The long return to Journey Through Twin Peaks: a behind-the-scenes essay (pt. 3 of 4)

The first part of this essay provides the context which my original 2014 - 15 video series JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS grew out of and the second part details their process of creation. This third part focuses on the videos I published in 2020 - 21 which cover Twin Peaks' third season and the other work of the show's contributors. A fourth part of this essay will follow next year, after I've created more videos focused exclusively on season three.

Visit

Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 - "Over the Mountain Pass"

to view all videos discussed in this essay

In the summer of 2018, following a cousin's wedding near San Francisco, I flew north to visit another cousin in Seattle. During this visit, we took a day trip to the area where Twin Peaks was shot, my first visit to the small towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie, as well as a few locations closer to the city - or even in its very heart (did you know that the rustic Roadhouse is actually a theater embedded right in downtown Seattle?). I'd moved from California to New Hampshire a couple years earlier but while out west again I was struck by how much...bigger everything is there. Not just the massive trees which dwarf eastern timber, but also the large patches of uninhabited areas between cities as well as the very sprawl of those cities (Los Angeles obviously, but even smaller urban centers like Seattle feel more spread out, less clustered, than a metropolis like New York or Boston). Paradoxically, both the bulk of massive natural phenomena like redwoods or the Rockies and the preponderance of empty or less densely populated spaces contribute to this experience of bigness, vast both vertically and horizontally.

About a year and a half after this trip, I finally got to work on new chapters of Journey Through Twin Peaks (although the ideas behind them had been percolating for a long time). These sprawling, scattered, grand-scale videos, in process and end result, bear the same relationship to my earlier videos as the West Coast does to the East. The contrasts are endless and illuminating. Parts 1 - 4 of Journey, assembled in just over four months in the fall and winter of 2014 - 15, were acts of extreme concentration. Little else filtered into my consciousness aside from Twin Peaks and my devotion to illustrating its chronological journey, mostly using clips from the series or film even as I expanded and experimented with my palette in the latter chapters. Part 5 of Journey, the form that these 2020 - 21 videos would eventually be assembled into, took nearly a year, during which my attention was spread across many other projects too. This also happened to be perhaps the most eventful historical epoch of my entire life even if I (like most of the world) was isolated in my experience of it. Part 5 was itself quite jumbled - both in terms of chronology and subject matter - and on top of that it was created all out of order, with the "last" section completed and released nine months before what were supposed to be earlier passages. Part 5 also ended up being longer than any previous comparable unit, indeed half the runtime of the previous four parts combined (its largest component chapter was itself almost as long as Part 1), and far from limiting itself to Twin Peaks (though it leapt around all three seasons and Fire Walk With Me, along with spin-off materials) it incorporated clips from well over a hundred different source materials scoured from YouTube or via hunts down different avenues.

Yet out of this often bewildering and overwhelming process, I was able to craft something that feels very much of a piece with the earlier videos - an expansion that carries on their spirit - and when I wasn't exasperated with delays or juggling different inputs and outputs, I had a ball putting it together. An order eventually emerged from the swirling activity.

If the writing, preparation, and editing of Journey Through Twin Peaks Part 5 was a complicated and drawn-out endeavor, so was the lead-up to it. Though I'll try to keep myself focused on the period of these videos, an introduction is necessary to set the stage because five long years passed between finishing Part 4 and initiating Part 5, much longer than I expected.

Creating Journey Through Twin Peaks (pt. 2 of 4)

In Part 1 of this look back at my video series, I focused on the build-up to its creation as well as the fast-paced, relatively brief process of putting together the first part. This entry examines the much longer period spent on the subsequent three parts, concluding with the presentation of the complete Journey Through Twin Peaks at this time three years ago on February 4. Part 3 will eventually chronicle the creation of new Journey chapters focused on The Return, which have yet to be produced but will hopefully be available this summer. (That process took much longer, and I eventually added a Part 4 of this essay as well.)

