#i can do it with a broken heart was written for lucy chen in these trying times of chenford angst

[timothyslucy]

"I CAN HOLD MY BREATH I'VE BEEN DOING IT SINCE HE LEFT" GOD WHAT A CHENFORD CODED LYRIC

[sylvies-chen]

Chenford +#67

67. “If you don’t want to talk about it then say so. Don’t lie and pretend to be fine when you clearly aren’t.”

Tim’s been acting weird all day.

It’s obvious to Lucy. The line on his forehead feels more harsh and prominent, he starts walking with just a little more determination, and he doesn’t call her Lucy once all day. He only calls her Chen— and even, on occasion, just plain “Officer”. It’s clear that something’s going on with him, it’s written right there in the everything about him.

Only she talks to Jackson about it, and he’s surprised by it.

“He seems normal to me,” he shrugs.

“Are you serious? You don’t see how obviously upset he is? He’s been pursing his lips and gritting his teeth all day, it’s freaking me out.”

“I’m pretty sure Tim’s always like that,” Jackson points out, slightly teasing.

“No, he isn’t,” she corrects him. Her tone gets slightly defensive and it should alarm her, but she’s sort of gotten used to being protective of Tim. “He’s calculating, not cruel, remember? I’m telling you, something’s up.”

“Well have you asked him about it?”

“Yeah, but he says that nothing’s going on and he’s compeltely fine. Typical Tim Bradford,” she chuckles dryly. “He’s met a feeling worth talking about.”

“Or,” Jackson counters, taking her by the shoulders and guiding her to the locker room as Lucy’s too caught up in thought to do it herself, “maybe he really is fine and you’re reading into things.”

“I know Tim though,” she protests meekly with a pout. “There’s got to be something wrong…”

Jackson sort of gives up after that. It’s pointless arguing with her when she has her mind set on something, Lucy knows that about herself. But she can’t help it, the way she worries— she never can, with Tim.

She leaves Jackson and changes into her plain clothes, having just got off a long and tiring shift. He promises to meet her back at the apartment and they came in separate cars so she’s allowed to take her sweet time with getting ready. Which is probably for the best, because her mind is still caringly fixated on Tim Bradford and that damn scowl he’s had on all day, accompanied by the bazillion unconvincing ressurances he’d given her.

It’s why she jumps— literally jumps up off the bench she’s sitting on— at the chancel to talk to Tim when she sees him getting ready to leave.

“Tim,” she calls out, scurrying to catch up to him.

He slows his pace and turns around, eyeing her slightly. “Officer Chen,” he nods courteously.

That stings. She doesn’t know why, but it stings. She doesn’t want to be Officer Chen, she wants to go back to before, to the happy Tim she’s come to know, who’d trusted her to let her know him. The one who called her Lucy. Just Lucy.

“Ok, what is up with you?” Her question comes out in a tone that’s as exasperated as she feels. Her hands fling out to her sides as if inviting answers. She wants those answers badly.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been acting stone cold all day, you’re starting to remind me of the old you,” she explains. “Something’s up, I know it.”

“Lucy,” he starts through pursed lips, his eyes fixed on hers almost as if warning her that he doesn’t want to go down this road. She realizes in his own way, he’s pleading with her. “Nothing happened.”

“I don’t believe you,” she argues. “I think something happened.”

“Oh do you now?” He looks at her, slightly bewildered and irritated. But that’s how she knows she’s close— Tim always gets the most defensive when she’s about to hit a sore spot.

“Yeah, I do. But I’m not trying to pressure you here, so fine. If you don’t want to talk about it then say so. Don’t lie and pretend to be fine when you clearly aren’t.”

He blinks at her, taken aback by her sudden honesty.

Then, after a humbled moment of silence where he looks down at his shoes while mulling through his turmoil, he returns the gesture with some honesty of his own.

“Mick went back to rehab,” he tells her simply; painfully.

“Back? But I thought he just got out last week.”

