universally unlistenable, but one doesn’t actually listen to that all-important ‘exception’.

I guess The Wire is the most interesting way of testing this theory. Does (can?) one draw an education-focussed narrative out of Domaje’s version of ‘Way Down in the Hole’ (Season 4) or a political emphasis out of the Neville Brothers’ version of the same song (the preceding season). Not explicitly? Not surprising, really, considering David Simon’s opinions on the relationship between music and cinematography:

I hate it when somebody purposely tries to have the lyrics match the visual. It brutalizes the visual in a way to have the lyrics dead on point. ... Yet at the same time it can’t be totally off-point. It has to glance at what you’re trying to say.

And is there not a pretty substantial GLANCE behind the fact that Domaje are five Baltimore teenagers soundtracking the Wire series specifically about teenagers – a musical glance, indeed, designed to act as a vessel for a viewer’s specific responses to that series?

Twin Peaks is another important example. I was explaining to somebody the other day, half-cut, my own theory regarding Twin Peaks’ uniquely obsessional appeal, namely that something within its extraordinary textured atmosphere fuses with what’s going on in one’s own real life, parallel to your watching of it for the first time – to the extent that in one’s memory a gorgeous fragment of art that you’ll never see for the first time again becomes entwined with a part of your life that you can’t reclaim, whether happy or bleak. The combined effect representing a great remembered shimmering donkeypunch of nostalgia – and one is therefore compelled to return to its source, again and again.

Well, when I stumble across Julee Christie’s ‘Falling’ (seldom by design, it hits me too hard) I hear within it Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper et al but also the week I spent revising for my finals and watching Twin Peaks with my girlfriend in a little house in Leamington Spa. I honestly do. I read the song in order to tap into that narrative. Whether I like it or not. I haven’t read Maria del Pilar Blanco’s recent collection of essays, Popular Ghosts: the Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, but I can only assume this concept is the background to that book’s decision to dedicate several paragraphs to ‘the haunted soundtrack of the Twin Peaks TV series.’

Romanticised nonsense y’say? Maybs. Really, this was all just a very long way of introducing the only question anybody’s got any business asking this week, so such a judgement is a bit of a moot point: WHY THE FUCK HAS NICK CAVE ALLOWED FUCKING HOLLYOAKS TO USE ‘RED RIGHT HAND’ IN A FUCKING TRAILER FOR ITS FIERY LATE NIGHT HALLOWEEN SPECIAL THING? That is an imposition of a narrative onto a song that makes Wilhelmus de Rijk’s bread-knifing of Rembrandt’s Night Watch in 1975 look like a favour to us all by comparison.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Freaks | Fiction | One of Us! One of Us!

Everyone; I’ve fallen in love with a freak. And by freak, of course, I mean ‘one in a million’, ‘utterly unique’. What? I’m shifting the cultural emphasis of the word! Shakespeare did it all the time! Refudiate that!



For a couple of months now, I’ve been wondering if there would ever come along a video-game that would, er, refudiate (damn it, it’s addictive) the now-famous Roger Ebert claim that the medium can never be art. Not, you know, wondering that hard. I have fiction-related stuff to be getting on with. That narrative form can presumably take care of itself.

Pictured: art.  And ambiguous directorial motives.

But, still, it matters to me, so I was delighted to find the game that proves him wrong. It’s called Deadly Premonition, and it was made by a small Japanese studio, and then hawked over here a few months ago as a budget game. It got a couple of awful reviews for its dreadful appearance, unnecessary combat, odd design decisions, etc. Then some irritating hipsters began to declare that it was so bad it was good. Then some more irritating hipsters insisted that, actually, in spite of everything it was good in its own right. Now I’m planning to be the most irritating hipster of all.

Let me explain. Deadly Premonition is maybe fifty-percent ripping-off Twin Peaks – a coffee-sipping FBI agent travels to a surreal, pine-filled American town to investigate the death of a young girl – and fifty-percent ripping-off the quirkily-gory Japanese horror games of yesteryear, in particular one of the best (I’ll give you a clue. Deadly Premonition invokes it with mysterious rituals, a deranged killer who tends to pop out and force the hero to hide in nearby cupboards, and a clocktower. A Clocktower.). There’s actually also a little Japanese-style surrealism in there too; the gas-mask-wearing “mysterious capitalist” Harry Stewart, who whizzes about in a wheelchair and speaks only in benevolent proverbs through his rhyming butler, Michael, is pretty Murakami. Actually, has anyone ever taken the time to compare Murakami and Twin Peaks? Might be interesting.

What Deadly Premonition does have is a protagonist who’s pretty unique, and who actually gets to explore the problems and fascinations of the gaming medium without ever truly breaking the fourth wall. Y’see, ‘Agent Francis York Morgan’ is no ordinary FBI agent. In fact, judging from the way he shoves his badge into the face of every new person he meets and announces his full title, staccato, and the fact that he never contacts his agency, ever, we might be inclined to believe that he is no FBI agent, period. ‘York’, as everybody calls him, is a twitchy type with a habit of constantly raising his hand to his ear, as if there’s an earpiece there (there isn’t) and talking to his good buddy Zach, who nobody else can see.

Now Zach is an odd one; part imaginary friend, part spiritual guide, he sees what York sees and to some extent controls him. In the most intense moments, York asks him what he should do, in idleness, York chats to him about 80s movies, and often when he’s having a conversation with one of the townsfolk, York will mock them, in asides, to Zach. Nobody ever seems to notice this. York is obviously a nutter, a freak, though a well-intentioned one – but at the same time, Zach is us, the player; so we laugh at his jokes and warm to his position. The ‘normal’ people very quickly become the outsiders.

Pictured: also art.

I should also mention that, in-game, York has to go around town questioning suspects, calling meetings, holding autopsies, and so on. But everyone in the town has their own daily routine set out for them (they genuinely do follow an intricate pattern around the map), and the game plays out in near-real time. So York, the outsider with nothing to occupy him, is often left with time on his hands and nothing to do, as the town plays itself out all around him?


So what does he do? He smokes endless cigarettes, for one, which do actually cause time to speed up. But he also plays games, sad, lonely games. You can take York down to the lake and fish, in the torrential rain, a happy little smile on his face. You can partake in solo races around the parking lots of the town, which he seems to have invented on the spot, as he never breaks the speed limit. You can even send out for fresh laundry, predict the future in your coffee, shave, and, most poignantly of all, walk up to residents’ houses, which you cannot enter, and ‘peek’ at them going about their daily lives. His freedom is beautiful, but also oppressive. There’s a genuine world, all around him, that he can participate in, but never fully enter. Sooner or later he’ll have to leave the little town and venture back into reality – we can only hope – an improved man. (There’s actually a great deal more of this in the game’s often bizarre and laughable plot. But I spoil not.)

Pictured...actually, okay, this one's debatable.

This is the difference, in the end, between the majority of fiction and video games, or cinema and video games.  Not this illusionary 'freedom' thing, but the fact that the two 'established' art forms allow us to remain apart, an observer to the last (in most cases - see my Second Person article).  Video games take us further in; we become complicit in the action, and more fully immersed.  It's far closer to 'pure' escapism.  I'm often reminded of the danger implicit in the character of Jonathan in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, who daydreams so thoroughly that he drifts out of the narrative and vanishes entirely.  If games are to take us further into the illusionary other-world, my point is, they'll have to work far harder to make sure we come out with a heightened sense of ourselves, not a lessened one.  But it can be done.  There's no reason it can't be done.



What’s that, Zach? Freaks? I don’t remember being asked to write anything about freaks.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor