My husband has not seen all of Twin Peaks. So we're doing that. Not as a vigil viewing so we can have a big weepy over a favorite dead white artist. Just, y'know, catching up. Him, catching up with a thing that doesn't really speak to him or his generation, and me, catching up with the fact that I've been watching this show longer than should be considered healthy.
Like, seriously, if you have Peaks fans in your life, scrutinize that shit. Why does someone religiously watch a show about a town where every inhabitant's feelings regarding gender & consent are, at a minimum, fraught?
If they tell you, "Because Peaks is cozy" maybe you should think about a pocket-sized can of mace.
Like, One-Eyed Jack's is not cute. Ben & Jerry Horne are not cute. Hank Jennings & Leo Johnson & Bobby "Definitely Fuckable" Briggs are not cute. Dale Cooper, when he picks up a copy of Flesh World and, noting a page is marked, smiles? Not cute.
Anyway. I've been watching Peaks since it was originally broadcast. I didn't know what that ad in TV Guide about "Who Killed Laura Palmer" was about, any more than I knew 'Wild Palms' would be a inchoate disaster of a telefilm. These were the things we watched because that's what television was, back when I was a zygote in Dogwater, Alabama. Television was a potential disappointment you tuned into, week after week, because Bush Senior was in office and we were recording Iraq War footage off CNN...
Now I'm looking at Twin Peaks on the largest television I've ever owned, marveling at how, in 35 years, I never noticed the wallpaper next to the back door in Shelley & Leo Johnson's horrible half-finished house.
The wallpaper is torn. Beneath the floral print, right beside the back door, are rows upon rows of cartoon chickens in cartoon chicken coops.
If it weren't for the future I wouldn't be able to look so closely at the past.
Which is another way of saying: this order of viewing has been... asynchronous.
We did the pilot, 'Northwest Passage', first. Then, because my husband has never seen the European VHS edit, I showed him the genesis of the infamous Red Room. Then we watched episodes 1-3. Then, Fire Walk With Me.
For no real reason other than it seemed right. I wanted to get us past the dream, and Cooper's curious recitation of the events from the VHS ending. That gets you through Cooper's first 24 hours in Peaks. Which seemed like the place to stop & introduce Laura formally, and her final days.
It certainly lent a horrible colour to episode 5, tonight, when Cooper & co. burst into Jacques cabin and found all the evidence of Laura's last night there. Like, the last time we saw anybody in that shitty little place there were four people sharing a coke mirror on a disreputable-looking mattress. Leo was having a hard time managing pants and Jacques was bleeding from a broken bottle to the head. It was, to coin a phrase, a grim scene.
Grimmer, when one considers that only one person on that mattress made it to the series cliffhanger.
I've been thinking a great deal about Ronette Pulaski,* this go-round. The girl who survived. And how Twin Peaks refuses to be her story. This isn't to dunk on Lynch & Frost (though, perhaps, we should) but to note that Fire Walk With Me is very deliberately puzzling, if not willfully obtuse, regarding Ronette's survival. One moment she's bound & praying to god. Then... she (or Laura?) sees an angel. Maybe she only seems to see an angel; perhaps she's only praying, and Laura's the one imagining it. Whatever the case, suddenly her hands aren't tied anymore. Suddenly Leland is punching her and throwing her out of the train car, to be MIKE's share of the harvested pain & sorrow. MIKE, maybe he doesn't swing that way anymore, since ditching The Arm, or maybe he could care less.
* Not for nothing, I suspect Lynch had some... feelings regarding Roman Polanski.
However one views it, Ronette is the one left behind. So a day later she struggles home, following the railroad tracks. Upon returning to Peaks she lapses into a coma & only rouses herself to forward the plot. We probably spend more time with Ronette's parents than we do with Ronette, conscious. She makes a cameo in the final episode, and that's the last anybody sees of Ronette, for twenty-five years.
The next time you, I, or Cooper see Ronette, it's The Return (or, as you infidels call it, season 3, blech) in the hidden quarters of The Fireman's House, and she's helping Cooper realize what time it is, and that he needs to hustle the fuck up and scram, because "My Mother's coming...!"
I'll probably return to this post, in a quarter century or less.
[ later: weak, full of pizza, straining from the floor to reach the microcassette recorder ]
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