eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Damn good coffee, cherry pie, and the “big bang of auteur television” — why Twin Peaks deserves to be a pop culture classic
In 1990, avant garde filmmaker David Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet) and acclaimed television writer Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues) teamed up to create a television show that would redefine what the medium could achieve in a one-hour drama. With Twin Peaks, the duo entranced audiences with the seemingly idyllic town, its quirky characters, and a central mystery — who killed Laura Palmer?
In a town like Twin Peaks, nothing is as it seems, and in Wrapped in Plastic, pop culture writer Andy Burns uncovers and explores the groundbreaking stylistic and storytelling methods that have made the series one of the most influential and enduring shows of the past 25 years.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770906631 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2015 |
| Series: | Pop Classics , #4 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wrapped in Plastic
Twin Peaks
By Andy Burns
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Andrew BurnsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-663-1
CHAPTER 1
"WHAT IS IT YOU DO, EXACTLY?"
At the dawn of the 1990s, I was a 13-year-old kid growing up in suburban Toronto, obsessed with the music of the 1960s and 1970s — the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and Pink Floyd. Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers were ancient artifacts of a forgotten time. The 1950s seemed like another world entirely, a fantasy place I recognized only thanks to the occasional Happy Days rerun and an enduring love of Back to the Future. Though I was an avid Twin Peaks fan, I didn't realize then that the Double R Diner was a throwback to the malt shops of the past. I didn't view Special Agent Dale Cooper as a modern day G-man, nor did I recognize brooding and pouting biker James Hurley as an embodiment of the iconic greaser of the '50s. As James Marshall, who portrayed the character, told me in 2014, at the time of casting "[Lynch] was looking for what they called the 'James Dean type' ... the gentleman who was representing me back then, funny enough, was the guy who discovered James Dean." The other teens in Twin Peaks, the Audrey Hornes and Donna Haywards, dressed like they'd just walked off American Bandstand, as though the past 40 years hadn't occurred. On Twin Peaks, time often appears to have stood still. While the teen me might have missed it, the 34 million viewers of the show's pilot likely didn't.
The 1950s had been a pivotal point for American pop culture. World War II was over and the Cold War had yet to instill fear in the nation. While the early part of the decade found the crooners of the '40s still thriving with adult listeners, the mid-1950s saw the advent of rock and roll — Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and his Comets, to name but a few. Parents recoiled while their children embraced the rhythmic sounds of distorted guitar, bass, and drums (music occasionally used as part of the Twin Peaks soundtrack alongside composer Angelo Badalamenti's moody score). Then there was the medium of television itself, which had entered the homes of millions of Americans. In 1948, only 350,000 homes in the U.S. were fitted with TVs. Five years later, that number had leaped to 25,000,000 — nearly 50% of all homes in the country. The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: all became part of the culture zeitgeist. These were the shows Americans gathered in front of their televisions to watch, welcoming idyllic family values into their homes every night. Canadian sociologist and futurist Marshall McLuhan once said, "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." In the 1950s, television became a common bond for people, breaking into the cultural consciousness by giving audiences an ideal to strive for.
David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, but moved around the United States thanks to his father's job for the Department of Agriculture. Unsurprisingly, his father's occupation helped give Lynch his ongoing love of the outdoors, which manifests itself in Lynch's surrogate on Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper. ("Got to find out what kind of trees these are; they're really something," dictates Cooper on his first drive into town.) While the constant movement and upheaval in Lynch's life could have been cause for grief or discontent, the truth was, unlike many of the characters in his art, David Lynch was raised in a loving and supportive environment. In his own words, the 1950s world he grew up in seemed perfect; it was what lay underneath that perfection where he would ultimately find his inspiration.
"My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees," Lynch told Chris Rodley for his book Lynch on Lynch. "Middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch oozing out — some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath. Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast."
In its exploration of the darkness under the light of day-to-day living, Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet serves as a spiritual prequel to Twin Peaks. Blue Velvet is the story of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who discovers a severed human ear while walking through a field in his hometown. Jeffrey is swept into the world lurking underneath his neighborhood's harmless exterior, one full of psychotic criminals and violent sex — topics the director continued to explore with Twin Peaks. Dark and disturbing, with moments of uncomfortable humor that sneak up on the viewer, the film also manages to celebrate the '50s iconography that David Lynch so loves — Laura Dern's retro skirt–wearing teen queen, Sandy Williams, could have easily fit in at Twin Peaks High School, while the film's soundtrack makes outstanding use of two '50s standards, Roy Orbison's "In Dreams and the film's title song, seductively crooned by Lynch's then-paramour and the movie's femme fatale (another hallmark of film and literature of the era), Isabella Rossellini. Leading into the creation of Twin Peaks, the decade of Lynch's youth clearly had a hold on his imagination.
