At the 4-Top: Meet Jonathan

Jonathan circa 1990, at his home in Kingston, WA, where he first watched Twin Peaks

I was definitely too young to be watching Twin Peaks when I first did.

Twin Peaks is not a show that should fascinate a 10-year-old boy.  It’s slow.  There’s kissing.  Nothing transforms (or so I thought…) There’s cops and bad guys but the cops are not macho dudes, and the bad guys are—nightmares? (Except for Leo and Hank.  I always knew those guys were assholes.) Ah—but there was a mystery.  Who killed Laura Palmer?  That question was everywhere.

I grew up in a small town on the Kitsap Peninsula called Kingston, WA.  It’s a place the ferry boat goes when you’re going camping in the Olympic National Forest.  Twilight fans on their way to Forks, WA drive through Kingston and think “Who lives here?” When I first moved to Kingston, my family and I lived on a dirt road with a hairpin turn called Sandy Beach Lane.  We were able to move into that house because a tree fell through it during a windstorm (there are a LOT of tall trees in Western Washington, these things happen) and the previous owners cut a deal with my mother and stepfather.  The house was on a bluff overlooking the expansive stretch of Puget Sound between the northern shores of the Kitsap Peninsula and the southern shores of Whidbey Island.  Gorgeous view.  And utterly remote, surrounded by densely immense woods.  Enough evergreens to blow Agent Cooper’s mind.  Needless to say, we couldn’t get cable television a mile away from the nearest paved road.  I had to watch what was on network television.

Jonathan takes in the destruction a felled evergreen can cause

A bygone from America is the TV Guide.  I know they still print it; but it is no longer a publication you could count on seeing in every American home.  The TV Guide may as well have been the bible in our house.  Winters in Western Washington are cold, gray and dark.  In a home surrounded by woods light disappeared by 4 in the afternoon.  The TV was often the only thing you could do, and I remember reading the TV Guide cover to cover.  It seemed as if on every other page there was a small advertisement asking: Who killed Laura Palmer?

I learned that the show was set in Washington State and that its popularity was ubiquitous.  It was the kind of show the was talked about on the local news.  The appeal of the show—and certainly the central mystery, was simply irresistible.  I had to see it.  I don’t remember if I managed to sneak down to the living room and watch the TV, or if I had one in my bedroom by then, or if my parents just tolerated their oldest son watching a very strange show about murder and cherry pie. But I did see it, picking it up at some point after the pilot but before the big reveal.

Despite being too young to see it, I am glad I found Twin Peaks and David Lynch when I did.  And Agent Cooper and Audrey and Laura and maybe Shelly Johnson was my first big crush. Even Ben Horne felt like a friend.  It’s a show that taught me to appreciate vision, to be comfortable with abstraction, to reward the fans swept up in the storytelling.  And it looked like home.  And it didn’t lie to me.  I knew the woods outside my house were scary and dangerous.  After all, a tree once fell on the home I lived in.  Who is to say they wouldn’t try to finish the job? 

I hope everyone taking the time to join us on our rewatch of Twin Peaks feels like they have been transported into a world that is familiar, strange and dangerous.  Whether this is your first-time hearing Angelo Badalamenti’s score or your umpteenth rewatch there is always something new to uncover in the world David Lynch and Mark Frost created for us.  

“Let’s rock”