Twin Peaks Supposed to Be Funny
When Showtime revealed the full cast list for the Twin Peaks revival last year, a few unexpected new faces stood out. Jim Belushi? Eddie Vedder? And—perhaps most of all—Michael Cera?
Coming soon to USA Network: a Dick Wolf (yes, that Dick Wolf) -produced, multi-part documentary.
Sunday night's pair of new Twin Peaks episodes revealed Cera's role, and I suspect it will be the most polarizing thing about this near-universally acclaimed series. Cera is Wally "Brando" Brennan, the child of Lucy and Andy. When we meet Wally, he's dressed exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One (I mean exactly), straddling a motorcycle outside the Twin Peak's Sheriff's Department. For the next five minutes—five minutes!—Cera delivers a mumbly, lispy monologue punctuated by long, awkward silences. He's talking about… Lewis and Clark? His own shadow? How he's cool with his parents turning his bedroom into a study?
This scene is as interminable as it is baffling. We get a little important exposition. (Sheriff Harry S. Truman is ill, which is as logical a way as any to write Michael Ontkean out of the series.) But more than anything, this strange, digressive scene is here because it is so goddamn funny. I would watch an entire hour of this. Everything about Wally Brando is such perfectly calibrated nonsense (though Cera, to his credit, never winks). So why is this scene there? If I had to guess, I'd say it's because it made David Lynch laugh too.
There were some goofy scenes in last week's Twin Peaks premiere, but this second set of episodes—particularly Episode Four—packs in as much comedy as it does drama. For all my projections about the news series, I certainly didn't expect that Cooper would reemerge from the Black Lodge as Dougie "Mr. Jackpots" Jones, who could hardly be less like the clean, precise Cooper from the original series. Presumably burned out from his 25 years in the Black Lodge, Dougie-Coop is addled and parrotlike, waddling around like a moron and doing whatever people tell him to do. Everyone notices he's weird, but nobody cares enough to do much about it; though Dougie-Coop is spouting sitcom-style catchphrases and draping neckties over his head, the real joke is the oblivious self-absorption of the people he encounters, who invariably find ways to shrug off his strange behavior.
After an extended, Black Lodge-abetted hot streak at a casino, Dougie-Coop finds his way back home to Dougie's wife and son (named, for whatever bizarre reason, Janey-E and Sonny Jim, respectively). The episode has repeatedly teased little moments that might jog Cooper's memory of who he used to be: the appearance of an owl, or the opportunity to deliver a thumbs-up. And then, near the end of the episode, we get to the moment that threatens to change everything, when Janey-E seats Dougie-Coop down at the breakfast table for a plate of pancakes and a hot cup of coffee to the sound of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five."
When I watched this for the first time, I was honestly on the edge of my seat. Cooper drinking coffee again. That's like Popeye eating spinach, right? Isn't a damn fine cup of coffee the perfect way to restore the razor-sharp brain of everyone's favorite FBI agent? The moment builds and builds, until he raises the mug to his lips, and, nope! Dougie-Coop sips the coffee—apparently unaware that it's hot—and spits it all over the room. Still an idiot after all.
We can probably assume Cooper will eventually get back to normal. (We don't know—but there's not much of a show if he doesn't, right?) And as much fun as it is to watch Dougie-Coop bumble around, Lynch and Frost also know we've been waiting more than 25 years to see the Agent Cooper we all remember come back. So the joke of this episode is ultimately on us—teasing our frustrated expectations for the moment when this shaggy-dog Dougie detour will pivot back to Agent Cooper, and finally pay off the cliffhanger set up decades ago.
This delayed gratification resembles nothing so much as the opening of Twin Peaks' Season Two premiere. Fans had waited months to find out the resolution to the Season One cliffhanger, when a mysterious shooter turned up at Cooper's hotel room and shot him. And now, as the show returned, Lynch delayed any conventional resolution by spending nearly five full minutes with a character later described as "the world's oldest and most decrepit room-service waiter," who wanders around the hotel room babbling about warm milk while Cooper bleeds out on the floor.
For anyone who had waited for clear-cut answers to such a nasty cliffhanger, this sequence was infuriating. It was also super, super funny. When Lynch wasn't at the helm, Twin Peaks' attempts at humor were usually broader, and they tended to fall a little flat—Nadine Hurley developing the brain of a teenager and the body of a superhero, or all the wacky shit surrounding a loose pine weasel during a fancy gala at the Great Northern.
I loved the first two episodes of the Twin Peaks revival, but I'm even happier with these, because they're not just thought-provoking and suspenseful and artful and nostalgic and weird—they're funny. And the original Twin Peaks run shows that Lynch understood, long before most TV creators understood, that the best TV dramas also tend to be the best TV comedies. Think of Christopher and Paulie bickering over the unkillable Russian in the pitch black-comedy of The Sopranos' "Pine Barrens," or Mad Men's bug-eyed Pete Campbell sputtering, "Not great, Bob!" Even the best sitcoms tend to fall into patterns, but comedy thrives on the unexpected—so when a drama breaks convention and goes for laugh, the payoff can be even more rewarding.
Twin Peaks has always lived in that same expansive, genre-bending tradition, where a wrenching story about a horrifying murder and the collective grief after it can always manage to squeeze a little slapstick into the margins. And there's an extra hidden benefit to making a drama that's this funny: It expands the entire emotional palette of your show by association. It's not for nothing that this goofy-ass Twin Peaks episode also features the most chilling scene of the new series, as Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield confront the doppelgänger wearing Cooper's mask. This scene would be scary on its own—but its power grows exponentially in the stark contrast between the laugh-inducingly childlike Dougie-Coop and this unsettling, dead-eyed pretender. It's a special hour of television that can simultaneously be the funniest episode I've seen in ages and the scariest episode I've seen in ages—but this week, Twin Peaks managed to be both.
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Source: https://www.gq.com/story/twin-peaks-funniest-show-on-tv
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