STACK #161 Mar 2018

DVD & BD FEATURE

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GATEWAYS:

Traversing the Peaks The original TV series

Twin Peaks David Lynch’s cult classic Twin Peaks returns this month with its unexpected coda – 18 more hours of surrealistic, riveting, dark, disturbing, offbeat drama – 25 years after it last screened. Jonathan Alley delves into the world of Cooper, Cole, cherry pie, and ‘damn fine coffee.’ W hen Twin Peaks was last on the small screen, Bob Hawke

remains available as stand- alone DVD releases or as an 11-disc ‘gold boxset’ edition packed with featurettes. The widely panned movie prequel, Fire Walk with Me, starring Sheryl Lee as a very-much-alive Laura Palmer in the week before her death – along with the late David Bowie, and Chris Isaak – is also disappear for no apparent reason, but the backstory of the new series gives the prequel a considerable amount of context, particularly concerning mysterious FBI agent and Cooper associate Phillip Jeffries, played by Bowie. The film is a difficult watch for TP newbies, but as a refresher before diving into the Limited Event Series, it's well worth the strange journey. Twin Peaks: The Music Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic theme (retained for the new series) is one of the show's many signatures. It made a brief star out of vocalist Julee Cruise in the early ’90s, and other elements of the score (some co-composed with Lynch) have wound their way into popular culture – significantly with Moby, who famously sampled the sinister Laura Palmer’s Theme for his global dance smash Go . The soundtracks for the original, the Fire Walk with Me prequel and the Limited Event Series, are all available on vinyl, with the TV season soundtracks also available on CD. available on DVD. The Limited Event Series explains a great deal of the film’s seemingly motiveless surrealism: characters suddenly, and literally,

represented a last kind of TV folklore, a cult of collective knowledge for something truly peculiar; a car-crash amalgam of soap opera, psycho-thriller, pop-cultural bang and flutter and the edge of something new; a cast of fresh faces including Sherilyn Fenn and Lara Flynn Boyle, saying and doing things we’d never seen on television before. The eccentric was the norm, the unexplainable the desirable, and the terrible, horrific mystery of who had David Lynch saw unravelling in front of him (the results of which are now plain as day); she was beauty corrupted, innocence perverted, the monster who truly believed in its own purity, who had everybody fooled. Cooper’s journey back to Twin Peaks from the depths of The Black Lodge forms the nexus of the new 'Limited Event Series'. It’s a wonderfully strange world to dive back into; but to truly appreciate its wonders and refamiliarise yourself with its wonderful characters – the true soul of the series – a journey back to the beginning could be in order. murdered Laura Palmer – popular Homecoming Queen by day, coke- snorting sex worker by night – lay at its centre. Laura was perhaps a metaphor for the America

was still PM, $2 bills were in circulation, and we’d never heard the word ‘internet’. In 1991, Twin Peaks took episodic, plot driven dramatic TV out of the living room, beyond the water cooler, and propelled it into the lexicon of popular culture in mere weeks, with a momentum it took other shows years to generate. People gathered in share house living rooms and swapped tapes of missed episodes, blissfully unaware that a few short years would consign these rituals to history. The cult classic starred Kyle McLachlan as the eccentric, enormously likeable, oddly visionary and caffeine craving FBI agent Dale Cooper, despatched to the beautiful (fictional) town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of local high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Quickly falling in with the equally offbeat townsfolk, Cooper – chiefly aided by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) – discovers the town’s dark underbelly goes way beyond your run-of-the-mill local prostitution ring, drug dealers, nefarious extra marital affairs and dodgy business dealings. No, Twin Peaks lies over its own special version of the Buffy hellmouth, a realm of pure evil

• Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series is out on March 28

discovered by Cooper’s old arch-nemesis FBI agent Wyndom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), and inhabited by spirits who possess unsuspecting locals. One of these, a terrifying long-haired psychopath named ‘Bob’ (Frank Silva), spells large amounts of trouble for Cooper and the quaint town. When David Lynch and Mark Frost made good on the tragic Laura Palmer’s promise – made in The Black Lodge in 1991 – that she would ‘see us again in 25 years’, and that the cult classic that had paved the way for today’s new television renaissance would return, hairs stood up on the backs of necks from The RR Diner to the far flung corners of the globe. To a generation whose youth ended just as the internet began, the original Twin Peaks

in an alternate reality called The Black Lodge, originally

Fun fact: Each episode in the Limited Event Series ends with a music performance at the Bang Bang Bar. Trouble – who perform a snaky, evil brand of garage rock – features David Lynch’s son Riley on guitar.

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MARCH 2018

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