From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Oceanstar) Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks Subject: "Appreciating Alt.tv.twin-peaks" Summary: an article submitted to the _TP_Gazette Keywords: gazette newsgroup Date: 25 Feb 91 17:59:06 GMT Distribution: na Organization: Citizens Opposing the Offing of Peaks Lines: 187 This the text of an article I submitted to the _Twin_Peaks_Gazette_. I sure hope you like it, because it's all about *you*! Thanks to everyone for your wonderful postings over the past months, and thanks especially to Rod Johnson, Keith Dawson, Janet Swisher, Scott Le Grand, Ann Hodgins, Robyn Grunberg, Connie at WVNVMS, Kurt Svihla, Jim Shaffer, Jr., Jerry Boyajian, Tom Neff, and Diarmuid Maguire (hope I didn't forget anyone) for your help in getting this together. I'm sorry I didn't have the space to credit as many people as I would like to have done. I'll let y'all know if it gets accepted for publication. --------------------------------------------------------------------- APPRECIATING ALT.TV.TWIN-PEAKS Copyright (c) 1991 by Fiona Oceanstar (fi@grebyn.com) "Twin Peaks" last week was pure enchantment. I thought Special Agent Cooper was uncommonly poignant on the subject of recycling plastic and saving Mother Earth. The real gem in that sequence, though, was when they went out to Coop's new property and Deputy Andy got his head stuck in the Clivus Multrum eco-toilet. Another high point was Donna's dramatic rescue of James from the Spider Woman--- especially that eerie apparition of the moody biker disguised in a miniskirt. By the way, did you notice that Leo has three triangles tattooed on the back of his hand? And that the llama reappeared? But what I really wonder about, is why the food fight started by Ben Horne (tossing smoked-cheese pigs and Double R pies, no less) segued right into a shot of Andrew Packard injecting himself with insulin. Is there a connection? Could Lynch be trying to tell us something about the dangers of a high-sugar high-fat diet? What? You say you don't remember these things. You say they never happened. You must have missed the episode on January 26th, which wasn't shown in the cosmos of television, but aired instead in the minds of some 38,000 people on the Net. The computer net, that is, an international web called USENET--where a newsgroup with the unassuming name of "alt.tv.twin-peaks" goes to delirious extremes in its devotion to the show. This is how it works: one person types in a message (called a "posting"), the message is posted to machines all over the world, another person reads the posting and responds, and soon there's a free-for-all of conversational threads. You can read them any time you want, reply any time you want. On Sunday, January 27th, for example, an unsuspecting fan asked "Was there an episode last night?" Rod Johnson, a linguistics professor at Oakland University in Michigan, read the question on his home PC and answered, "Yes, it was great--here's what happened..." Thus began the thread that filled in the void of that one Saturday night in January. _Horror_vacui_, indeed. The readers of alt.tv.twin-peaks are nothing if not obsessive. Each night the show is aired, they convene to take notes, carefully freeze-framing through each scene, typing each line into their laptops. Then they race to post their findings, dropping into the newsgroup's ongoing stream of analysis, speculation, cross-correlation, and background research. Sometimes the "netters" chase arcane details: The cast and plot of the Marlon Brando movie "One-Eyed Jacks." The name of General Robert E. Lee's horse (Traveler). What language was spoken by Eckhardt's companion in the diner (Afrikaans). Quotations from Shakespeare, Shelley, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Other times, they delve into complex esoterica: Tibetan Buddhist lore about "The Black Lodge" and "The White Lodge." Chess. Transvestism. The distinction between multiple personality and schizophrenia. The psychology of rape and child abuse. But the netters cherish hidden connections even more than details. The world created by David Lynch and Mark Frost is seen as an infinite universe of weblike possibilities. The "text" of this _Weltanschauung_ is not limited to dots on a TV screen or bits in a soundtrack. Twin Peaks is a window into another world--a world where associations to mythology and pop culture weave strange patterns into what we know of ourselves. "The owls are not what they seem," for example. This one was my own discovery. While browsing through the paranormal--Whitley Strieber's _Communion_ and Ed Conroy's _Report_on_Communion_--I ran across a discussion of owls. Apparently Strieber often sees owls at times of strange events, and he interprets these as "screen memories" of his encounters with "visitors." In an interview with Conroy he says, "The owl has emerged as one of the most predominant images of the whole experience, because not only am I involved with owl imagery, so are a lot of other people who have had the visitor experience." His sister has seen an owl at her upstairs window, and his neighbors in the New York woods remember being taken from their house in the night by a giant owl. What Conroy suggests, is that the image of an owl may be how we recall the ineffable experience of seeing the visitors--who aren't necessarily from outer space, but may be spirits that come to us in the woods. Spirits, perhaps, who eat the souls of human beings. Another line of research--by Diarmuid Maguire at Swarthmore --concerns the native Americans that live near Twin Peaks. Tribes such as the Nanaimo believe that dreams and visions give power to those who receive them. One of Maguire's references mentions dreams of humans with abnormal physical characteristics (e.g., dwarves). And better yet, these tribes apparently live in dread of a specific ghost, who's located in an other-worldly "house in the woods". They call this ghost "Bookwus" (as in Bookhouse Boys, perhaps?). The Bookwus masks used in ceremonies are said to resemble fierce owls. Often, though, the postings are much more whimsical: the netters delight in spinning theories from the smallest of clues. Could it be, for example, that "Ghostwood" refers to a nasty habit Killer Bob appears to have: trapping the souls of human beings in wooden objects? We've seen Josie screaming inside of a drawer knob; maybe the ka of the log lady's husband is what speaks from within her log. Will Maddy's spirit show up in the "Montana" picture frame? Multiple instances of liquids seen in bags or vials led to a bizarre exchange on a compound dubbed "Blue Goo"--its putative properties (bane against Bob?) and its chemical composition (phenothiazine?). Other popular theories include a notion of the Roadhouse as a portal to the other realm, and a speculation (after the Feb. 16 episode) that Sheriff Truman may be Bob's new host. Conjectures ran wild, of course, over Cooper's dream and the Giant's cryptic pronouncements, and Sarah Palmer's vision of a pale horse spawned a plethora of competing explanations. So often are such phrases as "Senor Drool Cup" and "The Man from Another Place" (dancing dwarf) invoked, they acquire their own abbreviations: SDC, TMFAP, WSAC (who shot Agent Cooper?), and of course, the well-known WKLP. Netters like to argue, too. Who was standing outside the window when Josie seduced Truman: Pete, or Jonathan? Where did Jacoby notice the burnt-oil smell: near the gazebo for sure, but what about in the hospital? Discussion about what was said ("J'ai une ame solitaire") by Lynch's son--called "the creamed-corn kid"--swelled into a memorable series of mistranslations. "I have a potato under the ground." "My hovercraft is full of eels." The poem from Spirit Mike was another bone of contention: "Through the darkness of future past/ The magician longs to see," but was it "One chants out between two worlds," or "One chance out between two worlds," then "Fire walk with me"? A net-wizard with a closed- caption decoder came to the rescue for that one, and "chants" is now the consensus. What really makes alt.tv.twin-peaks a fun place to hang out, though, is not so much the content as the atmosphere. These people have intensity. They have dedication. Over the months they've generated an impressive bank of "Twin Peaks" resources: an annotated timeline for all events in the series so far; cast lists and credits for each episode; answers to frequently asked questions about the show; a meticulous description of the European film ending; a catalog of recurring imagery (e.g., sprinklers, traffic lights, Palmers' ceiling fan); a guide to goodies like coffee cups, T-shirts, books, and the _Gazette_; a complete transcript of the second-season press kit; addresses and phone numbers for ABC and Lynch/Frost productions; a long list of favorite quotations; and even a program that generates "owlspeak" like that in Major Briggs' printout. And those who have the proper hardware can enjoy digitized pictures of the characters, and samples from the soundtracks (Leo's voice chirping "new shoes") that can be played on a MacIntosh. The disc space for all of this is located on the other side of the planet--in Australia. For me, at least, the pleasure in these files, and in the postings to the group, is not so much that I will read them all, but the way they add a layer of depth to the show. Anything to which so many people will devote that much work, accrues an extra value. Twin Peaks is a weird place. Alt.tv.twin-peaks celebrates that weirdness. As Francis Bacon says, "There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion."