You know what the MOST confusing thing about Twin Peaks, the TV show, is?
I’ve lost countless hours of sleep over this.
The most confusing thing about the show is why the midget, the giant, and the one-armed man, who seem to want to HELP Agent Cooper solve the Laura Palmer murder, don’t just come right out tell him in plain English who did it. Why doesn’t the midget just say “Hey, Laura was killed by so-and-so because of such-and-such reason and here’s how you can catch him“? Wouldn’t that help things along a lot better? Instead of doing that though, the midget and the giant decide to be cryptic and tell Cooper stuff like “the owls are not what they seem” and “without chemicals, he points“, and “there’s a man with a banana on his head playing checkers with Lionel Ritchie in a cafeteria“.
Cooper was fascinated by this, but, me, I think I would’ve been annoyed. It’s the big reason why I didn’t pursue a career in the FBI.
Anyway, this is the Twin Peaks movie. It came out after the show was canceled, but it’s set before the show. Don’t see it until you’ve watched the entire series though, because the movie is Spoiler City for it and, besides, you’ll have lot less understanding of what happens.
At its heart, this is just David Lynch’s story of a teenage girl’s descent into drug and sexual abuse hell. It’s a juvenile deliquent downward spiral movie, like they made in the 50s and 60s, but with midgets saying cryptic things and David Bowie showing up in a Hawaiian shirt for about two minutes. And with a father possessed by a demon, but nobody notices because in a David Lynch movie half the characters act like they’re possessed by demons. What it’s not is a two-hour episode of the TV show. This is a different thing with a different mood, and it has no interest in wrapping up any loose ends from the series. It’s a David Lynch movie, paced like an 80 year old man at the supermarket self-checkout.
The BEST reason to see this is for its hilarious opening half-hour where we get Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland as oddball FBI agents investigating a pre-Laura Palmer murder committed by the same killer in another Washington timber town. It’s some of the most imaginative stuff Lynch has ever done. Notice how, in the prologue, everything is the opposite of the TV show. In Twin Peaks, Cooper dealt with a cooperative police department, a motor-mouthed police station receptionist, and had his coffee and cherry pie at a warm and friendly diner. In the movie, Chris Isaak—whose character, Chester Desmond, even has reverse initials from Dale Cooper—deals with nothing but jerks at the police station (where the receptionist never speaks, only giggles), and has his coffee at a scary late night diner that looks like someone gets murdered in it everyday.