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. Welcome back listeners, welcome back to beautiful forested twin peaks. Smell those Douglas Furs. I am one of your co-ghosts. I am loglady ash today. I'm going to be loglady ash joined as always by a special investigative podcaster. It's John, how are we all doing? We are alive and well here continuing our twin peaks season one retrospective with episode one, traces to nowhere.
1:03So do you want to, I suppose the thing to do would be to kind of set up where do things stand at the beginning of this? To the pilot, where are we? So this begins to introduce kind of our extended cast of characters here in traces to nowhere. Coop is now staying at the great north and hotel. The investigation is underway. We're introduced to Audrey Horn and Benjamin Horn and their wayward family. Cooper and Sheriff Truman continue their investigation. They look into James, they start looking into Loris friends. And everything really starts to expand.
1:42We get Dr. Lawrence to Kobe. So this is really this episode serves to really introduce the wider range of characters here in twin peaks while still forwarding the investigation and setting up a lot of the B and C plots. Yes, absolutely. And you know our first kind of episode on this was maybe a little bit longer than we want to, we want the rest of them to be. We want them to be kind of short, digestible kind of sips from the coffee cup of discourse, if you will. So where would you like to start with this week's episode?
2:15Well, I want to start where every twin peaks episode starts and that's with the log lady's introduction. Absolutely. There is truly the art of praises right there. Just chef's kiss phenomenal. Log lady come on HV. The log lady at the beginning of traces to nowhere is kind of discussing what it means to find meaning in the events of our human lives. You know, what does it mean to detect that? What is the function of detection more broadly beyond just the scope of the detective? And I think that that is such a huge tease for twin peaks, right?
2:56Because this is a show that invites so much of that. It invites so much of this work of discovering meaning and looking for answers from everywhere from the basic plot of Cooper and Sheriff Truman investigating a murder mystery all the way over to these larger metaphysical questions surrounding the black lodge and its inhabitants and the greater like extraterrestrial and extradimensional and metaphysical mysteries that go on here. Well, yeah, precisely this is the problem of the police procedural, right? The police procedural is a kind of disciplinary discourse, right?
3:32It is the entire purpose of it is to go even in the very midst of kind of chaos and disaster, the world is at core fundamentally explicable, right? You can track the causal chains of a gentle capacity back to find the quote unquote guilty person. And that can be they can be safely excised from the social body and kind of the normal order or justice can be inscribed upon that. And I think the great advantage, the great kind of strength of twin peaks is it goes actually no because human beings, human psychology and human humans on a kind of existential level are so much fundamentally much weirder and much more interesting than that.
4:30Oh, absolutely. And like the fact that like, so if you if you've watched twin peaks on a streaming service, probably you've missed these log lady introductions. It's the best of my knowledge they're not included in a lot of the streaming versions of the show just kind of jumps right into the title sequence. But if you have the DVD or you would have watched it on television each episode is introduced by the log lady kind of asking some pointed yet philosophically meandering questions. And that really that changes how you encounter twin peaks as a text, right? It's no longer this thing that we watch. It's now something we participate in the construction of. We're invited to to have this Q and A session. We're invited to be part of the mystery part of the discussion. The log lady is kind of a mythical being in a way. She can directly ask us the viewer of the program questions and exist in and participate with the narrative itself. Right? Like we we are in so many respects, the log in her loving arms, you know, like being carried through the sequence of events in this. And it adds this ludic element, right? It changes the relationship to the text. You know, oh god, I just I can talk about the log lady forever. I could do a log lady series. I mean, precisely. And in a way, I sort of like that in some people won't have that experience because we're talking about it immediately. The people who haven't seen those introductions ago, what are you what are you all talking about? Right? It raises the question immediately.
6:06There is a there is a specter haunting twin peaks. The specter of the log lady. And this is like like a lot of the times when like, you know, my favorite character is the log lady. She adds so much to this. And it's because of these little extra elements because without these like little log ladies are very much, you know, tertiary almost background character. But when you realize that like the log lady is the first person you see every episode, the log lady defines each episode and kind of guides you like it fundamentally shifts how we look at twin peaks.
