It's Always Twin Peaks Day

We're stuck in the Black Lodge

I’m writing this two days after February 24th, a day that likely doesn’t mean much to you unless it’s your birthday or you’re a big Twin Peaks fan. There once was a time when I would have scheduled this to go up on that day because an editor might have told me people would be Googling “Twin Peaks Day” and they wanted to capitalize on the SEO…or whatever. But since I’m no longer beholden to those forces, and I don’t know how much SEO matters anymore thanks to AI making search engine results a total mess, I decided to write about Twin Peaks today because I just finished Scott Meslow’s A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks, and I’m once again thinking about my favorite David Lynch creation.

Even all these years after its initial premier on ABC, Twin Peaks fans are some of the most obsessive people you’ll find. They still squabble over minor details, get tattoos of characters like the Log Lady or Donna Hayward, and are likely to mumble “Damn fine coffee” after taking that first sip in the morning. I think that level of fandom will only continue because of Lynch’s passing last year. Even though his choices were—this is putting it lightly—idiosyncratic, people love to keep digging for meaning behind things if an explanation isn’t explicitly given. And while the Twin Peaks story has been examined over and over, the fact that it’s filled with so many surreal twists and turns that seem to go nowhere leaves it open to different interpretations. It reminds me of some of Bob Dylan’s lyrics or Grateful Dead songs written by Robert Hunter, the way that some fans need to understand the meaning behind every phrase, even if the answer was simply something like Dylan was just high as fuck when he wrote “Desolation Row” and liked the way “smiles” and “Bette Davis style” sounded together. I think a lot of the most crazed Peaks fans might feel the need to read “untold history” of the story that started with the question of who killed Laura Palmer is unnecessary—and yes, there was a lot I knew about while reading it—but I haven’t seen anybody put the entire story of the series into context the way Meslow has. As a fan and completist, A Place Both Wonderful and Strange will stay on my shelf along my other Lynch-related books because it actually did help me understand one of my longstanding obsessions a little more.

Looking back, being 9 in April of 1990 was pretty sweet. For starters, it wasn’t, well, now. The Gulf War would start later in the year, and from the perspective of a kid in the suburbs, even that didn’t seem like that big of a deal. As a child of the Reagan years, I was basically afraid of the things I’d been told I should fear, like drugs or AIDS. I was 9, so I wasn’t smoking crack or having unprotected sex, but the way they drilled how bad those things were into our heads was traumatizing. But besides the puppets in the Genesis video for “Land of Confusion” and Tim Curry as Pennywise in the original It miniseries, there wasn’t much television that affected me too deeply until I saw the first episode of Twin Peaks. It was a VHS tape somebody had recorded and loaned to my mom so she could watch it and get caught up, and for reasons only known to her, she let me watch it. Everything about it was unsettling from the start, but what really messed me up was 12 minutes in when Sheriff Harry S. Truman shows up to deliver the news to Leland Palmer of his daughter’s death while Palmer is on the phone with his wife. I think it’s maybe two minutes long, and obviously we find out a lot about Mr. Palmer later on, but the way the two parents scream and cry shook me to my young core so much that I think I disassociated after that and don’t remember watching the rest of the episode. The next Twin Peaks-related thing I recall was maybe a week or two later, when I overheard two teachers at my school talking quietly about “Laura Palmer.” After that, it seemed like everybody was discussing the show, so I tried watching it with whatever adult had it on so I could figure out what the hell the show was about.

As Meslow’s book hits on, I was maybe a little young to understand or be watching Twin Peaks, but I was hardly the only one trying to understand the strange story going on in Lynch and Mark Frost’s fictional Pacific Northwest town. The show “premiered to a whopping thirty-four million viewers” even though it was up against popular shows like Married…With Children and Murder, She Wrote,” Meslow writes. “Twin Peaks wasn’t just a hit; it was a phenomeon.”

A phenomenon that didn’t last too long. The show was initially on for just two seasons, but A Place Both Wonderful and Strange explains how viewers were quick to grow tired of not getting the answer to the central question of the show—who Laura Palmer’s killer was—and writers had to figure out how to stretch the tension while also balancing Lynch and Frost’s vision for the story. Even though plenty of people who’d been initially attracted to the show dropped out, the real Twin Peaks heads who stuck around basically invented modern television fandom. Decades before we were all reading show recaps on our phones, fans of the show who had access to the Internet in 1990 posted to the alt.tv.twin-peaks newsgroup. Everything about the way the show was received and discussed at he time feels like a mixture of familiar and old-timey quaint. There wasn’t on-demand streaming in the ‘90s, but people could record episodes (like the one my mom got) on their VCRs and rewatch them over and over for clues. That was a big part of Twin Peaks fandom when the show was on, but it was also the personal interactions it created, like the conversation I overheard my elementary school teachers talking about. “The aspect of the show that drove the most watercooler chatter—and that made it unique from any other murder mystery on television,” Meslow writes, “were the clues that dipped into the surreal.”

A page or two later, Meslow points out that modern technology like website recaps and YouTube videos dedicated to breaking down shows scene for scene, “when combined with a TV show that seemed to warrant closer scrutiny—would play out more deliberately in shows like ABC’s Lost or Apple TV’s Severance, where eagle-eyed fans were rewarded for their attention with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it easter eggs.” The word “deliberately” really stuck out to me, because that’s what I always feel like I’m seeing with almost any show that is obviously influenced by Twin Peaks—like they’re weird for the sake of being weird. Twin Peaks worked (and in some cases didn’t) because it just was. I mean that in a very woo-woo, meditative way, because I think it’s something the transcendental meditation spokesperson Lynch would have said about the show and anything else he did. If he had an idea in his brain that was too good not to try, then he tried it. If it didn’t make sense to anybody else, or even add anything to the story, big deal. Just the fact that a network would let somebody like that work that way on a television show is nuts to me. It feels like an impossibility in today’s world of everything getting focus-tested to death and “metrics” and algorithms playing a role in basically everything. “The writers, too, were encouraged to explore,” Meslow writes. Showrunner Harley Peyton adds, “There wasn’t a writer’s room in the way that there are now, traditionally, in television shows. We were basically all freelance writers in the first season.”

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange delivers the story of the Twin Peaks saga, from the original ABC show to Fire Walk With Me, and 2017’s masterful Twin Peaks: The Return, in under 300 pages. Honestly, that’s merciful considering how long people often go when discussing anything connected to Lynch and his work. Having the whole history laid out right there is a great way to better understand how the show was made and the way Lynch worked, but it’s the early part that deals with the ABC show that’s the most important. Twin Peaks premiered nearly 40 years ago, but the way it still resonates and influences so much means it will continue to pick up new fans who will have all kinds of theories and questions. It’s nice that they’ll have a place to look when they want more context to understand one of the greatest and weirdest stories of our times.