Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I actually wrote two different versions of this article but wasn't happy with either one and decided to merge the two to something approximating what I wanted to convey.


The year is 1992 and David Lynch has just come off of, arguably, two of the most successful years in his career. Twin Peaks was a critics darling, revered as one of the most groundbreaking television shows in recent memory. Concurrently, Wild at Heart (1990) received the coveted Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Then, things started to go wrong. ABC canceled the show after the ratings sharply declined in the second season after the murder of Laura Palmer was solved. Two other shows that Lynch worked on, American Chronicles and On the Air did not even last a full season. The proverbial icing on this rancid cake was the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), which debuted at Cannes Film Festival in 1992 to a hostile reaction from the audience and received an unholy critical ass-kicking. It went on to commercial and critical failure in the United States. How did Lynch go from media darling to media pariah with overwhelming negative reaction towards Fire Walk With Me from even fans of the show?


Lynch ended the T.V. show with multiple cliff hangers – most significantly, Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) was possessed by the evil spirit, BOB (Frank Silva), while his good self was trapped in a supernatural realm known as the Black Lodge. Instead of resolving this storyline (and many others), Lynch decided to make a prequel to the series. The filmmaker remembers, "At the end of the series, I felt sad. I couldn't get myself to leave the world of Twin Peaks. I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside. I wanted to see her live, move and talk." Fire Walk With Me focuses on the murder investigation of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), who was killer BOB's first victim, and with the emphasis on the last seven days of Laura's life.


The 1990s have become known as the age of irony for the horror genre. Self-reflexive humor, as epitomized by the Scream trilogy, replaced formulaic slasher franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street during the 1980s. One of the few films that went against this trend was Fire Walk With Me. Lynch’s film is not usually regarded as a horror film per se, but if looked at closely, does contain many conventions of the genre (i.e. the final girl against the malevolent monster). However, the veteran filmmaker pushes these rules as far as they can possibly be stretched. Film critic Kim Newman observed in his review for Sight and Sound magazine that Lynch’s movie “demonstrates just how tidy, conventional and domesticated the generic horror movie of the 1980s and 1990s has become.”


Right from the opening credits, Lynch establishes that this film will not be like the T.V. series and also it’s horror genre credentials. A television is set to an abstract, white noise image with ominous sounding music provided by Angelo Badalamenti playing over the soundtrack. An axe comes crashing through the T.V. followed immediately by a woman’s piercing scream. This opening sequence establishes the dark, foreboding mood that will permeate the entire film. This also feels like Lynch's statement on the unfair cancellation of his show. It is easy to see why Fire Walk With Me was a shock to some fans of the show. The first third of the film sets up a sharp contrast to the series.

Like the beginning of Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (1971), the events of Fire Walk With Me are set in motion by the murder of a woman. Lynch also presents an inhospitable world: FBI agents Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) encounter resistance at every step of their investigation. They are given a cryptic briefing by their superior Gordon Cole (David Lynch); they are forced to deal with a belligerent local sheriff and his deputy (when they ask for the dead girl’s ring, the sheriff replies, “We’ve got a phone. It has a little ring.”); and the locals offer little help (“I don’t know shit from shinola!” says a man at the local diner). By and large, the detectives are unable to figure out the identity of the killer. This is certainly a far cry from the upstanding Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) and the friendly townsfolk of Twin Peaks.


One of the criticisms leveled at Fire Walk With Me was the lack of humor. However, the first third of the film is one of the best examples of Lynch's wry, absurdist comedic sensibilities. The first appearance of Agent Desmond has him and several other agents busting a school bus full of crying kids. It is a classic, surreal Lynchian image. Other examples of his dry sense of humor are Sam's estimation of how much the sheriff's office furniture is worth and how Desmond deals with the belligerent deputy. It is not what they say rather how they say it that makes these moments funny.


Donna: Do you think if you were falling in space that you'd slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?


Laura: Faster and faster, and for a long time you wouldn't feel anything, then you'd burst into fire, forever. And the angels wouldn't help you because they've all gone away.


Once the film goes back to Twin Peaks, the mood becomes noticeably darker and foreboding as the last week of Laura's life plays out. Lynch shows an unflinching depiction of a young woman consumed by drugs, sex and, most harrowingly and disturbing of all, a victim of incest by her father, Leland (Ray Wise) under the guise of being possessed by a malevolent supernatural force known only as BOB.


Twin Peaks is a particularly atmospheric setting with indications that something ominous lurks out in the woods. Laura not only meets her demise among the trees but a grove of trees also serves as an entry point into an otherworldly dimension where the killer resides. The film's most impressive, show-stopping sequence is Laura and Donna's (Moira Kelly) trip to a Canadian roadhouse with two men. This sequence is an intense audio-visual assault on the senses. The entire frame is saturated by a hellish red color scheme, punctuated by a pulsating white strobe light. Over the soundtrack is a deafening bass-heavy song with a rockabilly guitar twang cranked up so loud that the characters have to yell over top of it. This powerful audio-visual combination fully immerses the viewer in an unpredictable setting that echoes the scene at Ben's in Blue Velvet (1986) and the introduction of Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart.

Laura Palmer is the final girl archetype but deeply flawed. She is arguably one of Lynch’s most complex and fully realized characterizations. She immerses herself in all of these vices, which distracts from the painful incestuous relationship with her father and BOB’s desire to possess her. The push and pull of these opposing forces are too much for her and this only increases her self-destructive impulses. Sheryl Lee does an incredible job conveying Laura’s overwhelming sadness at the realization that the sweet girl she once was is rapidly disappearing and try as she might there is nothing she can do to stop it. Lee is able to show the different sides of her character. There is the confident, aggressive side that picks up strangers and has sex with them. There is the scared little girl that is dominated by her father. And there is the sweet high school girl whose reserves of inner strength — that she uses to fight off BOB — are gradually being depleted. It is an intricate portrayal that requires Lee to display a staggering range of emotion.


BOB is ostensibly the monster of the film. With his disheveled, unshaven look of a dirty drifter, he is the evil side of Leland and a frightening metaphor for the incestuous relationship between father and daughter. BOB is a demon of some sort, a serial killer who delights in taking on hosts, such as Leland, and using them as instruments of evil and to indulge in his depraved appetites. Kim Newman observed that, “In the monster father figure of Leland/BOB, Lynch has a bogeyman who puts Craven’s Freddy Krueger to shame by bringing into the open incest, abuse and brutality which the Elm Street movies conceal behind MTV surrealism and flip wisecracks.”


