At the 4-Top: Meet Colin
Colin’s “Twin Peaks” Backstory
My dad was a professor of media and film, and both of my parents had impeccable taste in movies, music, and TV going pretty much all the way back. I was raised on Fred Astaire, Ella Fitzgerald, Alfred Hitchcock, Flash Gordon (O.G. and glam-rock), Kurosawa, and DEVO. (I read books, too.) It was perfectly normal for my folks to tell me, “Hey, there’s this movie we’re taking you to,” and then it would turn out to be, say, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” in real live 3-D. Good times!
Important new directors were a thing in my family. And while we’d often go to the movies, we also watched a lot of harder-to-find stuff at home on video (we were a Betamax family and we will fight you). It was in such circumstances that we settled down at various times on the sofa, with popcorn and Coca-Cola, to watch “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Elephant Man.” Though each of these was, in different ways, beyond my capacity to really understand, bending my brain—if sometimes disturbing—was really good for me. My whole life has basically been a long conversation with my parents about movies, books, politics, and good British murder mysteries.
In my last year of college, there was a stretch of dead days between the end of finals and graduation. Seniors hung around on the mostly abandoned campus, working or packing up or partying until we could finally fly the coop. Sometime around mid-May, a buddy of mine said he had VHS tape of the new David Lynch show. (So sad; VHS. Remember the Betamax!) I’d heard about it, and obviously knew something about Lynch (though I think my brain had mostly blocked out the trauma of watching “Eraserhead” at age 11). I used my staff key to sneak a campus TV and VCR into my tiny room. we folded the futon into a couch, and pressed play.
We emerged from the pilot, blinking and screaming inwardly. We immediately went and loaded up on many deeply unhealthy snacks, and then binge-watched the rest of the episodes before we even knew what “binge-watching” was.
What’s interesting to me now, as I rewatch again for basically the first time in 30 years, is how unbelievably potent that pilot episode was. I wasn’t able to keep up with all of Season 2 (seriously, kids: life before streaming was rough). And though I saw “Fire Walk With Me” in the theaters, I didn’t have the entire show handy to put it in context. So, if I’m being honest, my actual dedication to the show was kind of middling.
But I felt like I was a huge fan of the show—and in a sense I really was—because that pilot absolutely burned itself into my mind. I have been playing scenes and images from that experience for three decades. I had no idea that virtually everything I remember about the show came from that first fantastic Big Bang of darkness and donuts. Seeing it at just that moment—when my life was teetering between the wreckage of college and the vast unknown looming ahead—put me in a perfect dream-like state that allowed me to not merely watch the show, but to experience it.
“Twin Peaks” is more than just a cool old show for people in my age group, I think. For a lot of us, it is a touchstone in culture, something so foundational that you aren’t even aware of it. Many words have been spilled on its influence, but one of the great truths about Lynch and Frost’s concoction is that it hit everyone a little differently, but nobody got away a clean. (At least not if you’re a person of certain predilections.) That show left marks in your brain. A lot of us will be humming Badalamenti in the old folks’ home.
In this podcast, we’re all trying to figure out the how and why of all that. Can’t wait for what’s next, and I hope you’ll watch and listen along.