DVD REVIEW

Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition

Paramount Home Entertainment || Not Rated || Oct 30, 2007

SYNOPSIS

When Laura Palmer is found brutally murdered, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) soon discover that in the town of Twin Peaks no one is innocent and nothing is what it seems.


CRITIQUE

Let’s go back. Waaay back, all the way to 1990. In geological terms, 1990 might as well have been yesterday, but I’m sure some of you reading this can probably barely remember how different things were back then. MySpace and iPods weren’t around, but I’m talking about major cultural shifts. I’m talking about the days when O.J. was famous for being a bad actor, the days before Rodney King and the L.A. riots, when no one had heard of Quentin Tarantino and Johnny Carson was still the host of The Tonight Show. Bush was in office, the country was in a recession, and we were about to go to war with Iraq. Maybe things weren’t all that different, but everything sure seemed a lot more fun. In the spring of 1990 - around the time the Hubble telescope was launched, John Poindexter was convicted for his part in the Iran-Contra Affair, and Ryan White died of AIDS - the television show to end all television shows hit the airwaves, a true TV phenomenon if ever there was one, a series that would influence so many that came after it. You can have your Lost and your Heroes, I’m talking about a truly original program: Twin Peaks.

Laura Palmer may be the most famous character in television history not to have an active role in the series. We see here in pictures and home videos, and the whole series is about here in one way or another, but she’s never really in the show. The façade of Laura Palmer is the façade of Twin Peaks . She is the town. The picture perfect prom queen was a cocaine addled prostitute with a lot of problems. The postcard town is full of vice and corruption. (How fitting it is that this set actually comes with a set of postcards, a nice subtle joke aimed at anyone who gets it.)

Twin Peaks is a good time capsule of where David Lynch was as a filmmaker at the time. Just before Peaks he made a movie about the seediness and corruption lurking just beneath the surface of a quiet little logging town which also starred Kyle MacLachlan. The film, of course, was Blue Velvet, and Agent Cooper is MacLachlan's Blue Velvet character all grown up. Cooper has seen this before, in one way or another, and he is far from surprised when they find Laura's safe deposit box containing $10,000 in cash and cocaine residue.

The stock in trade of Twin Peaks was the mystery surrounding Laura Palmer and her death. That question mark cast a cloud of suspicion over everyone in town. The mystery is handled beautifully, the clues revealed without any hurrah, without it being beaten into our heads that A CLUE HAS JUST BEEN REVEALED. Great example: Ben Horne hears from his brother that Laura Palmer has been murdered. But it’s okay, he says, because they already have a new girl at One Eyed Jacks, which sets Ben at ease. The moment is so subtle, but if you pay attention there is an obvious inference that Laura was a prostitute. This is confirmed a few episodes later, but to anyone watching - really watching - it has already been revealed.

It is not uncommon for shows today to comment on themselves. Boston Legal does a lot of this, and there are many other examples. Twin Peaks did the same thing years earlier, and in a much more interesting way. The Invitation to Love segments in the first season remind me of the “Tales of the Black Freighter” comic within a comic in Watchmen, a pirate story that comments on what our superheroes are facing. Here we have a soap opera that speaks to what is going on in the show. There are characters who are identical cousins (also a conceit borrowed from The Patty Duke Show) – Jade and Emerald to Laura and Maddy. There is also an abusive Leo Johnson equivalent that dies a slow death after being shot. Aside from just commenting on what is happening on the show, Invitation to Love also speaks to the satirical, soap opera elements of Twin Peaks itself. It is as if they’re saying, hey, in case you hadn’t already noticed, some of this is kind of tongue in cheek.

Ray Wise gives one of the best performances in television history as Leland Palmer, the suffering father. That might sound hyperbolic, but all you have to do is watch what Wise does on the screen. As his story progresses, particularly in season two, he really becomes two people. In the episodes leading up to the Leland’s being outed as Laura’s killer, we are following a man in the last days of his life, and the tone reflects that brilliantly. Leland’s final scene, where he finally realizes that he killed his own daughter, is a bravura moment, and Wise gives a performance without equal. He is a monster on one beat, and a broken, repentant man in the next. This scene reaches a pitch that was too much for the show to maintain.

So why did they solve Laura’s murder? No one seems to know. David Lynch, Mark Frost, the cast and just about everybody with half a brain who has seen the series seems to think that solving her murder killed the show, and they’re probably right. Lynch called the mystery the goose that laid the golden eggs; Frost called it the coin of the realm. That mystery was the franchise, the nucleus from which all other mysteries were spawned. Without that we have nothing. Imagine if Buffy stopped slaying, if Gil Grissom gave up on science, if The Unit suddenly stopped fighting terrorism. All TV shows, even the bad ones, have an engine, a motor that drives them, and when that engine is turned off, the show cannot go anywhere.