There are some truly frightening and unsettling set pieces in Fire Walk With Me. Laura comes home for dinner and her father scolds her for not washing her hands. The scene goes from being one of typical domestic strife to one of unsettling horror when he starts questioning her about a necklace with an intensity that is not the sweet Leland Palmer we know and love from the T.V. series. It is an uncomfortable scene that is beautifully played by Ray Wise who never goes over the top with his performance. The next scene shows Leland getting ready for bed with a menacing look on his face — he is clearly under the thrall of BOB. Then, something happens. It is like something washes over him as his expression shifts to one of sadness and he starts to cry. BOB has left him temporarily and Leland is back in control again but with the knowledge of how badly he treated Laura at dinner. He goes into her room and tells her how much he loves her. It is a touching moment, one of love and compassion, in an otherwise bleak and cruel film. Wise does an incredible job at conveying the subtle shifts of personalities, from the menacing BOB to the sweet Leland and the inner turmoil that exists in his character.

There are little touches, such as the twisted wife (Grace Zabriskie) who is driven crazy by her evil husband a la Cry of the Banshee (1970) where an equally evil husband (played by Vincent Price) also drove his wife insane. There is the truly frightening moment where Laura goes to visit Harold Smith (Lenny Von Dohlen), a kindly shut-in to whom Laura delivers Meals on Wheels. She also confides in him and tries to convey the divided nature of herself and for a brief, startling moment, her evil nature makes itself visible to Harold, shocking both of them.


Even the birth of the film was beset by problems. The T.V. show had only been canceled for a month when it was announced that Lynch would be making a Twin Peaks movie. On July 11, 1991, Ken Scherer, CEO of Lynch/Frost Productions, said that the film was off because Kyle MacLachlan did not want to reprise his role as Agent Cooper. A month later, the actor changed his mind and the film was back on – albeit without cast members Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn due to scheduling conflicts.


In a 1995 interview, Fenn revealed why she really opted out of the film. "I was extremely disappointed in the way the second season got off track. As far as Fire Walk With Me, it was something that I chose not be part of." As a result, her character was cut from the script and Boyle was recast with Moira Kelly (With Honors). MacLachlan also resented what had happened during the second season. "David and Mark were only around for the first series...I think we all felt a little abandoned. So I was fairly resentful when the film, Fire Walk With Me came round." Even though MacLachlan agreed to be in the film, he wanted a smaller role (he only worked for five days on the film), forcing Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels to re-write the screenplay so that Agent Desmond investigated the murder of Teresa Banks instead of Agent Cooper.


To make matters worse, Lynch's creative partner in the series, Mark Frost opted out of the film as well. The relationship between the two men had become strained during the second season when Lynch went off to make Wild at Heart; leaving Frost with what he felt was most of the work on the show. Frost was busy with his directorial debut, Storyville (1992), but one can read between the lines. His absence on Fire Walk With Me was his way of voicing his displeasure with Lynch.

Fire Walk With Me debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992 to a hostile reaction from both audiences and critics. Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Lynch's taste for brain-dead grotesque has lost its novelty." Her fellow Times reviewer, Vincent Canby agreed: “It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be.” USA Today gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it, "a morbidly joyless affair.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “In a strange way, Fire Walk With Me is tipped too far toward the dark side. What's missing is an organic vision of goodness. The movie is a true folly-almost nothing in it adds up-yet it isn't jokey and smug like Lynch's last film, Wild at Heart.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, "And though the movie ups the TV ante on nudity, language and violence, Lynch's control falters. But if inspiration is lacking, talent is not. Count Lynch down but never out.” The film's editor, Mary Sweeney, commented on why it was on the receiving end of such hostility: "They so badly wanted it to be like the TV show, and it wasn't. It was a David Lynch feature. And people were very angry about it. They felt betrayed."


To this day, Fire Walk With Me remains Lynch’s most maligned and underappreciated film. Fans of the show missed the folksy humor but that is not what the film is about — it is Laura’s last dark days. By paring down many of these elements that made the show endearing to its fanbase, it ended up alienating many of them. The film has aged well and is starting to enjoy a reappraisal of its merits. Sheryl Lee is very proud of it: "I have had so many people, victims of incest, approach me since the film was released, so glad that it had been made because it helped them to release a lot." To his credit, Lynch looks back on his film with no regrets. "I feel bad that Fire Walk With Me did no business and that a lot of people hate the film. I really like the film. But it had a lot of baggage with it.” The director may have upset fans of the show but for fans of his feature film work, Fire Walk With Me is more consistent with their much darker tone. Once the film shifts focus to Laura’s descent into darkness, Lynch is relentless in his depiction of her downward spiral — one of the most harrowing depictions of a person coming apart at the seams. As a result, Fire Walk With Me is one of the best and truly terrifying horror films ever to come out of the 1990s.

SOURCES

Persons, Dan. “Son of Twin Peaks.” Cinefantastique. October 1992.

The Doors

Anticipation was high when it was announced that Oliver Stone would be filming a biopic about the popular rock band the Doors. With Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), he was gaining a reputation for being the premiere chronicler of America in the 1960s so it made sense that he would tackle that decade’s most famous (and infamous) musical acts. The question remained, what kind of approach would Stone take on the material? Many books had been written by journalists, people that knew him and even by members of the band itself, all with their own perspective and opinion on what the Doors meant to them and to popular culture. The world found out what Stone’s take was on March 1, 1991 when The Doors was released to wildly mixed reviews and strong box office. While many critics felt that Val Kilmer delivered an excellent performance as the band’s lead singer Jim Morrison, they felt that the film dwelled too much on his darker aspects and excesses and that Stone played fast and loose with the facts.


One should look at The Doors much like Stone’s subsequent film JFK (1992), as a mythical take on historical figures and events and not as documentary-like authenticity. I find The Doors to be a big, bloated, fascinating mess of a film that reflects the tumultuous times of the ‘60s. Despite the miscasting of a few roles and the rather one-sided view we get of Morrison, Stone’s film is a beautifully-shot acid trip through the ‘60s with some of the best choreographed live concert sequences every recreated on film. Best of all, it brought the Doors’ music back into the mainstream, reminded everyone what a brilliant band they were, and how much they influenced and reflected their times.

