All episodes & show notes for my podcast coverage of Twin Peaks season 1 episode 5
October 30 - November 5, 2021
(illustrations for storylines, character rankings, locations, TIME cover & all categories)
Mad Men - "The Crash" (season 6, episode 8)
Story (aired on May 19, 2013/written by Jason Grote and Matthew Weiner; directed by Michael Uppendahl): "The Crash" depicts an office racing through a work weekend while cranked up on speed, producing illegible gibberish despite grasping for elusive epiphanies and foolhardy connections. The episode itself, however, pulls off exactly what the agency fails to achieve, resulting in one of the best episodes of the entire series. Dozens of elements coalesce and reinforce one another in dazzling, disturbing, and deeply insightful fashion while other moments stand out simply as brilliant audiovisual flourishes, like Ken breaking into a hysterical tap dance routine punctuated with a singsong "It's my job!" as he describes the clients' abuse of him, Michael and Peggy quoting Lewis Carroll while characters weave around the partitions behind them, or Stan nonchalantly taking a penknife to the arm as Michael broadly misses the picture of an apple over his head. That last scrape is far from the episode's only close call.
Driving all of this mayhem are four present-day events and one dimly understood distant memory. First, Frank Gleason has passed away, with only Ted grieving the loss enough to avoid the weekend festivities. Second, buckling under the pressure to perform for Chevy, the creatives (and a few other lucky participants) are injected with a potent serum by Dr. Shelly Hecht (Rick Zieff) ostensibly to provoke an onrush of inspiration. Third, Sylvia catches Don lingering outside her door and attempts to warn him off although especially in his narcotized state he's only further encouraged to pursue his redemption. Fourth, Sally babysits her siblings in the Draper apartment, leading to a long, strange sequence in which a would-be robber (Davenia McFadden) regales the suspicious teen with a ludicrous yarn about being Don's childhood nanny, back for a visit. And finally, during his Depression-era days in New Jersey, young Dick Whitman is nursed back from fever and chest cold by Amy Swenson, the beauty marked prostitute who caught his eye when his stepmother brought him to live in this house of ill repute, a few flashbacks earlier.
That sickbed memory is the key to everything else; or at least that's what Don thinks, and Mad Men's writer are eager to prove him right. Abandoning the Chevy mission to focus on crafting the perfect profession of love for Sylvia, Don obsessively hunts down an oatmeal print ad from the fifties. When he finally digs it up, we see that the beautiful, adoring mother feeding her gap-toothed son is wearing a head-covering similar to Miss Swenson's, a perverse, even perverted underpinning to the innocent image, considering what the amateur nurse actually did to Dick when he recovered. "I took that boy's cherry," she boasts when the pimp kicks her out, leading to Dick's beating by his furious stepmother. "Because you know what he needs," the advertisement coos a mere dozen years after its traumatic inspiration. Thus a young adolescent's sordid loss of virginity is converted into a portrait of blissful domesticity for the purpose of selling a commodity. Dick-turned-Don has forever after conflated Miss Swenson's soothing care and molestation, because the only real mothering he ever experienced was at the hands of the woman who immediately thereafter deflowered him.
Signposts Oedipal and otherwise turn up all over the episode, culminating in Don's memorable, double/triple/quadruple-charged kiss-off to Ted: "Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse." Sylvia's beauty mark and head covering are the same as Miss Swenson's; Ken informs Don that it was his mother who taught him to dance and then immediately corrects himself - "No, my first girlfriend"; Bobby incorrectly tells Don that the thief said she was his mom; a photo of an infant on Miss Swenson's mirror ("Is that you?" "No.") suggests her own familial issues; and Don is propositioned in his office by the stethoscope-wielding Wendy Gleason (Alex Nikolas), straight from her father's funeral, in another blurring of the line between seduction and medicine (although this time the age gap, if not quite the power dynamic, is reversed). Don, caught across all these currents, is swept back to his building in one last ill-fated attempt to woo Sylvia, only to discover a police officer, his ex- and current wife, his ex's new husband, and his three children waiting in his own apartment - a motley family informing him that his home has been trespassed by another imposter. There's nothing left for Don to do at this point except pass out cold on the floor, the crash he never realized he needed.
