Mark Frost & David Lynch
Twin Peaks

THE REVIEW

Anyone who was a child or at least a teenager in the early '90s has impressed in their memory those few haunting bass notes that open to a bed of synthesizers, a sound commentary to a series of symbolic images that strictly follow in order of their precise meaning. "Who killed Laura Palmer?"", repeated like a mantra by the television audience that had suddenly become a guinea pig to verify if cinema could enter everyone's homes through television but without using its language. The critical assertion has always been: "television has a history divided in two: before and after Twin Peaks." In part, it is so, even though "The Twilight Zone" in the '60s had introduced a way of conceiving a television series that was innovative, the element of the paranormal as a pivot on which to investigate man and the space around him. Frost and Lynch picked up towards the end of the '80s the basic idea of that television series and transported it into a soap opera universe with '40s noir atmospheres. "Twin Peaks" is an innovative television series because for the first time it introduces a number of different perspectives into fundamentally common events such as love, betrayals, and secrets typical of the television dramas of that period. However, it changes the language with which everything is told, the element of sinister mystery that marks Agent Cooper's investigation in the town "where the world has not yet arrived" is the persistent background with which even the least demanding housewife must get used to and reckon with. The paranormal, the evil lurking in the woods, makes the viewing of "Twin Peaks" permeated by a sense of emotional claustrophobia, it is all so much in contrast between light and darkness that even love is not an absolute good. If the first series of nine episodes is a masterpiece of suspense and rhythm, the second loses a bit of momentum, one has to confront for the first time with the choral nature of the stories that necessarily have to progress in a very large and well-studied cast of characters by Lynch, this takes away a bit of power from the narration which, however, is skillfully brought back to excellent levels at the end, a startling finale for 25 years. 2017 will see its return with the third and final season, Lynch and Frost exploit the famous line spoken by the soul of Laura Palmer in the red room "we'll see each other in 25 years". Potentially it is the television event of the beginning of this millennium.