“He did. And now he’s back again. After one damn week,” he whispers as if cursing to himself quietly. It makes for a very private, intimate moment that Lucy feels strangely happy that she’s a part of. He’s letting her stand here and see him this vulnerable. That trust alone makes her heart race.

“Oh,” she replies, almost whispering herself. “Is that why you were so angry? Because you felt like you’d failed him somehow?”

“I got Mick into rehab in the first place because I felt guilty about ruining his career. But he was getting help. He was supposed to be getting better,” he explains defeatedly with a quivering lip.

“And then he relapsed. Progress isn’t linear, Tim. It’s just… part of the process. He’ll recover, I know he will.”

“What makes you so sure?”

His question is mostly skeptical but she can detect the slightest bit of curiosity in his tone so she answers him seriously anyway. “Because you’re a good friend. You’ll be there for him just like before.”

He nods, basking in the weight of her soothing words. She almost expects him to brush it off and go back to his normal, slightly emotionally stunted self after that but he doesn’t. He just keeps staring at her, looking a little worn down and a little broken.

“Thanks,” he replies half-assedly.

Lucy stands there, unsure of what to say. But really, only one way to comfort him feels right at the moment, so damn the consequences of it. “Will it be weird if I hug you?”

Her question doesn’t hang in the air for more than half a second before Tim snorts dryly. “I’m not six,” he tells her meekly. His hands are stuffed in his pockets and he doesn’t meet her eye for the first time since they started this conversation.

Lucy knows Tim is too proud to ever wholeheartedly say yes to that question. But his response isn’t a no which, in his own way, is a yes. So she takes the risk and closes the space between them, wrapping her arms underneath his and around his torso until her hands are sprawled across his back. Her hands just barely wrap around all the way and it makes her feel realize how tiny she is compared to him. Only in this moment, it’s him that feels small and vulnerable. And really, truly gentle.

He doesn’t react at first, just tenses up under her touch. This isn’t exactly professional and the few of their colleagues that are still in the building at this hour could see them at any moment, but Lucy doesn’t care. Platonic or otherwise, Lucu knows Tim needs this hug. On some level, she needs it to. Wants it.

Then, as if by some miracle, he reacts and softens under her embrace, leaning over so that his head rests on her shoulder and wrapping a muscled arm around her back. It feels just like it did when he held her after he found her in that barrel. It’s warm, it’s safe.

He sniffles, lets the comfort of her hug ease his pain. And in that moment, she revels being the one person who could make him feel alright.

[douxreviews]

Twin Peaks - ‘Pilot’ Review

“Mr. Cooper, you didn’t know Laura Palmer.”

Twin Peaks is both cultish enough and popular enough that there’s a thrill every time one fan meets another—and those thrills aren’t too far between. When it premiered in early 1990, people went wild. Remember when we were all so excited about Lost? Move those conversations to the water coolers instead of the internet, add some hairspray, and that’s about it.

And just like that, it was gone. After the initial adoration, viewers quickly drifted away or were turned off by the more surreal aspects. When the show’s second season finished (completing a total of just 30 episodes), viewership was way, way down. The follow-up movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me did okay…and yet the die-hard fans remained as intense as only fans can be.

I only experienced those early days by proxy. I was deemed too young to watch the show (looking back, I agree with that decision, but it made me so angry at the time—if I could watch Murder, She Wrote, why not this?), but my father loved it. My father lets himself get involved in exactly one TV show at a time. Sometimes he picks a clunker—The Event was his choice in this past season, poor guy—and sometimes he strikes gold: 24, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos. Back in the day, he loved Twin Peaks enough to buy the soundtrack, which he frequently played on our family’s only CD player, in the living room. My pre-teen years were scored by Angelo Badalamenti. No wonder I turned out so odd.

