At the 4-Top: Meet Damon
In the winter of 2007/2008, I was a second-year graduate student living with some of my best friends. Christmas had just come and gone, and the forecast was predicting a major snow storm (major in Seattle terms, anyway). Anticipating being effectively snowed in for a few days, we went across the street to Safeway and bought the last of the egg nog and went to Scarecrow video to rent some movies to watch. We came home with a rental copy of the Twin Peaks boxed set. None of us had seen the show before and it seemed like a good time to give it a try. While I had unsettling memories of seeing Fire Walk with Me a few years back (a puzzling experience without the context of the television show) I couldn’t really remember who had killed Laura Palmer.
Over the next few days, we stayed up late, wrapped in blankets, drinking rum and eggnog, and blazing through Twin Peaks while snow came down. We couldn’t get enough. The second night, our friend who lived down the street braved the cold to walk over and join us. I don’t think he went home until after we had finished the series. After we finished up watching each night, some of us would go walking in the snow, watching Seattle drivers unaccustomed to the weather slide around on the ice and theorizing endlessly about Twin Peaks. Who was BOB? What had happened with Josie and the drawer pull? And of course, ultimately, how was Annie? When we finally hit the end of season two, there was distress in our house. Surely, this was not the end? What would become of our beloved Agent Cooper? The snow was starting to melt and there was still a film only I had only the haziest memories of, so back to the video store we went to rent Fire Walk with Me. It didn’t provide much relief. Like most Lynch projects it left us with more questions than answers, and while we all wanted more, there wasn’t any. The show being almost 20 years old, we had to resign ourselves to that being the end of the story. But we had all loved going on the journey together over the course of a few days and we still talk about it when we get together.
Those first couple of years of grad school were an intense time. I was working a ridiculous amount and was constantly tired, trying to give school 100% while still maintaining other important parts of my life. I think what made our snowbound Twin Peaks marathon feel so special was that, for a few days right before the winter quarter was about to start, some of my best friends and I got to slip into another world together. We immersed ourselves totally in Twin Peaks while the world outside lay in a frozen stasis. The cares of real life, normally so pressing, seemed distant for those few days while we grappled instead with sinister forces from another place. In the weeks that followed, we rented every David Lynch movie available, hoping for another glimpse of that wonderful and strange world. I loved them all, but none of them quite captured that magic of our time in the town of Twin Peaks.
Most years since, when January rolls around and the world feels cold and unwelcoming, I’ve felt the urge to return to Lynch and Frost’s imaginary town that captivated us so much during that snowstorm. Some years later, the world of Twin Peaks grew with a new series from Showtime, every bit as mysterious and captivating as the original run of the show, which made it possible to spend even more time there. But not since that winter in grad school have I had the pleasure of sharing the experience with friends who were equally fascinated with it. That’s what’s most exciting to me about our trip back to the Double R with this podcast—not just re-immersing myself in Lynch and Frost’s world, but sharing it. Thanks for joining us!
