Wouldn't You Like to Be a Pepper Too? 
Media
Lynch Mob
For eight years, fans of Twin Peaks—led by two Arlington pals—have been trying to keep the cult TV show alive. At least in spirit.
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The idea for Wrapped in Plastic was hatched by Miller and Thorne at the Dallas Fantasy Fair in 1991. ABC had just canceled Twin Peaks,which had been logging miserable ratings in its Saturday night time slot, and both men were upset. Thorne was speaking on a Twin Peaks panel, for which he had plotted a meticulous chart of the characters’ relationships as well as a calendar of everything that had ever happened on the series. “I knew that Laura Palmer died on Friday, February 24, 1989,” Thorne says, “and that every episode took place on a day following her murder”—the second episode the next day, the third the day after that, and so on. “They never say it’s Saturday in the second episode, but the kids aren’t in school. And they never say it’s Sunday in the third episode, but they’re in church. The internal consistency!” Alas, the consistency finally gave out. “Late in the second season,” he continues, “the calendar was slightly off. The Miss Twin Peaks Contest should have fallen on Easter Sunday.”
When Thorne presented these and other findings at the Fantasy Fair, Miller sat in the audience rapt. He was impressed that someone else had such a thorough knowledge of the show. Afterward he approached Thorne and asked whether he would be interested in collaborating on a Twin Peaks fanzine, and Thorne said yes. It proved to be a good partnership. As a cartoonist who had majored in art at the University of Texas at Arlington, Miller had an eye for design, and he had learned the rudimentary skills of desktop publishing while putting out catalogs for his then-employer, Lone Star Comics. Thorne brought his own particular fetish for details to the table along with an academic sensibility; he holds a master’s degree in television production from Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, where he wrote his thesis on narrative theory in the TV series Homicide.
Not long after they joined forces, they settled on the name Wrapped in Plastic, a reference to Twin Peaks’ most enduring image: the lifeless, blue-lipped body of Laura Palmer, which was found bundled in a tarp by the side of a lake. (“She’s dead,” announces a fisherman who stumbles across her body in the first episode. “Wrapped in plastic.”) The debut issue—24 pages, with a simple design—was priced at $2.95, and it arrived in comic shops in October 1992. It began with the exhortation: “Think of it as a nationwide living room where we’re all hanging out talking about the television series.” Though it bore the noncommittal “published occasionally” on its cover, orders from distributors and letters from readers quickly convinced Miller and Thorne that they had hit upon something. “At the time,” Miller says, “we weren’t sure we’d get past issue two or three, much less forty.”
What they had hit upon was a thriving Twin Peaks subculture, whose denizens still flock every August to Snoqualmie, Washington—where the series was shot—for three days of cherry pie eating, coffee drinking, and schmoozing with actors who once played such peripheral characters as the Log Lady and the One-Armed Man. Of course, such obsessiveness was in vogue when the series was still on the air: A Los Angeles supermarket sold out of cherry pies on the day that the second season’s premiere aired; the Gray Line regularly ran Twin Peaks bus tours out of Seattle; and the New York Times reported that on Halloween 1990, “a thousand Audrey Hornes sashayed in pleated plaid skirts, tight sweaters, and saddle shoes, as multiple Agent Coopers, hair plastered down with Stiff Stuff, gripped their coffee mugs and deadpanned in Peak-speak” (Audrey was a femme fatale who was a schoolmate of Laura Palmer’s; Cooper was the FBI man who investigated her death and came to appreciate the town’s “damn fine coffee”). But even Miller and Thorne have been surprised by the extent to which the subculture is still intact years later.
In response, they have published ever-more-exhaustive examinations of the series—from essays such as “Moving Through Time: The Twin Peaks Cycle,” about the circular imagery in the show (“Even the doughnuts so beloved to Agent Cooper . . . can be seen as parodic rings”), to an episode guide for Invitation to Love, the soap that Twin Peaks characters watch religiously. There are also updates on the current projects of Twin Peaks actors (among them, the then-unknown David Duchovny) and spirited discussions of Lynch’s work (“David Lynch as Vengeful Auteur”). But Miller and Thorne draw the line at interviewing the show’s creator. “David Lynch’s nightmare, his image of hell, is probably being trapped in a room with Twin Peaks fanatics,” Miller emphasizes. “We’re not going to get into the minutiae of plot details with him. We’re not going to ask him, ‘What does the white horse mean?’ Besides, if we interviewed Lynch, what would we do next?”
What Lynch is doing next, however, greatly excites Twin Peaks fans—even if they’re not getting exactly what they want. “Ever since they brought Star Trek back, there’s been hope that Twin Peaks might get a second chance too,” says Thorne. “But it’s extreme fan naiveté. It’s not going to come back. It’s a pipe dream.” Still, Lynch himself is expected to return to prime-time TV this fall with Mulholland Drive, a two-hour pilot for a drama set in Los Angeles and starring, among others, Academy award—nominated tough guy Robert Forster, stage actress Ann Miller, and achy-breaky country singer Billy Ray Cyrus as a pool boy with bedroom eyes. Though little else is known about the series, ABC has described it as “vintage David Lynch, very much reminiscent of Twin Peaks.”
Understandably, Miller and Thorne can’t wait for the series to air, though they will continue to write about the one that first intrigued them nearly a decade ago. The forty-first issue of Wrapped in Plastic, which is currently in production, will feature a comparison of Lynch to another director, Peter Weir. “We’ll stop publishing the magazine when we run out of ideas,” says Miller. “We’ll give it up when we’re reduced to publishing the kinds of stories that the Star Trek ’zines were publishing before the sequel series came out—feature stories like ‘I Took Out Gene Roddenberry’s Trash.’”
Thorne nods in agreement. “Our friends’ reactions are, ‘You’re still doing that? What could you possibly have left to say?’” he says. “To them, it’s just a television show.”
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