I spend some of my “entertainment credits” to shore up my cultural understanding of the country I live in, the United States. It is still study… it is still doing my work.
I read books you had to read in high school, and I find that they are really good books.
I watch shows that you watched, read nursery rhymes.
I am watching Twin Peaks.
It’s a cult classic, and I am learning a lot from it.
I learn that to be a cult movie, it has to be consistently weird. Like The Big Lebowski or really many of the Coen Brothers movies. The movie, Being John Malkovich.
But Twin Peaks takes it to a whole new level of weird. I am not talking of the surreal elements, those are just silly props. I am talking about people being themselves. Stupid, naive, self-centered, living in their made up universe… illustrations to “you live in a world of your own design”, having very little of your map of reality and reality have in common… all very funny and all very commonplace… but here made weird, so you can see it.
Through adding weirdness it is now clearly visible, that most things we watch have a soothing, unreal corrective lens on them, because I have a hunch that Twin Peaks’ representation of reality, the reality of human behavior, is closer to how it is.
Continue reading “Weird is the necessary ingredient to getting a cult following”
