If you come to Twin Peaks expecting a small town mystery drama, you'll sort of get that, but there's a good chance you won't like it much. If you approach it as a pitch-black comedy disguised as a whodunnit, you'll have a better time. If you don't think the universe is an absurd, confusing place on some level, Twin Peaks just isn't going to make a lot of sense to you.
On several fundamental levels, Twin Peaks is just true to life. Characters and audience get caught up in a mystery about something bad happening to a beautiful girl, and in a bunch of interpersonal subplots, and most of it just doesn't matter. It doesn't even really matter who killed Laura Palmer. The more interesting question is why, and what her death means for her-where did she go when she died? Where did she really live in the first place? What is any of this stuff that seems like reality but mostly plays out arbitrarily and performatively like an episode of "Invitation to Love"? What is base reality? These are the show's real mysteries, and it's preposterous to think they've just been tacked onto the relatively superficial mystery of who killed Laura Palmer to make a buck.
Yes, much of the acting is stylized, and the stylization references 20th century tropes that kids today might view as so dated they're unworthy of comment. That's partially because Twin Peaks and other genre-bending satires broke that stilted culture, and for that we owe it a debt of gratitude. At the same time, Film Noir and live theater both retain a kind of hyper-staginess in their forms, and aren't for everyone. If you're struggling to get past this element to get into the show, it helps to imagine you're giving yourself over into the hands of the director, and it's all a function of the director's care and vision, and not sloppiness or unskillfulness. You gotta trust.
Much of TP's comedy comes from the incongruities of real life. Absurd lightness smashes up against tragic catastrophe. It's baked goods one moment, and death the next, and then it's squeaky curtain runners the next. This is life. TP is uncomfortable for some because it doesn't declare a clear genre, so we don't know what to expect or how we're supposed to feel about anything. This is also life. Is your life a light romantic comedy, or the prelude to stormy tragedy? Nobody knows. We pretend we know, but we don't. Genres are nice because we get to escape that uncertainty, but they're nonsense and lies, mostly. TP teaches us that defaulting to dark comedy is a reasonably safe way of being in the world when you don't know what's coming (and you don't).
Yes, the characters do silly things-eccentric things, dumb things, spastic things-just like people do in real life. Cooper is our hero because he doesn't discriminate, and social constructions are just that, to him. He sees through them, all the way into the bizarre nature of the show's base reality. Talking to a log isn't any weirder than half the things most people do on a daily basis. Lots of people operate under a 99% impression that they are perpetually 18 years old. What's another 1%, really? None of it matters, especially once you pan out into the context of the greater mysteries.
At the same time, some of the characters come off as eccentric in their kindness and decency, their good intentions, open-mindedness and sense of justice. These things do matter enormously in the world of TP. The fact that they come off as quirky is more a testament to the normalization of arbitrary conventions to the point of societal insanity. But in the ominous context of a reality beyond anyone's grasp, and which may very well be a bad one from our perspective, goodness holds up its weird little candles.
Yeah, season 2 drags in the middle, but there are still a lot of enjoyable goodies, even then. Again, it's true to life, wherein we slog through long stretches of banality, where depressing things happen to characters we sympathize with, where the bad guys seem to get the upper hand for awhile, and when we don't feel like we're making much progress towards getting to the bottom of any fundamental mysteries. Just gotta make the most of the little treats, like Duchovny in drag, until the process starts to unlock some answers. TP's base reality is interesting, and worth the effort by the end of season 2. And then in season 3 it gets bananas interesting.
"The buck stopped here."
On several fundamental levels, Twin Peaks is just true to life. Characters and audience get caught up in a mystery about something bad happening to a beautiful girl, and in a bunch of interpersonal subplots, and most of it just doesn't matter. It doesn't even really matter who killed Laura Palmer. The more interesting question is why, and what her death means for her-where did she go when she died? Where did she really live in the first place? What is any of this stuff that seems like reality but mostly plays out arbitrarily and performatively like an episode of "Invitation to Love"? What is base reality? These are the show's real mysteries, and it's preposterous to think they've just been tacked onto the relatively superficial mystery of who killed Laura Palmer to make a buck.
Yes, much of the acting is stylized, and the stylization references 20th century tropes that kids today might view as so dated they're unworthy of comment. That's partially because Twin Peaks and other genre-bending satires broke that stilted culture, and for that we owe it a debt of gratitude. At the same time, Film Noir and live theater both retain a kind of hyper-staginess in their forms, and aren't for everyone. If you're struggling to get past this element to get into the show, it helps to imagine you're giving yourself over into the hands of the director, and it's all a function of the director's care and vision, and not sloppiness or unskillfulness. You gotta trust.
Much of TP's comedy comes from the incongruities of real life. Absurd lightness smashes up against tragic catastrophe. It's baked goods one moment, and death the next, and then it's squeaky curtain runners the next. This is life. TP is uncomfortable for some because it doesn't declare a clear genre, so we don't know what to expect or how we're supposed to feel about anything. This is also life. Is your life a light romantic comedy, or the prelude to stormy tragedy? Nobody knows. We pretend we know, but we don't. Genres are nice because we get to escape that uncertainty, but they're nonsense and lies, mostly. TP teaches us that defaulting to dark comedy is a reasonably safe way of being in the world when you don't know what's coming (and you don't).
Yes, the characters do silly things-eccentric things, dumb things, spastic things-just like people do in real life. Cooper is our hero because he doesn't discriminate, and social constructions are just that, to him. He sees through them, all the way into the bizarre nature of the show's base reality. Talking to a log isn't any weirder than half the things most people do on a daily basis. Lots of people operate under a 99% impression that they are perpetually 18 years old. What's another 1%, really? None of it matters, especially once you pan out into the context of the greater mysteries.
At the same time, some of the characters come off as eccentric in their kindness and decency, their good intentions, open-mindedness and sense of justice. These things do matter enormously in the world of TP. The fact that they come off as quirky is more a testament to the normalization of arbitrary conventions to the point of societal insanity. But in the ominous context of a reality beyond anyone's grasp, and which may very well be a bad one from our perspective, goodness holds up its weird little candles.
Yeah, season 2 drags in the middle, but there are still a lot of enjoyable goodies, even then. Again, it's true to life, wherein we slog through long stretches of banality, where depressing things happen to characters we sympathize with, where the bad guys seem to get the upper hand for awhile, and when we don't feel like we're making much progress towards getting to the bottom of any fundamental mysteries. Just gotta make the most of the little treats, like Duchovny in drag, until the process starts to unlock some answers. TP's base reality is interesting, and worth the effort by the end of season 2. And then in season 3 it gets bananas interesting.
"The buck stopped here."