To Wish Impossible Things
Ten years ago the unthinkable happened - in a good way, for once
It was inevitable that I would write about Twin Peaks in this space. It’s a definitional show not just for the culture at large but for me personally, and its return season is still perhaps my favorite piece of media made in the last 10 years at least. In the grand scheme of things though, I came to the series fairly late. I was a full-on David Lynch convert at 18 of course, having seen Mulholland Drive in its original theatrical run - an experience that changed my life in the way that it completely recalibrated for me what movies could be. Viewings of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway followed shortly after, but there were major portions of his filmography that were not readily available in the early 2000s, and Twin Peaks especially was not super accessible until the first season was reissued on DVD my freshman year of college. And even then, rights issued made it so that it was released without the pilot, which I eventually saw thanks to Vision Video1 in Athens - one of the great filmic havens of my lifetime - having an import/bootleg copy available. But since I didn’t want to watch until I saw that pilot, I had already learned so much about the show and its mythology in perhaps the best possible way other than actually viewing it - by scouring the archived history of Usenet message boards.
Season 2 remained unavailable for years even after the release of Season 1 in any form other than the VHS set from its initial airing. Fresh off the cliffhanger of Season 1’s ending I spent the next several years tracking down these tapes individually off of eBay, an effort which flagged somewhat when that season reached its post-killer-reveal doldrums. I finally finished the initial run of the show shortly after graduating college - a year before Season finally saw life on disc. I distinctly remember going back and forth between its closing episodes and the final episodes of the BBC version of The Office2, watching each on the small CRT TV I had set up in the room I was staying in back at my mother’s house. Like Dale Cooper, permanently (at that time) trapped in the inter-dimensional weigh-station of the Red Room, I was stuck not knowing quite where my life was going or how to get there. The show was in an eternal limbo that seemed mirrored by my own life.
And like most people, I never truly entertained the idea that it would ever come back in any form.
Cut to October 3rd, 2014. Tiff and I were living in Austin, and while we still have fond memories of that time our relocation wasn’t working out the way that we had hoped. We were in fact only mere months away from moving back to Atlanta. I was working in a used bookstore, cursing my return to retail as I was getting further into my 30s even though it was truly one of the greatest jobs I’ve ever had (I got a 50% discount off merchandise already priced at half off, I ran the Drama and Mythology sections which meant I spent my days shelving [ie reading] the inventory for those shelves, and I had health insurance for the first time in years). One evening I was waiting to go on shift, scrolling aimlessly on my phone when I noticed something strange - David Lynch and Peaks co-creator Mark Frost tweeting the exact same quote from the show at the exact same time: “Dear Twitter Friends: That gum you like is going to come back in style. #damngoodcoffee”
It seemed obvious to anyone familiar with the show what this meant, and and yet it also defied any reasonable hope. Lynch himself had referred to Twin Peaks as being as dead as dead could be - especially after the abject failure of the at-the-time misunderstood and under-appreciated prequel film, Fire Walk With Me had seemed to kill off any and all interest from the general public. I seem to recall there may have been some slight indication that this relaunch may have been a possibility - perhaps we knew already that Lynch and Frost had been meeting for the first time in decades? For some reason I seem to recall that in all of its surprise that this news wasn’t coming completely out of nowhere, but either way I had literal tears welling in my eyes as I ran to find my friend Drury, another Lynch fanatic, and share with him the news.
It would be quite a while before we knew what the promise within those tweets entailed. It would be three years until the show aired. Three years that included a brief period where Lynch walked away over a budget dispute, the release of a tantalizingly absurd cast list, and the natural concern over whether a director, no matter how talented, could come back after a ten year filmmaking hiatus and still have “it.” As the premiere of the new season approached I remember reading the special issue of EW that profiled it and thinking consciously about what was happening for the first time. “What if this isn’t good?” I had the courage to ask myself. “Even if it’s good, is it going to be anything like the original? What is this even going to be?”
The eventual answers to those questions? 1) I was silly to ask and didn’t have to worry about this, 2) Not particularly aside from some key details, and 3) I may still be trying to figure this out 7 years later.
I made a comment on Instagram a few weeks ago that it may be time for me to finally write about Season 3 of Twin Peaks. Truth be told, it is not so much its impenetrability that has made me hesitant - that’s an innate part of the endeavor, and solving it is beside the point anyway. It’s rather that its resonances are ultimately so personal that I have been hesitant to really delve into them too bluntly. It really only occurs to me now that when I learned the news, sitting in the back room of that bookstore in Texas, that I would finally find out what had become of Dale Cooper, I was at a point in my life where I was finally putting things together and moving forward towards a future that was finally not only defined, but hopeful3. Three months after the news dropped, I would be married and teaching my first classes. The show would eventually premiere the summer before, and run into the fall of, the start of my first university faculty position - a step that would launch me into what would become my long-sought career. It’s airing would just so happen to align with a trip Tiff and I took to the Pacific Northwest for Christmas 2017 that would allow for a half-a-day’s detour to the Snoqualmie Valley which houses the real-life locations for the film, meaning that I spent my 35th birthday in Twin Peaks.
In its unyielding mysteries and forever-left-unresolved (but at least intentionally this time) narrative threads, season three of Twin Peaks would nonetheless in so many ways be a fulcrum point around which my life develop a new sense of meaning. It would even prime me for a spiritual recalibration that would be accelerated by years to come that were both triumphant and challenging.
I’d like to talk about all of that some time soon. I flirted with it a few weeks ago, and this week the confluence of the tenth anniversary of its announcement plus my discovery of the out-of-print Season 2 soundtrack on vinyl was to me as clear a sign as one of Agent Cooper’s dreams. I have been getting the urge to rewatch Season 3 in full for what would be the fourth time. It has been seven years since it first aired, and seven is of course a number weighted with meaning. The last time I watched it was after the birth of my first child, which means that my second kid is due a viewing.
-cs
It was also thanks to this store that I was able to see Eraserhead on a worn out VHS tape, it being otherwise only available for purchase through Lynch’s own website for what was the ungodly-for-a-college-layabout price of $50.
To this day the two are linked by their bummer endings, which is doubly interesting since in both cases those finales would be amended (by the Christmas Specials of The Office and in Twin Peaks’ case by The Return). To this day I can’t hear Handbags and Gladrags without also thinking about Dale Cooper running from his doppelgänger through the interlaced halls of the Black Lodge.
So in other words completely unlike the one that finally awaited Dale Cooper in the end.