And nowhere is exactly where Twin Peaks went. The final episodes devolved into what feels like weird for weird’s sake. Bob, the evil force in Twin Peaks, all but disappears. Ben Horne thinks he is a Civil War general. Nadine has superpowers and thinks she is 18 years old. David Duchovney shows up as Dennis/Denise Bryson, a cross-dressing DEA agent. There are all these bizarre-on-purpose moments that are never terribly interesting.

Not to forget the one major character who comes in late in the show, probably too late, Windom Earle, Cooper’s nemesis, comes to town to make Cooper’s life hell. Earle shows up (in an episode directed by Diane Keaton) and dons one disguise after another, with the braindead Leo as his stooge. By the end, Windom Earle is too much of a supervillain, holed up in his secret lair with his high tech gadgets, an all seeing eye that watches everything Cooper does. He’s a bit too Frank Gorshin - too all seeing, too all knowing, spouting things like, “Eureka!” and trapping Leo in a Rube Goldberg device designed to kill him.

The final episode brings the show back to where it began. I don’t know if Lynch knew the show was going off the air (though its ratings had plummeted, and the show had been preempted by the Gulf War for six of its last eight weeks), but the season/series finale is a daring episode with a brilliant ending. One can only imagine what a third season would have looked like.

Chances are, if you’re a Peaks fan you saw it during its original run. Its video and DVD releases have been spotty at best, and the show has rarely been syndicated. Bravo reran it nine or ten years ago, back when Bravo was commercial free and still had programming that was somewhere in the neighborhood of edgy. Other than that, the show that influenced so much of what followed became more of a show that people knew of more than they had actually seen. The series lost its center towards the end, but even then it was and is better and more interesting than so much of what is on TV.


THE VIDEO

Twin Peaks is presented in the original full frame format. The series set a new standard for cinematography in television, and the DVD transfer translates that nicely. I wasn’t sure about the sharpness of the picture until I looked at some of the bonus material, which shows what this could have looked like. There is a little room for improvement, but what we have is very good.


THE AUDIO

This DVD is presented in 5.1 Dolby Digital, with an optional 2.0 Surround track. The presentation is excellent. Everything from the music to the wind and the waterfall to the more intense, FX intensive audio moments (I’m thinking of Bob here) is balanced perfectly. The soundtrack is presented without any annoying hums or hisses, and the overall presentation is excellent.


THE EXTRAS

Log Lady Intros: here we have the complete introductions by none other than the Log Lady herself. Every episode features an optional opener, wherein the Log Lady gives a cryptic description of what is to follow.

Lost and Found: four deleted scenes of varying lengths.

Production Documents: a collection of call sheets and production breakdowns.

A Slice of Lynch: a great roundtable discussion about the origins of the show with David Lynch, Mädchen Amick, Kyle MacLaghlan, and John Wentworth. They talk about how everything came together, debuting against Cheers and its surprise success. Lynch laments the solving of Laura Palmer’s murder, which he says was never supposed to happen. “It was sacred,” he says. There is so much here you just have to see it. (29:59)

Scenes From Another Place: a feature length look at the making of the show with Mark Frost and the cast and crew. Everyone seems to be in agreement that solving Laura’s murder – “the coin of the realm,” as Frost calls it – was a huge mistake that killed the show. What is most surprising is how bad everyone thinks the second season was. This can be viewed as a whole, or in four parts. (1:45:50)

Saturday Night Live: a 1990 episode hosted by MacLaghlan. We get his opening monologue, as well as “Twin Peaks Sketch,” a hilarious send-up of the show. Watch for Conan O’Brien as one of the deputies.

Return to Twin Peaks : a look at the annual Twin Peaks Festival, which has been going on since 1993. (19:41)

The Black Lodge: a collection of TV promos and more.


FINAL THOUGHTS

If not for Twin Peaks, many of the great shows we have come to love in the years since might never have existed. Somehow, the series never really got its due on VHS or DVD … until now. The series gets its due in this Gold Box collection. The package is beautiful, and the presentation is excellent. The bonus material is great, and the audio-visual presentation is better than ever. Fans of the show are the obvious market here, but this set is really for anyone who loves great television.

VERDICT: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

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Review posted on Nov 27, 2007 | Share this article | Top of Page

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