My Response:
My Response:
LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #4: S1E4 (Rest in Pain/"Episode 3") podcasts & illustrated companion
All episodes & show notes for my podcast coverage of Twin Peaks season 1 episode 4
October 23 - 29, 2021
(illustrations for storylines, character rankings, locations, TIME cover & all categories)
A Revised Schedule - continuous status update on various projects
I am no longer using this post to track my activities (see here instead). Here is what I wrote at the time:
Mad Men - "Man With a Plan" (season 6, episode 7)
Story (aired on May 12, 2013/written by Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner; directed by John Slattery): Two agencies are coming together under (what was once) SCDP's roof and the office is bustling as cumbersome furniture moves in and nervous employees worry about being moved out. The executives also experience an adjustment period, with Ted and Don particularly mismatched. Guiding a margarine brainstorming session in Don's unexplained absence, Ted's more collaborative, team leader approach to the creative department is contrasted with Don's role as the aloof, enigmatic diva. Don proceeds to drink Ted under the table in a display of dominance, parallel to his hotel rendezvous with the willingly captive Sylvia (both Rosens have fled their apartment following a blow-up over their rebellious son). She's turned on by the master/slave dynamic Don deploys as he orders her to strip, stay in bed, and wait for (and on) him day and night. Don is definitely on some psycho shit in "Man with a Plan" but the prowess of his in-office hazing gives way to sweaty anxiety in the cockpit of Ted's private plane, and his authoritative leer melts into despair when Sylvia gently informs him that the game is over and she's going home. Hamm's face is as malleable, iconic, and instantly evocative as those classic masks of Greek drama - this is absolutely one of his best performances in the series. Don's dual power plays provide the coiled spine of the episode, around which Pete attempts to deal with his increasingly senile mother and Joan bonds with Bob Barker (James Wolk) in mutually beneficial fashion (he manipulates his way into a doctor's office when she has a medical incident, and she in return saves his job). Finally, in a brilliant stroke after all the personal and professional turmoil, the time-addled Mrs. Campbell wakes her son to inform him, amidst claims that he'll be late for school, that "they shot that poor Kennedy boy." "That was years ago, mother," Pete sighs before falling back asleep. And then in the final shot, a newscaster's voice and the chatter inside the ill-fated Ambassador Hotel as its only soundtrack, Megan weeps and Don broods as history does, in fact, repeat - or at the very least, rhyme.
My Response:
LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #3: S1E3 (Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer/"Episode 2") podcasts & illustrated companion
All episodes & show notes for my podcast coverage of Twin Peaks season 1 episode 3
October 16 - 22, 2021
(illustrations for storylines, character rankings, locations, TIME cover & all categories)
Laura as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #6 (podcast)
The forties Hollywood classic Laura - in which Otto Preminger wraps the legacy of high society urban melodrama in the emerging form of the moody film noir - is one of the most notable cinematic influences on Twin Peaks. Namely...well, that's just it: it's right there in the name! The central mystery figure of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is reflected in Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), complete with her very own theme music, haunting portrait, and ambiguous "I am dead yet I live" persona. Not only that; the unforgettable columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) would influence both Waldo the bird and Dr. Lydecker the offscreen veterinarian in the nineties series - and the film even features its own Jacoby to boot. In fact, my coverage of Laura initiates a three-month series (the first of many) which groups several Twin Peaks Cinema topics together based on a common theme - in this case, "What's in a name?": films whose character names are adopted in Twin Peaks (see also Madelaine Ferguson and Gordon Cole, if you're wondering what's next). But if nomenclature was all Laura shared with Twin Peaks, I could leave the discussion to this single paragraph. The connections go much deeper, linking wealthy, jealous patrons; detectives falling under the spell of women whose deaths they are investigating; and of course, victims who prove more complex and human than the mythic memories that survive them. This episode kicks off my monthly standalone podcast feed for Twin Peaks Cinema in earnest (the previous public episodes - all on films written or directed by Peaks creators - were released on my main podcast feed, in addition to monthly patron exclusives stretching back two years). And I couldn't think of a more perfect way to dive in than with Laura herself.
