0:00Hello creeps, I'll be your ghost. I mean, host. As we delve the crypts of spooky movies and even spooky your theory, welcome to horror Vanguard. We have a close, close counts here in the horror Vanguard podcast, which we've relocated to sunny Twin Peaks in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America. My name is Ash, one of your co-ghosts. Join as always by... It's me, I'm special investigative podcaster, the Lickriggai, otherwise known as John. How we all doing today? Would that then make me the sheriff of horror Vanguard?
0:53I don't know how to deal with that. To be honest, if I think anyone is the sheriff of horror Vanguard, it is absolutely you. In my heart, I want to be the log lady of horror Vanguard. I just want to appear with my little log and have people ask awkward questions. No, I think you are absolutely the sheriff of our podcasting town. Fun, fun behind the scenes ash fact. I once went to a three-day long release party for Twin Peaks the return. It was the only time I've ever done cosplay and I did the log lady. This makes complete sense to me.
1:37It was a lot of fun. I believe it was.
1:43Chocolate Mocha Cupcakes with little Swedish fish on top. They sound amazing. To be honest, I think Swedish fish are one of the most cursed foods that have ever been created. But the rest of the cupcake was really good. Well, I think we've probably spoiled the surprise for the rest of the conversation. Can you guess what we're talking about? This is the beginning of a brand new horror Vanguard retrospective. We struggled through the torture traps that make up the sore franchise. We are eternally condemned to be citizens of Rapunzel City.
2:18Or as long as we live dealing with the rest of the evil franchise. We decided in our infinite wisdom to give ourselves a break. We got in the rental car. We decided to drive up to the Pacific Northwest and talk about a strange and terrifying event. We are talking about the entire first season of Twin Peaks. It's going to be amazing. We're breaking this up into a season model. This is season one of our Twin Peaks retrospective, where we'll be covering season one. We're going to do the rest of the seasons. We're also going to hit you with both movies, missing pieces and Firewalk with me.
3:02We are both extremely excited because for whatever you can say about Twin Peaks, at least we're not talking about Resident Evil again. I'm so delighted. I have a large cup of extremely good coffee next to me. Let's get into this. So, the very first thing that I want to bring up when discussing Twin Peaks is Twin Peaks criticism. We have an interesting dilemma in front of us. That's that David Lynch is quite possibly the poster boy for art resisting interpretation and artists resisting any possible interpretation of their work.
3:46He's so beautifully opaque with what he does. I think that that in turn should cause us to reflect as the critics of art. Right off the bat in Twin Peaks, there's a sequence for me that makes me reflect on art criticism. In the opening introduction, when we're listening to the beautiful soundtrack to the show, one of the first sequence series of sequences that we see are trees being milled, right? Sobblades being sharpened, trees being cut and processed. And like, what is the function of the saw? Right? It's to cut down the woods and process them.
4:25Twin Peaks the show, the town, it is those very woods. We as critics mustn't become the saw. Twin Peaks should never become solved or processed. It's not a woodland to be managed and clear cut and subdued. It is to be wild and alive. We are explorers, cohabitants, and humbled passers-by. Nothing more. To become more is to defile both those woods and the thing that we claim to be. And that's kind of how I want to approach this. I think there's this interest in seeing Lynch as someone who is either completely solvable or completely surreal and people go, oh, you can't explain what's going on.
5:16And neither of those, I think, is accurate in the slightest. What's impressive to me, actually, is just how deliberate everything in Twin Peaks is. I completely agree that the aim of providing a solution to a riddle is a kind of vivisection of a piece of art. And that's really not the point. That's really not the, that's never what we try to do. Let us then become members of the community. Let us join in. Because this is what the show is about, right? The show has a kind of central mcguffin plot. In many ways it's a very traditionally structured kind of television show and what kind of television show it is is super interesting.
6:09But yeah, we're not here to solve Twin Peaks for you. We're not here to give anything approaching to the singular definitive reading of the text. What we are here to do is go on a journey. We are here to have an experience. And I think that's what watching the show itself is like. Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. So let's talk about some formal elements of the pilot. Right? We're talking about the very first episode of Twin Peaks, the pilot in Northwest Passage. Let's kind of pick apart the formal nature of what we're dealing with.
6:51Absolutely. Why not begin with the beginning? How this show came about? Because on paper at least it's a kind of weird thing, right? You have. You have this. This is actually a really important point. A lot of people talk about this as a David Lynch show. And of course, Lynch is a super important influence. But this is not solely David Lynch's work in terms of its development. There's also Mark Frost. In the 80s, Mark Frost worked as a writer for I think two or three years on Hill Street Blues, which was a very, very successful police procedural.
