Olfactory Fiction
One term that does as good a job as any of describing my myriad of personal interests is ‘cultish’. I like things that attract a group of dedicated followers. Often (although not always) these are things that few others are interested in. While this has been a trend throughout my life, with regards to mass media it crystallized in my sophomore year of high school. Before that I may have been interested in moderately offbeat books, but my taste in television and movies was decidedly conventional. I watched the occasional Star Trek, but with no more passion than I watched Matlock or Family Ties. These things filled time and occupied the back of my mind, but they were not objects of passion or parts of my identity. That changed with Twin Peaks.
I was actually a latecomer to the show. I missed the flurry of interest across America during the summer of 1990, and when I read synopses in Newsweek the show seemed odd in a dull sort of way. I ended up flipping the channels and staying on an episode because it was set in a brothel and featured barely-dressed women, which to my sixteen-year-old mind beat out whatever cop show I was on NBC, my usual network. But it didnÂ’t take me long to get caught up in the story, and begin taping every episode and rewatching them to catch every detail of the story and the style. Of course, this meant that I watched the show through its sudden decline in popularity, which resulted in its being cancelled after the second season and left us with an ending that felt maddening (although now it seems somehow appropriate). Twin Peaks was an amazing self-contained world, which I could approach on my own terms and engaged my mind and spirit more than any other piece or art (perhaps because at the time I did not think of television as a form of art). And although it excited me about the possibility of television, it also spoiled me for other programs. Since then I have had some great moments watching The Sopranos, and last yearÂ’s discovery of Buffy was excellent, but that is about all of the narrative television that I craved watching for myself. Everything else was watched for social reasons, in moments where I needed dull distraction, or because I had some hope that it would be like Twin Peaks. In fact, the showÂ’s lasting legacy on me may be that it turned me into a viewer of film. Soon I was renting David Lynch movies and hunting around Blockbuster looking at who directed a video rather than who starred in it.
Because the world of Twin Peaks meant so much to me, many of its details remain etched in my mind. For example, in the show the nefarious spirit of BOB was represented by the smell of scorched engine oil. In retrospect, this seems like a curious artistic choice. Television is a medium that gives you access to the two strongest senses, it seems strange that in anything besides a cooking show you would want to appeal to other ones. But Twin Peaks was nothing if not unconventional. Having just begun driving our old but well-maintained station wagon, I had little occasion to smell engine oil. So the knowledge that it resembled a fictitious villain was filed away, but never forgotten. I recently completed a long and successful road trip. Towards the end of the trip, I started having a little difficulty with my engine. Whenever I stopped it would emit smoke, and the smoke would smell of BOB. I was momentarily not in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee but rather in a small town in Washington. (On the surface they are surprisingly similar.) People say that smell is the sense that is best at jogging memory. But it is amazing that a smell which is new to me can have such strong associations with a memory that was made up.