A Place Both Wonderful and Strange

Review

I love Twin Peaks. While I only discovered it a few years ago, I feel like it has become a part of me in a way difficult to describe. Fix your hearts or die is a thing I think about so often, especially today. “What do you fear most in the world?” “The possibility that love is not enough.” That’s my favorite line in the series, and probably the essence of my greatest fear as well.

I’ve seen the series a few times, but of course could not resist starting another watchthrough after putting this book down. The subtitle to Meslow’s text is ‘The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks’ — and I did learn a lot that I’d never known, and felt that pleasant warmth of reading something I already knew.

A Place Both reads fast and reads fun, with everyone’s love of the show pouring our of the pages. Meslow seems to have spoken with almost everyone involved in the production of the show. Of course, you can’t help but feel Lynch’s absence, even as he is quoted from special features and interviews from days gone by. A relief to know that, if interviewed, he’d probably say something like, “it’s all there on the screen.”

Probably the biggest thing I got out of it was a reframing of a specific event that happens in the last episodes of The Return. It is too spoilery to go into here, but if you’ve seen the show and read my notes below, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I’d recommend this to anyone who likes or loves the show.

Notes

SPOILERS for Twin Peaks

• p26 - So was Robert Forster, a veteran of crime and war movies. Lynch and Frost adored him, but he bowed out, apologetically, as the production came closer to reality. “Bob came in with a caveat, which is, ‘I would love to do this,’” recalls Frost. “‘Unfortunately, a friend of mine had asked me to do a pilot. I don’t think it’s going to go to series, but I can’t turn my back on my friend.’ It was really impressive, actually.”
  • TB: I’ve always found it hard to imagine Robert Forster as Sheriff Truman. I love Forster, but Ontkean’s energy is not exactly the same. Perhaps it’s because when I think of Forster, I think of Jackie Brown, and Max Cherry just is not Harry Truman. In The Return when Forster joins, I enjoyed him, but he does not have the same thing as Ontkean and the spark between Ontkean and MacLachlan is pretty powerful.
• p47 - “[Dunham] asked David, ‘Have you got any advice for me?’” recalls Dunham. “He said, ‘Yeah. When the car shows up in the morning to pick you up, get in. When it takes you to the set, get out.’”
• p57 - This scene [Audrey’s cherry stem scene], Frost later revealed, drew extra scrutiny from the network. “I got an astonishing note from one of the censors,” he said. “They thought the act of twisting the cherry stem was in some way a reference to oral sex. I called her up and said, ‘What in the world would make you think that? You must have an absolutely filthy mind.’ Censors, the whole idea is so childish. You feel like you’re talking to hall monitors in school again.”
• p62 - Albert makes yet another crack at Truman’s expense. When Truman threatens to punch him again, Albert retaliates instead with a rapid-fire monologue, written by Frost, that reveals the beating heart underneath his snarky veneer:

  While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchet man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely rebenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method . . . is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman.

• p94 - More complicated is what Leland leaves behind. Is Leland responsible for these crimes? . . . Lynch, when asked, was blunt: “He’s a victim.” . . . For Mark Frost, the truth was somewhere in the middle: “We thought, ‘How can you reckon or deal with or depict something this evil unless, you know, the man is clearly either mentally ill or possessed?’” he says. In 1990, he called BOB “a creature from somewhere else, and maybe he’s only from within Leland. We don’t exactly say where he’s belched up from. He is somebody who kind of went along for the ride.”
  • TB: Emphasis mine - clearly the belched up imagery persisted all the way to The Return, as this is exactly what we see happen at the Birth of BOB.
• p152 - “My process is different for every character I play, but I never played a character that required so much of my body, mind, heart, and soul that there was very little space left for me during that time—for me, Sheryl, during that time,” said Lee in 2017. It wasn’t until more than a week after filming had wrapped, when Lee had returned to Los Angeles, that she was standing in a grocery store line and realized, to her relief, that she was finally having her own thoughts, not Laura’s.
• p161 - None of this surprised David Lynch, who had been preparing for a fall. “They warned me if you’re on the cover of Time, you’ve got two years’ bad luck coming,” Lynch reflected a decade later. “And a black cloud did come over me, and when the black cloud comes over, there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing. And you look out and you wonder, “How come these things are happening and people are saying these things?’ It’s just the way it is. It’s just part of the deal. And then you wonder, ‘How long will the cloud be there?’”
• p206 - Where does evil come from? In Twin Peaks, that’s not an abstract question. Sheriff Truman described the evil in the woods. Albert Rosenfield described the evil that men do. When asked what he feared most, Major Briggs replied, “The possibility that love is not enough.”
  • TB: That quote is my favorite line in Twin Peaks.
• p238 - . . . Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle), a Great Northern security guard introduced just a few episodes earlier. “He’s who the Greeks used to call a deus ex machina, you know?” says Frost. “He’s a machine of the gods, who has come down to render a service, quite unknown to the bearer of the glove. I think it sort of tickled us both—a green garden glove boxing match.”
  • TB: The scene and character described here always bothered me. I thought it odd that such a notable character would be seemingly eliminated in this way and by this character. I think reading Frost call him a ‘machine of the gods’ reframes it for me. While, yes, I’ve understood the Sykes character to be a DEM before this, reading it in English takes some of the negative connotation out of it. Especially when, one could argue, Laura is a machine of the gods. Or, at least, a machine of the Firemen. Twin Peaks has always embraced mythological characters appearing and speaking directly to our heroes and influencing events, so ultimately this has resolved a concern I had with The Return.