The film starts off with Morrison (Val Kilmer) recording An American Prayer and reciting lines that rather nicely apply to the beginning of this biopic. Then, Stone takes us back to New Mexico, 1949 when the singer was just a boy. As Robert Richardson’s camera floats over desolate, sun-drenched desert, the first atmospheric strains of “Riders on the Storm” plays over the soundtrack. Right from the get-go, Stone establishes the mythical approach he plans to adopt for the film by recreating a popular story told by Morrison that as a young boy his family passed by a car accident involving an elderly Native American Indian. As the story goes, at the moment when he died, his spirit left his body and went into the young Morrison. The story was meant to explain Morrison’s fascination with shamanism and mysticism.

We quickly jump to Venice Beach, 1965 where Morrison is attending film school at UCLA along with Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan). He also meets Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan), who would go on to become the great love of his life, and they quickly become romantically involved. The appearance of these two people exposes early on one of the film’s flaws – the miscasting of Kyle MacLachlan as Manzarek and Meg Ryan as Pamela. Whereas from his first appearance on-screen, you instantly accept Val Kilmer as Morrison, MacLachlan comes across as too stiff and the dialogue doesn’t sound natural coming out of his mouth. Not to mention, his wig is a distraction. With Ryan, it is her identification with romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally... (1989) and Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) that makes it so hard to believe her as a free-spirited flower child that eventually transforms into a promiscuous drug user. In scenes where Pamela is supposed to come across as naive, Ryan conveys a clueless vacancy. It’s too bad because she would go on to demonstrate an ability to tap into a darker side with Prelude to a Kiss (1992) and more significantly with the little-seen Flesh and Bone (1993). However, with The Doors, she is clearly out of her comfort zone and it is glaringly obvious.

From there we go to that fateful day when Morrison sang some of the lyrics to “Moonlight Drive” to Manzarek and they proposed starting a band, coming up with the name, the Doors. Stone jumps to the band now with drummer John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) and guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) rehearsing “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” This is a really strong scene as it shows the genesis for their biggest song, “Light My Fire” and Stone makes a point of showing that Morrison didn’t write all of their songs. Stone also shows how they all contributed to the song’s evolution that resulted in the classic it became. I also like how we see the Doors starting out, playing a small dive on the Sunset Strip called London Fog. Morrison is still so shy on stage that he can’t face the audience. This is the film at its best, showing the band creating music and in action, performing live.

It goes without saying that The Doors truly comes to life during the concert scenes as all the theatrical stage lighting and dynamic camera movements showcases Richardson’s skill as one of the best cinematographers ever to get behind the camera. The warm colors he uses in the London Fog scenes conveys an intimacy representative of the small venue and symbolizes a band still learning their chops, both musically and how they perform in a live setting. Richardson really gets a chance to cut loose in the sequence where the band go out into the desert and take peyote. He employs all sorts of trippy effects and also creates some stunningly beautiful shots, like that of a blue sky populated by all kinds of fragmented clouds or a pan across a rocky formation with shadows creeping upwards, animated via time lapse photography.

Stone then segues to the Doors playing at the Whisky a Go Go in 1966 – the next step to the big time. We see them perform “The End,” an epic Oedipal nightmare. It’s a hypnotic song that shows how far the band had come. Morrison is no longer shy and commands the stage like no other before him. Kilmer is mesmerizing in this scene and you can see how fully committed he is to the role. It’s not just the ability to recreate Morrison’s signature moves but he has an uncanny knack to immerse himself in the singer’s headspace. In these concert scenes it is incredible to see the actor throw himself completely into them just as Morrison would.

In the spot-on casting department, it was an absolute delight to see Michael Wincott freed from the shackles of playing clichéd heavies and make an appearance as legendary music producer Paul Rothchild who worked on many of the Doors’ albums. He has a fantastic scene later on when he tries to get through to a drunken Morrison during an awful recording session and delivers an impassioned speech even though the singer tunes him out.

Stone’s film starts to lose its mind when the Doors arrive in New York City in 1967 and the way he presents the hysteria of their arrival is like the Second Coming of the Beatles. There are moments of amusing levity as Stone shows the obvious culture clash between the square staff at The Ed Sullivan Show when the producers try to be hip by talking to the band in their own “lingo” using words like “groovy” and “dig it” that sound forced and fabricated. The Doors are told to change a lyric in “Light My Fire” so as to satisfy standards and practices. Stone has a bit of fun with their televised appearance, fudging how Morrison defied the censors.

Stone shows the skyrocketing of Morrison’s ego and how he began to believe his own hype. He also suggests that Morrison really started to lose control when he and his bandmates attended a party at Andy Warhol’s The Factory. All sorts of pretentious weirdoes vie for Morrison’s attention. Manzarek sums it up best when he tells Morrison, “These people are vampires.” However, it’s when the rest of the band departs the party leaving Morrison to fend for himself that Stone suggests the moment when the first schism between them was created. The look of distrust on the singer’s face as his bandmates depart says it all. There is no one to keep his indulgent behavior in check. We are subjected to an unfortunate fey caricature of Warhol thanks to the usually reliable Crispin Glover. Hanging out with Nico and Warhol’s regulars brings out Morrison’s worst excesses which Richardson shoots like some kind of monstrous nightmare, a bad trip that we want desperately to end. This sequence starts Stone’s escalation of depicting Morrison’s self-destructive journey.

And so we get a scene where Morrison does cocaine with a self-professed witch (played by a vampy Kathleen Quinlan) and participates in a silly, over-the-top ceremony whose inclusion stops the narrative cold. Stone is playing with the mythic figure that we know as Jim Morrison. The Doors tries to show both sides: the mythic persona and the real man drowning in fame, drugs and alcohol. Stone hints at this transformation when Morrison does the famous photo shoot that has been immortalized in posters and in the pages of glossy rock magazines like Rolling Stone. Morrison is drunk on alcohol and one might argue his own fame. He begins to believe in his own image and the photographer (Mimi Rogers) only coaxes him on when she says, “Forget the Doors. You’re the one they want. You are the Doors.” It is at this point in the film that Morrison is no longer an artist or a poet, but a commodity to be used up by everyone: the media and the masses. On Morrison’s rise to the top, everyone wants a piece of him, to capture a little bit of the exhilarating ride. Morrison’s mistake was that he obliged and thought that he could handle it.

