Fade in on a hotel room inside of the Great Northern. The sassy pulse of the Snare Drum Shuffle, the third in Angelo Badalamenti's non-continuing series of three all-purpose musical compositions, rages on. Not, mind you, that I begrudge the man even slightly his ability to help set the tone for the entire series through such consistent scoring, though I have to admit straightaway that I downright covet the business savvy that turned these notes -- the few, the proud, the recurrent -- into their own lucrative corner of the show's short-lived marketing blitz. A brief back story, if I may. Back in headier days, I maintained a proud and egalitarian co-ownership of the Twin Peaks soundtrack, a collection of Badalamenti's "contained in and inspired by" compositions that miraculously totaled something close to double digits' worth of tracks, doubtlessly including such filler additions as "Angelo Listens to the Car Radio" and "Angelo Teaching His Son to Read." When my brother, with whom I maintained this joint CD ownership, fled for the manifold freedoms of his collegiate experience a full year before I did, we were forced to split the entirety of our collection in a lamentable execution we, to this day, unironically refer to as The Divorce. Mind you, deciding upon the beneficiary of music procured almost solely as a result of my mother's hard-fought money was not the easiest of tasks, so it became necessary to rely on numerous other intangible methods of concession. And though I annexed for my parting gifts the canonized two-CD oeuvre of Scandinavian ABBA-fallout band Roxette and the to-this-day-fresh-in-its-hermetically-sealed-plastic pop stylings of a Split Enz spin-off band (a chapter of musical history unto itself) called Schnell Fenster, I was unable to convince my brother that the Twin Peaks soundtrack should be mine all mine. And so it goes in the year 2000.
Good thing there's a point in here somewhere. Oh, yes, there it is, buried underneath all that pesky self-indulgent free family therapy you all watched me get paid to drag you through. On said exalted CD, Snare Drum Shuffle took on at least three separate incarnations in tracks for which I now must make up the titles, from "Audrey's Theme" to "Cherry Stem Blues" to "Horne-u-copia," each of which distinguished itself from another by its incorporation of a lute or the sound of a human snapping, remaining otherwise identical. There must have been something special about this CD, though, because I really wanted it then and I still want it now. Meanwhile, Adam, rest assured in the fact that the World Party CD I stole from you as the U-Haul was pulling away will be returned any day now. 'Cause they're the Beatles, you know. And you can also have the "Aspects of Love" London cast recording back, whenever you want to come pick it up. It's not that I don't respect what Lloyd Webber has done for the mainstreaming of the musical theater genre and all, but, you know, showtunes are for sissies. And with "Cats" closing, well, things have just been really hard for me lately.
Dear Djb, Please check your contract and cut/copy/paste the section in which my lawyers finely detailed the part about you spending the whole freakin' recap talking about yourself and your fascinating family history. E-mail that whole part to me so I can look it over, okay? Oh, you say that section doesn't exist? Well. Exactly. Best regards, Sars. ["I didn't write that. But I will add that this Dr. Freud who keeps garnishing your paychecks is a real pest." -- Sars]
A long, slow pan of the room is soon to be accompanied by Cooper's latest address to Diane, in which he brings her up to date on the activities that landed him in Room 315 of the Great Northern. The room fulfills Truman's promise of being "clean, reasonably priced accommodations," and Cooper adds a few thoughts on his satisfaction concerning issues as diverse as the quality of the mattress, the bathroom, and the telephone. It's a very routine iteration of the first night of his stay, all of which makes the visual irony of what appears on the other end of this pan all the more effective. For during the "clean, reasonably priced accommodations" line in this opening speech, the camera pans to two black-clad feet suspended from a bar just below the ceiling, and the camera proceeds to pan slowly down the length of a human being hanging upside-down. The socks are held up by suspenders, which from this angle and in association with the shoes look very bondage-like in their appearance. Further on, the camera reaches a pair of bare knees, and there is one heart-stopping moment in which we see only skin, the indication of any future naughty-bits-concealing fabric growing more unlikely by the second. I wonder for but a brief moment of sheer, dawning horror if the middle American focus groups and Nielsen families were so vocal about their alienation from the Pilot that the execs at ABC decided to tinker with the tone of the entire series and turn it into a bawdy, cutting-edge weekly chronicle called 1-900-FBI-LOVE, a show about the wild times of a law-enforcing federal bachelor who the ladies can't resist and who lives by the credo "anything you say or do can and will cause me to be held against you in a court of love." Anything to keep up with that upstart new Fox network everyone keeps talking about. Because, you know, it's 1990 and all.
But this, oh thank the programming gods above, turns out to not so much be the case. As the camera pans down a bit more, the clothing reappears in the form of boxers and a tank top, and as Cooper enters the portion of his speech which muses on the television's reception, the camera stops on his face and I realize that we've caught up with him in the middle of his morning exercises. Finally treated to a more comprehensive shot of the room, we see Cooper hanging upside-down in his entirety. But, he adds, "the true test of any hotel, as you well know, Diane, is that morning cup of coffee, which I'll be getting back to you about within a half hour." She must be so relieved, as I can only imagine how that information comes to bear on her daily tasks as his assistant. Or as his tape recorder, as the case very well may be. He turns off the tape recorder, gets down from the poll, thinks of another essential piece of information necessary to recount to his intrepid Diane, and flips the tape recorder back on as the music abruptly ceases and an air of utmost seriousness descends. Uh-oh. What unforeseen plot development could this dramatic tonal shift signify? How 'bout this? "Diane, it struck me again earlier this morning. There are two things that continue to trouble me, and I'm speaking now not only as an agent of the bureau, but also as a human being. What really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, and who really pulled the trigger on JFK?" Hee. Dang, three and a half full minutes into this episode and I've already forgotten to communicate the most important piece of information yet: I freakin' love this show.