On the morning of October 3, 2014 less than twenty-four hours after I'd put the finishing touches on the first part of Journey Through Twin Peaks, the entire context of Twin Peaks - and with it, my little video project - was forever altered. David Lynch's and Mark Frost's simultaneous Twitter teases would be revealed within days as what many suspected: Twin Peaks' return to television as a limited series on Showtime in 2016. This was a cosmic coincidence for my purposes; not only had I just launched what would become my most ambitious online work just as it became newly relevant, but this same week I'd announced that I'd be devoting the following six weeks exclusively to Twin Peaks, including perhaps the longest interviews ever conducted with John Thorne, publisher of the legendary fanzine Wrapped in Plastic. We'd spoken during the summer, and at one point we mused about the future of this world we were both falling back in to. (John, whose involvement with the work had obviously been far more extensive than my own, hadn't written or engaged with Peaks much at all in the previous decade; the magazine's last issue had been 2005 and its co-founder, Craig Miller, had passed away a few years later.) As exciting as The Missing Pieces was for Peaks fans that had been starved for new content since the early nineties, John noted that this was all a bit of tempest in a teacup - or, perhaps, a coffee cup.

John's friend had attended the red-carpet premiere for The Missing Pieces in Los Angeles and observed (in John's paraphrase) "it was the same types of people who are at every Lynch event, it was a fairly small venue. From the outside, it has this glamour to it like it was a big event, and Twin Peaks was in the air. But in fact it was a small event magnified by social media and the internet." John himself added, "I’m glad it’s still there and I’m glad it’s getting press coverage but there’s a small core devoted." We both reflected that the old Lynch - the one who savvily played the "Czar of Bizarre" for mainstream media in the early nineties - would have capitalized on this momentum rather than calmly letting it pass. I remembered the odd buzz of the spring, when (twenty-fourth!) anniversary pieces were popping up left and right, Twin Peaks would randomly trend on Twitter, and the first announcement of the deleted scenes was made; I noted that if Lynch and Frost wanted to seize the moment with some sort of revival, this would have been the opportunity. But a couple months had passed since the blu-ray, Brad Dukes had already made the rounds to promote his oral history (the first of a tsunami of Peaks literature though at the time it seemed an unprecedented one-off), and if there was any chance of Twin Peaks re-emerging in the broader public consciousness, it was rapidly fading. And then, of course, the news.

By the time that particular interview went up, I'd already conducted another with John to wrestle with this unexpected windfall. Those Wrapped in Plastic interviews were published three weeks in a row after the first part of Journey Through Twin Peaks; also in October I interviewed Martha Nochimson, author of The Passion of David Lynch and David Lynch Swerves, and continued a deep dive into the archives of the Twin Peaks Usenet forms (alt.tv.twin-peaks) where early internet adopters discussed the series in the early nineties. After all, the Journey videos were only supposed to be one part of my now expanded "Twelve Weeks of Twin Peaks," a central feature perhaps but not the only show in town. And while the blog content was exclusively Peaksian, I still found room for non-Peaks endeavors elsewhere - for example, tweeting my "alternate Oscar" picks, a new year every day, throughout the fall. By early December, however, the video series had taken over the weekly Peaks posts altogether; by the end of the month, when a much-delayed Part 3 finally premiered, I had dropped the "Twelve Weeks" limitation entirely and was dedicated to publishing about Twin Peaks as long as it took to finish this project, and as the new year dawned my Twin Peaks immersion became exclusive and all-encompassing, not just yielding by far my most popular work but changing me in the process.

This is the story of how I created parts 2 - 4 of Journey Through Twin Peaks, and what that experience meant to me.

3 years of Journey Through Twin Peaks (& how it began, pt. 1 of 4)

Newfound Lake, NH

(site of some early inspiration)

On October 1, 2014, I uploaded the first Journey Through Twin Peaks video. Since then, this series has become by far my most popular work, and certainly one of the projects I'm proudest of. Journey took about four and a half months to complete, and began as the coming-together of several different ideas. By the fall of 2014, I had already been publishing a lot about Twin Peaks for six months, ever since I casually decided to read a book of Twin Peaks essays (Full of Secrets, edited by the late David Lavery) that had been sitting on my desk for four months, and in my online cart for half a decade before that. What follows is a short history of the process that led to this video series, if you find such things interesting! (Well, it was supposed to be short but it ended up kind of long - in fact I will follow up at another time with parts 2 and 3, as I enjoyed revisiting this process, however navel-gazey...)

Thank you to everyone who has watched, shared, commented on, or otherwise engaged with Journey Through Twin Peaks. I hope it continues to help people in their own journeys with this work.

And here is where the playlist for Journey Through Twin Peaks begins: