Tropic Sprockets / Twin Peaks in the Tropics 

By Ian Brockway

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks has always been in my thoughts from 1990 onward. I used to gather in my friend Amy’s dorm room and watch the quirky but oddly cozy show. Amy with a bright complexion and a cheerful disposition reminded me of a Twin Peaks character: upbeat but somewhat enigmatic. The series was one of my first experiences with Surrealism and also my first touch of romance. I was infatuated with my friend Amy as I was with Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) on the show. Both people were unattainable to me as romantic loves. Amy once gave a picture of herself and her flashing eyes and warm smile frozen in space reminded me of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). 

Amy and Laura together had that wonderful quality of unreality. Unrequited and impossible to touch but beautiful just the same.

Last week I watched Twin Peaks: The Return and my former feelings for the show and Amy resumed in force, those Tuesdays when I used to travel around the UM circle, me and my chair making clicking sounds, listening to the night and  pondering the mystery of Laura, the blonde girl wrapped in plastic like a lost mermaid of that very university lake, gorgeous but sadly iced in death.

The new show is a very different experience. The folksy tone is gone and in its place is a spacey detached quality, which perhaps is Lynch’s take on our new hyper, swift, divisive and distracted country. 

Though the original flavor had changed, I was greatly excited each week. Here was Laura, here was Audrey and Amy was with me once more as I saw Lynch’s voluptuous red curtain, the fluttering cloth that speaks     of love and is a friend to me.

As the shows progressed, I recalled my dreams more vividly and began to identify with the childlike Dougie (Kyle Maclachlan) (a kind of Talking Heads toddler version of the confident and responsible Agent Cooper) who gulped coffee like apple juice. 

Did not I do the same at times? Only to run to the bathroom as Dougie did in a shaking haste to pee? 

And were not the electric sparks depicted in the show the very same ones that powered my electric chair, making it possible for me to get a coffee each afternoon?

The series soon took an apocalyptic turn, showing the A-Bomb and Hiroshima only to then to display radiation in abstract terms: huge swaths of black across the screen accompanied by jarring sound. I related to this as well being diagnosed with thin bones, yet I felt alive, at one with the TV, a complete mixed media installation: one body, one screen. I was a new Ian, just as Twin Peaks was a new show. 

I loved Laura but I was more intrigued by Sherilyn Fenn in her updated role as a lost Alice in Wonderland not knowing where to go or who she was.

When Audrey danced again 25 years later along with me, I thought of Amy. And then once more when Agent Cooper rose from his hospital bed to take charge. If Cooper could return, why not Amy and my university, the U.M. of 25 years ago?

The prospect of the series had me in knots. How would I feel and what would I actually see after two and a half decades?

A week passed and there was Agent Cooper in the lodge I loved with that red curtain of Amy’s lips and the black and white chevron patterned floor that jittered like my brain waves, affected by palsy. 

Cooper took Laura for a walk in the woods with chirps that appeared to mimic the electronic chirps of my chair.

My startled silence echoed Cooper’s final question in the finale, one of them almost uttered in black and white, the other in color.

Then a week later, falling asleep at 3:30 am, seeing visions of Audrey, some kisses and my wheelchair falling off a curb, my body is hurried into the car: Things have changed. Hurricane Irma has turned West and is intensifying.

The Apocalypse is coming. Where is Amy? Where is Audrey Horne? Or Laura?  Are current events all in black and white? 

What year is this? Like Mike (Al Strobel) the mystical one armed man, I asked, “Is this the future or is this the past?”

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