Needless to say (although I'm saying it anyway), this interview with John Thorne - co-editor/publisher/writer behind Twin Peaks magazine Wrapped in Plastic - will include many, many spoilers for the series and film.
For thirteen years and seventy-five issues,
Twin Peaks fans had one safe haven in a media landscape completely indifferent, even hostile, to the strange, wonderful world they loved. Publishing its first issue in October 1992, a month after the critically-reviled
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me bombed at the box office, and going on permanent hiatus in September 2005, two years before the
Gold Box DVD collection would introduce a new generation to the TV series,
Wrapped in Plastic carried the torch during the long dark age of
Twin Peaks. Or rather, it ensured that this dark age was in fact a golden era, with vital new interviews, deeply insightful essays, and the latest cast-and-crew news bundled into a slick, appealing package every couple months.
Wrapped in Plastic was a fanzine but it was also something more: a vital source of scholarship in an era when one of the most iconic, original, and influential TV shows of all time was rarely discussed.
Wrapped in Plastic unearthed countless insights into the production of the series which still resonate today, via extensive interviews and close readings of production documents and other details. It solicited contributions from all quarters, publishing rich and provocative analyses of the series in light of literary criticism, television history, esoteric philosophy, even Arthurian legend. And, in the style of the show it honored, it broke the mould, mixing fanservice with erudition, commercial calculation with aesthetic consideration, personal passion with objective research. And, of course, the entire project was homemade: Craig Miller and John Thorne edited and published every single issue, barely squeaking out a profit while writing a substantial number of the essays themselves. It's no wonder they eventually felt burnt-out - what's amazing is that it took so long for the pace to get to them. Sadly, Craig Miller passed away in 2010 and with that,
Wrapped in Plastic was officially over.
I discovered John Thorne's work this past spring, as I gathered quotes for a massive round-up of
Twin Peaks commentary, trying to trace the elusive history of the show, the film, and their reception. Intrigued by his long-dormant blog (particularly a post called "The Subject of Laura Palmer"), and heartened by his quick responses to my inquiries, I contacted him to propose an interview. Having come to
Twin Peaks only after the magazine went out of print (like many others wooed by the show in the digital/social media era), I was only dimly aware of
Wrapped in Plastic and had never had the chance to sample its contents. John shared some of his work with me and I investigated the descriptions of previous issues to get a tantalizing sense of the magazine's treasures (though I haven't been able to yet, I plan to invest soon in its archives - as Gordon Cole would put it, "MASSIVE, MASSIVE QUANTITIES" of back issues!).
The following conversation was conducted nearly three months ago, several weeks before the release of
The Entire Mystery blu-ray (with its 90 minutes of deleted scenes from the film) re-ignited interest in
Twin Peaks in late summer. John and I discussed his own experience watching the show, the backstory of
Wrapped in Plastic, his insight into Mark Frost and David Lynch, and particularly two essays on
Fire Walk With Me, "Dreams of Deer Meadow" and "The Transformation of Laura Palmer." The first,
Wrapped in Plastic's most controversial article, proposes that the entire prologue of the film is best - and most accurately - interpreted as Agent Dale Cooper's dream. The second, a much longer version of the blog post that hooked me, digs deeply into the process behind the development of Laura Palmer's character. Taken together, the discussion of these two essays makes up more than half of the following exchange which has been dramatically cut down from a three-hour phone conversation. Two months later, John and I would speak again - intending to touch base for half an hour, and again talking for three hours - about
The Missing Pieces and other matters. That interview will appear next week as a follow-up.
Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention the big news. Rumor has it that later today, Mark Frost and David Lynch will announce one of the greatest comebacks in TV history: the return of
Twin Peaks in some form, probably a miniseries on premium cable.
[As expected, a few hours later Showtime declared that it will be running a brand new nine-episode Twin Peaks miniseries in 2016, which will be entirely written by Frost & Lynch and directed by Lynch. Later in the day, John Thorne posted on his blog for the first time in over two years, declaring that he is now planning to renew the mission of Wrapped in Plastic in one form or another.] In an amazing reversal for a series ignominiously cancelled after a season and a half, maligned in the mainstream media, and viciously shot down when it attempted to take cinematic form, it looks like - as Lynch and Frost simultaneously and cryptically tweeted last week - "that gum you like is going to come back in style." If this is true, we can expect the deluge of new, curious fans of the classic
Twin Peaks to dwarf anything since the original series aired nearly twenty-five years ago, and it is my hope that as the torch ignites once again, we can remember the folks who carried that flickering flame in the years when the show was nearly forgotten. So let's part the red curtains, cross the threshold, and unwrap
Wrapped in Plastic one more time...
