a review of 双峰

#70 (March 11/31) Kicking off my rewatch of Twin Peaks before the new series airs in a couple of months; Since the pilot (90 minutes) is listed as a movie here, I'm counting it for the 365 Challenge. Although I've declared my love of Twin Peaks (even the more slack episodes of Season 2) on the internet many times before, I'll admit that viewing it in the frame of a standalone film rather than the first episode of a TV series is a bit underwhelming. Structurally, it feels a lot looser than any of Lynch's films up to this point, and ends with kind of an underwhelming hook to the next episode. But the first half hour, from Pete Martell's discovery of the body up to the appearance of Agent Cooper, plays out as a delightfully heightened '80s period melodrama. The way Lynch establishes all of the iconography of the series (Laura's homecoming queen portrait, the stillness of the country road landscapes, the single stoplight near the Roadhouse) is organic but still feels highly intentional in context.