“Itâ’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once…”

It’s the gorgeous, mooningly Lynchian line delivered by a good girl in love in a bad way that’s always epitomized the eternal appeal of Twin Peaks for me, arguably the cult show that turned everything that came before it on its head while setting the new standard for everything that came after.

I can vividly remember watching the criminally brilliant pilot movie that chronicled an F.B.I. agent’s arrival in a small Pacific Northwest town to investigate the grisly slaying of the high school homecoming queen. The images I encountered therein remained with me all through school the next day and beyond: the best friend of the murdered Everygirl Laura Palmer looking to her empty desk and tearfully inferring that she would never return; a horrific crime scene in a derelict train car whose centerpiece was an altar-like mound of dirt venerating a half-heart necklace and the cryptic message Fire Walk With Me scrawled in blood; a brutalized girl wandering down from the mountain and into town, half-dead with her wrists bound; and a gloved hand retrieving the second half of the Laura’s necklace from under a rock under cover of night.

Peaks was my first formative experience in which TV shaped the entertainment I would later seek — a midnight movie magically broadcast right into my living room. What remains salient now as the series reaches its twenty-year anniversary is not just how it united an assemblage of character actors who you’d never expect to see all together in one night, but how the male cast in particular undercut expected soap stud clichés and offered up a unique palette of offbeat man candy you’re not likely to ever see again in primetime.

Starchild & Butch: Special Agent Dale Cooper & Sheriff Harry S. Truman

Peaks‘s upending of hoary soap opera conventions included casting idiosyncratic leading men; there is no standard-issue dreamy doctor, slick advertising executive, or hunky plumber in this mix. Our main pair of flatfoots are, if anything, parodies of square-cut machismo, and it’s really their differences in deduction that help them function as perfectly balanced antipodes.

Chipper, shalaque-haired Agent Cooper may serve as main character and the primary player of audience identification, but he actually operates as the Yin of the duo. Forward-thinking, bright-eyed, and receptive to metaphysical phenomena like clairvoyance and Buddhist philosophy — traits the series ascribes to the “gifted and the damned” Palmer women with their abilities of second sight — he’s a starchild in the body of a boyscout (“Aces!”), conflicted by his transgressive attractions to a teenage hellcat and a dead girl. So straight he’s queer, Cooper in Kyle MacLachlan‘s hands was for David Lynch what Johnny Depp is for Tim Burton: a cinematic stand-in through which the director can channel his aw-shucks oddness. The pair drifted apart due to MacLachlan’s fear of typecasting, the actor finding a serviceable enough career in film and TV — ending up on Desperate Housewives, as generic a “Someones trying to kill me…maybe even my husband!” nighttime soap as you’ll ever find — while Lynch has yet to be able to find a leading man he can connect with on the same level.

Michael Ontkean‘s rugged Sheriff Truman was always the pick of the male cast for me. With his deep, black eyes, gravel voice, and loose head of curls, he’s the picture of rural studliness, and though you’d expect his name to signal his falling into line with a monolithic manly ideal, even he moves against type. Sturdy and able, yes, but also soft and open in his I’m-on-my-knees-for-you interracial relationship with the stunning owner of the local mill, and not at all condescending in his partnership with government weirdie Cooper. Truman finds himself increasingly more enamored with the G-Man and astonished by his preternatural abilities to uncover clues with the wackiest of methods. In time, the two come to move lock-step, Truman going so far as to induct Cooper into the secret society of watchmen called the Bookhouse Boys, while Cooper finds his practical, by-the-book Yang in the earthy lawman and loyal friend. Whenever I hear Peaks‘s lush, swooning theme song — a staple on my iPod — it’s Truman I picture meeting by moonlight under swaying black pines and the watchful eyes of the wood owl.

Nasty Daddies & Naughty Boys: Leland Palmer & The Brothers Horne

The woods may loom with ominous dread in the town under the mountains, but home is where the horror is. If fathers are the pillars of the community, then this town has some faulty towers, with the most outwardly composed and successful men up to the most filthy antics of whoring and graft. All nighttime dramas have their tyrannical patriarchs, but these men were out there. If you weren’t simultaneously moved by and terrified of Ray Wise‘s full-throttle batshit performance as Leland Palmer, then you had cast iron nerves. This was a bravura turn — veering from bleakest despair and manic compulsion, to seething rage and demonic glee — and Wise was so committed to the part that when he cut his hand during a key scene involving daughter Laura’s photograph, he improvised and proceeded to rub his own blood into it. That his face can transform from Daddy-Handsome to Spring-Heeled Jack on a dime only makes him that much more compelling given the still terrifying violence the series enacted.

Somewhat more benign were Ben and Jerry Horne, so named for their unbridled oral fixation for nailing teenage hookers and chowing down on all manner of exotic delicacies. As essayed by Richard Beymer and David Patrick Kelly, the pair shift pleasingly from corporate cutthroats to whimsical man-children, the elder Horne nearly raping his own daughter in a supreme case of mistaken identity, while little brother sets his eyes on a Norwegian viking queen. These two were always a hoot, and their most poignant moment came in a lovely piece of purely Lynch-inspired nostalgia: a childhood memory of a beloved babysitter dancing for them on a hook rug while waving flashlights. Some experiences truly are formative.

