Thursday, March 28Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Twin Peaks by David Lynch. THAT GUM YOU LIKE IS GOING TO COME BACK IN STYLE

THAT GUM YOU LIKE IS GOING TO COME BACK IN STYLE
25 years later…Twin Peaks by David Lynch and Mark Frost returns on SHOWTIME

6th of October SHOWTIME announced: «The critically-acclaimed Golden Globe and Peabody Award-winning series Twin Peaks will return as a new limited series. Series creators and executive producers David Lynch and Mark Frost are on board to write and produce all nine episodes of the limited series. Four-time Oscar nominee David Lynch will direct every episode. Twin Peaks will go into production in 2015 to air on the network in 2016, marking the 25th anniversary of when the program last aired. Set in the present day, Twin Peaks will continue the lore of the original series, providing long-awaited answers for the series’ passionate fan base».

The show starts with a flagrant murder of a homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Local authorities start to investigate the case. The deeper Agent Cooper plunges into the reality of Twin Peaks the more dark secrets of this eerie place are revealed. However, the main question remains constant — who killed Laura Palmer?

As the authors of Twin Peaks subtly hinted more than once — the detective line in the series is not the crux of the show. The intrigue and allure is instead David Lynch’s and Mark Frost’s provincial America – cherry-pie-and-damn-good-coffee-America, where the high-school girls look like the 50s red-lipped film divas and are perfectly aware of where to get their cocaine. “The owls are not what they seem” (as was constantly repeated throughout the whole series). And, indeed, nothing is what it seems. A Simultaneously attractive and frightening world, with a shade of surrealism is the world of David Lynch, who had already in his youth conceived that no matter how beautiful the cherry tree is, there are always red ants swarming under it.

Twin Peaks is a step-by-step explanation of the future, way more metaphorical and allegorical than other David Lynch works such as «Blue Velvet» and «Mulholland Drive». The scene is set in a dreamlike atmosphere of mutual understanding and universal peace. With non-stop working factories producing material goods. Constantly smiling and closely acquainted dwellers – this is Twin Peaks before Laura Palmer’s death — sweet illusion embodying a saccharine American dream. But the dream cracks, our illusory cherry-pie-world starts collapsing, and simultaneously all the masks are torn away from even the most mediocre characters. After all, do not forget — the owls are not what they seem.

Despite the uninspired forecasts, the authors of Twin Peaks managed to find influential supporters on ABC and produce an exceptional project of an indefinite genre which violates all the unspoken rules of TV. The unexpected success of “Twin Peaks” is believed to be the reason why American television industry started to rethink their ideas about how a series should be made, and opened the way for the more sophisticated, cinematic thought-out projects that we know today.