We see how drugs and alcohol fuel Morrison’s irrational behavior and he becomes verbally and physically abusive towards Pamela. Anything that was good about Morrison depicted in the film is now gone and all we’re treated to is a series of scenes showing what an asshole he had become and how he had been consumed by his own fame. His bad behavior reaches new heights of ridiculousness during a scene where he and Pamela host a dinner party for their friends and hanger-ons. Stoned out of his mind (and probably drunk), Morrison provokes Pamela who starts throwing food around hysterically and then tries to stab him with a carving knife while he taunts her. Stone sledgehammers the point home by playing “Love Me Two Times” on the soundtrack as if to reinforce Morrison repeatedly cheating on Pamela with other women. If there is anything good that comes from this wildly over-the-top scene it is that it shows how estranged Morrison has become from the rest of his bandmates.

Fortunately, the film has amazingly choreographed concert sequences that repeatedly bring it back from the brink of its own excesses. The New Haven ’68 concert depicts Morrison’s run-in with the law when he was maced in the face backstage by a cop. It’s no longer about the music but the abuse of his power as a lead singer with a microphone to air his grievances. The best concert sequence in the film is the San Francisco ’68 one. Bathed in hellish red light, Morrison whips the crowd into a frenzy. His increasingly desperate performance is juxtaposed with his out of control personal life as he almost traps Pamela in their bedroom closet and proceeds to burn it down, gets in a car accident and is involved in a Wiccan marriage ceremony. We see Morrison in a wonderfully hallucinatory moment channel his Native American Indian spirit as he loses himself in the music. The last shot of this powerful sequence shows Morrison drunk on his own power and fame as much as he’s drunk on alcohol. The expression on Kilmer’s face says it all.

Over the years, directors like Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin flirted with directing a Doors biopic. In 1985, Columbia Pictures acquired the rights from the Doors and the Morrison estate to make a film. Producer Sasha Harari wanted Oliver Stone to write the screenplay but never heard back from the filmmaker’s agent. After two unsatisfactory scripts were produced, Imagine Films replaced Columbia. Harari tried contacting Stone again and the director met with the surviving band members. He told them that he wanted to keep a particularly wild scene from one of the early drafts. The group was offended and exercised their right of approval over the director and rejected Stone. By 1989, Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, who owned Carolco Pictures, acquired the rights to the project and wanted Stone to direct. The Doors had seen Platoon (1986) and were impressed with what Stone had done.

Stone agreed to make The Doors after his next project, Evita (1996). After spending years on it and courting Madonna and later Meryl Streep to play the lead role, the film fell apart over salary negotiations with Streep. Stone quickly moved on to The Doors and went right into pre-production. Guitarist Robby Krieger had always opposed a Doors film until Stone signed on to direct. Stone first heard the Doors when he was a 21-year-old soldier serving in Vietnam. Historically, keyboardist Ray Manzarek had been the biggest advocate of immortalizing the band on film but opposed Stone’s involvement. According to Krieger, “When the Doors broke up Ray had his idea of how the band should be portrayed and John and I had ours.” Manzarek was not happy with the direction Stone wanted to take and refused to give his approval to the film. According to Kyle MacLachlan, “I know that he and Oliver weren’t speaking. I think it was hard for Ray, he being the keeper of the Doors myth for so long.” Manzarek claims that he was not even asked to consult on the film and if he had his way wanted it to be about four members equally rather than the focus being on Morrison. Stone claims that he repeatedly tried to get the keyboardist involved, but “all he did was rave and shout. He went on for three hours about his point of view ... I didn’t want Ray to be dominant, but Ray thought he knew better than anybody else.”

While researching the film, Stone read through transcripts of interviews with over 100 people. The cast was expected to get educated about 1960s culture and literature. Stone wrote his own script in the summer of 1989. He said, “The Doors script was always problematic. Even when we shot, but the music helped fuse it together.” He picked the songs he wanted to use and then wrote “each piece of the movie as a mood to fit that song.” Before filming, Stone and his producers had to negotiate with the three surviving band members, their label Elektra Records, and the parents of Morrison and Pamela Courson. Morrison’s parents would only allow themselves to be depicted in a dream-like flashback sequence at the beginning of the film. The Coursons wanted there to be no suggestion in any way that their daughter caused Morrison’s death. Stone found her parents to be the most difficult to deal with because they wanted Pamela to be “portrayed as an angel.” The Coursons tried to slow the production down by refusing to allow any of Morrison’s later poetry to be used in the film. After he died, Pamela got the rights to his poetry and when she died, her parents got the rights. Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, who promoted Doors concerts in San Francisco and New York in the ‘60s, played a key role in negotiations.

When Stone began talking about the project as far back as 1986, he had Kilmer in mind to play Morrison, impressed by his work in the Ron Howard fantasy film Willow (1988). However, during this time actors ranging from John Travolta to Richard Gere to Tom Cruise and the lead singers from INXS and U2 were considered for the part. Stone auditioned nearly 200 actors to play Morrison in 1989. In his favor, Kilmer had the same kind of singing voice as Morrison and to convince Stone that he was right for the role he spent thousands of dollars of his own money to make his own eight-minute video, singing and looking like the Lizard King at various stages of his life. When the Doors heard Kilmer singing they couldn’t tell if it was him or Morrison’s voice. Once he got the part, he lost weight and spent six months rehearsing Doors songs every day. Kilmer learned 50 songs, 15 of which are actively performing in the film. He also spent hundreds of hours with record producer Paul Rothchild who told him, “anecdotes, stories, tragic moments, humorous moments, how Jim thought, what were my interpretation of Jim’s lyrics,” he said. He also took Kilmer into the studio and helped him with “some pronunciations, idiomatic things that Jim would do that made the song sound like Jim.” The actor also met with Krieger and Densmore but Manzarek refused to talk to him.

