2B — Thursday, February 27, 2020
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“Diane, 11:30 am, February 24th. Entering the town of Twin

Peaks,” FBI Agent Dale Cooper says into his tape recorder as fir
trees flick past his car window.

Twin Peaks is a peaceful town. Quiet houses line the streets,

lawns trimmed and protected by white picket fences. For those
not working at the town’s massive lumber mill, there’s not much
to do except have a beer at The Roadhouse or eat cherry pie at
the Double R Diner alongside what Cooper celebrates as “damn
fine” cups of coffee. The town has a picturesque sense of natural
tranquility, conjured by tall trees, winding rivers and jagged
mountain peaks. It’s, as Agent Cooper calls it, “where a yellow
light still means slow down, not go faster.”

Cooper is in Twin Peaks because a teenage girl was murdered.
Laura Palmer was the homecoming queen, an English tutor, a

Meals on Wheels and Special Education volunteer and beloved
by everyone in town. Who could have possibly wanted her dead?
This is the driving question of the show, a terrifying secret that
unearths a thousand more.

The first episode is 90 minutes, practically a feature film. For

what initially seems like a murder mystery, most of the genre’s
conventions are absent — the pilot focuses on introducing the
small town and its citizens as the news of Laura’s murder rocks
Twin Peaks. In the first scene, Pete Martell, an old man out
fishing, stumbles upon Laura’s dead body washed up on a pebbled
beach. As he calls the police, he breaks down in tears.

“She’s dead… Wrapped in plastic…”
From this first chilling scene, it’s clear that this sleepy hamlet

is not prepared for the horror about to be unearthed. Laura’s
two best friends, James and Donna, learn about her death in
school; their small town’s sense of safety crumbles right in their
homeroom. As they weep, a girl runs past the classroom window
with her head in her hands, screaming. Soon, the halls are empty.
In 2020, when American schools haven’t been safe for decades,
this is even more disconcerting.

The worst grief comes from Laura’s mother who, throughout

the first few episodes, is either weeping hysterically, staring off
into space or, most horrifically, shrieking in the throes of surreal
visions, like a visiting Donna’s face morphing into Laura’s and a
ghostly man crouching under Laura’s bed, snarling.

In the midst of this horror, however, there are surprising, off-

kilter moments of levity. In one scene, Agent Cooper and Harry
Truman, the town’s sheriff, go to a bank to look at Laura’s safety
deposit box. A gigantic, taxidermied deer head sits on the table,
one eye looking right at the camera. Cooper and Truman stare
down at it, intrigued. “Oh,” the bank clerk says, smiling as she
enters the room. “It fell down.” Neither Cooper nor Truman
respond and get back to work.

As Agent Cooper investigates, it becomes clear that Laura’s

murder is just the tip of something vast, looming above the small
town like the dark mountains that surround it. As if the murder
mystery and quirky humor weren’t enough, there are also signs
that something otherworldly haunts Twin Peaks. There are lights
in the sky at night and dreams resurrect the dead, who have some
dark secrets to share. We’re never given any sort of explanation
about these paranormal events, with each hint only leading to
more questions. What secrets lurk in the dark woods, under the
towering fir trees? Nevertheless, the most horrific moments in
the show are completely human, and they’re found in the domestic
violence, teenage drug use and even sex trafficking that may be
occuring in the small town.

In the show’s most piercing

moments,
the
comedy
and

horror mix. In episode three,
Leland, Laura’s father, spins
around to a 1920s swing song,
clutching a picture of Laura,
swirling faster and faster as he
wails in grief. “We have to dance
here,” he says in between deep,
wheezing breaths as his wife
tries to wrench the picture from
his hands. “We have to dance for
Laura!” They grapple with the
picture and end up smashing it
as the upbeat swing continues
to blare. It’s completely heart
wrenching, but also hilarious in
an bleakly absurd, “laugh or cry”
way that’s only found in “Twin
Peaks.”

The show took the cop drama,

the sitcom, the soap opera, a
dollop of horrific surrealism
and a hunk of “damn fine”
Americana and blended it all
together. It’s what a TV executive
before its release called “Norman Rockwell meets Salvador Dali.”

