Welcome to Twin Peaks. It's one of those picturesque rural towns that reminds you of
time-honored American traditions, like peace and order and homemade cherry pie. Visitors
tend to marvel over the magnificent Douglas firs and admire the breathtaking mountain
scenery. Located in the Pacific Northwest, just five miles south of the Canadian border,
Twin Peaks looks like a prosperous community of contented citizens devoted to their
families. On the surface, at least, it's a bucolic life.
But that's on the surface.
World-renowned director David Lynch ("Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Blue Velvet")
brings his incomparable visual artistry to "Twin Peaks," a disturbing mystery about the life
of a seemingly typical small town. Co-created with executive producer Mark Frost ("Hill
Street Blues"), "Twin Peaks" presents an unsettling, sometimes darkly comic vision of the
ominous unknown lurking beneath the commonplace and the everyday. The nude body of
Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen, emerges from beneath the surface of a
nearby lake. Her sensational murder sends shock waves through Twin Peaks, stripping
away the veneer of respectable gentility to expose seething undercurrents of illicit passion,
greed, jealousy and intrigue in a population of unusual characters.
When another girl is found, viciously tortured but still alive, FBI agent Dale Cooper arrives
in Twin Peaks to conduct an investigation. Young and sardonic, Agent Cooper has an
almost prescient understanding of human motives and his own quirky but very methodical
approach to doing business. He is also keeping whatever information he has about the
crimes to himself. Cooper forms an immediate rapport with Sheriff Harry S. Truman, who
has grown up in the community. Harry is not much of a talker, but he knows more about the
people in that town than they probably know about themselves. Their search for the
murderer leads to one shattering discovery: No one is quite what they appear to be and
almost everyone has something to hide.
Cooper and Truman's probe into Laura's death uncovers many busy secrets in Twin Peaks.
Was Laura leading a sordid double existence? Did she find out that her erstwhile boyfriend,
Bobbie [sic] Briggs, was having an affair with a married woman? Why would well-respected
businessmen scheme to take over the valuable Packard Sawmill property? Why is
Catherine Martell so bitterly jealous of her brother's widow, the beautiful and imperious mill
owner, Jocelyn Packard? Each revelation lays bare whole other worlds, as we delve
deeper and deeper into the characters' fantasies, loves and obsessions.

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© Mike Hartmann
thecityofabsurdity@yahoo.com