“The Twin Peaks Archive” from Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch
“Where I come from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.”
Pour some coffee. Go to DavidLynch.com. Get some work done.
Twin Peaks was the first TV show to chill the fuck out. A lot of shows and movies before and after, up to right this minute, started with some kind of bang. This is because, quite simply, they are not skilled enough to ensnare your interest any other way.
But wasn’t Twin Peaks the show that opens with the finding of the dead body of Laura Palmer, small town Prom Queen, thusly making everyone in town a suspect? Correct. However, the show opens with a smoky Northeastern mountain town landscape, the wind through the trees, and then…a beautiful Asian woman humming to herself as she lines her eyes with a pencil. We then see a local sweet old man going fishing. He kisses his frigid wife goodbye. She doesn’t even look up from her newspaper. Outside, the old man hears a ship in the distance. He ruminates on the lonesome sound of the foghorn. Then he finds the dead girl. “Wrapped in plastic!” he tremors into the phone with the Police.
Twin Peaks couldn’t have been any less about the girl in the bag if it failed to mention her entirely. It was about what the girl in the bag did to everyone’s plans. It was about bringing an FBI Agent into a small town that was also held a potential parallel universe (?) It was about all things Americana, but with an arsenic lining.
The old man's wife spent half of Season 2 masquerading as a Japanese Businessman!
A show that’s just a “Who killed this girl?” mystery without any of the other stuff is AMC’s The Killing. And as solid a weepy, dreary procedural it may be, it is forgettable. It didn’t get into my bloodstream.
The all-encompassing thread to Twin Peaks was its music, composed by Angelo Badalamenti, and every track (released and unreleased) is streaming right now on David Lynch’s homepage. It’s all buzzing with intrigue, 90′s digital wow-wow, but it’s addictive and soothing as hell. You will have no choice but to focus on your task at hand when you listen to this music. It just makes me so disinterested in any other distraction when I put it on.
This is what I see whenever I hear this music.
May I recommend the tracks “Dark Mood Woods,” “Freshly Squeezed,” and “Shelley”? Also, I may also recommend watching this show, as every one of the 29 episodes are streaming on Netflix. It isn’t for everybody, but if it is for you, you will thank me. Or rather, you’ll thank this man:
Mr. Lynch, madman / hero / savorer of life
1 comment
Michael Russo says:
Jan 13, 2012
From that paragraph above and the way you described it, I definitely have to watch this show. Oh wait, I have netflix access…so I will.