Catherine Coulson, the actor who portrayed the inscrutable Log Lady on the cult classic TV series “Twin Peaks,” has died.
According to the NYT, Coulson worked with David Lynch on “Eraserhead” and was set to reprise her role as the Log Lady in a “Twin Peaks” reboot scheduled for next year.
I suspect many of you have never heard of “Twin Peaks,” but it was a BFD on TV 25 years ago. I recently watched the first season again on Netflix, and it holds up over time.
Open thread.
BGinCHI
I just rewatched Season 1 as well, Betty, and I agree. I’m not a huge Lynch fan, but what he is doing there is so far ahead of its time I couldn’t believe it. When it came out it was just so weird, but now you can see how it anticipates so many aesthetic moves made by TV and movies now.
It’s spoof of High School melodrama is particularly smart. And if you think about what John Hughes was doing at the time it’s particularly interesting.
Also, too, I can’t get the damn theme music out of my head.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
She started her career working on camera crews and didn’t really start acting until “Twin Peaks.” She and Lynch were classmates at AFI.
Trust me, acting is WAY easier than working in the camera department. A whole lot less heavy lifting, for one.
Stillwater
“Something IS happening, isn’t it Margaret?”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@BGinCHI:
I don’t particularly like Lynch, and I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” fan, but for some reason the prequel movie “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” struck a huge chord with me. Still not sure why, but I think it was because Lynch let the movie show some genuine emotion instead of downplaying the tough scenes with jokes.
Patricia Kayden
Never watched Twin Peaks but RIP to Ms. Coulson.
Mike J
If I didn’t already have plans for the afternoon, I’d head to Twede’s and get some pie in her honor.
MCA1
Jeezoo, 25 years ago. I’m old.
BG’s right – that show was bizarro trippy weirdness that I completely didn’t get at the time, but it’s better now than it was then. And I’m not even “not a huge Lynch fan,” I’m no fan of his at all. The genre mashup was ahead of its time, and I have little doubt that had it premiered in today’s landscape of cable domination and Netflix and whatever else, it would have been considered perfect binge television and been a hit.
Dan
My gf at the time was a fan so I watched an episode. It was the weird dwarf scene. I decided I would never miss another episode of Cheers to watch that mess.
Eric U.
I barely remember her from the show. I think we stopped watching at the end of the first season. I keep meaning to go back and watch.
On another note, BJ has been locking up firefox for the last couple of days. Meta issue, why are browsers written in such a way that a single page element can just lock them solid? I’m sure it’s just waiting on content, I doubt I would find said content to be particularly interesting.
BGinCHI
One of the other brilliant things about the early episodes is Agent Cooper’s taking notes for a woman (maybe his boss? you don’t know) on a handheld tape recorder. It allows him to narrate his reactions to the locals while staying in investigative mode.
Plus the whole thing is filmed where Mrs. BG’s (admittedly wingnut) family have a farm. Her uncle was the fire chief of Fall’s City. The area is amazing (Snoqualmie Valley).
Steve
Hey, that’s General Hammond from SG1 when he was just a wee major!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Just in case there’s a crossover audience, the re-release of “The Iron Giant” is this weekend:
http://fathomevents.com/event/the-iron-giant-signature-edition
If you like animation and you’ve never seen it, what the hell are you waiting for? It’s rated PG and has a few scary/destructive moments, so it’s probably best for slightly older kids (maybe 10 and up).
BGinCHI
@MCA1: I agree with your agreement.
I’m not a Lynch fan at all. I always thought Blue Velvet was hugely overrated. Quirky gets old after a while. Just tell a good fucking story. That’s why TP is his best work.
Thoughtful Today
Watch it with a cup of good strong coffee.
Brachiator
Love Lynch, especially “Eraserhead,” but never got much into “Twin Peaks.”
But the show is remembered and has a loyal fan base. That’s why it’s coming back on Showtime:
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/07/08/twin-peaks-premiere-2017-mark-frost
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Have you watched the Lego movie? It’s brilliant. Really fast and really smart with ripping satire.
Like all movies in this genre, it’s for adults but kids can love it too, as my 3.5 yo does.
