twin peaks: 1x03 "zen, or the skill to catch a killer"

Title: Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer

Original airing date: April 19th, 1990

Director: David Lynch

Last year I started writing a piece about Twin Peaks for one of our school's magazines, Nacht. I didn't get very far into it before the Sisyphean task that was senior year took its toll on me. I had started developing this idea about why food is so important in Twin Peaks, heading in a very Proustian direction. The start of episode two is a strange one: a "traditional" family dinner interrupted by Jerry Horne and the "best damn sandwiches ever." 

I believe there are two tensions at work here. First, there is the separation between outsiders and insiders. Second, there is the subversion of the safest, most domestic sphere: the family. Every time I watch this scene I feel like I am intruding on some private moment.  It has nothing to do with the closeness of the family, since they could not be further apart, each member occupying an ordinal spot, but there is something about this that feels wrong.  The camera leers in from the angle of someone lurking by the table, standing and shuffling his feet, not sure of what to do. What reservations I may have about witnessing this scene, Jerry Horne lacks completely. The two brothers share a giddy moment―leaving the rest of the family silent at the table.  

The Hornes are one of Twin Peaks' few families, in the traditional sense of the mother-father-two-children definition. But Johnny is an adult still operating at a fourth grade level and Ben is caught up in a double-crossing business love affair with Catherine Martell. Catherine in turn has no children with Pete, and though Pete considers Josie to be like a daughter, she herself has lost a husband and is childless. Norma and Hank, Nadine and Ed, and Shelley and Leo are all more examples of childless couples who cannot find love within their own homes. The Hayward family seems to only suffer from a physical disability, though I still can't pinpoint the exact weirdness of Donna's sisters. 

Boiled down, Twin Peaks offers few stable family situations. The family as a source of security is fractured by the death of Laura. Her death, we will later learn, comes from within. And this is the greatest fear of all: where one expects a haven, one will find a nightmare instead. I see food as a physical manifestation of this comfort and horror. At its best, the food in Twin Peaks provides unity, pride, and satisfaction. At its worst, which we'll see later in the hospital food, it will literally kill you. 

The sense of voyeurism we feel during scenes like the Horne family dinner is never experienced by Agent Cooper.  Going native almost immediately, Coop's connection to the town is most strongly felt through his stomach.  No one appreciates the cherry pies and coffee of the Double R and Great Northern like Agent Cooper, who must indeed have the metabolism of a bumblebee to keep up. To instantly love the food in Twin Peaks is to instantly feel a sense of belonging in the small town. Perhaps if Albert had stopped for a slice of pie first, he would not have solicited this response from Lucy:

I didn't notice that her book was about Tibet until I screencapped this scene. Yet another testament to Lynch's ability to never miss the smallest details. All of the episodes directed by Lynch are noticeably so, but this is the most cohesively Lynchian of them all. The interior shots are incredible for the worlds that Lynch creates, from One Eyed Jacks to Pete and Cathy's comfy but eerie abode to Josie's bookcase to the Double R Diner where Audrey dances in her own little dreamworld. These worlds, like Laura, are full of secrets.

The dancing and creation of little words continues into dreams. The first time I watched the dream sequence I had the sound cranked up loud enough that the shuffling of the midget scared the crap out of me. 

Philosophizing and theorizing aside, the dream sequence is a vision to behold. If you listen to Lynch talk about the Red Room, he'll say that he had fragments of this idea, and that the 

walls are red, but they're not hard walls. Then you think some more; they're curtains. And they're not opaque, they're translucent. Then you put these curtains there, but the floor, it needs something, and you could go back to the idea and there was something on the floor. It was all there. So you do this thing on the floor, and you start to remember the idea more. You try some things and you make mistakes, but you rearrange, add other stuff, and then it feels the way the idea felt.

Match the feelings to the idea. So simple, yet I think Lynch would've made a good interior decorator No wonder chevron (and velvet, red or blue) have steadily remained in the design and decor repertoire of Twin Peaks fans everywhere. Here are some shots that Richard Beymer (Ben Horne) took while on set:

As if the ending weren't enough, this episode is full of other classic Twin Peaks gems: Agent Cooper's idiosyncratic methods of rock throwing to deduce the killer, Tibet, Leland dancing with Laura's photo, and Coop's hair after waking from the dream. Small wonder that the title has a lot in common with one of my favorite books too, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.