It all started with The X-Files. You see, we hadn’t watched television since about 1988. Part of that was practical—we couldn’t afford cable and then when we landed at Nashotah House there was no cable service anyway. Bouncing from job to job after that, when money was tight, we figured cable was a luxury we weren’t used to anyway. Then came DVDs. I should also say that my family heard other people talking about certain shows—some of them quite good—but we hadn’t seen them. Then we decided to watch The X-Files. This was followed by Lost. Then the X-Files again. On my lonesome I watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker. But people had talked a lot about Twin Peaks. Curiosity got the best of me. We decided to see what it was about.
I knew that Chris Carter had cited various inspirations for The X-Files. Kolchak was a major one, but another was Twin Peaks. It helps to have watched a David Lynch movie or two before jumping into the deep end here, but the first season (it only lasted two) started out like a regular drama. Like Northern Exposure, it had quirky characters. Then after a couple episodes paranormal aspects began to appear. Things were not what they seemed in Washington. It turned out to be an evil spirit possessing people in the town. Laura Palmer’s murder was more or less solved. Dale Cooper, however, had been trapped in the Black Lodge in the cliff-hanging end of the second season. We then watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the point it settled in the sequence. Like the aforementioned X-Files, a reboot occurred many years later and the DVD set we had included the renewed season. Things really get weird there.
It turns out that we had indeed missed some good television during those Nashotah House years and later. Actually, doctoral years and later—Twin Peaks originally aired when we were living in Edinburgh, so we had a legitimate excuse. Boomers, particularly late boomers, grew up with television. As an adult (so I’m told) I can see that television had a big influence on my life, even though I stopped watching in my late twenties. Do I understand all of what happened in Twin Peaks? Of course not. Then again I scratched my head after watching Eraserhead too. The first of David Lynch’s movies I saw was Dune, which, unfortunately, wasn’t that good. I’ve come to trust him, however, and I suspect that telinema will lead me to watch more of his films. And we’ll probably be on the lookout for other television we missed, that, in retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have.
