MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (24)
By:
March 22, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
TWIN PEAKS | 1990–91
The touchstone art of our lives is always conditioned by context, the wheres and whens of our exposure to whatever book, movie, TV show, song, painting, etc., that has managed to worm itself in our being. The granularity of first contact. I, for instance, can’t write about Twin Peaks — the original version that appeared on ABC in 1990 and ’91 — absent this contextual lens. I was in grad school in April, 1990, when the pilot was broadcast, and I mean broadcast in the analog sense: played on TV at a designated date and time, only manipulatable by taping it on VHS. I had known the series was coming for a while and yet there really was no way to prepare for it, beginning with that languorous opening credit sequence, scored by Angelo Badalamenti, which lasts a full two-minutes and forty seconds. There is no quick cutting here, no fast editing. We are on the cusp of the Internet and the yet-to-come miniaturization of time segments.
The opening credits transition to a series of dissolves that take us not directly to Laura’s plastic-wrapped body on the pebbled beach, as we might remember it, but rather to Josie Packard (Joan Chen), a haunting presence throughout the series. She sits before a mirror, applying lipstick so very slowly, a sad and faraway look in her eyes, as if she knows and has already accepted the horrors that are about to unfold. This is followed by a cut to Pete Martell (Jack Nance) leaving Blue Pine Lodge to go fishing, followed by a cut back to Josie, her face turning towards the camera at the sound of the door slamming, and then, finally, a cut returning us to Pete outside, walking with his fishing gear along a path just above the inlet where, in the background, not noticeable at first, lies an object at the water’s edge that, we will soon learn, is the wrapped body of Laura Palmer.
The melodrama runs so hot and high in the first ten minutes and it isn’t until the introduction of Dale Cooper — a full thirty-six minutes into the pilot — that the full kaleidoscopic spectrum of the show’s genre and tonal dimensions begin to reveal themselves. I remember something moving inside me as I watched it, a subtle awakening that’s still happening. I taped that first episode on my Magnavox VCR, carefully labelling the VHS tape in the neatest handwriting I could muster. I made another copy from the copy to lend to a friend who returned it when my first copy got tangled in the machine. The generation loss of the copy of the copy meant that the images were even softer, the bleeding-together colors richer and deeper and blurrier, widening the spell of the mystery, giving the episode the quality of a long-lost artifact recently resurfaced.
It’s become a cliché to say that Twin Peaks changed TV.
The real change happened inside us, inside those of us who watched it.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!