Rewatching Twin Peaks: Does It Hold Up?

The minute the familiar opening montage of Twin Peaks flashes across the screen as I settle back to watch the pilot, I can feel my eyes tingling with nostalgia. The music swells, and we’re swept through the sequence to the iconic scene of Laura Palmer on the beach, eyes dead and cold, and plunged into one of the most famous cult television series in U.S. history. While Twin Peaks ran for only two seasons, it’s a David Lynch classic and a must for fans of the auteur, and it’s coming back in 2016, which might explain why the show has suddenly received an uptick in attention.

Or maybe it’s because you don’t have to painstakingly figure out how to get the VCR working again to watch it, or pay a fortune for carefully remastered DVDs. Twin Peaks in digitised form is available on Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon instant, and that means it’s hitting the Internet age. Suddenly, it’s all the rage among people who were barely old enough to watch it when it aired (myself included), and, in some cases, among those who weren’t even alive when the show was on the air.

This week marked the 25th anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall, but we’re also closing in on the 25th anniversary for Twin Peaks, which debuted in April, 1990. The first Bush was still President, the HIV/AIDS crisis was raging, the economy was in pretty good shape, and we were all about to watch a small town crumble at the seams after the death of prom queen and all-round good girl…or was she?

The mystery of who killed Laura Palmer wasn’t the only cultish aspect of the series. People fell in love not with the detective storyline, but with the stories of the residents of Twin Peaks and their own little sordid secrets, the trappings of small town life and tales never told and things uncovered that were better left hidden, in other words, the things Lynch does best. And, of course, the show was filled with Lynch’s trademark dark and utterly bizarre humour; those pop culture references and slips of the tongue that fill American life about fish in the percolator and log ladies come from Twin Peaks, though many people wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the source of these references when asked, unless, of course, they were avid fans or had recently watched a few episodes.

Twin Peaks had a profound effect on American pop culture, coming along when it did, with apparently the perfect blend of elements. It’s consistently rated one of the best television shows of all time, with the pilot episode in particular receiving accolades. As a young fan who remembers when Twin Peaks was on the air, I have a vivid memory of the days when we had to watch television when it aired, as it aired, because few people could afford a VCR, and we crowded around the television screen with its shoddy reception to watch the pilot, all gasping at the reveal we knew was coming when the plastic-wrapped bundle was painstakingly rolled and opened.

Twin Peaks is utterly mundane. It’s completely bizzare. It’s a perfect mixture that only an auteur like Lynch could have achieved, which is why many are excited to see the series reboot, though I have some reservations about it; I was concerned about how well the visuals, and the ethos, would translate to the contemporary television era. 25 years is a lifetime in television years. Even remastered and cleaned up, Twin Peaks is shaky and grainy, the sound quality less than ideal, the sets clunky and cheesy. Yet, these are part of the appeal, what makes the show what it is, not drawbacks but assets, and if the show is gussied up and transformed for modern audiences, it may lose something in translation.

I, however, was far more worried about losing something in translation between those days as a child in the 1990s and today, which is why I haven’t watched Twin Peaks since it was on the air until this week, when I hesitantly started watching it again. I was deeply concerned that it, like so many nostalgic things from childhood, would be ruined if I revisited it, thinking that Twin Peaks was, like funfetti cupcakes and The Last Unicorn, better left in the past.

Yes, I just compared two iconic childhood (if you’re a child of the U.S. of A Certain Era, at any rate) staples with a television show many people thought of, and probably would still, as not really appropriate for children at the time. I was that kind of child, and it was that kind of era. In a time when family friends were dying of AIDS and Desert Storm was raining death overseas, Twin Peaks seemed pretty tame.

Would it stand up to the test of time? I already knew that many deemed it a classic piece of U.S. television, and that I would probably enjoy it on an intellectual and aesthetic level, but that is not the same as enjoying it on a personal, emotional one, as I did in my childhood.

But the minute I heard the theme music, I was immersed in the world of Twin Peaks all over again. My sense of nostalgia swelled as I listened to the familiar chords and realised that they’d been playing in the background all my life, whether I realised it or not. I was a beat ahead on every single pop culture reference, the show so engrained in my psyche through personal and social experience that it was as though I was carrying a mental script.

The burr of rotary phones, the whine of a flash charging, the broad cuts of the suits all felt delightfully real and tangible for me. Twin Peaks is such an authentic representation of its time that it’s almost painful, and it makes a mockery of modern interpretations of the same era; obviously, because it was filmed then, but more notably, because it embraced every seemingly mundane bit of iconic Americana unabashedly.

Twin Peaks had been patiently waiting for me, and it was every bit as delightful as it had been 25 years ago, and shaped through my memory in the intervening years. Obviously as a child there were many things about the show that I missed or didn’t comprehend, many more nuances that are coming out as an adult, but the core underlying truth of the series remains; this is good fucking television, in 1990 or 2014, and there’s a reason it occupies an iconic role in U.S. film and television history.

Photo by Jyrki Salmi, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license