Heartthrobs and Hot Rods: Ed & James Hurley

Every town has its clannish Romeos, and Peaks‘s resident studs were the lovelorn Hurleys. “Big” Ed — surely so-named because he’s tall – is the hometown hero with one foot trapped in past, in this case his babe-like high school flame, the other foot trapped in a quagmire of a marriage with a patch-eyed neurotic obsessed with having silent drape runners. Ed as embodied by the nicely lupine Everett McGill, is gigantic with a guttural drawl to match, and his workin’ man charm is so potently attractive that we can see why he’d never go dateless in his neck of the woods. McGill and onscreen wife Wendy Robie would reunite a year later in Wes Craven‘s The People Under The Stairs as an inner city husband and wife pair of Right Wing sickos, her as Susie Homemaker-gone-whack-job and him as her loving hubby in a studded black leather bondage suit.

The series’s juvenile male lead came in the form of wounded-looking James Marshall as Ed’s nephew James, his blond locks colored blue black to give him that edge as the motorcycle-riding secret flame to Laura and holder of half of her periapt necklace. His character sounds hackneyed at first blush, but in Lynchville where the ’50s and present day co-exist photogenically, high school crew politics are inverted. It’s the jocks and big men on campus who are the thugs and the criminals, while the bikers decked out in leather and denim take girls on picnics, meet their parents, and listen to gauzy pop music at the Roadhouse. James was prone to looking like he was about to burst into tears/punch someone, crooning doe-eyed love ballads, and helping the teenage girl sleuths break into places. In the end, all he got was heartbreak and the open road, the sound of his bike roaring mournfully as he sped off for parts unknown under the town’s eerily windblown traffic light.

Bruisers, Losers & Users: Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs & Mike Nelson

Taking out the white trash! Outside of murder, arson, international intrigue, and secret government projects, the big bane of the Twin Peaks P.D. is the drug/flesh trade. While the ward girls in town are peddling nekkid pictues of themselves in the swinger’s magazine Flesh World, their boyfriends are buying, selling, or snorting the white stuff for kicks. The top dawg in the local cartel is load-hauling truck driver Leo Johnson. When he’s not abusing his child bride or partying with underage girls, Leo uses the half-wit jocks from Twin Peaks High as pushers and mules. In a case of nepotism actually resulting in perfect casting, Eric Da Re, son of the series’s casting director, is perhaps too convincing as a psychopath with a muscle car who can obviously fuck like a freight train but beats chicks with soap-in-sock bolas. This goes beyond the infidelity and murder-for-profit that characterize most primetime soap marriages. This bastard is vicious and irredeemable. He gets a well-deserved bullet-in-the-head, but because there wasn’t much pesky gray matter in there to begin with, he becomes a half-feral vagrant roaming the hills.

Leo’s two right-hand men are Bobby Briggs and Mike Nelson, local football stars and mooks-for-hire. Portrayed by Dana Ashbrook and Gary Hershberger, they’re two physically well-contrasted alpha males acting in tandem — dumb, brunet mouthbreather Bobby nailing Leo’s wife and always on-the-make for some money-making score, while dumb, strawberry blond Mike gets ditched by his girl in favor of James Hurley. Vandalism, bar fights, and funeral brawls are their stock in trade, but as often is the case with their type, they tend to coast on ‘tude, Bobby a virtual slave in secret to Laura’s wiles and Mike set upon by Nadine, the horned-up wife of Ed Hurley, after she traumatically regresses back to girlhood and takes a shine to his hot blond ass. Still, like most functionally-retarded jocks, their best chemistry is with each other, especially when they’re barking in their jail cell like rabid dogs baying at the moon. Woof.

Today, my obsession with Lynch’s fantasy hamlet remains just as potent as it was that first night seated in front of the TV with my legs hugged to my chest. Laura’s iconic prom photo sits on my end table. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer rests on my bookshelf. Copies of the dearly-departed Lynch-devoted magazine Wrapped In Plastic hang framed on my wall. With its town not found on any map nor accessible by any road, Twin Peaks will always be that dream place I reach either in that strange state between slumber and waking, or through the wonderful vision quest known as DVD.

Twin Peaks: The Gold Edition is now available featuring loads of damn fine extras including:

The long-unavailable pilot movie (featuring the U.S. Network and the alternative International endings), remastered picture from the original negative with 5.1 Sound personally approved by David Lynch, original broadcast 2.0 audio, deleted scenes, Secrets From Another Place: an exclusive feature-length documentary, A Slice of Lynch featurette, Return To Twin Peaks featurette, an interactive map of Twin Peaks, and the complete Log Lady introductions from the original series’s broadcast

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com

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