Ill See You Again in 25 Years
In the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks (1990-1991), "I'll see you lot again in 25 years" were the words spoken backwards by Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) to FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), the detective who had spent more than than a flavour investigating her expiry.
Post-obit Laura's promise to Cooper she assumes the frozen pose of a statue before disappearing entirely from view. For those who had watched Twin Peaks during its initial run, this was nothing new. Unexplained actions, surreal figures and abiding non-sequiturs had appeared throughout but they remained no less eerily transfixing.
Laura's promise, within the context of the show, occurs within the Blackness Club. This is a liminal zone that exists between the small town that the series is named after, its surrounding Douglas fir forests and that which lies "beyond", a metaphysical crossing-point between life and death, expert and evil.
It is visualised as a room of zigzagged floors, black couches, white statues and gently swaying reddish curtained walls wherein time is fluid and spoken language is spoken backwards. Long before Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) intoned near time being a apartment circle in True Detective (2014), Twin Peaks abounded in existential enigmas.
In the Blackness Lodge, bodies announced and disappear; time loops; lights flicker and wrenching screams fill the air. Like the experience of watching Twin Peaks in general, the Black Social club scenes are and so aesthetically singular, and so highly stylised, and at times then bluntly terrifying that it is hard to imagine how David Lynch and Mark Frost's co-cosmos was greenlit by and aired on prime fourth dimension U.s.a. network television receiver.
At a time in which network rather than cable TV programming held clout, Twin Peaks was, initially at least, 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 civilization forms. In The Simpsons, for instance, Homer is seen laughingly watching a mock Twin Peaks episode earlier exclaiming: "I have admittedly no idea what is going on."
There was a Saturday Nighttime Alive parody, cross-media spin-offs (The Surreptitious Diary of Laura Palmer, penned past Lynch's girl Jennifer Lynch, or The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes), coffee ads likewise as endless magazine covers with the cast.
Furthermore, as media fandom scholars such every bit Henry Jenkins have observed, Twin Peaks was one of the first shows to launch nascent forms of TV/internet fandom. Its outset audiences took to online bulletin boards and forums, together with VCR recordings and fanzines to collectively effort and brand sense of a deliberately obtuse testify.
When the network placed the evidence on hiatus subsequently the first flavor, the fans passionately rallied around the show imploring the network to "Requite Peaks 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 have lived without. For myself, that involved annihilation to do with the town manufactory or the seemingly endless and sick-fated Windom Earle storyline that dominated the finish of flavour ii.
The real "problem" with Twin Peaks was that it simply did not cohere with the conventions, demands and audience expectations of network TV during the early 90s. When audiences dropped off because the question of who killed Laura Palmer still had not been answered, ABC responded by changing programming days and times and and so cancelling the prove.
Lynch himself (unlike the more than Boob tube-schooled Frost) has fabricated no secret of the fact he never wanted to reveal who killed Laura. He would take preferred, instead, to leave that question unanswered and then that it might generate yet further enigmas. When network pressures forced the show to reveal Laura'southward killer, Twin Peaks provided an respond while defiantly opening upwardly other existential questions. The Black Lodge, aliens, doppelgängers. Killer BOB.
The real legacy of Twin Peaks is not who killed Laura or any of the other narrative mysteries that followed. It is how this prove managed to exist (and still is, upon reviewing) so powerfully and affectively mysterious. From the oneiric opening credits on, you lot felt like its seemingly innocuous, small-scale town, biscuit carpeted reality could, at any moment, give way to an entirely different, unnerving world.
The click of a record player, BOB steadily crawling over the lounge room couch, the motility of the ceiling fan, the sway of a traffic light or that low humming drone that resonated throughout. The employ of images and sounds in Twin Peaks become the stuff and substance of nightmares.
To engagement, I tin can only think of one Television prove that even comes close to achieving that kind of surrealist atmospherics whereby one reality subtly and seamlessly enfolds into another – Hannibal (2013-).
This calendar week information technology was announced that Twin Peaks is prepare to return for a tertiary flavor on Showtime in 2022 – 25 years after Laura promised she would meet Cooper again. Purported to be a direct continuation of where the concluding season left off just set in the present day, there has already been much anticipation, speculation and hesitation.
Social media is rife with dissimilar generations of Twin Peaks fans trading those old just familiar quotes ("it's happening again"; "that gum y'all similar is going to come back in style"), demanding to be the new Log Lady, and wondering whether or not we will know Cooper'southward fate.
With Lynch/Frost at the helm once again and Lynch set up to directly all of the nine slated episodes, questions grow. How will the new Twin Peaks stack upward against its slick, stylish and nightmarish cablevision brethren? Will it be as agonizing, equally hilariously funny and as wildly multi-generic as the original? There is some time nonetheless before any of those questions can be answered.
Let the states hope that the contemporary age of "quality Boob tube" and "narrative complication", peculiarly on cable, will finally give Lynch/Frost room enough to play.
Source: https://theconversation.com/ill-see-you-again-in-25-years-the-return-to-twin-peaks-32624
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