A few years younger than Lynch, Mark Frost, born in 1953 in Brooklyn and raised in Los Angeles, California, found his inspiration from more conventional fare. "I was initially swept away by classic adventure authors like James Fenimore Cooper, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard," he recalled in 2012. "As I got older, I got a little more populist in my tastes and embraced pulp fiction like Doc Savage and Tarzan. I also became a comic book collector in my early teenage years, particularly the Silver Age of the Marvel Universe and that led me into Tolkien and fantasy and sci-fi like Heinlein, Le Guin, and Bradbury." Frost's love of sci-fi continued with his discovery of The Prisoner, the late 1960s British television show about a secret agent held in a seemingly idyllic seaside village alongside others whose names, like the agent's, have been replaced with numbers. According to Frost, the psychedelic, spooky, and oftentimes just plain weird show "was very formative for me as a kid; it gave me the courage to go in different directions from a narrative standpoint."
The young Frost also developed a taste for 1940s and '50s film noir, which came in handy during the three years he spent as a writer on the critically acclaimed and commercially successful NBC crime drama Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), itself inspired by the police procedural novels that first gained popularity in the 1950s. Frost made his bones working alongside brilliant writers like show creator Stephen Bochco and future TV series creators Anthony Yerkovich (Miami Vice) and David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood). During Hill Street Blues's seven-season run, the writers broke ground by using slang and common language to lend the series a more authentic feel. It was also one of the first nighttime network shows that was narratively complex — storylines intertwined and could last the length of a season, instead of only an episode. As Frost later recalled to Sean Morrow, "The experience on Hill Street Blues taught me about multiple story arcs on a broad network scale."
According to a story Mark Frost told in 2013 to a crowd gathered at the University of Southern California for a Twin Peaks retrospective, when he and Lynch first met, they immediately connected and began exploring ideas, none of them taking off. "And then [CAA agent and future Mulholland Drive producer] Tony [Krantz] called us up one day and asked us if we wanted to do a TV show," recalled Frost. "And we said heck no!" Neither Lynch nor Frost had any interest in collaborating on a television series. While Frost may have thrived writing Hill Street Blues, the ideas he and Lynch had been crafting were designed for the silver screen. They shared a rebellious mentality seemingly unsuited to the confines of network television. As Frost recalled, "David and I always had this feeling of ourselves as outsiders. Even though I'd done three years on Hill Street Blues and had worked in kind of mainstream television during that period, I never felt like I had ever been embraced by the mainstream. I wasn't too interested in that."
Lynch's work had been based in the limitless potential of film — not to mention everything an R rating would allow. His first film, 1977's Eraserhead, was a nightmarish, surreal head trip about a man caring for his deformed child. No studio would touch the film, which found its fame on the midnight movie circuit, where it became a cult favorite. His second, 1980's The Elephant Man, told the true tale of the deformed 19th-century Englishman Joseph Merrick. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including one for Best Director, though it won none. With the exception of his third film, 1984's sci-fi would-be epic Dune, which had courted and failed to find a mainstream audience, Lynch's movies had been dark, art-house projects. At the end of the '80s, television was seen as a stepping-stone to the more artistic and lucrative world of moviemaking; why would David Lynch want to work in a limiting medium?
However, Tony Krantz kept encouraging Frost and Lynch to consider the possibility. At a Los Angeles restaurant called Nibblers, Krantz suggested Lynch "do a show about real life in America, [Lynch's] vision of America the same way [he] demonstrated in Blue Velvet." A small town setting struck a nerve, and Lynch and Frost began to see its potential. The duo started throwing around a few ideas. Recalling the 1957 film Peyton Place, about a New England town rife with sex, murder, and moral ambiguity, Frost liked the idea of focusing on multiple lives in a small community where outside appearances mask something darker, revealed only behind closed doors. Lynch became interested in the storytelling possibilities television could offer. "A continuing story is a beautiful thing to me," Lynch told Entertainment Weekly in 2000. "And a mystery is a beautiful thing to me, so if you have a continuing mystery, it's so beautiful. And you can go deeper into a story and discover so many things."
David Lynch and Mark Frost soon hit upon the simple image they would pitch to Chad Hoffman, ABC's vice president for dramatic series, in a 10-minute meeting: a woman's corpse wrapped in plastic washed ashore in a small town — the homecoming queen murdered. While the murder, and the character's dark secret life, would be the catalyst for the series, the plan was for that story to move into the background as the audience got to know the eclectic citizens of the town.