Iron Giant is underrated for sure.
misterpuff
@Thoughtful Today: And a piece of pie.
eric
@BGinCHI: Elephant Man BY FAR his best. one of the best movies ever.
eric
@BGinCHI: Everything is awesome!
jeffreyw
What we really need is a perfume that smells like brushing melted butter on a hot bun.
Lord Baldrick
LOG! All kids love Log!
It fits on your back!
It’s great for a snack!
It’s LOG, LOG, LOG!!!
(from Blammo)
WereBear
@Brachiator: Thanks for that!
I love the fact that such things can be brought back to reach a new audience. Just like the way eBooks has revived the concept of the mid-list for publishing.
BGinCHI
@eric: Agreed. I forgot about that. Sorry Lynch.
Germy Shoemangler
I remember seeing “Fire Walk With Me” and one scene made an impression: Characters are talking to each other in a noisy club. Lynch uses subtitles.
Up til then in other movies, characters could whisper to each other in the noisiest settings and the audience could hear them perfectly. The noisy music or whatever in the background would simply… recede. “Fire Walk” was the first realistic depiction of a noisy music club I’d ever seen.
Belafon
My 14 year old son loves Twin Peaks, can’t wait for the new season, and will be sad to hear this.
BGinCHI
@eric: That’ll be $37.
–pause–
Awesome!
trollhattan
Twin Peaks was one of a handful of shows that convinced me to end my long teevee-owning hiatus, for better or worse. One of those shows you watched with friends, both for the experience and the head-scratching. Being from the Seattle area I also spent lots of time IDing the locations–they captured the place really well, before it became an “it” destination.
BGinCHI
@jeffreyw: Everything is buns with you, Jeffrey. The blog is up here!
eric
@BGinCHI: the final scene is that movie is sublimely beautiful. i get goosebumps thinking of it and i have not seen it in years.
MaximusNYC
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Tell me about it. I spent a year working on film and TV camera crews. Ended up with a hernia. That was enough production work for me.
On the plus side, part of that year involved being a camera assistant on “Strangers With Candy”, where I got to meet a brilliant guy I’d never heard of before named Stephen Colbert. Not that we interacted much — mostly I was just putting tape marks down on the floor to indicate where he was supposed to stand in different shots.
MaximusNYC
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Interesting. Many people had the opposite reaction — enjoyed the series, but were bummed out by the darkness of the movie.
I’m a big enough Lynch fan that I loved them both. I even have the Fire Walk With Me deleted scenes that were released on Blu-Ray last year.
jeffreyw
@BGinCHI: I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about. Here, have a picture of puppies!
MaximusNYC
@eric:
Agreed. One of Lynch’s best moments.
BGinCHI
@jeffreyw: You magnificent bastard.
trollhattan
@MaximusNYC:
Only did television, never film. Definitely developed a hate-hate relationship with cables. Fucking miles of cables and back then, the camera cables were nearly an inch thick and youuugely susceptible to failure. The cameras themselves were monstrous compared to today’s, which are, like, 80% lens.
Good times.
eric
@MaximusNYC: “I am not a monster, i am a human being.” Hurt’s performance is, in my mind, the most under appreciated performance in cinema. Unadulterated genius.
(Also, Raul Julia in Kiss of the Spider Woman.)
sigaba
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
You’re also less likely to be hit by trains on non-union shoots in Georgia. (Final OSHA report came out yesterday.)
I’m curious about the new Twin Peaks but I’m skeptical more generally of anything with Lynch’s name on it nowadays. I’ve done some work over the last few years for a production house that “ghost-produces” David Lynch’s media projects and music videos. What this amounts to is, some musician says “Wouldn’t it be cool if David Lynch directed my music video”, and David Lynch says “You can put my name on it as long as I get lots of money and I don’t have to do any work.” He may take half an hour and “consult” once everything’s done, but that’s it. A lot of “name” fine artists go in for this shenanigans.
I heard Log Lady on NPR, I think it was The Frame a few months ago. She sounded really excited to get back to the show. She still owned the log.
canuckistani
I really liked Season 1 of TP. But once the big mystery was solved, it kind of wallowed around looking for a plot and never really grabbed my attention again.