Mad Men - "For Immediate Release" (season 6, episode 6)
Welcome to my viewing diary for Mad Men. Every Monday I will review another episode of seasons four, five, and six. Both parts of season seven will be covered in the summer of 2022 (now updated to winter 2021-22). I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.
Story (aired on May 5, 2013/written by Matthew Weiner; directed by Jennifer Getzinger): The SCDP elite ride a roller coaster in "For Immediate Release": toasting as they plan to take the company public, panicking when the loss of two huge clients threatens their valuation, rebounding by landing a meeting with Chevrolet, worrying as they realize who their rivals are, and finally executing a brilliant maneuver to secure their position. Don and Pete are to blame for Jaguar and Vicks Chemical cutting their ties. Don fires Herb - or fires himself, it's hard to say exactly - after a lousy dinner triple date (or would-be triple; Megan's mother plays the increasingly drunk fifth wheel when Roger stands them up). Battered down by the inane conversation of Herb's wife Peaches (Sarah Aldrich) and faced with yet another obnoxious request from the piggish car dealer himself, Don decides to get reckless, dumping Jaguar just to wash himself clean of Jersey's stink. Meanwhile, Pete finds himself in that classic brothel scenario when he comes face to face with his father-in-law in a compromising position (for both of them, obviously). Tom punishes Pete professionally by cancelling their contract and trusting that his daughter's estranged husband will "do the right thing." In Pete's eyes, however, that means telling Trudy where he saw her dear old dad. Pete, often one to tout his own racial progressivism, is eager to describe Tom's paramour as a "two-hundred-pound Negro" for shock effect.
So yes, the firm could definitely use a breakthrough right about now, and it's Roger and his airline employee girlfriend Daisy McClusky (Danielle Panabaker) who come to the rescue: Daisy spots a Chevrolet whale on a local flight and Roger prepares his harpoon. As it turns out, one of the agency's rivals - good old CGC - is also struggling. A partner, Frank Gleason (Craig Anton), reveals that he is gravely ill with pancreatic cancer; meanwhile Ted's affection for Peggy blossoms into an embarrassing kiss. By the time Ted and Don run into each other in a Detroit bar, they're both getting desperate, tired of their companies' junior status in the industry and certain that they're about to be overshadowed once again by those big names. And then Don gets creative. Alone, each would fail, but together... The next morning, the two agencies collaborate on their pitch to Chevy and when they return to New York they surprise Peggy - who was expecting to pick up where she left off with Ted - with the big news. From now on, SCDP and CGC will become SCDPCGC (or something like that). Don saved the business once with a split, and now he may be saving it (and himself) with a merger. Yet Peggy doesn't exactly seem pleased to return to the lion's den.
My Response:
My Response:
September 2021 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN THE MOVIES #83 - Twin Peaks Cinema: Eraserhead (+ my Eraserhead archive w/ Paris Belongs to Us, Twin Peaks Reflections: Gordon, Harry, Cooper, Owl Cave, Bookhouse, Cooper and Annie/Season 3 Part 3 & more) plus kicking off TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS
Individual cross-posts for the two Twin Peaks Conversations bumped this round-up back a few weeks, but it was also delayed because I never recorded my bonus section this month (intended to include many podcast recommendations from my recent listening). Expect two in October to make up for the absence. Nonetheless, I created this month's main patron episode early in September, racing to keep up with a public podcast on the same theme (tracing ten connections between Inland Empire and Eraserhead). Having already covered Eraserhead many times, including its ties to Twin Peaks - as my free archive episodes make clear - I was keen to focus on new aspects in this analysis. Season three proved a particularly rich field to mine, with multiple aspects of Cooper evoking Henry. Elsewhere in the episode, I dig into another of Lynch's most surreal, otherworldly works - the "Purple World" sequence in The Return (which, oddly enough, also feels connected to one of Twin Peaks' most straightforward storylines: the Cooper/Annie romance). And one of the longest passages in my archive reaches outside Lynch's own oeuvre to link his own debut to that of another avant-garde yet narrative filmmaker, Jacques Rivette's Paris Belong to Us.
LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #2: S1E2 (Traces to Nowhere/"Episode 1") podcasts & illustrated companion
All episodes & show notes for my podcast coverage of Twin Peaks season 1 episode 2
October 9 - 15, 2021
(illustrations for storylines, character rankings, locations, TIME cover & all categories)
John Carpenter's Halloween (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #33)
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LINKS FOR EPISODE 34
Lost in Twin Peaks now has its own feed on most platforms
(including Apple Podcasts)
Lost in Twin Peaks episodes so far this week:
Mad Men season 6 viewing diary
Cross-posts for Twin Peaks Conversations w/ David Bushman & Twin Peaks Unwrapped hosts Ben & Bryon
Mad Men - "The Flood" (season 6, episode 5)
Story (aired on April 28, 2013/written by Tom Smuts and Matthew Weiner; directed by Christopher Manley): In an authentic historical moment that Weiner must have had in mind when originally conceiving this series, Paul Newman makes an appearance at the fourth annual Andy advertising awards and shakes the night out of its insular complacency - just before he in turn experiences an even more shocking interruption. Using the Madison Avenue platform as an excuse to promote his favored presidential candidate, the Hollywood mega-star launches into an impassioned speech for Eugene McCarthy. Admiring his early opposition to the Vietnam War and bold campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson when the president seemed insurmountable, Newman admonishes Robert Kennedy and his supporters for trying to ride McCarthy's coattails after the fact. Already we are in the thick of '68 drama - the antiwar movement, the presidential race, and the legacy of JFK's assassination all intertwined in this moment - although the writers place the small agencies (including both SCDP and CGC) far to the back of the crowd so that they have to squint to even see Newman in the distance. And then comes the big news from someone shouting out a question in the crowd: Martin Luther King, Jr. has been shot and killed. By the time the shell-shocked Drapers return to their apartment, Megan's unexpected award (SCDP's only scoop, for a long-departed employee and recently-departed client) is barely even an afterthought, caught in close-up cutaway on the couch.
"The Flood" is certainly the episode most defined by a single news event since "The Grown-Ups" (and I suspect we won't have to wait long until the next one) but the two episodes deal with epoch-defining assassinations in a different manner. This is partly a function of the show's own narrative evolution: in contrast to the tighter ensemble dynamics of season three, Mad Men's focus has become more diffuse by now, with Don and Peggy working at different agencies, Betty off in her own separate plotline with Henry (only the kids connect these worlds), and even Pete and Trudy split apart. Pete attempts to bridge that gap over the phone but he falls flat, staying alone in the city as she makes it clear that this separation is probably going to be permanent. Even characters who could be together are separated under the circumstances: the Rosens have just left for D.C., where the rioting is much worse than in New York; Don and Bobby go to Planet of the Apes while Megan takes Sally and Gene to a vigil in Central Park (they come together in the end when Don delivers a memorable monologue about fatherhood); and Michael, in one of his most significant episodes thus far, is observed mostly in terms of his family life, including an embarrassing date with the cute, buttoned-up Beverly Farber (Nicole Hayden) coordinared by his loving if overbearing father. Many employees don't even show up for work and those who do want to leave as soon as possible, except for the ever-more-shallow Harry, who gets into a shouting match with Pete over the importance of King's death and its effect on business. (I'm surprised Harry's outraged "That's the latest thing, isn't it? Everybody's a racist!" hasn't become more of a mocking meme in the current Critical Race Theory-obsessed discourse.)