Something this complex was unheard of in the early ’90s, an

era that also saw the premiere of “The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld,”
“Law and Order” and “Beverly Hills 90210.” While these other
shows left their mark, none of them had anything as audacious
as the first few episodes of “Twin Peaks.” They told either self-
contained or serialized stories with clearly defined plots, without
any of the ambiguity that makes “Twin Peaks” so enthralling.
Most of those shows also dealt with fairly archetypal characters,
while “Peaks” gave everyone, no matter how apparently minor, a
complicated individuality.

This is especially apparent in the show’s women, who shine

with strength, independence and wit even by today’s standards.
Characters like Audrey Horne, a teenage femme fatale, and the
Log Lady, an elderly woman who carries (and converses with) a
log, constantly play off of the viewers’ expectations and remain
some of television’s most complex, fascinating and unique female
characters.

The show’s creators, Mark Frost and David Lynch, brought

a cinematic touch to every aspect of the production that still
rings with quality. It wasn’t just that the writing was complex.

Everything about “Twin Peaks,” from the cinematography to the
set design, was constructed with care and bravery, creating an
utterly believable and unique world. The soundtrack, by composer
Angelo Badalamenti, is also superb, able to conjure both airy ease
and deep, gnawing horror with an equal amount of power.

Notwithstanding its wild surrealism, “Twin Peaks” feels more

true to life than conventional ’90s fare like “Roseanne,” “Cheers”
or “Full House,” depicting American life in all its hilarious,
horrific extremes with characters that leap from the screen.

Cooper
agonizes
over
a
potential
serial
killer
while

simultaneously gorging on a donut buffet that covers an entire
table. Bobby, a teenage football star, goes from flirting with
waitresses at the Double R to participating in a cocaine deal in
the dark woods, where someone pulls a shotgun. Audrey rebels
against her father by playing loud jazz but also infiltrates a nearby
sex ring in the hopes of finding Laura’s killer.

While admittedly exaggerated, this contrast mirrors the highs

and lows of the ’80s, still fresh in the minds of the show’s 1990
audience. It was a decade of both horrific and joyful excess, an era
of both Pac-Man and the War on Drugs, “The Breakfast Club” and
the AIDS crisis. As the ’90s played out, this depiction only became
more topical in the era of both Desert Storm and Powerpuff Girls,
the end of apartheid and the O.J. trial.

30 years later, “Twin Peaks” is still more wild and captivating

than most shows currently on television. Plus, after “Peaks”
ended in 1991, Lynch and Frost were far from finished. There was
1992’s film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” which told the
story of Laura’s death, going all in on surrealistic horror. Then,
miraculously, Frost and Lynch brought “Peaks” back for a third
season in 2017 with almost every single cast member returning.

“Twin Peaks” is about America’s crushing dark side and the

flickering light that rises to meet it, told through the lens of
a small town in northern Washington. It’s about unanswered
questions, both hilarious and horrific. It’s about the love found
between people trying to do the right thing, and the terror that
arises when some inevitably don’t. It’s about the wonder in the
everyday, and the chilling thrill of things beyond reality.

It really is, as Agent Cooper says, “damn fine.”

Thirty years later, ‘Twin Peaks’ is still damn fine

ANDREW WARRICK

Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE: TV

CREATIVE COMMONS

Tim O’Brien and the ’90s postmodern patient zero

Turn back the clock to the most unironic ironies, to halcyon days:

a distant landscape populated with plaid and Dr. Martens-donning
teens and tweens. Blockbuster stores are thriving, proudly located
on Main Street. Simultaneously colorful and grungy, the ’90s
represented a new counterculture rebellion, a relentless repudiation
of the establishment and a universal truth. Emerging out of the
hyper-consumerist ’80s and post-Watergate eras, young adults in
the ’90s re-examined their relationship to their government, their
corporations and their ideologies, morphing and adjusting their
personal creeds accordingly. Feelings and emotions took precedence
over fact in describing the new, increasingly gray, morally suspect
world. The vaulted American Dream became less of an aspiration
and more of an imposition. The ’90s marked the advent of accepting
“truth” as subjective.

One can use O’Brien’s seminal work on Vietnam to observe a

transition in American thought and belief. His work best encapsulates
the ’90s disillusionment and ill ease with the establishment and
mainstream narratives. No other written work holds government
and ideology suspect like Tim O’Brien’s classic “The Things They
Carried” (1990). The novel interrogates the notion of a universal
“truth” and questions the institutions that claim to know what is
“true.” His novel functions as a postmodern patient zero, a template
by which secondary school teachers teach subjectivity.

