Twin Peaks

So I've been continuing to watch Twin Peaks, which I mentioned earlier. I've seen it (or most of it) before, having watched it when it was originally on, as well as having re-watched it on DVD a couple years ago. I've just moved beyond the murder of Laura Palmer, to the stretch of the show where things become weird, and not just in a Lynchian way. This is the part of the series where I traditionally begin to lose interest, where the series no longer seems as precariously balanced between soap opera melodramatics and the genuinely uncanny. Instead it seems to think it's enough to rely almost exclusively on melodrama, with a light peppering of Native American lore and extraterrestrial insinuations, just to remind viewers that the show could be legitimately frightening. SPOILER ALERT -- I have some thoughts:

• Before starting to re-watch it, I had sort of come to believe that the acting was pretty dire, almost across the board, but I no longer think that this is true. A lot of what I had previously viewed as acting deficiencies now looks more a matter of the writing: the characters do not have realistic reactions to events, and the actors who seem to deal the best with this are also the most compelling of the series. This is true of Kyle MacLachlan, certainly, and it's true of Ray Wise and Grace Zabriskie, as well: the most wrenching moment of the pilot episode is hearing Zabriskie's mournful wail through the telephone. But it's also true for Dana Ashbrook and Mädchen Amick as Bobby and Shelly, who I had never given a whole lot of consideration to in previous viewings. Of the younger actors, they acquit themselves the best with the material. Sherilyn Fenn, while not always particularly convincing in her delivery, at least remains charismatic in her role.
• The same is not true for some of the other actors. I expel an audible sigh whenever there's a scene with both Lara Flynn Boyle and James Marshall in it. Good lord, those scenes are DULL. At least when Maddy was around, Sheryl Lee offered something else to watch than those two. And now we're getting into James's roadtrip to The Postman Always Rings Twice Land, which -- WE DON'T CARE. It was bad enough when the two of them were sleuthing around and driving agoraphobes to kill themselves -- once the murder was solved, there's no reason to care about them at all. And I sincerely, sincerely do not.
• Piper Laurie is the bomb. Seriously, she seems to have the time of her life as the traditional soap opera bitch, a really big fish in a small pond. And coupling her with the eternally squirrelly Jack Nance was kind of brilliant.
• The death of Maddy Ferguson is the most harrowing scene that I have ever seen on a network television show. When it was broadcast, it kind of scarred me, and it continues to exert incredible power over me, to the extent that I was actively dreading the episode that it came in. At the same time, it had such an effect on me because it was just really well done: the scene continues long after the point where any other show would cut. It's brutal and queasy, both in terms of the actions depicted, as well as in relation to the audience. It's just incredibly affecting.
• Considering how much iconic power the dream scenes have, and how associated with the series they are, they don't occur particularly frequently. The Man from Another Place only shows up a couple times in the first season and we haven't seen him since, except in flashbacks. Since the Red Room scenes are basically used as a shorthand for Twin Peaks itself, this is fairly surprising.
• Watching the investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer, I was struck that the first season of Veronica Mars is basically the same story told from the perspective of Donna. Not EXACTLY the same, but enough that it holds up under scrutiny. Teenage girl with a double life murdered by the adult man she was having an affair with? Best friend investigates her murder, and along the way falls in love with the murdered girl's boyfriend? There's a lot of differences, but you can almost imagine Rob Thomas taking note of the problems Twin Peaks encountered, and finding solutions for them. Not that Veronica Mars didn't encounter its own problems in its second season, but that just means in 2021, a visionary TV auteur will make one of the best TV shows around based on the investigation into a school bus crash.
• David Lynch and Mark Frost deserve our appreciation, simply for making the Log Lady a thing.
• During the original run, owing to the network shuffling things around, and the goddamned NFL preempting the show so often with games, I completely lost track of the second half of the second season. So there's a lot about the second season I don't remember, or have never actually seen. But, for some reason, I did see the final scene of the final episode, and that instills the same dread in me that the Maddy episode does. In fact, the last time I watched it, I never got to it, because I just sort of didn't want to get any closer to it. I know it's a stupid reaction, and I'm going to try to make it all the way to the end this time. But the dread is still there. That's the mark of good television.