There isn't really a single moment untouched by the King assassination, the subsequent unrest, and the larger implications of the civil rights movement's promise both fulfilled and unfulfilled. Even the new, seemingly dead-end (I doubt it) character Randall Walsh (William Mapother), a bow tie-wearing acidhead who's "in insurance", brings it up in the meeting Roger secures with Don as a favor. Peggy's search for an apartment on the Upper East Side is uncomfortably filtered through her realtor's eager-but-failed push to take advantage of the moment by lowballing their offer (Abe is concerned about the area's lack of diversity although his high-minded liberalism is somewhat tempered by his journalistic excitement while covering this moment of sorrow and fury). And with potentially the most significance, Henry reveals that he's fed up with Mayor Lindsay's brand of racially aware liberal Republican, as well as being a political sidekick more generally, so he's going to run for a safe GOP seat in the state Senate. There, he hints, he will take a more hardnosed approach to what he views as the city's decline into crime, corruption, and disrepair. Henry, who always seemed like a throwback to an earlier era of patrician moderation, is beginning to unveil a neoconservative streak just as indicative of the Mad Men ensemble's view of this moment as their antiracist alarm.
"The Flood"'s least overtly King-centric moment may also be its most memorable; although delivered to an initially horrified, eventually touched Megan, Don's speech feels more like a soliloquy and is worth reprinting in full. Every episode so far this season has ended with a scene attempting to humanize the increasingly unsympathetic main character, to the point where it's become an almost cringeworthy cliche. This gesture is certainly the most effective, and affecting, especially since it incorporates his sociopathic streak into our expectations and Don's own delivery:
"I don't think I ever wanted to be the man who loves children. But from the moment they're born, that baby comes out and you act proud and excited, hand out cigars. But you don't feel anything, especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them but you don't. And the fact that you're faking that feeling makes you wonder if your own father had the same problem. Then one day they get older and you see them do something and you feel...that feeling that you were pretending to have. And it feels like your heart is going to explode."
My Response:
TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS #2 w/ David Bushman, author of Conversations with Mark Frost & Murder at Teal's Pond (YouTube & extended PATREON)
Update for yesterday's Lost in Twin Peaks podcast: the episode went up in the afternoon, but the illustrated companion is not yet finished - it should be complete within a few hours.
In those fateful days just before the pandemic hit, I tore through David Bushman's book Conversations with Mark Frost in anticipation of my upcoming video work on the Peaks co-creator. Later in 2020, I'd begin work on "The Bookhouse Boy" and this book would serve in many ways as a Bible for that project (by far my most time-consuming, and perhaps my most complex, video essay). I'd already spent much of 2019 reading Frost's book, watching his film and TV work, and discovering surprising connections to Twin Peaks. Now here was Frost discussing his own career in his own words, for the first time in such depth, as well as his own fascinating life and philosophy. Bushman provides a brilliant guide through this terrain, asking probing questions and follow-ups (including about the ongoing mysteries of Twin Peaks and particularly The Return) and bringing to bear his own extensive knowledge of television history and Frost's role in it, from his twenty-five years at the Paley Center for Media (as well as, I learned in this conversation, programming the cable network TV Land). Bushman has been immersed in the Peaks world since co-authoring Twin Peaks FAQ with Arthur Smith in 2016, spending the bulk of his time on the upcoming Murder at Teal's Pond - a true crime investigation into the case that inspired Frost to create Peaks in the first place. After introducing Bushman, we spend the first part of our conversation on that topic before moving onto Frost...
PART 1 on YouTube
(Embedded videos are having difficulty right now - you can jump here for this one.)
In the second, longer part of the conversation - over a half-hour of Frost/Peaks/TV-focused content - we hone in on the dynamic and complicated Lynch/Frost relationship and how it plays out in season three. We ponder why the TV era that Frost sharpened his teeth on has largely been forgotten, tease out some lingering Peaks mysteries, and whether a united vision is even possible given the different visions of the co-creators.
And listen to...
This new series kicked off with a bonus episode last week (an interview with the authors/hosts of Twin Peaks Unwrapped) but from now on it will be monthly, so expect the next conversation in October...
LOST IN TWIN PEAKS #1: The Pilot - S1E1 podcasts & illustrated companion (+ #0: introducing show format)
All episodes & show notes for my podcast coverage of the Twin Peaks pilot
October 1 - 8, 2021
(illustrations for storylines, character rankings, locations, TIME cover & all categories)
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