Twin Peaks, revisited (On Display Collab)

When I was growing up, I was a Twin Peaks nut.

I had encountered David Lynch's material before, having seen Blue Velvet on videotape in junior high and Dune was a regular Saturday Afternoon movie special on WPIX. There was something visually stunning about his material. His landscapes drew me in. The quirkiness of his characters. The moment I saw the tall, blue mountains of Washington State and the dark green woodlands during the opening of Twin Peaks, I had the feeling that I would be hooked. The haunting music of Angelo Badlamenti, like wind. Mysterious and etherial.

The moment I saw one of the images we were to write about for the On Display collab for this month, Twin Peaks popped into my head.

David Lynch's imagery and the Twin Peaks story is one of those things that have been burned into my psyche. Obsessions do that to you.

When I was deep into the Twin Peaks hysteria, I bought a book called The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. I've always enjoyed reading diaries, indulging myself in The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole and the then recently released Henry and June, based on Anais Nin's unexpurgated diaries. There is something enjoyable and voyeristic about reading someone's journal or diaries (I think that I need not convince you of that, Constant Reader). So, I entered Laura Palmer's world.

Her life was... strikingly similar to mine at around the age of 15. I shudder to think about it now because I was young and foolish and made terrible choices and made "adult" decisions that I really wasn't mature enough to handle. I'm not beautiful like Laura Palmer is portrayed, but I certainly was as wanton and curious and enjoyed the attention of men. I was also thin and Asian, which seemed to qualify me as an exotic sex object, something from the pages of Barely Legal.

The life in her diary was an extreme form of mine. A "where you could be headed if you keep up your stupid ways". Prostitute, drug dealing, drug abusing Laura Palmer took her life to those extremes, while keeping up her good-girl appearance to her friends and school peers. I was never a prostitute, never took drugs, nor dealt them. I got involved in other things. Computer addiction. Late nights on the phone. Warez warez warez. It's the same sort of things. The same bleary-eyed expressions at school from lack of sleep. The duality of being withdrawn most of the time, but in the evenings have this sort of creature come out of the woodwork. Where I could be mad and wild and crazy.

It was a sort of madness.

Laura went over the edge. Driving with her boyfriend speeding down the lone roads late at night, they came to a stop light. Without warning, she jumped off and ran into the woods, resolving her duality by removing all traces of one aspect. By abandoning him, she gave up on her goodness and surrendered to the night.

My duality was resolved by merging the two halves. In high school, my school life and my computer life were separate. Get the people I knew back then in a room together and they would have little to talk about. When I entered college, the friends I made in school were the same as the ones I met online at school. We would hang out at the university IRC channel and spend hours on end on the university newsgroups. Two became one.

Funny, how one can read similarities into a character, isn't it? We both rode that dark, lonely highway. She jumped off. I didn't. I'm not a legend, but I'm happy. I connected with Laura Palmer in a freaky, tangential way. Perhaps it is only in my own twisted mind do I see the connections. Maybe I'm BOB. Maybe I'm the Little Man From Another Place. Where can I find my signature on a demon self-portrait?