Amir Khalid
@Steve:
The late Don S. Davis also played Agent Scully’s father in two memorable episodes of The X-Files. He’s not the only Twin Peaks cast member to show up on The X-Files. David Duchovny had a recurring role as a cross-dressing Federal agent.
@BGinCHI:
Agent Cooper’s boss, Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, was played by David Lynch himself. Dale Cooper addressed someone named Diane in the recordings. The liner notes to the original TV show’s soundtrack album include headshots of all the characters. Among the headshots is a photo of Cooper’s tape recorder, captioned with the name Diane.
MaximusNYC
@trollhattan: Ugh, cables. One of my worst days was shooting a basketball game scene, where the camera was dollying at top speed up and down the court. We were shooting HD video, but this was a very new thing at the time, and the camera had a couple different cables coming out of it — one for power, one for a video feed to the monitor, I think. (I’m sure now the power would be batteries and the monitor feed would be wireless.) I was literally sprinting as I played out the cables, knowing that if they got caught on anything the camera and possibly the operator would get yanked right off the dolly. Thankfully this didn’t happen. But I did get publicly chewed out by my backstabbing 1st AC for not coiling the cables back up fast enough between takes.
Oh yeah, and an idiot producer had the idea that there should be clouds of Fuller’s earth wafting thru the air (I think to make the light look “shafty” or something?). The crew members were all given crappy dust masks, but I still ended up coughing up grey mucus for a couple of days afterward.
Roger Moore
@Lord Baldrick:
It’s LOG, It’s LOG
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood
It’s LOG, It’s LOG
It’s better than bad, it’s good
MomSense
@jeffreyw:
EARS! Look at the ears on that pup. Oh wow, I would find it difficult not to take that little cutie home with me.
MaximusNYC
@eric: Oh, I got confused — thought you guys were talking about the final scene of FWWM. But yes, The Elephant Man is excellent thru and thru.
different-church-lady
Wait… did you say 25 years ago?
[whimpers pathetically…]
MaximusNYC
@canuckistani: It’s tragic that ABC stupidly forced Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal Laura’s killer a third of the way thru season 2. They had wanted to keep the mystery going indefinitely. The series felt deflated after that… and it didn’t help that Lynch more or less neglected it to go shoot Wild at Heart.
But when he came back for the slam-bang 2-part finale, the magic definitely returned with him.
Amir Khalid
@eric:
I remember that line as “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a man!”
trollhattan
Since is open thread, which Republican presidential candidate will take the lead on promulgating this gentleman’s Shocking Discovery?
I’ll take Fiorina for five-hundred.
kdaug
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Crossover my ass. Iron Giant is brilliant for any of these curmudgeons.
Especially those who like David Lynch.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I’ll take Carson.
kdaug
Go big with the Wig! Wigington 2016!
NotMax
@canuckistan
As I commented about Lynch/Twin Peaks at the time of the original airing of season 2, “Anyone can do obscure if he has no idea where the story is going.”
Season 1: Groundbreaking (for TV)
Season 2: A hot mess.
Shall take the opportunity to once again recommend the first few seasons (season 4 went way off the track but they mostly redeemed themselves with season 5) of the British series Misfits to those who liked Twin Peaks. Capsule description: what if David Lynch and Patrick McGoohan collaborated to write X-men?
SatanicPanic
@Roger Moore: Trump for sure
ruemara
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I kinda prefer the lifting. But it seems I’m being relegated to the director track.
dedc79
Rich Lowry is seeing starbursts (again):
MaximusNYC
@kdaug: Lynch fans are generally not curmudgeons, in my experience. They tend to be people with a good sense of the absurd and a love of all things weird. Lynch haters, on the other hand…
ruemara
I must be the only animation fan who doesn’t care for Iron Giant.
Calouste
@trollhattan: To use the phrasing popular with our friends over at Wonkette: All of them, Katie.
different-church-lady
@MaximusNYC: Haters of all kinds, for that matter.
About 15 years into adulthood I figured something out: pissing on other peoples’ small joys is a lousy way to go about life.
Brachiator
@ruemara:
I liked it, but it didn’t knock me out.
