August 17, 2012

Twin Peaks: Season One

As Stan recently pointed out, David Lynch is a guy who can get weird. That's his whole specialty, and was the main reason I was excited to get into his controversial short-lived t.v. series Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is a small Washington town where seemingly everyone has some secrets to hide, especially high school homecoming queen Laura Palmer, who is found murdered in the pilot episode. Laura's death resembles another unsolved crime elsewhere in Washington, so the FBI is called in in the form of the show's greatest character- special agent Dale Cooper. Cooper's opening scene has him start to play the classic "This is my case so the police answer to me now" crap, only to turn it on its head and become a wacky, lovable character who's pretty easy to root for. His unorthodox methods of trying to solve the case using his subconscious fit right in with the David Lynch aesthetic, including a bizarre hallucination that became the iconic scene of the series. Nearly every scene with Cooper kept me satisfied, unfortunately almost every other one left me disappointed. The rest of the actors on the show seemed pretty terrible and as bad as the soap opera parody that they watch. I guess after watching Mulholland Drive I was hoping for more supernatural mystique and unreliable narrators, shit like that, but instead I got what feels like a boring, by-the-numbers mystery. I do have to give the first credit for ending with a very ballsy twist even though I'm worried about where the show is going to go in the next season. I've heard others describe the second season as bizarre and unwatchable, so I'm actually still pretty excited.

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