Stone auditioned approximately 60 actresses for the role of Pamela Courson. The part required nudity and the script featured some wild sex scenes which generated a fair amount of controversy. Casting director Risa Bramon Garcia felt that Patricia Arquette auditioned very well and should have gotten the part. However, Meg Ryan was cast and to prepare for the role, she talked to the Coursons and people that knew Pamela and encountered several conflicting views of her. Before doing the film, Ryan was not at all familiar with Morrison and “liked a few songs.” She had trouble relating to the culture of the ‘60s and said, “I had to reexamine all my beliefs about it in order to do this movie.”

Stone originally hired Paula Abdul to choreograph the film’s concert scenes but dropped out because she did not understand Morrison’s on-stage actions and was not familiar with the time period. She recommended Bill and Jacqui Landrum. They watched hours of concert footage before working with Kilmer. They got him to loosen up his upper body with dance exercises and jumping routines to develop his stamina for the demanding concert scenes. During them, he did the actual singing and Stone used the Doors’ master tapes without Morrison’s lead vocals to avoid lip-synching. Kilmer’s endurance was put to the test during these sequences, with each one often taking several days to film. Stone said, “his voice would start to deteriorate after two or three takes. We had to take that into consideration.” One sequence, filmed inside the Whisky a Go Go was harder than the others due to all the smoke and the sweat, a result of the body heat and intense camera lights. For five days Kilmer performed “The End” and after the 24th take, Stone got what he wanted and the actor was left totally exhausted.

With a budget of $32 million, The Doors was filmed over 13 weeks predominantly in and around Los Angeles. Krieger acted as a technical adviser on the film and this mainly involved showing his cinematic alter ego Frank Whaley where to put his fingers on the fretboard. Densmore also acted as a consultant, tutoring Kevin Dillon who played him in the film. Controversy arose during principal photography when a memo linked to Kilmer circulated to cast and crew members listing rules of how the actor was to be treated for the duration of filming. These included people being forbidden to approach him on the set without good reason, not to address him by his own name while he was in character, and no one could “stare” at him on the set. Understandably upset, Stone contacted Kilmer’s agent and the actor claimed it was all a huge misunderstanding and that the memo was for his own people and not the film crew.

Not surprisingly, The Doors received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “The experience of watching The Doors is not always very pleasant. There are the songs, of course, and some electrifying concert moments, but mostly there is the mournful, self-pitying descent of this young man into selfish and boring stupor … The last hour of the film, in particular, is a dirge of wretched excess, of drunken would-be orgies and obnoxious behavior.” In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “At its best, the film's haunted Doors music and visceral look creates the sense of being in some hypnotic trance. But by the end, audiences may feel they have been beaten over the head with a stick for two hours.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “His movies make people edgy, and that's a good thing. But this time Stone is a symptom of the disease he would chart … Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.” In his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Amid all this trippy incoherence, the performances are almost irrelevant. Kilmer does a noteworthy impersonation of the singer, especially onstage, where he gets Morrison's self-absorption. He gets his coiled explosiveness too, but the element of danger in Morrison is missing.”

The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Some of the effects are arresting, and apart from some unfortunate attempts to ‘re-create’ Ed Sullivan, Andy Warhol, and Nico, the movie does a pretty good job with period ambience. But it's a long haul waiting for the hero to keel over.” Famous conservative pundit George Will not only attacked Morrison, calling him, “not particularly interesting” and that he “left some embarrassing poetry and a few mediocre rock albums,” but also the film: “for today’s audiences, Stone’s loving re-creation of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district is just a low-rent Williamsburg, an interesting artifact but no place for a pilgrimage.” However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “As Morrison, Val Kilmer gives a star-making performance. Lolling around in his love beads and black-leather pants, his thick dark mane falling over features that are at once baby-sweet and preternaturally dangerous, Kilmer captures, to an astonishing degree, the hooded, pantherish charisma that made Morrison the most erotically charged pop performer since the early days of Elvis.”

So how did the actual Doors feel about the film? Robby Krieger was impressed with Kilmer’s portrayal of Morrison: “It was really weird. I even called him ‘Jim’ a few times without meaning to.” In his memoirs, John Densmore wrote, “For what it is, I do think Oliver Stone’s vision of Jim Morrison has integrity; however, it is a film about the myth of Jim Morrison.” Ray Manzarek said of the film, “The movie misses out – Oliver Stone blew it ... The movie looks good, sure, but the basic heart is stone cold.”

Stone also uses several film techniques like special lighting to create a red hue over everything and a swaying, chaotic camera to create an off-kilter hallucinogenic world that he would later perfect in Natural Born Killers (1994). This effect gives the film the overall effect of a peyote experience without actually taking drugs. The Doors also captures the madness and paranoia of the era with quick edits of the horrors of Vietnam, and the Robert F. Kenney assassination juxtaposed with the belligerent cops at every concert, and the rampant drug use associated with this scene. One band member says during the film that he took drugs to expand his mind not to escape as Morrison did. As the scenes of Morrison’s excessive behavior pile up, a feeling of exhaustion sets in as it begins to be all too much which, I guess, is kind of how Morrison felt towards the end. A feeling of burn out takes over and the end of the film can’t come soon enough. The experience of watching The Doors leaves one drained and you really feel like you’ve been somewhere and experienced something.

The Doors is a potent reminder of the self-destructive power of rock stars that the media manipulates and thrives on. At one point in the film during a press conference, Morrison says, “I believe in excess,” and in doing so underlines the whole thesis of the film. The Doors is a film about excess on many levels: on a individual level with Morrison himself, on a national level with thousands of fans going crazy at the mere sight of the singer, and on a personal level with Stone’s own preoccupations permeating throughout. The Doors also examines the seductive power of the cult of personality, the god-like status to which people like Morrison or someone like Kurt Cobain are elevated to and the inevitable crash that follows when they can’t handle the responsibility. Morrison represents a generation trying to escape the pain of a crazy world. Like Cobain, Morrison wanted to ultimately be seen as an artist, but was treated in life and after his death like a commodity (Morrison was once referred to as the “ultimate Barbie doll.”). Both men were consumed by the very thing that created them: the media. They also ended their own lives, Cobain via suicide and Morrison through alcohol abuse. The Doors is a powerful study of excesses of every kind: sex, drugs, alcohol, and fame on an individual and on a society.

