Dream Breakers: Twin Peaks, Ads and All

David Lynch went hot and cold on commercials. In one interview in 1990, he claimed to like how advertisements broke television shows into pieces, calling the remnants “little eleven-minute movies,” thinking them “kinda neat.” Yet when he spoke with the editor of Lynch on Lynch (1997), the director couldn’t stand the thought of ad breaks, nor the loud “gangbusters” approach of marketing. “I would turn the whole set off!” he exclaimed. American broadcasters were sacrificing a chance for people at home to enter dreams, he rued, and for what? Selling products? That ruined everything. 

The first episode of Twin Peaks aired in the US on April 8, 1990, as ABC’s “Sunday Night Movie.” At nine o’clock that evening (eight o’clock central), some 34 million people tuned in to watch the 94-minute pilot episode—although it came closer to two hours, what with the ads. For those arriving later to Twin Peaks through streaming or boxsets, it can be hard to imagine five unskippable, often brash interruptions to the mounting mysteries of the pilot. For those who watched that Sunday? They were yanked intermittently from the revelation of Laura Palmer’s murder into other media and a carousel of American commodities: pizza, beer, and appetite suppressants; soda, pharmaceuticals, and cars. On network television, that was just how it was.

Clashing against a fictional town where, as the ever-quotable Dale Cooper puts it in the first episode, yellow traffic lights mean “slow down” and not “speed up,” these spots accelerate impatiently. In one Ford ad, a process shot of metal machine arms is there one instant and gone the next. Comparable shots of the sawmill in Twin Peaks’s opening credits last much longer: Images take time to show cogs and blades twisting, turning, sparking, much in line with the tempo of the show. Commercials were edited faster than that, zooming past means of production toward the tagline. (“Sometimes you gotta break the rules,” one fast-food restaurant swaggers.) Lynch complained ads were ten decibels louder too, no matter what Twin Peaks’s talented sound mixers attempted. Get up from the couch and grab snacks during breaks, sure—but ads, to Lynch’s ears, blared aggressively enough to be heard with one’s head deep in the fridge. 

He’s right, too. Find a tape recording of the pilot’s original broadcast, and actors in ads do tend to shout. Turtlemania, after all, is sweeping the nation in 1990. Burger King knows it, and goes fires blazing in the first ad break to hawk a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video cassette. Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael then return in the second ad break, where a booming voice reminds audiences April 7th–15th is National Cadillac Week too. Cowabunga! In the next ad break, domestic drapery in an Aquafresh spot blows and swooshes with “a brush of fresh air” that would, with its blustery cacophony, surely send Nadine Hurley into an absolute frenzy. Grace Zabriskie’s traumatized scream might close the pilot, but—cut to the fifth and final break before the end credits—a baby cries immediately after, apparently desperate to be gently lullabyed by the smooth ride of an Acura car. When Angelo Badalamenti’s beautifully hypnotic soundtrack comes in three minutes later, an ABC newscaster drowns it out with some babble about baseball and tomorrow’s lineup on Good Morning America. 

If Lynch knows atmosphere—the sweet scent of Douglas fir, the unsettling sensation of flickering fluorescent lights—then most ads know just how to harsh a vibe. Rapidly edited or flatly lit, silly or unironically self-serious, none of these ads resemble Lynch’s own stylish work for commercials. Directing for cigarettes, cars, and fashion houses, Lynch shunned the post-cinematic language of most marketing, and insisted on silver-screen aesthetics instead. His 1988 ads for Obsession by Calvin Klein, for example, are seductive visions of silky superimposition and diaphanous play between shadow and light. There is, mercifully, no shouting. Lynch knows that silence and absence are key to desire; he keeps the product at hand suspended, out of reach until the final frame. 

It isn’t that Twin Peaks exists entirely apart from the marketplace of capitalist America. (At the start of the pilot, a carton of Quaker Oats and a box of Cap’n Crunch on the kitchen counter behind Sarah Palmer quietly set the scene of an American household.) It’s just that conservative dollar-grabbers who cannot read the room are absolutely bad guys, dream breakers. Owning the town’s hotel and managing the local sawmill, two such sinister cash lovers roll their eyes at the mass grief that has flooded Twin Peaks. Never mind those rivers of feeling—it just spoils their scheming, wrecks their sales. 

Back in the commercial breaks, real-world drama distracts from the scandal in Twin Peaks, as news segments report on the dying days of Communism in Hungary, ferry arson in Sweden, and three murders at home in America. Corpses other than Laura Palmer’s pile up. You can see why Lynch started to take against chopping up shows like this. Vaseline presents viewers with moisturized, beaming hands in the third ad break, threatening to smear its jellied relief over the ugly, grisly image of Laura’s greying dead fingers (which Lynch and cowriter Mark Frost fought to keep in—and keep long—against network executives’ concern and disgust). Nothing is left to haunt and resonate when there are stories to tell, things to sell. 

With the fifth and final break, a preview of next week’s episode announces a change of scheduling—the rest of the season airs on Thursdays. That slot got shuffled around again come the second season. When the show returned that September, ABC aired a spot that dramatizes a network executive asking a boardroom which great genius scheduled Twin Peaks and two other hit shows (Vietnam War drama China Beach and Civil War western Young Riders) on Saturdays—of all days! “Save our jobs,” pleaded the title card. It was weird, and goofy, but it spoke to Lynch’s frustrations too. 

Appearing as a guest on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in 1991, Lynch blames that scheduling decision for Twin Peaks’s dwindling ratings. He explains it, one showbiz David to another: People who watch Twin Peaks are party people, too cool ever to be in on Saturday nights. “I’ve heard that Wednesday at ten… That’s a prime slot,” Lynch smiles to the host. He then asks audiences to send complaints about all this to the president of ABC, reading the postal address off the scrap of yellow paper he pulls out from his pocket. It is more charismatic by far than ABC’s spot. Whatever the campaign—petition this executive, watch this show, and even buy this product—Lynch did it better. As for those dream breakers? Audiences could write to them at ABC Television, 77 West 66th Street, New York 10023. They needed to be told.