7:30David Lynch's commissioned or hired by Warner Brothers to direct something about the life of Marilyn Monroe. These two people meet. They decide they're going to make a TV show. So I think it's super important to go. Just as I'm very, very skeptical about auto theory in film studies. And I think TV, as a much more mediated, capitalized product, is even more resistant to being thought of as a kind of the product of a singular or to like Lynch has a distinctive style, right? But it's not just the David Lynch project. David Lynch doesn't even direct all of the episodes.
8:10No, yeah, yeah. And I think this really highlights the communal nature of making television content. You know, because this is a Lynch Frost production, right? It's both of both of their creative inputs going into a lot of this. But like, just try and imagine Twin Peaks with anyone but Kyle McLaughlin as Dale Cooper. Yeah. And Dale Cooper is quite clearly, and Lynch admits this is quite clearly based on David Lynch. And Lynch even says, like, Cooper says a lot of the things that he would say. Yeah, the acting in this is just like, everybody is right where they need to be.
8:50It is just so good. So like, this isn't just the David Lynch thing, but David Lynch is the name, right? This is what everybody talks about. So maybe who is David Lynch? Who is David Lynch? Who are we talking about here? That is that I believe is the question of our time. I think the person who figures that out, when some kind of cosmic gift, do you want to give us a 101 of Lynch's biography? Yeah. So David Lynch is a American filmmaker, started out as a painter. I think I don't kind of agree with the famous film critic Pauline Cale a lot, but Pauline Cale called David Lynch the first populist surrealist, which I think is.
9:35No lie detected, which I think is completely accurate. So he is very influenced by kind of European art traditions. He's very into transcendental meditation. He makes weird movies that I guess that's a kind of the better way, the best way into Lynch that I can think of. Would you consider yourself a Lynch fan? Have you kind of seen Lynch's movies? I have seen many of them, not all of them. One of my upcoming products, their product projects is a complete rewatch of everything that I can get my hands on that David Lynch has ever done.
10:10Commercials included. Prolific commercial film or commercial director. Also, by the way, interesting David Lynch point, which I think elucidates something that I find interesting about David Lynch's filmography. And that's for as weird and surreal as David Lynch's work gets. It's also ultra mundane. Like often this kind of like Twin Peaks is just a police procedural, but it's a police procedural that is a vehicle for a lot of very strange thought. That's very interesting because I would disagree about what Twin Peaks is.
10:49I'm going to like where this is going. Just to say that a lot of David Lynch's work, a racer head is a very mundane story about a guy down on his luck struggling with family life, attempting to put it together with a bunch of incredibly weird stuff happening around that. Yes, super, super interested in interiority, I think, very interested in the makeup of the psyche. And like I say, a deep appreciation for the European art tradition. A lot of his stuff gets into very psychosexual territory, blue velvet, maybe the most famous example of it.
11:33But but someone who is very interesting, even though. He's very interested in interesting in a kind of psychological and kind of like interior sense, rather than someone who's interested in spectacle. Yeah, yeah, definitely. The spectacle is very judiciously used as kind of like grand over the top moments are very intentionally crafted in Twin Peaks. Do you have a favorite Lynch movie? I always struggle with favorites. The thing that I rewatch the most out of everything that David Lynch has made is Twin Peaks. Maybe the thing that I watch most frequently is his daily YouTube announcements.
12:16Yes, the David Lynch weather report. Beautiful. Beautiful. Refreshing, like a cool breeze. How about you? I watch those a lot as well. I think out of the films, I really like the elephant man. Which I think is beautiful. I think Arraza Head is obviously incredible. Classic. I think the elephant man is a little more developed. I have a deep fondness for his adaptation of June. And I genuinely do wish that he had gotten the chance to direct the return of the Jedi. I think that would have been incredible. It would have been a far superior film.
13:00I think Lost Highway is great and super weird in the best kind of way.
13:13How can you not love Wild at Heart, which has got a very young Lord Durn in it?
13:21I would count myself a fan. That's good. It's a good starting place for us. A moment ago, you said you had some perhaps disagreements, some thoughts about the genre of this show that we're watching. What do you think about that? Well, you said that there is a police procedural, which I think is in the first, in the pilot in the first episode, probably true. But I think overall maybe not. What I think it is is I think this is David Lynch making a soap opera. Oh, yeah, definitely. So obviously it has its central plot, Mcuffin of Hugh Kild or a Palmer, which, but really the show unfolds as it's about personal relationships.
