When David Lynch died last week, I knew I had to watch something. And I also knew what: “Twin Peaks,” Episode 1. Known as The Pilot or “Northwest Passage,” by any name, it’s an absolute banger. For me, those 90 minutes of 1990 network television are the Lynch keystone.
Yes, the filmmaker left behind plenty of work, though he should have made even more; see the dedicated Wikipedia page on his abandoned projects, a shrine to movie-industry waste. But “Twin Peaks’” debut marks his most important work. Not best — most important. Singular cultural figures and movements benefit from a signature breakthrough: a Gallery Six reading; an Elvis-on-Sullivan moment; the “9 to 5” beat dropping over that movie’s opening credits.
April 8, 1990, gave Lynch his catalytic event. That night, an unfathomable 34 million Americans simultaneously entered a Lynchian mindstate. Some found they liked it there.
And, of course, I had hometown motivations. As Jule Banville noted on The Pulp last week and as The Roxy proclaimed on its marquee, Missoula stakes a special claim on Lynch, born at St. Patrick Hospital on Jan. 20, 1946. On Instagram, Missoula-reared photographer Holly Andres wrote: “I feel a real kinship with him, as though our rods + cones were developed amidst the same evergreens.” Lynch himself dispelled the longstanding (and awesome) myth that the Wilma building inspired Blue Velvet, so that leaves “Twin Peaks” as Lynch’s piece of work that’s most obviously imbued with his Inland Northwest roots: the 14 years he spent kicking around Missoula, Sandpoint and Spokane and his family links to Hungry Horse and the Bitterroot.
It was time to rejoin Agent Cooper on Highway 2, amid more trees than he’d ever seen.
‘Twin Peaks’ is Lynch’s piece of work that’s most obviously imbued with his Inland Northwest roots: the 14 years he spent kicking around Missoula, Sandpoint and Spokane and his family links to Hungry Horse and the Bitterroot.
Almost 35 years old, the “Twin Peaks” pilot swaggers more than ever. From the hypnotic opening credits and the discovery of Laura Palmer, plastic-wrapped on a clammy lake beach, it glows with self-confidence.
Everyone involved seems to know something special is going down. Everything looks beautiful, the evergreens and slate skies suffused with a mellow Fujifilm glow, the night a deep midnight black, all of which cinematographer Ron Garcia is on record explaining in depth. Lynch mixes stillness — always willing to linger on a sparking sawmill blade — and jump-scare jolts. Characters materialize at a dizzying pace, strange and gorgeous, emerging fully formed and played to the hilt even though some get only seconds on screen. (And others get more. In my mind and soul, James and Donna, out in the woods, middle of the night, making out on the motorcycle and burying the other half of Laura’s necklace — that scene never ends.)
Angelo Badalamenti’s plush score sashays and snaps. The silence isn’t really silence, but rather a subliminal hum of ominous, pregnant room tone which might be the most Lynchian of sounds.
But this “Twin Peaks” belongs to the world. To a Missoulian — maybe most any viewer from the nation’s upper-left corner — the pilot sends a special message. The show gets us.
Yes, Lynch refracts his world through surrealism, film noir, 1950s juvenile delinquent B-movies, 1980s teen flicks — John Hughes is an underrated influence — breathy soaps and prime-time rippers like “Falcon Crest.” And no, our diners didn’t look that cool. No, our roadhouses did not book Julee Cruise. And all due respect to the finest Missoulians and Spokaneites of the first Bush administration, no one was hot as Mädchen Amick or Dana Ashbrook.
But this alternate world is still the Northwest (or maybe a Northwest), one of the region’s mountainous and forested corners, far from the sea. And for what may be the first time in pop cultural history, this Northwest is sexy.
“Twin Peaks” glamorizes our steaming sawmills, baggy cardigans, plaid skirts and dirty flannels. It winks at our log-cabin-kitsch architecture. The brooding forests, cold mountains, a sketchy half-built house with a semi out front: We know these. Even the most bizarre characters concealed kernels of reality. Doctor Jacoby’s cracked spin on Hunter S. Thompson brio amplified real eccentrics who walked this earth and even held down professional gigs in that time, with no social media to train them otherwise. Figures like the Log Lady and the One-Armed Man (not yet on the scene in the pilot) seemed outré to the nation, but in that time period Missoulians could encounter the chanting drone of Reverend “Red” Bex or the whimsical figure of Tommy the Leprechaun, out in the real world. (When I first moved to Portland in 1999, the Log Lady [Catherine Coulson] and One-Armed Man [Al Strobel] both lived in town.)
‘Twin Peaks’ glamorizes our steaming sawmills, baggy cardigans, plaid skirts and dirty flannels. It winks at our log-cabin-kitsch architecture. The brooding forests, cold mountains, a sketchy half-built house with a semi out front: We know these.
As I watched it again, I remembered the powerful sense it gives a person from this part of the world of being seen. Things here were not always as they seemed. “Twin Peaks” told that truth.
And in retrospect, the show’s massive splash was part of our collective arrival on the national scene, a “Northwest moment” unfolding at many levels of American pop culture. The pilot aired:
- About three years after Sub Pop used the word “GRUNGE” to describe Green River’s Dry as a Bone EP;
- One year after Portland’s Katherine Dunn published “Geek Love,” arguably Lynch-adjacent and cult-destined;
- One year after Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy took place in a flinty, noirish Portland where only pharmaceuticals can work magic. (Shout out, Grace Zabriskie, human center of the Drugstore Cowboy / “Twin Peaks” Venn diagram.)
Less than a year after “Twin Peaks’” debut, Nirvana released Nevermind, coincidentally just days after the International Pop Underground Convention gathered an elite insurgent music scene in Olympia. Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” would hit in 1992 — though often associated with Iowa, several of its pieces are set in Seattle, in a low-end milieu that would inspire about half the MFA-program short stories written over the following decade. The film adaptation of A River Runs Through It came that same year, soon followed by Legends of the Fall.
Soon enough capitalism transmuted this energy into Singles (1992), Stone Temple Pilots and the Marc Jacobs grunge collection. We won’t even talk about “Yellowstone,” thanks. But traces of true mossy-weird cool endured for years in these latitudes — and maybe still do.
When Lynch died, the outpouring was intense and global — a phenomenon. Obviously, Lynch deserves it. But the scale of the reaction also says something about the world, about a huge, currently unsatisfied hunger for creative integrity, distinctive vision and generous spirit. Lynch was all of that. He inhabited his own artistic universe in a way very true to lands where he was born and spent his childhood.
He chased the big fish, always.