After documenting and following a series of soldiers, giving

insight into their personal narratives and war experiences, Tim

O’Brien undermines his own “truth” with a legendary chapter titled
“How to Write a True War Story.” Within that chapter, Tim O’Brien
effectively promotes false truths and fiction as the best way to
transmit experiences that cannot be put into words. He writes, “Often
the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal
stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.
In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s
just beyond telling … True war stories do not generalize. They do not
indulge in abstraction or analysis ... It comes down to gut instinct. A
true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”

O’Brien’s insistence on sensory perception, claiming “the

stomach” as the best truth receptacle, prioritizes feeling over fact.

By manipulating and mixing fact and fiction in his novel, O’Brien
establishes fact as fiction. The “crazy” truth requires the fictitious
“normal stuff” to “make you believe.” There are no true facts in the
same way that there is no truthful fiction. Everything and everyone
is subject to subjectivity.

O’Brien’s treatise on subjective truth would echo through America

over the next three decades.

The postmodern emphasis on feeling in “The Things They

Carried” foreshadows 2020’s complete rejection of reality and
objectivity. After the disruption of Vietnam, the emergence of video
news and rampant financial uncertainty, the American public lost
faith in objective truth. Objective truth, or the attempt to evoke
truth as an unshakable, immutable value comes off as naive and
shortsighted. As a patient zero, a taught template for understanding
subjectivity, O’Brien’s work forecasted the success of fictitious
truth and popularized it. The American public no longer finds the
concepts of truth and facts persuasive.

The erosion of objective truth is also in part

due to the increase of news options available to
the American public. In the ’90s, new television
stations and news outlets emerged, changing
the way “truth” and fact were projected to
the American people. Originally, Americans
received their news from a trifecta of three
large media outlets: NBC, ABC and CBS. All
news sources reported the same information.
By the mid-1990s, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC
fully emerged onto the scene, facilitated by an
overhaul of telecommunication laws called the
Telecommunications Act of 1996. With the cable
industry deregulated, news channels became
more targeted, laying down the architecture for
the 21st century’s diverse and hyper-saturated
news market. By the 2000s, cable news focused
on emotional resonance as a more real and more
representative “truth” than the “real” objective
truth, manipulating interviews and statistics to
provoke audience reactions.

Starting officially in 1996, Fox News radically

changed the landscape of cable news. The
network was created with the intent to present

news with a specific narrative; a digestible, targeted analysis of
headlines. One of its first shows, The O’Reilly Factor, was pre-taped,
unlike previous live news programs. The producers were able to edit
and preview the content. The show was ahead of its peers in tactically
curating Fox’s nightly news for its audience, choosing provocative
stories that promoted the network’s agenda. The channel’s nightly
news concentrates on aggregating and sorting news, choosing which
headlines and world events to highlight.

This process of selected news cycles became more heightened in

the 21st century, in which the rise of the internet and social media
allows for a more rigorous and specialized curation of news. Now,
in 2020, algorithms calculate an individual’s interest in content
and news, providing the individual with more of their chosen
poison. Individuals can easily and unintentionally self-segregate
themselves. The Pew Center reports that 20 percent of Americans
receive their news often from social media in 2018, a 2 percent uptick
from 2016. This statistic is worrying, considering the subjective (and
often untrue) reporting of modern platforms that prioritize their
own specific “truth” and mission over any vague concept of what’s
fair and objective.

The ’90s has a rocky relationship to objective “truth” as shown

in Tim O’Brien’s novel. Though his investigation of subjectivity
only explicitly applies to inexplicable concepts, such as war, the
suppositions of his argument remain.

Does an embracement of “gut feeling” best uphold authenticity?

Does an objective truth exist? Does a subjective truth exist? Can our
understanding of truth further deteriorate into uncertainty? These
questions, raised in the 1990s, linger in the new age of American
media that is heralded by technological innovation and ideological
exhaustion.

CREATIVE COMMONS

B-SIDE: BOOKS

ELIZABETH YOON

For The Daily

“Twin Peaks” is about America’s

crushing dark side and the flickering
light that rises to meet it, told through
the lens of a small town in northern

Washington

By the 2000s, cable news focused on

emotional resonance as a more real and

more representative “truth” than the

“real” objective truth

The vaulted American Dream became

less of an aspiration and more of an

imposition. The ’90s marked the advent

of accepting “truth” as subjective