twin peaks: 1x02 "traces to nowhere"

Title: Traces to Nowhere 

Original airing date: April 12th, 1990

Director: Duwayne Dunham 

The lucky people around for the original airing of Twin Peaks only had to wait four days between the pilot episode and the official first episode of Season One. Compare that to how long I've been waiting for Mad Men Season 5 to start and well, it just seems a little unfair. 

After a brief glimpse into Agent Cooper's morning ritual of working out and asking Diane about the Kennedys, we get one of the finest moments in coffee drinking history. Only to be made better by Audrey's entrance and a tree-print cardigan that I'm sure someone somewhere has already DIY-ed and sold on Etsy. 

Apparently David Lynch hand placed every speck of sand and dirt onto Laura's dead face. Such attention to detail is what I've always love about the visual worlds that Lynch creates. For every sweeping theme about good and evil, there is a detail like Lucy's acorn necklace to Dr. Jacob's fish tie. 

I always loved this scene for the colors--the greens and pinks and reddish hues all directly translate into some Irish/Scottish autumn parade for me.

While deep down I felt sorry for Nadine, most of the time she set me on edge. 

Another classic one-liner delivered with the perfect pauses by Pete Martell. 

The first time I saw this scene, where Sarah Palmer imagines Laura's face on top of Donna's, I actually got so scared that I hid my face under the covers, only to be frightened moments later by the first appearance of BOB. Of course now when I see it, I laugh a little about how shoddy the special effects are, and how maybe it's a lot more campy than scary. But the music! I think watching Twin Peaks with quality sound is really the key to getting sucked into the series, as opposed to on an iPhone or something like that...

Despite the turns later in the series towards the supernatural and other worlds and such, I think that Twin Peaks is at its core still about domestic life. Families and the traditional structure of the nuclear family are portrayed far more realistically here than on other family shows at that time like Growing Pains, and by more realistically I mean they are challenged. People cheat on each other and have affairs! Sons and daughters have arguments with their parents and don't always work things out! And of course there's poor Shelly Johnson, a reminder that domestic violence reaches the prettiest of ladies and is never the victim's fault. There's a lot of debate out there about the role of women in Twin Peaks and whether or not they fall into silver screen stereotypes, but even if the show if indeed full of stereotypes and archetypes as Lynch is wont to do, there is certainly a consciousness about what he is doing. More on that next time, as I try to keep up with these more regularly. At this rate, I won't even get through the first season before the new year!