I do appreciate the fact, though, that other animators and movie makers have found it to be compelling and inspirational.
japa21
@trollhattan: Once upon a time, idiots like that would never have even been interviewed, not even by a local station. Now even nuttier ideas are allowed to circulate to the masses, a portion of which are bound to fall for them.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@sigaba:
Yep, Sarah Jones is who I was thinking of. Some asshole always has to be the new John Landis. It’s a miracle only one person was killed on those tracks.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@ruemara:
The real power is in being the producer, which is why all of the big directors are actually producer/directors. Though, interestingly, the REALLY big guys like Spielberg and Scorsese do have producers they work with so the big guy doesn’t have to personally keep track of the budget.
John Revolta
@different-church-lady: Damn, here I was all ready to start bitching about how over-rated I thought Lynch was and now you went and ruined it for me. Pot meets kettle, film at eleven.
ruemara
@Brachiator: I’m going to watch it again, but I’ve watched it twice and it doesn’t move me as much as I thought it would. Tastes vary. I do agree, it is a well done film.
MaximusNYC
@different-church-lady: Yes. It’s important to realize that differences of taste are not that important. Character is. When we’re defining our identities in our teens and twenties, we often tend to overlook that.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I’m dying at the budget thing. I want a producer. Instead I have worthless online sales hubs. Stupid money.
Germy Shoemangler
On the subject of Twin Peaks, I remember the soundtrack fondly. Those deep electric guitars. And Julee Cruise! Her “(I Want You) Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” was one single chord, no chord changes… and it worked perfectly.
And for a while, the Twin Peaks soundtrack sound came to represent modern music. I remember watching a commercial, probably for some cleaning product or prepared food, and they were doing the cliche “through the decades” thing that commercials sometimes do. They started with (do wop!) 50s, on to (british invasion!) 60s, disco 70s… and then when they arrived at “present day” they featured deep electric guitars ala Angelo Badalamenti.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MaximusNYC:
Don’t like how Lynch gets his actors to play difficult, emotional scenes and then undercuts them by tapdancing away and pretending he meant it all as a joke.
In his defense, he’s gotten much better about it than he was in his “Blue Velvet” and “Wild At Heart” days, but I still don’t entirely trust him to not make a joke out of rape and sexual abuse like he did in those films.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
It was a different context, but Fred Brooks said you could do it any way. You can have a single producer/director, the producer be charge and the director subordinate, or the director in charge and the producer subordinate. He felt that most projects in his field were too big for a producer/director- it’s hard enough to to either job, much less both- so that it was preferable to keep them as separate jobs. I suspect that’s true for most movies, too, and that most of those producer/directors are really directors first, and they let their subordinates do the real work as producers. They just want the title and the control rather than the actual duties of producing.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@ruemara:
When you’re doing an independent film, one of the ways you need to hire is finding people who are willing to do double duty. Your actors need to be willing to help move props around. You set decorator should be willing to help with lights. Etc.
One of my screenwriting teachers at UCLA Extension wrote and directed an independent film that starred his wife, and one of the things they did during the hiring and auditions was bring their toddler daughter along and make sure everyone was comfortable with her, because anyone on the cast or crew might have to watch her during a scene. It all worked out. :-)
NCSteve
I was always a huge Lynch fan and a huge fan of Twin Peaks. Based on my conversations with people who lost interest, I think if he’d just done a better job of conveying the fact that each episode was one day and that those days were consecutive, the audience pressure to reveal the killer, already, dammit, because it’s been forever, might have been less and they could have maintained interest through at least a third season.
But “Fire Walk With Me.” Damn. The real brilliance of the series always laid in the sense of menace and horror lurking just beneath all the quirky, funny stuff, the feeling that the darkness you saw, the details of the crime scene, Laura’s autopsy, the occasional dream flashes of the murder, and the sex-tinged evil of “One Eyed Jack’s”, were only the black surface of a deep dark lake. Then they did the movie and you saw the living hell that was that poor girl’s life, a double life that, horribly, mirrored her father’s double life, and damn, the real horror was its banality, not the supernatural cause, if any.
Yeah, for a few years there, Lynch was brilliant.
goblue72
Agree with comment above, if this premiered today, it would have had a much different reception – and likely would have found a home as a Netflix Original, or one of the networks that put out the “serious” middlebrow serialized scripted dramas like HBO or AMC, possibly Showtime.