My first real Twin Peaks experience was in high school, when the boyfriend recommended we watch the prequel (made after the episodes aired) Fire Walk With Me to prepare for seeing Lost Highway in the theater. FWWM was okay, given that I had no back-story (fore-story?), but Lost Highway was great. It appealed to my desire to dissect things. (Well, not living things. I’m squeamish.)

It took me five years to finally watch Twin Peaks, the series. The only copies in the town I then lived in were on VHS, rented from the tiny independent video store housed in a house. (When they went out of business, I owed them a late fine of $2. I still feel bad about that.) I promptly got the bug, watched the tapes as fast as I could rent them, and theorized like mad with the one person I knew who also liked the show, a kindly bartender. He explained the finale to me over strong drinks, and then I was done with the show. This was before the internet was fun, so it didn’t occur to me to look elsewhere for more theories and speculations, much less a fan community. I haven’t re-watched it in the many years since.

All of that backstory is by way of warning: I’m not a die-hard Peakean. In fact, I don’t even know if TPers have a name for themselves. That’s all information I could easily find out, now that I’m used to spending my days glued to a computer screen, but I’m oddly disinclined to eavesdrop on 20-year-old arguments, get tangled up in sides, camps, or even the dreaded ‘shipper wars that every show has. When I review this show, I want to watch the show and talk about the show. I don’t want to pick sides, start fights, or invest in a SuperDuperGold DVD set. Twin Peaks isn’t that kind of show for me.

What kind of show is it, then? The pilot episode doesn’t do justice to the delightful zaniness that is to come. Frost and Lynch shot the pilot, Lynch did a movie (Wild at Heart), and then Frost and Lynch began work on the first non-pilot episode. The pilot establishes important characters and a few of their relationships. It welcomes us to the town of Twin Peaks, pulls back the lace curtains a bit—but not all the way—and leaves me with a strange impression of humor-laced tragedy. In other words, even in the face of tragedy, people still make bad jokes, still have bizarre personality tics, and generally still live their lives.

That tragedy, of course, is Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), who is found dead in the show’s opening minutes. Laura Palmer is screen-siren beautiful even in death, and just as inscrutable. We learn in the pilot that she is a homecoming queen who dates the football quarterback, a tutor, and a beloved daughter.

But for some reason, no one seems surprised that she is dead: At the end of the episode, her secret boyfriend James Hurley told Donna, Laura’s best friend, that “It all made some sort of terrible sense that she died.” Even before that, her mother’s panic in the morning when she can’t be found feels like she had been waiting for that moment for months, and her father, once warned of Mama Palmer’s panic, tells the sheriff that his daughter is dead, rather than the other way around. Even the opening lines, when Pete Martell tells Sheriff Truman “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic,” the first question isn’t “Who?” but “Where?” When Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James (James Marshall) see the police at school, their first thought is of Laura, and their first reaction is to cry.

The overall impression is of a town, and a girl, on the brink. Laura finally tipped over into something—shocking but not surprising itself. The town, meanwhile, continues on its way for a while, but might never be the same. With a population just over 50,000, Twin Peaks may be “a town where a yellow light still means ‘slow down’ instead of ‘speed up,’” but the main industry is intrigue (with a healthy dose of tourism and logs).

And the intrigue industry is definitely impacting the tourist and log economies. The Hornes, who own The Great Northern hotel, are trying to con some Norwegians into building a golf course (with houses), but son Johnny has “mental issues” and daughter Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) is one breakdown away from a borderline-personality diagnosis. Meanwhile, Benjamin Horne is working with Catherine Martell to take down Josie Packard (Joan Chen), Catherine’s sister-in-law who inherited the mill. The Sheriff is dating Josie Packard, while his friend Big Ed (James’s uncle) is cheating on his crazy wife Nadine with sexy Norma (Peggy Lipton). Norma, of course, is Shelly Johnson’s (Madchen Amick) boss—and Shelly is married to a crazy truck-driving maniac who beats her and just so happens to come home with blood on his shirt after Laura’s death.