14:21It's about the drama of people's mundane life, right? It's which is classic soap opera territory. Hugh's sleeping with who, who's having an affair, who's falling in love. This is the generic language of melodrama. Yeah, no, no, I think that 100% stands. But I also think it is probably one of the first major shows on American television that was so interested in this idea of generic hybridity. It definitely wants to be and is several genres. It's incredibly deridian. It's participating all over the place in police procedurals, horror, mystery. There's some noir elements to this. And of course, the melodrama.
15:10Yeah. And I think that's a cool thing. It's a cool thing that you can, there's a lot of code switching that goes on. And I think what really helps this is something that people really underplay about David Lynch as a writer and filmmaker, which is that he has a very kind of weird sense of humor. Twin Beaks is incredibly funny. Yeah. It's really funny. Everyone goes, oh, it's so weird. You won't know what's going on. It's like, don't get hung up on that. It's really funny in places.
15:45What do you think about the score then? What do you think about the score in the soundtrack to Twin Beaks? Because I like Angela Bottle-Demantie and Julie Cruz are just phenomenal. Falling is such a good song. Like, what can you say? What can you say? I think it's a really good habit of ours that we try not to get into just kind of gushing or doing hagiography of cultural texts. But it's the high point of TV music, like easily the high point of TV music. And I mean, like, starting for the fact of the first thing you think here, the opening theme is Julie Cruz's falling. I think it is so important for the text of what Twin Beaks is. You know, that it is haunting. Like, it's like, diaphanist song about falling in love and like opening into this murder mystery and this intrigue and other dimensions and like, oh, it's so good. And it's like, the music is not kind of coded to be generically like a police procedural, right? It's very lush. It's kind of romantic. It's melodramatic. There's, you know, a lot of the men in the film are scored with what gets called cool jazz, you know, a lot of like finger snapping and like, you know, it's sort of like neo-noir west side story, which is amazing. But it is, it's directly, it's tuned into a very kind of specific emotional frequency, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
17:25So, so how do you think then that this informs how the show is doing exposition? I, again, I don't, I don't like to just kind of gush, but I think it's a, it's, it's a phenomenally well-written show because it's all of it is so deliberate. And the weirdness is kind of part of it, but I think it, the pilot, for example, it manages to set up the relationships and the main characters of the town before Dale Cooper even arrives and does it in such a way that you never get much of like the sheriff going, oh, by the way, this is that person, this is that person to us as the audience, right? There is that a little bit where there's the town meeting, but generally by the time everything sets, like you kind of know who everybody is and what the general state of the initial relationships are, right? And I think that's a really cool trick to pull off. Yeah, there are several moments throughout the first season where we do these kind of like introductory recaps of characters. You know, when, when, when, when Cooper is, is using a dream derived method of divination to locate prime suspects, you know, we get a quick recap of a bunch of characters and again, yeah, the town hall meeting, but those, those are done so naturally, so diagetically, that we don't get a lot of the kind of ham-fisted introductions and like, you know, like soap operas are really guilty of this too, like reintroducing the same character over and over again, because if you haven't been caught up, they need to catch you up all the time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Twin Peaks just, it feels like so much more of an organic way of a narrative unraveling. Yeah, I mean, this is what makes me say, it's a great, it's a great soap opera. You know, the whole, the whole point of a soap opera is in its mundanity, right? You're not there, you're not there for like fantasy escapism, you're there for this idea of like, you could have, there's, there's a kind of sociology of, of melodrama that's happening.
19:36And I think Lynch, like Twin Peaks, the entire show is very good at driving through a sort of a kind of slightly weird obtuse take on the sociology of melodramatic relationships.
19:55Oh, we're gonna have so much fun in the discourse zone, aren't we? Oh yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Before, before we go there though, the last thing we need to talk about in formalism is the pilot is not just the pilot, it's also made for TV movie. There's an international cut of the pilot that they produced, shot and produced and finished in case nobody wanted to pick up the show as a show so that they didn't waste their effort and they could just kick it out the doors of film. Yeah, adds about 20, 23 minutes of additional footage to make a kind of TV movie length.
20:27And I gotta say I am so happy that we got the show and not this kind of weird little movie that it could have become because the movie within the full length of it, it's the first 40 minutes of the pilot and then it's like a bunch of additional footage. And it's so, it's a mess, it's a massive resolution, it's so sudden, it kind of jams in all of these, all of the kind of metaphysical elements that come to define Twin Peaks in the following episodes. And it's just, it becomes this unwieldy little thing. So very glad we got the show and not the movie. Yeah. And the show manages to set up those metaphysical elements really well, right? Donna has the, no, Laura's mother Sarah has the nightmare right at the end, you know, of pulling the locket out of the earth. And it's like hang on a second. And that's, I love it. It's such a good cliffhanger for a pilot where you suddenly go, wait, did she hang on?
