Last night me and the Missus watched the pilot and first episode of Twin Peaks (in her case for the first time!). In the opening minutes of the pilot, Laura Palmer’s body is discovered, her mother realizes she’s missing and frantically makes phone calls trying to find her, and then her father is notified of her death while speaking to her mother on the phone. As Mrs. Palmer’s screams of grief faded to black for the first commercial break I was surprised to find myself in tears. I turned to the Missus, who was similarly shaken up, and said “Wow, that was tough to watch.” She replied “I was just going to say it’s refreshing to see a murder mystery that treats the murder this way.” Indeed, I think that if the show hadn’t started this way–treating Laura’s death and its profound effect on her loved ones very very seriously–the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. Beneath all the weirdness, humor, and glamour beats an emotional heart of genuine sadness.
“She’s dead… wrapped in plastic…”
Yeah, for all the hundreds (thousands?) of TV corpses we’ve seen since then, on CSI: Law Enforcement Unit and so forth, that one can still chill you just thinking about it. Because she wasn’t just a dead body.
It’s also interesting in that everyone, including the men, is very open about showing their grief. That sets a two-fold stage: on the one hand, Twin Peaks is a place where norms about stoicism (and therefore perhaps other things) don’t apply, and on the other hand, there are things that are concealed beneath the apparent openness.
Jim: It makes me think that having Pete Martell, the nicest guy on the show (which is saying something), be the one to discover her body was certainly no accident.
Bruce: Yes indeed! I know that everyone complains about the lack of interesting, well-rounded female characters in TV and film, but the men of Twin Peaks really show you that the same is true of male characters. So many of them exemplify traditionally “female” characteristics like emotional openness, reliance on intuition, belief in romantic love, valuing friendship over individual success, and so on. It’s quite refreshing to watch, even compared to shows that I think are very good where the men are trapped in male mode, like The Sopranos or Battlestar Galactica (excepting maybe Bobby Baccala and Gaius Baltar).
The lack of stoicism also enhances the overripe, sensual feel of the drama. Everyone (even hardasses like Hank Jennings and Albert Rosenfield and Bobby Briggs and Ben Horne and, at least after his unfortunate wounding, Leo Johnson) is at some point or other shown to be exquisitely vulnerable.