While the adults play those games, the teenagers follow suit. Laura was dating Bobby in public and James in private; Donna was dating Bobby’s best friend Mike in public and falls for James in the pilot. Bobby and Mike, unfortunately, are terrible actors: I sometimes wonder if the director just said, “Give up acting! Just stare and vibrate a little without blinking!” This makes their teenage rages and exaggerated misbehavior all the more disturbing, as they seem just like the cartoon villains one would find on a Lifetime special. No wonder Donna’s dad doesn’t let Mike in the house.

In life, that was Laura’s world. Now that she’s dead, her place in that world—and whatever else it might encompass—has to be discovered by a hero, a man who should need no introduction, the greatest detective who ever lived: Special Agent Dale Cooper.

Special Agent Dale Cooper is a straightforward man who appreciates good coffee, good pie, plain speaking…and absolutely loves the process of detection and discovery. In the pilot, some of his smiles seemed horribly inappropriate, until I realized he was So Very Happy that he had found a clue—he is certainly not haunted by Laura Palmer’s death, at least not in any traditional sad-detective way. How he will come to relate to Laura and the circumstances of her death is one of the main arcs of the series.

How the town relates to that death and those circumstances is equally important. In the pilot it emerges that Laura did not die alone: Ronnette Polanski lived through whatever rape and torture killed Laura, but remains comatose. Ronnette gets short shrift in the town’s imagination, perhaps because the cast of characters the show focuses on knew Laura better, perhaps because Ronnette was working-class and Laura came from Twin Peaks’s small aristocracy.

In the pilot, the town is like a live wire. When the kill site is discovered, there’s a quick shot of the train car surrounded by men who aren’t police officers, holding rifles as though they expect the killer to still be inside. The pilot effectively captures the way each member of a small community can be struck differently but with equal virulence by the same tragedy. Likewise, it introduces the idea that no one can really know Laura Palmer, not James the secret boyfriend who claims she wasn’t acting like herself, perhaps not even Donna who claims to know her better than Laura realized. And if we can’t know Laura, perhaps we can’t know anything that’s going on in this tiny town.

Bits and Pieces

• Quick shout-out to the folks at the Sheriff’s Station: Lucy, Andy, Hawk. We’ll see more of them.

• Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), wacky shrink, was rubbing a very inappropriate place on his hula-dancer tie.

• Crazy Nadine seems to have a fixation with her drapes.

• The severed moose head on the table in the bank. Yep, it’s a David Lynch TV show.

• Zooming in on an image to catch a reflection of the person taking the film is equally Lynchian, as are the flickering light in the morgue (symbolizes a reality-shift or a personal satori) and the stoplight.

• Diane, to whom Special Agent Dale Cooper dictates his every move and every thought—I do not envy your job.

Clues?

• Laura’s diary entry for a few weeks previous said she was “nervous about meeting J tonight.” Who is J?

• Cooper says that the letter “R” under Laura’s finger matches her case to that of Teresa Banks, a year ago in another part of the state.

• Laura’s half of the broken-heart necklace was found in the traincar on a mound of dirt with a scrap of paper on which was written, in blood, “Fire walk with me.”

• Ronnette Polaski advertised her services in Flesh World, and Laura kept a copy.

• According to James, Bobby had told Laura that he’d killed someone.

For all its atmosphere, the pilot episode of Twin Peaks does not give an accurate picture of where this series is headed—and, trust me, it’s going to some very weird places. Having said that, it does a very impressive job of establishing relationships both covert and overt, and focusing on the two emphases of this show: Laura Palmer and the town itself. The final shots, of an unidentified hand taking James’s half of the heart necklace from the woods, of the stoplight, and of Mrs. Palmer’s sudden screaming as though she has seen something—in the living room? The scene in the woods?—are just a hint of the mysteries to come.

Three and a half out of four Douglas firs.

(Let’s try to keep spoilers for future episodes out of the comments. There might be someone out there who still doesn’t know who killed Laura Palmer.)

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)