21:29What? And that's your kind of first indication that things have the potential to get really weird in a kind of fun, sustained way. But yeah, I actually, do you know what is the real first indication that things have the potential to get weird in a fun and sustained way? It's signing up for our Patreon at patreon.com slash horror vanguard. As segues go, I think that one's pretty good. That one's pretty solid. Sorry, I steamrolled you there. I just saw like, I was like, oh, there it is. There's the moment. Let's take it. Long time, listens will know that we have a recurring problem with knowing how to, you know, do self promotion. But if you like the show, you'd like to see more of it and you'd like to help us keep going, please do check out the Patreon. All right. So let's, let's get in the discourse zone and let's start by talking about the thing that we got to get out of the way first. And the thing that we'll be revisiting throughout this series and this season and future seasons is Twin Peaks Copaganda. Oh, this feels like this feels like one of those kind of hot takes that somebody puts on Twitter and they become the main character for the day where they go,
22:39I see your old standing Twin Peaks basic propaganda, a copaganda. But this is actually a super interesting question, right? Harry, Harry, especially in the pilot in the first episode proper comes off as very competent, very well respected, very kind of integrated into the community. Cooper's this, you know, slightly weird outside figure. It's very easy to, it would be very easy to make a straightforward argument that you go, oh, this is just another example of American Copaganda. And I, I think that's only very partly true. What do you think?
23:24This is something I'm going to talk a lot more about when we get to episode two, or the Xander, the skill to catch a killer. Yes. I think that episode is the one where like the discourse flows about Copaganda and that one. I would agree with you very broadly that there are elements of Copaganda in this show. It's something that is present. However, unlike a show like any generic standard issue police procedural, this show kind of strains the boundaries of Copaganda and gives us the freedom to call a lot of things into question that kind of, I think less thoughtful, less critical
24:03Copaganda pieces don't allow. This is exactly what I mean, which is like you can go, oh, it's Copaganda because it has law enforcement characters who are sympathetically presented, but also, it kind of shatters any sort of straightforward, realist or positivist epistemological frame within which law enforcement operates. Like, Cooper solves crimes with dreams and like with these, we, we'll get into that. These weird, weird kind of leaps of logic. And so it's like this idea of it being like, oh, you just need to have like the very smartest people and they're going to be the ones that keep you safe. Doesn't, doesn't exactly work. A lot about the show is sort of cuts against the grain of what a normative police procedural would be. So obviously, you can go, there is a degree to which that's true because that's the way that a lot of contemporary culture just talks about the police, but the show complicates it in very important ways. Absolutely. So how do we, how do we feel about coffee besides it is perhaps the single greatest thing on this rock we call earth? Well, I mean, it's the motif, right? So what do we, I don't know, it's a stimulant, it's the world's most widely taken drug.
25:35It's the the addiction which is most socially excused and even condoned in certain ways.
25:47What do you think about this? I think this is going to get really interesting because conversations on coffee are going to be continuing in the following episodes. But to set the stage, like coffee and the show are thematically and fundamentally entwined. Coffee is a thematic vehicle through which we can analyze the motifs and themes and scenes and incidents of twin peaks. Like coffee itself is a way of knowing, intra the tax to twin peaks. It's a lens through, it's a murky brown lens through which we can see the world of Dale Cooper and friends. I mean, it's a coffee is a huge imported product. It's often grown on the hugely exploitative conditions. It is a kind of social signifier.
26:44It's a way in which the working day is often regulated and controlled. You can't get through work without your morning coffee. There's a whole thing about Cooper switching to decaf. And he's drinking way too much caffeinated coffee. That's what Lucy tells us. So there are all of these, there are all of these, there's a kind of enormously complex semiotics of coffee. Like what it means and what it represents. There's, and of course, coffee and donuts being the culinary semiotics of American law enforcement completely as well. There's so many kind of layers to this. So I think you're completely right that it is absolutely a way into the show, into the show's epistemological commitments.
27:31I could not agree anymore with that. One thing that I wanted to mention is there's this, so we get this really interesting scene. So we go Andy, which is one of the deputies in this little community. And he's kind of the oaf of the group. He's a little bit comic relief, but also very empathetic. And we have the scene where, you know, like the police come see and find Laura Palmer's body on the beach. And Andy has kind of overcome with the horror and emotion of the moment. And he just just starts uncontrollably bawling, just sobbing. And the sheriff, naturally to kind of like a patriarchal masculinity is like, oh, are we going to do this again? Just like last time, like stop you're crying now. Like it's very much like, but and I think that that scene of crying, we're watching
28:30Andy cry, we're watching the sheriff kind of scold him for that. There's it's easy to fall into a reading of being like, oh, it's recapitulating to patriarchal views about men and their emotions, men shouldn't cry. Andy shouldn't be crying. He's the laughing stock. But I think that by making Andy this this oaf, he's kind of a buffoon. We have a natural sympathy for him and that builds in alliance. It's possible to watch Twin Peaks and feel nothing for the sheriff because he's a character you just don't connect with. You know, he's very plain. But Andy, like we've all been the laughing stock of a joke. We've all been the oaf at the office one time or another. Like you will connect with him.