6:43I think I think in many ways it sort of just clarifies a lot, you know, if the show comes off as too weird, it's because you you haven't. We conditioned by the generic structures of television to treat each text in a certain way. That's the whole point of jet of genre conventions in a sort of fundamental way, right? Is to condition the audience to responding or interpreting a text within a given set of pre existing hermeneetical frameworks. And the the problem of twin peaks quote unquote is that on a personal subjective level, the the content and form of the text create friction with those implied hermeneetic schemes that we are kind of preconditioned to approach television with.
7:31And I think the advantage of the advantage of the log lady is to kind of shatter them to go actually know you think you're watching something you think you're watching a predefined easily comprehensible text, right? You're watching a soap you're watching a police procedural but actually you're being drawn into something which is both of those and at the same time neither. It's not even a TV show, it's a game. Like the the function of the log lady, it's you're absolutely right is shattering genre of formulations not even in television as a television media with its own conventions and its own kind of technological relationships to culture but media in general, right? Like this is this is changing what twin peaks even looks like log lady log lady. Oh dear. Shall I lead us on to the next topic?
8:27Please do my friend. Please do. Excellent. So one thing that I like to talk a lot about in the context of anything David Lynch makes or is related to or has created input behind his mundanity, right? I think that for as much and we talked about this in the previous episode, a touch on it rather, but as much as David Lynch is a master of surrealism on a conceptual level which I would agree with and not argue at all, I think that David Lynch is also just a wizard of the mundane. Right and is able to control mundanity in such a way that almost it opens us up to the seriality in the mundane which I think is really important, right? Yes, let's talk about the gothic reenchantment of small town americana because that's that's precisely what I think you're driving out, right? Which is this absolutely completely constructed idea, the ordinary is boring and this is not the case, like every single moment of existence, every single kind of like microsecond that our consciousness sparks into webs and rhizomes of innumerable complexity is compellingly weird and I think what's I completely agree with you, I think what's incredible about Lynch is that he takes that weirdness seriously and in and in what is too often written off as the mundane in a pejorative sense, right? You go, oh well that's yes, people very very dismissive of the mundane but actually Lynch takes it phenomenally seriously and goes like in those moments, like of domesticity of like going to school, of going to work, every moment is this kind of cornucopia of potentials, right? What could happen to you? And this is a classic thing about the ethics of horror, right? Everyone has had, everyone has had a kind of ordinary day that gets shattered in an instant by phone call, right? Like something happens, you see something, you hear something, someone that you love or maybe even yourself you full ill, right? The world kind of snaps apart, the very ordinary stuff of life is suddenly revealed to be very trivial and in the mundanity you kind of come back to it with this sense of actually, you know, life is far weirder than we give it credit for.
10:53Absolutely and I think like so this episode does this really brilliantly, right? Like we're introducing his serial killers, occult miseries, death of loved ones, deaths in the family, these metaphysical and ontological questions about what we are even doing as humans in this endeavor on this planet. And at the same time, Koup is just ranting and raving about getting, Albert getting lunch at the lamplight or in, Sheriff and Ed, yeah, the Sheriff and Ed are talking about Ed having an affair. Okay, like there's a lot of like drama there, Donna Hayward is talking with her mom about realizing that her and James are in love, Benjamin Horan's affair with Catherine from the Packard sawmill, like and the Sheriff's affair with Josie, like all of the mundanity keeps ticking and it's not that those things are separate from these massive jarring cataclysmic events. They're not separated from the divine and the mysterious and the horrifying, their constituent elements of it.
11:56Yeah, precisely, precisely, this is this idea that there's a kind of like split in the show is completely kind of incorrect in my opinion. The show is entirely insgraded and this is why this is the kind of theme of the episode really is all of this mundane duplicity because we are phenomenally self-deceiving, right? Mostly because if we want to approach this in a kind of psychoanalytic way, we're incapable of actually admitting our desire, right? The whole point of psychoanalytic therapy is not to get you to stop desiring, it's to get you to be okay with admitting the things that you want, right? Yeah. Or the thing that you want is never really the thing that you want, it represents something else, right? It's not necessarily, it's not necessarily about the affair, it's about what does the affair signify, right? Absolutely, yeah. Desire is always the desire of the other. What is it that you have learned to want? And I think that one of the really great things about this episode is the amount of time it takes to go, no, everybody does this.