When Lynch and Frost eventually handed in the finished pilot to ABC, its head honcho, Robert Iger, ordered an additional seven episodes. But most of the studio executives weren't sure what to make of Twin Peaks. As one unnamed executive prophetically said at the time, "Most people here do not expect that Twin Peaks will work. The critics and audiences give us signals like 'We're tired of what we've seen before; don't give us more of the same.' But when you venture out there, there are not a lot of indications that they're embracing what's different. It's like a wife-mistress thing. 'Yeah, we wanna get it down and dirty, I want that choice in my life, but I wanna come home to a good mother.' In some ways, maybe what David will be is the martyr who will push the boundaries — expand what TV can do and should do — without being wholly successful." Lynch and Frost did indeed push the boundaries of television, finding a new audience, while also appealing to the one already familiar with Lynch's work in cinema. "When [David Lynch] came to television, there was no way I wasn't going to watch," said actor James Roday, who at 14 years old in 1990 was already a Lynch fan and would, more than 20 years later, spearhead a tribute episode to Twin Peaks on his own series, Psych. "Of course, he delivered everything that you would expect David Lynch to deliver, and more, and he was doing it in primetime network television."
CHAPTER 2"A PLACE BOTH WONDERFUL AND STRANGE"
Our first taste of Twin Peaks comes in its alluring opening credits. Unlike shows like Dallas or Beverly Hills, 90210, where actors' images and clips from episodes are given the most screen time, the opening credits to Twin Peaks set the mood by showing us the town — the sawmill, smoke emanating from its stacks; a Welcome to Twin Peaks sign; a river tinged with dark water calmly running. The credits take their time, a minute and a half, to transport viewers into the strange town in a visually memorable calling card, a gateway into the world that David Lynch and Mark Frost have created. The visual is complemented by the gorgeous series theme, written by Angelo Badalamenti. There are no clever lyrics (though singer Julee Cruise later recorded a version with words penned by David Lynch), no trumpets blaring or rock and roll guitar riffs. Only a slow moving instrumental that swells just as the show's title appears onscreen. Though there's nothing flashy or sexy about the series opening, it's haunting in its focus. The Great Northern Hotel, the Packard Sawmill, the forest and sprawling trees that first capture the interest of Agent Cooper — they're all here in these opening moments, conveyed in a serene yet foreboding manner. This combination of images and music is much closer to an opening sequence of a film than the typical television show. As audiences would soon find out, Twin Peaks was anything but typical.
Before crafting any of the characters who would inhabit Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost first nailed down the small-town setting. They drew a map and established town landmarks, such as the omnipresent mill seen during the show's opening credits. Creating a believable location outside the sprawl of Hollywood wasn't difficult for either man, since both had grown up away from urban environments — Frost spending his formative years in Minnesota, while Lynch traveled with his family throughout the Northwest and lived in towns like Spokane, Washington, and Boise, Idaho, during his boyhood. When shooting began on the Twin Peaks pilot, it took place throughout Washington State, where the lush green forests, cascading waterfalls, and small towns seemed transported directly out of Lynch's childhood memories.
In a bit of cosmic good fortune, while Lynch and Frost were scouting locations, a friend's recommendation led them to Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, which, to their amazement, was the spitting image of what they had written in their pilot. "There was a little diner across from the railroad station," Frost recalled in 2000. "There was the sawmill right in town. There was what looked like, in our minds, the Great Northern Hotel on the hill overlooking the town perched next to a waterfall. It was a really weird moment of synchronicity." This manifestation of what Lynch and Frost had come up with on paper would be the first of many surprises that the series embraced in its two-season run.
As a filmmaker, David Lynch is always open to inspiration and improvisation, a sensibility uncommon on a network dramatic series, but one that allowed for moments of inspired madness in Twin Peaks. As part of the deal struck with ABC, David Lynch shot a closed ending to the pilot of Twin Peaks for the European market so that if the network chose not to pick up the show, they would at least be able to release it as a proper film with an actual ending. It was in preparing this sequence (in which Laura's killer is a drifter) that Lynch dreamt up the Red Room. As the director explained in Lynch on Lynch, "I was leaning against a car — the front of me was leaning against this very warm car. My hands were on the roof and the metal was very hot. The Red Room scene leapt into my mind. 'Little Mike' was there, and he was speaking backwards ... For the rest of the night I thought only about the Red Room."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wrapped in Plastic by Andy Burns. Copyright © 2015 Andrew Burns. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.