TWIN PEAKS IN B-MOVIE TERMS

It’s been just over two weeks since the finale of the 18 episode run of new Twin Peaks chapters on cable. Like many other fans I’m still digesting some of those new episodes in light of the gloriously dark and nightmarish conclusion, so this particular blog post applies ONLY to the original Twin Peaks television series, the 1992 film Fire Walk With Me and its deleted scenes from The Missing Pieces.

Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’m often surprised at the way so many detractors still try to insist that the show and the movie made no sense. And bear in mind I am NOT referring to the various theories over particular symbolism or the lengthy debates to be had over the ethical and philosophical implications of the storyline.

No, I’m referring to the way some people dismiss the entire project as if it’s a bunch of weirdness with no discernible plot or storyline. There IS SO a (very) easily discernible plot and storyline. And I’ll say again I’m NOT talking about deeper meanings which no two people may ever agree upon, but the basic tale.

That underlying story has often been presented in various forms via B-movies and cult TV shows like Kolchak The Night Stalker, the Silver John stories and other very accessible works. Twin Peaks presented the story in non-linear fashion and through marvelously obscure puzzle pieces but the general outline was devilishly simple.

It is very true that Twin Peaks was – as so many have said – the forerunner of The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, Fargo and Fringe. It’s just that Lynch and Frost ingeniously fragmented the storyline, giving viewers the fun of piecing it all together like a detective story.

My own favorite way of describing the original Twin Peaks series was always “It’s like Dark Shadows crossed with the Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner.” But for this blog post I’ll look at it in B-Movie terms for the skeptics, NOT for people who are already fans of the show. Here we go:

Logging work in America’s Pacific Northwest unleashed malevolent supernatural forces which were known to the Native Americans for ages. The entities involved were so dark and vile that they actually FED upon human pain and suffering (garmonbozia).

Those forces were so omnipresent in the area that they suffused the trees themselves with the result that the indigenous tribes called the forest region Ghostwood or Spiritwood.

The lumber industry had made the forces more active not only by cutting down and clearing away many of the trees – which made the portals to the other realms dangerously close to inhabited areas – but also by actually constructing buildings and objects out of the wood from those trees.   

The energies and Qliphothic entities thus unleashed managed, very gradually, to thoroughly corrupt the town of Deer Meadow and through the wicked inhabitants of that town began “branching out” (sorry) to prey on the citizens of another Pacific Northwest town: Twin Peaks.

The infiltration of Twin Peaks by people possessed by those entities AND by the entities themselves resulted in (among other things):

888 – Escaped figures from the darker realms molesting a young Leland Palmer then decades later using his sexual attraction to his own daughter Laura to enter and take complete control of him …   

888 – A brutal series of rapes and murders which claimed Teresa Banks, Laura Palmer and others …

888 – The disappearance of FBI Agents Phillip Jeffries, Chester Desmond and, ultimately, Dale Cooper …

888 – Representatives of the United States Armed Forces taking a covert interest in the forces operating in the vicinity of Twin Peaks and Deer Meadow and the potential military uses of those forces …

888 – The occasional entrapment of the souls of human beings in the supernatural wood from the trees in Ghostwood – a wooden log in one instance and the handle of a bedside table in another …

888 – POSSIBLY causing the karmic backfiring of Ben Horne’s attempts to reform from his malevolent ways, causing all his attempts to “go straight” to have very negative outcomes …

888 – Periodic attempts by benevolent spiritual forces to thwart the vile Qliphothic entities by enlisting and aiding mere mortals …

888 – The formation of a secret group of “Bookhouse Boys” who often faced the dark forces of the Twin Peaks area but knew that “civilians” or “muggles” ( or other descriptive terms) would never believe their tales of the supernatural, hence the secretive nature of the group …

888 – The malevolent actions of the Twin Peaks entities and their human pawns inevitably catching the attention of the FBI’s unofficial Blue Rose Task Force. After all, the Qliphothic entities making their home in the Pacific Northwest are not the only dark paranormal forces in the world, and the Blue Rose Task Force headed by Gordon Cole had been investigating such phenomena for years.

                Like the Bookhouse Boys, the Blue Rose Task Force knew that ordinary people of the rational world would not believe in the existence of the forces they combatted so they frequently used coded references to those forces while assuming a surface air of clinical investigative procedures.

I am aware that many of my fellow Peaks Geeks may disagree with my particular wording in the above, but in general, it synopsizes the “literal” part of the Twin Peaks storyline. Of course, that literal part is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

AGAIN, THIS BLOG POST WAS NOT TARGETED AT PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY FANS OF TWIN PEAKS BUT FOR THOSE PEOPLE WHO JUST SAMPLE A LITTLE OF THE SHOW THEN DISMISS IT AS NONSENSE.