Archives, eh
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# Oh god, not you again
I sort of mostly remember when Twin Peaks first aired on Australian television. I was still in high school but only just barely, I think. It can’t have been too long after Bundaberg got a third and fourth television channel; I certainly remember it being strongly associated with Channel Ten, as opposed to the mishmash of Channel Seven and Channel Nine shows that the old local network, SEQ-7, used to buy.
Wow. I can’t believe I still remember the name of the old channel. SEQ. Those were the days, when it was just the ABC and SEQ – Dad would make me switch from SEQ back to the ABC for the cricket because he didn’t like the ads during the cricket but I preferred the stats that Channel Nine broadcast. Or a few years earlier he would come home in the evening and make me switch to SEQ from the ABC because he wanted to watch cricket and I wanted to watch Masaaki Sakai beating up those three stunt guys in that quarry. Sorry? What do you mean, ‘which episode?’
So anyway, my clearest memory of Twin Peaks is the advertising campaign that preceded it. Actually, one specific ad. And even then, only a small part of that ad. There was probably some random scenes from the pilot at the beginning of the ad, maybe even the shot from the opening credits of the buzz saw being sharpened since that gives me such a sharp feeling of deja vu. But then cut to Some Guy from Channel Ten who turns to camera from watching the show and burbles something about it being “quality television”. What, really? You’re not going to tell me that you laid out a sizable chunk of change on some shit dribbled onto the screen by monkeys dressed in chinos and ponytails? What a fucking shock, eh?
My sister loved it. I, on the other hand, distinctly remember killing myself, dissolving my corpse in acid and having resulting liquid sprayed over a thousand square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean so that I wouldn’t have to watch it, so that I couldn’t even accidentally see a moment of it and be driven insane by it’s unfathomable inanity. My quest, my long quest to insulate myself from it and its fucking dopiness has failed. D bought the god damn box set of it with all the episodes, both the US and International pilots and presumably a bazillion incomprehensible-because-there-is-no-there-there added extras which hint at content that only exists somewhere on the tenth dimension, hidden between two pathologically antagonistic vibrating super strings.
And I see I was right to avoid it; or at least I was right to avoid it then, back when I was a dopey teenager who didn’t know shit about shit. Now that I am a dopey thirty-something who doesn’t know shit about shit but with a better developed sense of the ludicrous, I can appreciate those bits of the plot that are so insanely fucking stupid that your mind can’t help but go boing when they hit it like a rubber express train. Like:
- That’s a biker bar? That place, where Julee Cruise, in a beret no less, is singing her two beats an hour, one hit wonder leitmotif to the floppy haired, shoe-gazing teenagers? That’s a biker bar? Man, if a real biker walked in he’d be contractually obliged to beat them all to death with a tire iron; not that he would need the contract, he’d probably do it on principle.
- The homecoming queen is a prostitute and nobody knows but her customers? Yeah, right. If that had happened in Bundaberg, a town considerably larger than Twin Peaks, the entire town would have known about it – and in some cases you wish weren’t quite so memorable, gone for sloppy twenty-seconds – within a week. Random marginalised senior girl, yes; prom queen, not so much.
- That guy is a biker? Andpried the astronomically damaged prom queen away from the football hero who, despite his cavernous arseholery, appears to be fucking half the surprisingly un-white-trash white trash girls in the town? Surely he’d be reluctant to be riding that bike and working in a garage for fear that he might damage his poetry writing hand.
Yes yes, it is supposed to be “quirky” i. And it is television, that highly accurate mirror of reality. There is a line, though, past which quirky, funhouse reflections cease to allow disbelief to be suspended, when disbelief comes rushing back in waves of irrepressible stone monkeys. Twin Peaks didn’t just cross that line, it went so far beyond the line that it clocked reality and ended up back at the beginning, only to come up behind all of us at the line trying to see if we could spot it, and ran us over in the twenty-four metre long stretch limo it bought with all the money paid out to by the Julee Cruise dance remix (a jitter-bugging five beats a minute) and the Laura Palmer brand plastic tarpaulin.
i Yes, and thanks so much for that, Lynch. You just had to open the gate for all the rest of the quirk that washed over us after we’d kicked over the traces of the eighties and numbed us to the point that we ended up thinking the cast of Friends were charismatic and Colour Me Badd were cool instead of illiterate. I’m looking at you, Northern fucking Exposure.
