By Sam Tucker
Like most children, I have some “from the vault” stories my parents only told me once I was older — things too weird, scary or incomprehensible to explain at the time. One of the strangest involves a night they hired a neighborhood kid to babysit my brother and me while they went out to see a movie.
In classic ’90s fashion, about an hour into the screening an usher walked into the theater with a flashlight asking for a Mr. or Mrs. Tucker — there was a phone call waiting on the landline. Cursing his luck, my dad stormed out, picked up the receiver and immediately pulled it away from his ear as he heard his sons wailing in the background while the rookie babysitter tried to explain that we had suddenly started freaking out. My dad, embodying peak ’90s parenting, told the kid that handling this was exactly why he was being paid and promptly hung up.
My mom still says she has dreams about that surreal moment — likely made worse by the movie they were watching: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a continuation of their favorite show, Twin Peaks.
Beginning March 21, the Independent Picture House is thrilled to present David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking series Twin Peaks in its entirety. The series will screen all 30 episodes of the original two-season run, followed by 1992’s Fire Walk With Me, 2014’s Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces and finally the haunting 18-episode 2017 revival, Twin Peaks: The Return — notoriously difficult to find on the big screen.
For the uninitiated, “weird, scary and outside of comprehension” is also a pretty succinct description of the work of the recently deceased Lynch, a truly singular filmmaker. His (unfortunately small) catalog returns again and again to similar themes: a hidden evil lurking just beneath the surface, often wrapped in a noir package. Whether it’s the twisted Hollywood dreamscapes of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, or the idyllic suburb turned upside down in Blue Velvet, Lynch had a gift for making the mundane feel deeply unsettling — turning everyday life into a nightmarish abstraction that still feels strangely real.
Lynch was famously protective of his vision, rarely compromising —even turning down directing The Return of the Jedi before making his own bizarre yet fascinating take on Dune. Through self-financing and international partnerships, he preserved creative control over most of his work. Which makes it all the more surprising that his most popular creation, Twin Peaks, aired on ABC and drew an astonishing 33% of the television audience when it debuted in 1990.
Centered on the murder of a beloved high schooler in a small Pacific Northwest town, Twin Peaks is a shocking mix of mystery, infidelity and the supernatural — territory that TV contemporaries such as Cheers, The Golden Girls and a Mission: Impossible reboot wouldn’t have dared touch. By building an incredible ensemble of characters — many entangled in complex romantic webs — and placing them in a town that feels both modern and oddly out of time, Lynch brought his surreal sensibilities to mainstream television and the office water cooler.
Fire Walk With Me serves as a prequel to the series, set in the days leading up to the murder that begins the story. I only saw it recently, and now I understand why that theater experience stuck with my mom for so long. Without television censors, Lynch pushes the darkness even further, revealing just how deeply the town’s evil runs through its residents. Originally running nearly three hours, the film was cut down, with the removed scenes later released as The Missing Pieces. I was lucky enough to see a combined three-hour version of both, and it was well worth the extra time.
As a whole, Twin Peaks remains a seminal work that continues to inspire stories across every medium — including video games such as the recent Alan Wake 2. It’s hard to explain the experience of watching it. As the kids say, it’s a “vibes” thing — one that hits just as hard whether it’s your first trip to Twin Peaks or your fifteenth.
So this spring, head over to the IPH, turn your phone off and enjoy a damn fine drink while visiting a town where everyone knows everyone and nothing is what it seems!