Q: What was it that first attracted you to Twin Peaks? My older sister took me to see Eraserhead as a midnight movie at a university when I was pretty young, and it was a life-altering experience for me. I'd never seen a film before that so resembled a dream. I remember cuing up for Blue Velvet the night it was first released, so I got hooked early on Lynch and was anticipating the TV show with a great curiosity about how on earth he'd be able to do anything like that on TV.
Q: What makes it so special and unique? In many ways it's a satire of standard American soap opera. It's so over-the-top exaggerated at times that it's bordering on ridiculous. For example when everyone is bawling about Laura's death through the first few episodes accompanied by cheesy organ (the camera sometimes panning to the soap that THEY'RE watching - "Invitation to Love"). But all the crying is contagious, and you get the laughter-with-tears-in-your-eyes syndrome. That old fine line between comedy and tragedy. There are lots of extremes: The girls are all stunning beauties but the ugliness and violence that threatens them is equally severe. It's cartoonish in a way. As in so much of Lynch's work there's 50's American Dream on the surface but something really, really severe and creepy is just below.
Q: Where do you rank it in terms of the history of television shows? Pivotal, I don't think it can be appreciated to the full extent it deserves now because the influences it’s had are so prevalent in television now. You just didn't get that kind of surrealism infiltrating the mainstream back then that we do now. Recently when I watched some of the earlier episodes I became aware that to watch the episodes on DVD you miss out on a certain element that was there when it was broadcast; and that's this thing where you'd have been taken though some incidents in the story and then you'd get the camera holding on that stop light swaying in the breeze, and the wind in the trees (and sometimes these holds were quite long - pretty unusual for television) and then you'd be thrown into, say, a commercial for laundry detergent or candy bars. The show has these edits built in to accommodate the commercial breaks, in such a way that the advertisement breaks became part of the complete package - the viewing experience. I don't know this as fact but Lynch is such a master at creating and releasing tension that I presume he was very aware of building the structure around the necessary commercial breaks in quite a clever way, exploiting what might be seen as the disadvantages of the medium in a creative way. Sometimes you'd hardly be aware that you'd now been delivered back into the show because it cuts from an advert straight back in to "Invitation to Love".
Q: Where do you rank it among Lynch's work? Well, the series is erratic and while certain episodes are top-notch Lynch, others stray so far from the path that it's obvious that he didn't have active involvement at times at all. Especially some of the second season episodes following the disclosure of who killed Laura - it loses its way (and then makes a kind of grand recovery right at the end). Also, it isn't really pure Lynch. People seldom mention Mark Frost but they wrote the show together, at first, after which Lynch himself was less involved, as I understand it. But what we'd define as 'Lynchian' is pretty evident throughout.
Q: Who is your favourite character and why? I'd rather just say it wasn't James.
Q: As a musician, how important do you feel Angelo Badalementi's score was to the show? Badalementi is to Lynch as Bernard Hermann is to Hitchcock. It's such a magic combination, such a part of the tapestry, that when you're seeing a film that doesn't involve that respective composer, you may not even be aware of what it is but something is missing.
Q: In your own words, what does Twin Peaks mean to you? - Both personally and analytically. Well, obviously Lynch's films and the music they contain have meant enough to me to have recorded my album "Songs From The Films Of David Lynch". Twin Peaks itself has been inspirational in that it proved that something you'd have guessed would have been too dark and weird for mainstream TV actually got on there and reached a massive audience. I've gone through periods of feeling a bit hopeless about reaching a larger audience with what I do musically because I know it's not mainstream and maybe it's a little too off the beaten path. But people are often more adventurous and open minded than the media-feeders give them credit for. I like the subject matter, high school romance and a murder mystery, the stereotypes (cops and donuts, motorcycle rebels, etc) The playfulness and healthy doses of the bizarre and absurd. Mixed with a nearly sickening sentimentality at times. It's fine entertainment.