"She's filled with secrets."
Logging machinery sharpens its own teeth as the music of mystery plays.
An endless parade of actor names blink on to the screen-how many people are in this show? What kind of a name is 'Ontkean?' Is that the name of a murderer?
A sad and beautiful woman puts on makeup in front of a mirror only to turn towards the camera just so-as though she were suddenly aware of the camera, and now cheating out to the audience to reveal an eerily powdered face.
A fisherman kisses his hand and touches his wife's ear before going out to the shore to discover a woman's corpse wrapped in plastic.
The police show up to take pictures of the corpse, make a preliminary identification, and a tall, goofy looking cop weeps openly despite the admonitions of his superior to handle his business. Apparently, this policeman weeps at the sight of the fallen.
The cops try to keep a lid on the news of the identity of the murdered young woman, carefully regulating the dissemination of the information to the immediate family . . .
. . . but soon enough the word gets out: Laura Palmer has died. And the specter of grief prowls the community of Twin Peaks bringing shock and tears to many who learn of Laura's death. Apparently, this young woman was well regarded in her home town. She was popular, beautiful, smart, the golden child.
Of course, this is all revealed to be partially a facade of perfectionism covering soul-deep misery, uncertainty, and a fear of secret, all-consuming evil, but this first episode concentrates on the ripples of grief and heartbreak emanating in all directions from the carefully wrapped corpse of Laura, what her death means symbolically to those who knew her or knew of her. Her death is a small town version of the murder of JFK: a catalyst for bringing to the surface deep-seated conflicts that go beyond the mere mechanics of murder-of an aggressor taking the life of their victim-and into the realm of metaphysical conspiracy.
When an admired person is senselessly killed, we struggle to make sense of why such a person had to die and in such a pointless, brutal fashion. Surely there must be some larger significance than the anger and entitlement of the perpetrator triumphing over the life of the victim. A lone asshole with a gun-Lee Harvey Oswald-murdered an American president, and we, as a nation, have never been able to live that down. How can one miserable piece of shit strike so deep into the heart of the nation all on his own? Surely there must be some far-flung conspiracy, some allegorical significance?
But in America, lone pieces of shit with guns strike deep into the national heart all the time, usually by slaughtering scores of unarmed children attending public schools. Sane gun control would pretty much end these crimes, but American society is infected with an irrational belief in a kind of interpersonal militarism that mandates that each person is all alone and must provide for their own security at all times by becoming a soldier in the army of one ready to shoot anyone who poses a threat at all times . . . but I digress.
Twin Peaks is a fictional construct, and so it is, by design, full of secrets, constructed to be rich with internally logical allegory and symbolism, and, yes, Laura Palmer's death is not just another sad and sickening outcome of America's longstanding culture of violence toward women-indeed, she will be revealed to be at the nexus of a vast metaphysical struggle worthy of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien.
But in this first episode, we have yet to rocket off into the realms of high Lynchian weirdness. We are essentially presented with a realistic, if quirky, police procedural involving a joint FBI-Twin Peaks PD investigation into Laura Palmer's murder. The large cast of characters-all those names popping up in the opening credits-exist to give various layers of depth to the story, to allow a nuanced, meandering exploration of the ripple effects of grief, and to provide a wide array of possible suspects within the mainline murder mystery plot.
This pilot episode runs about ninety-three minutes, and almost plays as a self-contained feature-length film, save for its cliffhanger ending, and abundance of characters and clues which have yet to be satisfactorily paid off by episode's end. The pilot assembles a large cast, and establishes a distinctive look and tone with simple, direct filmmaking. It isn't nearly as weird as the episodes to come-this is the David Lynch that would go on to make The Straight Story, not so much the Lynch of Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire.
But the weirdness is coming.
In fact, there's another version of this pilot-a misbegotten twin that leaned hard into the desire for tidy endings in order to secure a release as a stand alone movie for European television . . .
NEXT: 2/26/18: Twin Peaks Pilot: Alternate International Version (1990)