13:02Every, it's the basic, one of the basic conditions of being human is being forced to reckon with the inability of ourselves to reconcile with the things that we actually want, right? That's the whole point of these affairs, right? You are in a certain situation, the other represents not just your attraction to the other, but they represent a kind of escape from your current state. Ed, I think is probably the kind of paradigmatic example of this, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Ed is a good example of this. We've also got Donna and James, which are in a lot of ways kind of mirroring what's going on with Ed as a character. And at least Donna is able to admit it, right? It's a very difficult thing to admit, because it's driven with a lot of guilt and not at all surprisingly a lot of grief. And I actually find that scene between Donna and a mother kind of like actually really quite moving, you know, this idea of going, but but moving because it's about being able to admit to admit what it is that you want. I think is extraordinarily powerful, especially in an episode where literally almost every other character has been incapable of doing that.
14:19Right. Yeah, yeah, this episode is defined by all of these characters having desires that to themselves are occulted. You know, we talk about the the the the the black lodge, right? And all of the characters they're in as being like the mystery of twin peaks, the source of darkness, the evil presence in the woods. But like all of their desires are straightforward, they're nonhuman, you know, they don't have the hang ups that we have. You know, the real darkness that's that's cutting rifts through twin peaks that that's driving all of this is the fact that no one can come to terms with what they want in this life. Yeah, yeah, precisely. And every every single one of them is just just eaten alive by that. Yeah, absolutely. So no, I know you had something interesting to say, but the discourse on drugs that starts to appear starting in traces to know where isn't isn't that kind of just another example, right? What's like, I think the choice of the drug in question is really interesting, right? Mm-hmm. It turns out Laura Laura, Laura did kind of everything in the town, organized meals and wheels was dating the football captain was a chooser was helping people there English language. And I'm like was dating the bad boy on the bike. I'm like cocaine makes a lot of sense here, right? Like, do you need a lot of energy to complete those tasks? Yeah, but also and this is maybe like in a way, this might sound a bit weird, but in a way cocaine strikes me as perhaps the the capitalist drug par excellence, right? This I did this. Why what's it? It's a stimulant. It's supposed to make you more productive. Cocaine is associated with wealth on both sides of the law, right? The people who are extremely rich and you know, often work on Wall Street or in the houses of
16:10Parliament, love to do lines of coke. It's, you know, think about Norega or the other kind of infamous drug dealers that kind of get glam like it's about wealth, it's about power, it's about productivity, it is it is kind of like powdered capitalism, right? I think, you know, it's very it's very noticeable that she's not doing psychedelics, she's not doing weed, right? She's not doing like super heavy opiates which are designed to kind of numb you from existence. It's about this kind of like hyper intensification. And I think that's super interesting. I completely agree and I think like the conversation about desire and desire being occulted becomes metatextual in this episode a lot because now we start to introduce the elements of cocaine and the story of the drug use, the drug bust plots that are going on the stuff with Jacques Renault that's going to start becoming more prominent. And what what the contrast is for me is that like all of the main players, every adult in this story is their entire life is defined by relationship to an upper. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like, and I'm not talking about cocaine. It's coffee. Yeah. Yeah. It's caffeine, right? Like like Cooper, Cooper, everybody, like they love coffee. They're always drinking coffee. They're always talking about coffee. Coffee is always in focus.
17:35And there's kind of this metatextual balance here where it's like, okay, like it's in this is something we touched on in the last episode, but it's perfectly acceptable to define your life and relationship to a drug as long as that drug falls into these acceptable social frameworks and these acceptable capitalistic frameworks. If your relationship to a drug falls outside of that, that's when problems start to emerge. Right. And this is in a way, this shows bringing that to the foreground, right? Because it's hard not to notice that like, sure, everyone's love with coffee is cute, but why is it cute? Why do we find that cute? And why do we find the presence of cocaine and picturesque, specific Northwest Americana to be to be something vulgar to be something alien? No, I completely agree. I completely agree. Right. It's like, none of this is a surprise. I think the discourse around drugs often gets caught up in this kind of like moral panicking. What are the young people doing when they're out of sight? But it's like, everybody does it.