Lynch’s Pacific Northwest noir combo surrealist and satirical take on 1980’s big hair prime-time dramas like Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Dynasty was just way too ahead of its time, and way too far out for the primetime broadcast networks of the time. The teens loved it (for awhile) but I think it left the mainstream scratching its head after awhile. And the Studio Suits just wrecked it.
Lot of weird and wacky stuff came out of (and got set in) the PNW at that time. Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy & My Own Private Idaho. Matt Groening (Life Is Hell, Simpsons) and Gary Larson (The Far Side) both came from the PNW. The mainstream-y with a quirk Northern Exposure TV show.
JustRuss
If you’re a gamer and Twin Peaks fan, check out Alan Wake–the original, not the sequel. It captures a bit of the series’ creepy quirkiness, and has a character very similar to the Log Lady, RIP.
One of the DVD releases of Twin Peaks features an introduction to each episode by the Log Lady. Fun stuff.
goblue72
@NCSteve: Agreed. Laura Palmer’s murder was supposed to be a relatively unsolved MacGuffin that provided an excuse for a somewhat surreal, circular (and at times satirical) meditation on mishmash of themes (teenage angst; the occult; the insular, suffocating & downright weirdness of small town life; etc) framed within the genre of the prime time soap opera.
It was niche, arty TV in era that didn’t yet have On Demand Streaming and a segmented TV marketplace of a 1,000 channels.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: This surprises me.
MaximusNYC
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): He has walked a fine line with a lot of that material, and some people (including my wife) feel that he sometimes crosses onto the wrong side of it. I can see that interpretation, and there have been certain moments (e.g., in Lost Highway) where I felt there was a depiction of a misogynistic ugliness that felt gratuitous. The more charitable interpretation would be that his collisions between the horrifying, the beautiful, and the absurd are just a reflection of human existence in all its strangeness.
Interestingly, I have met feminist women who like Lars von Trier’s films, which often put women into absolutely horrific situations, because they view them as bluntly confronting a certain kind of reality that women sometimes do indeed face. But I find von Trier’s stuff contrived, sadistic, and intolerable. So I can understand how Lynch, when he works a similar vein of material, can rub people the wrong way.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MaximusNYC:
I think that Lynch is better than he used to be — to me, “Mulholland Drive” hits all of the old Lynchian tropes but does it without downplaying the underlying tragedy of the main character’s murderous obsession (which I still think she’s reliving over and over again in a kind of hell dimension, but views differ, I know). But to me, “Blue Velvet” was all but unwatchable because Lynch didn’t take the characters’ pain seriously, and I agree with every word of Roger Ebert’s classic one-star review of it.
The only Von Trier I’ve seen is “Dancer in the Dark,” but that one worked for me because he clearly understood the difference between being a victim and *choosing* martyrdom, and at the end of the film, Selma consciously chooses martyrdom by refusing her chance for a retrial. But it sounds like Von Trier has lost sight of that distinction in his recent films and just goes straight to torture and victimization.
Gravenstone
@BGinCHI:
Had a friend in college who raved about Blue Velvet, so a bunch of us stayed up one night to catch it on cable. To say we were underwhelmed does no justice to our collective disappointment Thereafter, whenever our friend had another suggestion about anything, he would inevitably be greeted be a chorus of “she wore bluuuuue velvet …”
Major Major Major Major
The most terrifying scenes I’ve ever seen were in Inland Empire. That movie is fucked up.
“I’m so sorry… I just… I don’t… Speak… Polish!”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Gravenstone:
Hey, at least your friend made you watch a critically acclaimed (if overpraised) movie. I had a friend insist I see Ron Howard’s “Gung Ho” with her, which was a racist piece of 80s claptrap.
Renie
My son is a youggee Lynch fan; writes about him. Anyone interested here’s a link: to his website articles.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: I didn’t say I was perfect in adhering to that ideal.
different-church-lady
@John Revolta: Claiming that you feel Lynch is overrated is one thing. Claiming that Lynch sucks and anyone who likes him is an idiot (for example) is quite another.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@different-church-lady:
Hey, I’m just saying that anyone who likes Lynch is a stupid moron who wouldn’t know a good film if it bit them in the eye. Did I come on too strong?
;-)