“The basic story was far from original. But in the hands of two visionary creators like David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks took the familiar and transformed it into a series no one could have anticipated,” (Burns 2).
In Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks, Andy Burns takes a look at the early nineties show Twin Peaks and how it made a mark on the cultural zeitgeist at the time before seemingly disappearing from the mainstream, though leaving it’s mark regardless on the television shows and movies we watch today.
I love ECW’s Pop Classics series. I love how they range from more mainstream to niche works and how regardless of the topic each one is written with great love for the topic they are coming. That’s no different with Andy Burns’ Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks where Burns explains his love for the series through fanzines and a website which is sadly no longer up. I was excited to read this book as Twin Peaks had been on my watch list for a long time, I actually bought the book before starting the series as motivation to watch it. As such, I waited to read this until after I finished The Return only to realize fairly early on when reading this that this was published before The Return came out. I’d love to read an expanded form of this book including the third season, or even a sequel book just discussing that because I think it needs one.
But Burns’ book is well researched, he explains what made TV was like before and after Twin Peaks as well as the attitude towards it from a Hollywood perspective at the time. While TV shows and miniseries are all the rage now in the early-nineties, and honestly into the 2010s, the line between movie actor and TV actor rarely crossed. TV shows were seen as a downgraded job compared to movies, which is why it was a big deal to see David Lynch who at the time was a Hollywood director decide to move to television.
Burns was lucky in his book to get some of the actors, directors, and creators of the show to speak to him for his book. For the most part I liked his analysis and I did enjoy that he focused on the bizarre and at times dark humour that exists in Twin Peaks, though I was surprised by the lack of care he gave to the character Denise. In the world of Twin Peaks, Denise is a transwoman FBI agent played by David Duchovny (it was the nineties) and for the time the show came out the character was treated with quite a lot of respect. When Twin Peaks: The Return came out in 2017 Lynch plays a character who famously tells Denise that he told the other FBI agents that they could “fix [their] hearts or die” when learning of her transition. Despite Burns wealth of information and love of the show, I was surprised to see Denise reduced to one sentence, and for the implication that her character was present for laughs when her identity as a transwoman was shown very seriously and with love.
While Burns’ care towards Twin Peaks is obvious in the show, I wanted a little more. The Pop Classics books are bite-sized essays of information, but with the small wordcount they sometimes come across as more summary than analysis, and I’m a sucker for a good fan analysis. Still, this is a great beginners book for fans of Twin Peaks, but I’ll probably be searching for something that goes a bit deeper into the lore.
Publication: February 1 2015
Publisher: ECW Press
Pages: 112 pages (Paperback)
Source: Owned
Genre: Non-Fiction, Essays, Film, TV
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:
Damn good coffee, cherry pie, and the “big bang of auteur television” ― why Twin Peaks deserves to be a pop culture classic. In 1990, avant garde filmmaker David Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet) and acclaimed television writer Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues) teamed up to create a television show that would redefine what the medium could achieve in a one-hour drama. With Twin Peaks, the duo entranced audiences with the seemingly idyllic town, its quirky characters, and a central mystery ― who killed Laura Palmer? In a town like Twin Peaks, nothing is as it seems, and in Wrapped in Plastic, pop culture writer Andy Burns uncovers and explores the groundbreaking stylistic and storytelling methods that have made the series one of the most influential and enduring shows of the past 25 years.
Sarah O'Connor 