SOURCES

Broeske, P. “Stormy Rider.” Sunday Herald. March 10, 1991.

Green, Tom. “Kilmer’s Uncanny Portrait of Morrison Opens Career Doors.” USA Today. March 4, 1991.

Hall, Carla. “Val Kilmer, Lighting the Fire.” Washington Post. March 3, 1991.

Kilday, Gregg. “Love Me Two Times.” Entertainment Weekly. March 1, 1991.

MacInnis, Craig. “The Myth is Huge, But the Truth is the Lure of the Eternal.” Toronto Star. March 2, 1991.

McDonnell, D. “Legendary Rocker Lives Again On.” Herald Sun. March 2, 1991.

McDonnell, D. “Rider on the Storm.” Courier-Mail. March 16, 191.

Mitchell, Justin. “Opening Up A Closed Door.” St. Petersburg Times. December 28, 1990.

“Oliver Stone and The Doors.” The Economist. March 16, 1991.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Hyperion. 1995.

Thomas, Karen. “Helping Stage The Doors.” USA Today. March 12, 1991.

Thomas, Karen. “Ex-Doors Member Slams Stone, Film.” USA Today. April 4, 1991.

Twin Peaks Tribute Week: April 4 - April 10th, 2010

Twin Peaks holds a special place in my heart because it was responsible for getting me seriously into film. I had always enjoyed watching them but once I saw the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, directed by none other than David Lynch, I had to track down and watch everything else he had made. This led to Blue Velvet (1986) which immediately became my favorite film of all-time and made me realize, for the first time, that a film could be so much more than just entertainment. What struck me about Twin Peaks is that Lynch took a lot of the themes from Blue Velvet (evil hiding under the facade of small-town innocence, voyeurism, a woman in trouble, etc.) and brought them into mainstream television, changing the medium forever. The show began with the murder of Laura Palmer and explored the ramifications of this incident over 16 subsequent episodes. As a result, Twin Peaks demanded much more of the viewer than the average weekly drama. One could not simply watch the occasional episode and expect to understand what was going on. Many details and clues to who killed Laura were buried throughout the 17 episode story arc so that watching every one was crucial to following the narrative.

What Lynch and his collaborators did was create mini-movies that lasted just under an hour every week, drawing us into a strange and engaging world that nobody had ever seen before. The show debuted on April 8, 1990 with an estimated 35 million audience. ABC helped fuel a media blitzkrieg promoting the pilot episode as a television event and trumpeting the show as a hit with advanced praise from the critics. Twin Peaks became one of the first pop culture events of the 1990s. Intense interest around who killed Laura reached a fevered pitch with articles appearing in major periodicals like Time and Newsweek while Lynch made appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Unfortunately, the quality of Twin Peaks declined rapidly after the Laura Palmer storyline achieved closure. The show was never able to regain momentum and the series was cancelled after its second season. For a brief while it became a pop culture phenomenon and marked one of Lynch’s most prolific periods of his artistic career where he managed to bring his unique worldview into the mainstream.

The show was kick-started by the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the beautiful teenage high school girl and homecoming queen found washed up on a beach, naked and wrapped in plastic. The outpouring of grief throughout the town is emotionally gut-wrenching as we see how news of her death affects her family, her friends, and even those who barely knew her. In some way, she touched everyone’s lives – good or bad. To save on money, Lynch intended to cast a local girl from Seattle "just to play a dead girl.” The local girl ended up being Sheryl Lee. "But no one – not Mark, me, anyone – had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead," Lynch said in an interview. Indeed, the image of Lee wrapped in plastic became one of the show's most enduring and memorable images. And then, while Lynch shot the home movie that  Laura’s best friends James Hurley (James Marshall ) takes of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Laura, he realized that Lee had something special. "She did do another scene – the video with Donna on the picnic – and it was that scene that did it." As a result, Lee became a semi-regular addition to the cast appearing in flashbacks as Laura and becoming a re-occurring character – Maddie, Laura's cousin who also becomes another victim of BOB (Frank Silva), the demonic presence from another dimension.

When another girl from her school, Ronette Polaski (Phoebe Augustine), is found wandering along a deserted stretch of railway tracks, beaten and raped, the FBI is called in to investigate. Enter Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), an eccentric fellow who records his every thought and the minutest details into a tape recorder to his unseen assistant Diane. He meets with Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), a plain-spoken man who begins to feel a little like Dr. Watson to Cooper’s Sherlock Holmes. The FBI agent relies on his intuition and most intriguingly, his dreams to provide clues into the possible identity of the killer.

This culminates in a fantastic episode (directed by Lynch) where Cooper dreams of meeting Laura in an otherworldly dimension known as the Red Room where she whispers the killer’s identity into his ear while a backwards talking dwarf (Michael Anderson) dances to groovy jazz music. While making Eraserhead in 1971, sound designer Alan Splet taught Lynch how to say words phonetically backwards. Lynch planned to record some dialogue this way and then reverse it in a scene that was never shot. "When I got the Red Room idea this must have been coming back to me. Then the idea followed that the visual would all have to be done backwards as well." When this episode aired it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen on T.V. Lynch’s avant garde sensibilities were harnessed by co-creator Mark Frost’s sense of structure and storytelling and the result was some of the most compelling television as the nation became swept up in the mysteries of the show.

A producer at Warner Brothers wanted Lynch to direct a film on Marilyn Monroe based on the book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers. Lynch remembers that he was "sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story.” Veteran television producer/writer Mark Frost was hired to write the screenplay. Lynch's agent at the time, Tony Krantz suggested that he work with Frost. Even though this project was dropped by the studio, Lynch and Frost became good friends and wrote a screenplay entitled, One Saliva Bubble with Steve Martin starring in it. However, this film was not made either.

Krantz had been trying to get Lynch to work on T.V. since Blue Velvet but the filmmaker was never really that interested in the idea. One day, they met at a Los Angeles restaurant and Krantz told Lynch that he should do a show “about real life in America – your vision of America the same way you demonstrated in Blue Velvet.” Lynch got an idea of a “small-town thing” but he and Frost were not too keen on it but decided to humor Krantz. Lynch remembers, "so one day Mark and I were talking at Du Pars, the coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, and, all of a sudden, Mark and I had this image of a body washing up on the shore of a lake." Frost wanted to tell “a sort of Dickensian story about multiple lives in a contained area that could sort of go on perpetually.” Frost, Krantz and Lynch rented a screening room in Beverly Hills and screened Peyton Place (1957) as a source of inspiration for the kind of town they wanted to create.

