David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (Icons) by Lim Dennis

Author:Lim, Dennis [Lim, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

As with all soap opera towns, almost everyone harbors a secret or leads a double life in Twin Peaks. The hotel owner is sleeping with the late sawmill owner’s sister and plotting a takeover from the heiress, who is having a clandestine affair with the sheriff. The diner owner is cheating on her abusive husband with her high school sweetheart, the town mechanic, while one of her employees is two-timing her own abusive husband with one of Laura Palmer’s ex-boyfriends. Eccentrics are well represented: the eye-patched Nadine, obsessed with creating silent drape runners; the crackpot psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby, with his two-toned glasses and Hawaiiana-cluttered office; the Log Lady, who receives oracular messages from the wood stump cradled in her arms (ponderosa pine, naturally). And that’s not even counting the characters who seem to have drifted in from alternate dimensions: the One-Armed Man; the Giant; the dancing, backward-speaking dwarf known as the Man from Another Place; and the denim-jacketed, straggly-haired, soul-snatching demonic entity BOB.

The two most important figures in the Twin Peaks cosmos — FBI special agent Dale Cooper, the outsider through whom we discover this terrain, and the dead Laura Palmer, the reason he was summoned there — meet only in dreams, or rather, in the red-draped dreamscape of the Red Room. The clean-cut, pomaded Cooper, with his nose for mystery, could be a slightly older Jeffrey Beaumont from Blue Velvet, looking for “something that was always hidden.” A connoisseur of the everyday, almost comically alert to his surroundings (“I’ve never seen so many trees in my life”), he also shares Lynch’s Boy Scout enthusiasm, sweet tooth, and openness to Eastern mysticism. Laura haunts the show from the moment the plastic shroud is peeled from her face, as delicately as a bridal veil. She appears repeatedly, beaming under a tiara, in her homecoming-queen headshot, which is on proud display in the high school’s trophy case and the Palmer living room. This wholesome picture of Laura, which also accompanies the end credits of the initial episodes, contradicts the one that gradually emerges of her as drug addled, promiscuous, manipulative, damaged, fearful, and self-destructive. In this pivotal role, Lynch had cast Sheryl Lee, a twenty-two-year-old actress from Seattle, off a headshot. For the pilot her sole assignment was to play dead, except for one scene in which she appears in a video recording, dancing with Donna and flirting with the camera. Lynch was so struck by Lee’s radiance as the living, breathing Laura that he wheeled out the old soap-opera trope and wrote her into the show as Laura’s look-alike cousin, Madeleine, only to subject her to a similar fate.

Lynch told Time that he hoped Twin Peaks would “cast a spell.” It certainly did on the press, which couldn’t stop writing about it. Critics reveled in the incongruity of Lynch on prime time (“This all-American surrealist takes to television like a parasite to an especially nourishing host,” declared the New Yorker). While soap opera magazines profiled the cast members, the critic John

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