THE MAGUFFIN
Please don’t tell me who killed Laura Palmer
Kathy Hofmeyr
Posted Thu, 03 May 2007

Sheriff Harry S Truman: There's a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms, but... it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we've always been here to fight it.

Even David Lynch’s biggest fans would admit that the director is not well in the head. It must be said off the bat that I am not one of David Lynch’s biggest fans. In fact, the films of his I have seen lead me to the conclusion that he’s a big bloody pseud.

However, not even I can deny that ‘Twin Peaks’, a collaboration between Lynch and Mark Frost, is a phenomenal achievement. The series appeared in 1990 and ran for only two seasons, but to this day remains a cult icon of its genre. The success of its expressionist, dreamlike narrative — so far removed from the usual nuts-and-bolts style of the detective genre — surprised viewers, critics and (I’ve no doubt) the producers themselves alike.

Laura Palmer, a pretty and popular teenager from the little town of Twin Peaks, is found murdered early one morning, and the local sheriff’s office enlists the help of the FBI in investigating the case.

Although Laura is dead from the moment the show opens, she is a fascinating character. Her story becomes a testimony to just how little people know about their loved ones and how much may be discovered once they are gone. And the evil Laura has done, and more specifically the evil done to her, most certainly lives on after. A pretty, cheerful homecoming queen who dated the captain of the football team is found to have led a double life of drugs, sex and mental illness.

No surprises there — a common enough theme for cop/detective/FBI shows, but what makes this story different is the way in which it is told. The town of Twin Peaks, in a sense, mirrors the duality of Laura herself: all calm and lovely and homey on the surface, but a roiling cauldron of crime, cruelty, sex and murder underneath. As Sheriff Truman explains, it’s what the community has to live with in return for the good things — and in Twin Peaks there is much that is good. And not just the coffee.

Twin Peaks also is a town living in two separate eras. So much of the characters’ dress, behaviour, the music they listen to, the buildings in which they live and work give one a powerful impression that the show takes place in the '50s (although a late '80s costume designer wouldn’t have had too much trouble with that). Think 'Pleasantville': long skirts, bobby socks and twinsets with immaculate coiffures. Yet the town’s secret underbelly is firmly embedded in 1989, with all its attendant woes: high crime rate, easily accessible hard drugs and sex, sex, sex. This synchronology (if you’ll excuse the clumsy neologism) is destroying the town, and worlds collide with Laura’s death.

Enter Special Agent Dale Cooper, undoubtedly one of the oddest detectives ever to grace the screen.

Cooper is a delightful character — creator/producer Mark Frost once referred to him in an interview as “a sort of Freudian-Jungian-Holmesian detective”. Played by Kyle MacLachlan (before he became puffy and played Charlotte’s stuffy husband in 'Sex and the City'), he is a bizarre boy-man hybrid, considered and densely logical one moment; flushed with child-like excitement the next. Cooper is both scientific and psychological/intuitive in his approach, relying equally on forensic evidence and his own dreams to guide him to Laura’s killer.

And so begins a beautiful love affair. The thirty-year-old Kyle MacLachlan (described by Rolling Stone journalist Rich Cohen as "the boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement") is a perfect Cary Grant-esque romantic hero: chiselled, tall, slick, broad-shouldered, but with features so fine he appears almost feminine. His femme fatale, of course, is Twin Peaks herself. Cooper begins to fall for the little town and its strange people, its mood swings and its tempers, its beauty, fragility and vulnerability.

When the show first aired in South Africa, I was twelve or thirteen and not allowed to watch it. Greatly irked by this, I was forced to experience the show vicariously through friends with more liberal folks and by reading the merchandising companion piece, ‘The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer’. But the show is hard to follow even if one is watching it — even over and over — never mind trying to absorb everything second-hand, and eventually I gave up.

Perhaps I ought to thank my parents. My adolescent self is unlikely to have appreciated it — “Mommy, who’s the little man in the red room and why does he talk funny?” (Michael Anderson of ‘Carvivale’ fame) — but when a friend lent me the first series box-set I devoured it like a long-lost series of Hitchcock movies.

This has been a very difficult column to write. I should confess that, unlike most of my Maguffins, this one has been written using little or no research — simply because I daren’t read anything on the topic. Series 1, as those of you who have seen the show will know, ends on a cliff-hanger to end all cliff-hangers, and since the distributors have been the most dreadful schnorrers with the second season, I have been unable to access what follows.

What this amounts to, obviously, is three years on the edge of my seat. I don’t want to know what happens to Special Agent Cooper, or whether Leo Johnson will be picked up by the cops, or whether Lucy and Deputy Andy will resolve their differences, whether Norma will leave Hank — or indeed what significance Hank’s double-three domino has. I don’t even want to know who killed Laura Palmer. Not, what is, until I can see for myself.

Take me back to the red room, Laura…

» ‘Twin Peaks’, Season 2 is now available on DVD. ‘The Twin Peaks Maguffin II: So That’s Who Killed Laura Palmer’ will follow when the author can afford to buy the box-set.