They pitched the idea to ABC in a ten-minute meeting with the network's drama head, Chad Hoffman with nothing more than this image and a concept: "The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer was the foreground, but this would recede slightly as you got to know the other people in the town and the problems they were having ... The project was to mix a police investigation with the ordinary lives of the characters," said Lynch. At the time, ABC was in last place among the T.V. networks and were looking for something that would get them out of the basement. ABC liked the idea and asked Lynch and Frost to write a screenplay for the pilot episode. Originally, the network didn’t think Twin Peaks would be made into a series and might run as a seven-hour mini-series that would appeal to college students.

The first thing Frost and Lynch did was draw a map of the town. According to Frost, “we knew the town had a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” They talked about it for three months and then wrote the script in ten days. Frost wrote the more verbal characters like Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer) while Lynch was responsible for Agent Cooper, writing most of his monologues. Originally, the show was entitled Northwest Passage and set in North Dakota, but the fact that a town called Twin Peaks really existed (much like Lumberton in Blue Velvet), prompted a revision in the script. Frost and Lynch went on a location scout to Washington state and a friend of Frost’s recommended Snoqualmie Falls. They drove there and found all of the things they had written about in the pilot. ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard ordered the two-hour pilot for a possible fall 1989 series. He soon left the position in March 1989 as Lynch went into production. The director shot the pilot on location near Seattle in 24 days and on a budget of $4 million (subsequent episodes averaged $1 million and took a week each to shoot). Robert A. Iger and his creative team took over, saw dailies and met with Frost and Lynch to get the “arc” of the stories and characters. Iger saw a rough cut of the pilot by late May and ordered seven episodes.

However, even though Iger liked the pilot, he had a tough time persuading the rest of the network brass. "I was baffled by it," admitted then ABC president Mark Mandala, "but we were all 50-plus white males." Iger suggested showing it to a more diverse, younger group. "Unanimously, they loved it," Mandala remembers. Some executives figured that the show would never get on the air. However, Iger planned to schedule it for the spring. The final showdown occurred during a bi-coastal conference call between Iger and a room full of New York executives – Iger won and Twin Peaks was on the air.

Frost and Lynch wanted to create a timeless quality and achieved this by mixing styles from several different eras. Lynch said, “this started happening on Twin Peaks when we were shooting in the school which was built in the fifties. Something from the era just started floating around in the present day and influenced a lot of things that took place on the set.” Surprisingly, Lynch encountered very little interference from the network. Standards-and-practices only had a problem with one scene from the first season: an extreme close-up in the pilot of Cooper’s hand as he slides tweezers under Laura’s fingernail and removes a tiny “R.” They wanted the scene to be shorter because it made them uncomfortable but Frost and Lynch refused and the scene remained.

Before the pilot episode premiered on T.V., a screening was held at the Museum of Broadcasting in Hollywood. Media analyst and advertising executive Paul Schulman said, “I don’t think it has a chance of succeeding. It is not commercial, it is radically different from  what we as viewers are accustomed to seeing, there’s no one in the show to root for.” The two-hour pilot was the highest-rated film for the 1989-1990 season. Initial episodes were well-received by T.V. critics. The Washington Post’s Tom Shale wrote, “Twin Peaks isn’t just a visit to another town. It’s a visit to another planet. Maybe it will go down in history as a brief and brave experiment.” In his review for The New York Times, John J. O’Connor wrote, “Twin Peaks is not a sendup of the form. Mr. Lynch clearly savors the standard ingredients ... but then the director adds his own peculiar touches, small passing details that suddenly, and often hilariously, thrust the commonplace out of kilter.” Entertainment Weekly gave the show an "A+" rating and Ken Tucker wrote, "Plot is irrelevant; moments are everything. Lynch and Frost have mastered a way to make a weekly series endlessly interesting." Time magazine said that it, "may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for American TV.”

What makes the first season so strong is the strength of Frost and Lynch’s vision for the show. They hand-picked every director and writer for the episodes they didn’t do themselves and this resulted in a solid consistency. Many of them were directors that Lynch had known from his days at the American Film Institute (i.e. Caleb Deschanel and Tim Hunter) or referrals from someone he knew. Lynch and Frost maintained tight control over the first season, handpicking all the directors. "They have a script and they chat with one or both of us and away they go. And then I'd see their shows at the sound mix. If something was completely wrong there would be time to fix it. But I can't even say that that ever happened," Frost said in an interview. After directing the second episode, Lynch went off to complete Wild at Heart (1990) while Frost wrote the remaining segments. The Lynch-directed pilot episode was the series blueprint in terms of style and tone that everyone else adhered to. It’s not surprising that the weakest episodes are the ones that diverge too far from this template.

One can’t talk about Twin Peaks without mentioning the unforgettable music by Angelo Badalamenti. He had worked previously with Lynch on Blue Velvet and really stepped it up on the show to provide rich, atmospheric music that enhanced every scene it was used. The music is so distinctive that is almost another character on the show. Who can forget the haunting theme for Laura Palmer or the jazzy score for the Red Room? And, of course, there is the show’s theme song that is instantly recognizable. Every time I hear the opening strains, it gets me every time. In the fall of 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch created the score. Lynch would often describe the mood or emotion he wanted the music to evoke and then Badalamenti would begin to play the piano. In 20 minutes, they produced the signature theme for the series. Badalamenti called it the “Love Theme from Twin Peaks.” Lynch told him, “you just wrote 75% of the score. It’s the mood of the whole piece. It is Twin Peaks.” Truer words were never spoken.

The show featured a fantastic cast of actors that ranged from Lynch regulars like Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet) and Jack Nance (Eraserhead, Dune, Blue Velvet), to Hollywood veterans like Piper Laurie (The Hustler) and Richard Beymer (West Side Story), to newcomers like Sherilyn Fenn (Two-Moon Junction) and Madchen Amick. They inhabit their eccentric characters so well and really make you care about them, like the pure of heart Agent Cooper, or hate them, like the wife-beating truck driver Leo Johnson (Eric Da Re). While these characters are either on the side of good or evil, they have plenty of layers (and secrets) that are fleshed out over the course of two seasons.

