Monsters of Television

Everything about Twin Peaks lends itself to the tone of the show, from the music to the odd characters to the plot itself. The show is set up and paced in a way that is reminiscent of dime-store paperback murder mysteries: there’s a certain lingo to the tale, a certain flavor the characters, a certain atmosphere to the location that combine to create a very distinctive experience. It’s kind of delicious.

With every little bit we discover about the inhabitants of Twin Peaks, knots come unraveled and new ones tangle up and the threads of our disparate storylines start weaving into one another.

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All small towns are hosts to their fair share of crazy. It’s a rule, a code that the universe must obey. Some towns, it must be said, have a few more odd citizens per capita than others. Whether this concentration of strange is a by-product of isolation, limited gene pools, circumstance or chance varies. For Twin Peaks, I get the feeling that something else is to blame.

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Wading into pop culture is a bit like going to university. It’s a hodgepodge of people with a hodgepodge of interests forced to live together in relative harmony. Don’t take a particular class – read a specific book, see a certain film or watch a certain show, tune in to a musical group – and there’s a hole in your education, an understanding you will fail to have. There are frats and sororities and clubs dedicated to topics of all kinds – shows, songs, characters, plot-holes – and if you aren’t part of them, you’re jeered or pitied. Or both.

And just like university, there’s simply too much to take in, so you miss things. You can still understand their place in pop culture – I have never seen Lost or The Simpsons, but I “get” many of the references made to them and I have a pretty solid grasp of where they fit in the grand scheme of things – but you will never quite fit in with those who have actually had the experience.

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