18:38Everybody's doing it. Everybody is on some sort of upper that's the air stimulant, something that's designed to make them keep going, make them keep maintaining the kind of duplicitous doubling of their own selves that's being enacted on the screen. We're all doing drugs and we're all doing drugs nearly every day. Energy drinks, the caffeine in those, the caffeine in coffee, right? Like, it's just everywhere. It's ubiquitous to society, right? Our relationship to it though is like all desire, just interwoven and enmeshed and sunken into the black lodge of our own psyche.
19:11Yes, absolutely. And that I think for me, like, there's a lot of horror in Twin Peaks, right? Like, there's a lot of horror and terror going on in this series and it drives a lot of it. Like, David Lynch is just a master of fear. And I think in this show, like this episode starts to kind of like tease out some of the deeper, more frightening things into in peaks and that's, this episode kind of introduces a question and that's, you know, like, what's more horrifying? That terrible things will happen to you or that even after life's worst, even after like the most horrifying and painful and shattering things happen, that life will continue. People, people will recover, people will continue moving, the cycles of society will continue to go on. And it's, it adds a sense of there's always this touch of the cosmic and what David Lynch is doing. And this introduces a very mundane kind of implication of cosmic horror into Twin Peaks. Completely. What's the worst thing is that like in many, in many ways, right? In many ways, the worst thing is not that it's not that the people die or the, you know, people kind of disappear, it's that you have to continue in the wake of that. Right? That's the worst thing. That's the, that's in many ways that's often the kind of unlivable thing about dealing with grief or dealing with loss or dealing with kind of traumas and pain, right? It's the idea that when, when something is gone, you're still there. And that's, that's the hardest thing, right? And it's hard precisely for the reason that it raises the kind of, it raises the stakes of the question to the kind of existential to the cosmic as you put it, right? You know, we know that we know bodies are contingent fragile things. We know that ourselves are immensely fleeting, but there is a sort of like continuing in the wake of an absence, right? There's the, the great American Australian
21:17Gothic picnic at hanging rock, right? Which is just, has an unexplained disappearance in it. What, like, this is the big question. What do you do when someone's just gone? And it's like, well, as Twin Peaks shows, you do the same thing you did when they were there, right? Because you have to, because there isn't really anything else to be done. And that is the, the profundity of that is terrifying. So let's wrap up today's mini episode. Do you do you have any closing thoughts or questions as we go out? What do you think about the overlook coat? I mean, the great northern, the overlook hotel of this, of this television show. This was one of my favorite things about this episode, the, the getting to spend more time in this phenomenally weird space. Cooper is constantly talking about the need to find somewhere cheap, so much cheap and affordable, somewhere with a, with a bed and a television. And it, it's, it's so strange that there is, in a place that doesn't seem to have a huge tourist trade, there is also this enormous hotel. There's something so kind of like incongruites about this. What about you? I mean, like, I've always found the great northern, besides being in a certain respect, aesthetic goals for interior design. It's, it's to be a truly menacing place. You know, it's, it's, it's the home of the horn family and they are like some of the most creepy and terrifying and jarring characters. So Benjamin, in particular, and his brother, oh yeah, awful, awful people. Yeah, the great northern, it's, it's where we watch, you know,
23:06Leland Palmer start breaking down like, like so much like really gutting emotional stuff happens at the great northern. And I think it's also the site of like, like a land grab, but Benjamin Horn is trying to buy up twin peaks and turn it into an investment property, right? He is, he is the Grim Reaper for the small town, right? He is the reason why no homes are going to be affordable in twin peaks. By the time we get to our generation, right? It's the Benjamin Horn's of the past that drove us to the damnation we face today. And, and, and like, what is the great northern, if not a lodge? It's literally a lodge. You know, and we need to look at it with kind of the same, the same kind of energy, the same frameworks, the same ontologies and hermeneutics that we used to discuss the black lodge and the white lodge. I think that's, I think that's a great, that's a great place to wrap it for the first proper episode of the show. And then Johnny's next time as we move on to the, the art of Zen, all, of course, how to catch killer. We hope you've enjoyed the dread discourse. Until next week,