The problem with the second season is that after the murder of Laura was solved, the show lost its way for a spell as the writers struggled to create a storyline just as compelling. This is evident in brooding teenager James Hurley’s clunky film noir storyline or Nadine’s (Wendy Robie) bizarro regression to her teenage years albeit with a steady supply of adrenaline. Cooper even started wearing flannel shirts – a flagrant betrayal of the spirit of his character and symptomatic of how the show faltered with the absence of Frost and Lynch’s guiding influence. Twin Peaks improved significantly once Cooper’s ex-partner Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh) arrived in town to play a deadly game of cat and mouse (and an actual game of chess) with Cooper that builds to an unforgettable final episode that infuriated many viewers but remains one of the most exciting and unpredictable swan songs for a series in television history.

Several problems plagued Twin Peaks that became readily apparent during the second season. There were the restrictions of the medium of T.V. According to Lynch, "the power of most movies is in the bigness of the image and the sound and the romance. On TV the sound suffers and the impact suffers." The network was also an issue for Lynch who said, “there were a lot of good people at ABC, but I really still got the feeling that what motivated their decisions had nothing to do with the show. And that's where I think they go wrong. The show is the least important part of their plan." The change from Thursday to Saturday night really hurt the show by diminishing its viewer audience. Lynch said, “I don't think the TV executives are as loyal to any one show as they are to an overall thing against the other networks. There's no way I can talk about what they did because it made zero sense to me. All I know is that they killed it by changing nights and then forcing the solving of 'who killed Laura Palmer.'"

As a result in the change from one day of the week to another, they lost a large chunk of their audience. "It's nice when people like something that you've done but it's sort of like love that seems inevitable that the people reach the point when they've had enough of you, and they fall for the next thing. You're helpless to control that process and awareness of it is like a dull ache,” Lynch said in an interview. There was also the public's desire to know who killed Laura Palmer. "And one thing led to another, and the pressure was just so great that the murder mystery couldn't be just a background thing any more." Once the murder was solved, the show lost its focus and struggled through several sub-plots and declining ratings. Lynch also didn’t like what happened to Agent Cooper over the second season: "Cooper ceased to be 100 per cent Cooperesque for me. He got these flannel shirts and stuff! Some people maybe liked it. So you say, ‘Yes, I'm glad in a way, and in another way I'm really sorry because a guy that's too much like me cannot sustain that intense interest or dream.’ He's got to be specific. Cooper is a certain way. It's necessary."

During the course of the second season Lynch and Frost had a falling out. While they worked closely together during the first season of the show, when Lynch went off to do Wild at Heart, Frost says that, "David left me alone." Frost elaborates further in an interview: "When he [Lynch] got on the set, very often he threw out the script – which didn't please me all that much. But he would go off and do his own thing. He wasn't showing up all that often. He'd come in and direct an episode every once in a while. He wasn't really involved with the scripts. Then he'd go off on his own thing and leave us hanging." Clearly, Frost did not like or approve of Lynch's methods on the set but it is abundantly clear that Frost has his own agenda. In a 1991 interview, he said that he and Lynch worked closely on the first seven episodes but in a Wrapped in Plastic interview he says, "David's not really a writer by nature. He's a wonderful director and a great visual stylist, and he can write in collaboration with somebody. But it's good if the person he's working with has a strong sense of narrative and story, because those honestly aren't David's strengths." It seems that Frost was quite resentful of the amount of attention Lynch received about the show, while he did not get nearly the amount of press or recognition for his contribution.

Looking back, Frost wished they had “worked out a smooth transition” and that the Laura Palmer storyline was a “tough act to follow.” In regards to the second season, Frost felt that “perhaps the storytelling wasn’t quite as taut or as fraught with emotion.” At its best, Twin Peaks surpassed the safe confines of generic T.V. The first appearance of the Black Lodge, an otherworldly dimension populated by cryptic supernatural figures, in the third episode is a prime example of when the series defied genre categorization. Agent Cooper has a dream where he finds himself in the Red Room, a place within the Lodge populated with backwards-talking dwarves, op-art floor design, and distorted spatial relationships. Lynch described the Black Lodge as a place where "there is no problem with time. And anything can happen. It's a free zone, completely unpredictable and therefore pretty exciting but also scary.” Cooper's dream is a brilliantly constructed sequence that echoes Lynch's experimental debut feature film, Eraserhead (1977).

Lynch went one step further when he revisited the Black Lodge in the final episode of the show. At this point, Twin Peaks was on the verge of cancellation. Lynch had returned from working on other projects and was surprised at what had happened to the show. Instead of only offering a tantalizing glimpse of the Black Lodge, as he did in episode three, he adopted a go-for-broke attitude by re-writing the script as he shot the episode and proceeded to set almost half of the show in this environment. As Agent Cooper wandered through various rooms searching for his true love, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), the conventions of generic T.V. disappeared. Cooper's actions followed a dream logic that seems confusing at first, but makes sense if you remember what was said about this place in previous episodes. The final result is a wonderfully surreal exercise as Lynch regained creative control to end the series with a shocking conclusion – good does not triumph over evil as Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge while BOB takes possession of his body in the real world. Lynch brings Twin Peaks full circle by thumbing his nose at convention and once again subverting our expectations.

Twin Peaks paved the way for quirky, unusual fare like Northern Exposure, American Gothic, The X Files in the ‘90s and continues to do so with shows like Wonderfalls and Lost. It has been 20 years since the pilot episode aired on T.V. and the show has lost none of its power or ability to enthrall with its intriguing mysteries and engaging characters. Lynch and Frost’s show broke through and proved that challenging, cinematic, serialized T.V. could find a mainstream audience if even for only a brief time.

For more Twin Peaks, check out the Twin Peaks Archive blog which is also celebrating the show's 20th anniversary. Jeremy Richey also paid tribute to the show at his wonderful Moon in the Gutter blog. There's also the episode guide blog, props blog, and exhaustive In Twin Peaks site. Joining the fun is Edward Copeland's in-depth look back at the show over at his blog and Christine Hadden's excellent celebration of the show over at her Fascination with Fear blog.