29:10And to connect with him and to also know that you're connecting to like a man who just openly cries a lot. I think like it's very subtly and very slightly opening this door. Right. So like the kind of like blasted landscape that is the emotions that men are allowed to have access to under patriarchy and crying in public as as one of those and crying with your co-workers, especially in a job so traditionally masculine. Well, that's that's the joke of it, right. You have a you have what set up as like the kind of stereotypical cliché police procedural. And it's on the cup by what seems to be hugely sincere emotion. Like at first you go, it's kind of funny. So seal. And then you go, actually, I really you really feel for this guy who's clearly in a line of work. He's not he's not suited for. There's the horrible moment where he calls in after finding the train car, the torture slash murder site. And his in pieces about this. And you're completely right that it cuts through the kind of presuppositions that the audience has about how are police supposed to respond to these acts of violence. And I think this and I think I think I think I always brings up a kind of really important question, right. And maybe something that we should get out of the way first in the very first episode, which is Laura Palmer is the 17 year old homecoming queen of this small town.
30:42You know, the classic beautiful blonde head blue eyed young American woman. And there's that obviously infamous quote from Edgar Allen Poe that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poesicle topic in the world. And I guess this kind of how do we approach this from a feminist point of view. You know, the police procedural is is all about often it's way too often about this kind of misogynistic depiction of the depiction of the torture and murder of women, right. Often young women there's often a great deal of sexual violence involved. You know, is this just another one of those things or can we or other ways of talking about this, which sort of think about things in a new way?
31:41Yeah, and I think that's that I think is a really good guiding question for the series more broadly because like we could look at Andy's frequent emotional breakdowns and see him as defective or damaged or somehow less in massive scarequats, you're less of a man than the sheriff who's able to weather and withstand these things with us, you know, a chisel jawline kind of emotional efficiency. However, we can also invert this. We can see Andy is the one who isn't broken, who isn't damaged, who has access to a rich pallet of emotions that he can freely share. And then we can look at Cooper and the sheriff and the other man in this movie as the ones who have been in some way damaged or broken or become been made to become somehow incomplete, having now have less access to different ways of feeling. So I think like the how the series approaches gender as a whole and oh, the
32:40David do company episodes are coming our way. There's a lot going on in Twin Peaks. And because of the nature of lynchian cinema and what lynch and frost accomplished with the show, it doesn't it doesn't ever reduce, right? You can't boil this down to like a clear homogeneity. There's always going to be some friction and some bite in the test that is really useful because that opens wider discussions rather than committing to like one ontological position. This is exactly what I was going to say. And I actually think there's a very strong argument to make for lynch as a as in lots ways of a profoundly feminist filmmaker. I think you can make that argument about Twin Peaks. He is really good at writing at the kind of psychological multitude within the individual subject, particularly in his female characters. And you know, I think you can go that yeah, some of the visual language in this is a bit dated and it's now a little bit cliched. You know, the constant slowmo video of Laura on the hike, lots of like closeups of her. And you could you can absolutely do that.
33:55But I also think there is a lot of super suggestive super really interesting perspectives about about women generally in this show that you don't get a lot in other more kind of basic or straightforward murder mysteries. Like for example, the thing that kind of pops into my head watching the pilot again is like compare this, compare this to something like Frank Miller's Sin City, which is another sort of like weird surrealist neo-noir. And Sin City is so much more reductive and so much more kind of like leaning into the very obvious cliches and sort of sexual fantasy of the femme for tall, whereas this is so much more interesting in lots of very complicated ways.
34:47And yeah, well, there will be lots of discourse to get into. But I'm firmly on the side of Lynch being a really interesting filmmaker and in some ways a deeply feminist one.
35:03Yeah, definitely. I think I think this kind of like this is a great place to just let the curtain slowly fall on this episode. Dude, you have any final thoughts before we exit the Northwest passage and continue our travels into the rest of the series? No, I think you're completely right. I think it's a great place to stop. Let's let's ready ourselves to get to know the rest of the inhabitants of Twin Peaks. We hope you've enjoyed the dread discourse. Until next week,