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