“You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster or some kind of weird mirror. These are just examples. It could also be something much better. Prepare to enter, The Scary Door.”
— Futurama, “A Head In The Polls”
An episode about such vast and important subjects as “Apertures and Doorways” deserves more than a few scattered puns and pop culture references to introduce it. You, dear listener, deserve insightful analysis and deeply researched facts of impeccable pedigree. The sort of treatment that a Joshi, a Price or a Vandermeer would give. These are just examples. It couldn’t get much better.
While not that, we are still proud of some of the far shorelines that this conversation paradoxically beached itself on. We start with the need for an inciting incident to enter into a protagonist (or at least their house) through a door of some kind. This is either the traditional sort of door, or the more metaphorical kind, such as those reputed to window the soul. For the auteur director to which we focus much of our interest, the camera aperture may be more apropos, but Lynch is not the first stop on our weird odyssey this episode.
Ligotti is in fact the beginning and end of our conversational carnival this time out. We are the Grimscribe’s Puppets as he leads us from the heights of horror celebrating “The Last Feast of Harlequin” and “The Frolic” to the absurd humor of the famous parody of his style reviewing a particularly horrifying pizza product sporting a crust too insane to contemplate, much less devour. We end on a familiar territory made alien in his unproduced script for the X-files: “Crampton.”
Karl forgets to mention the chain of thought that runs from That Town to Barbara Crampton, to the curious interplay of horror and other dangerous subjects. This is almost certainly a good thing, since he was planning on referencing what the rift that Elle opens to the Upside Down in Stranger Things most resembles. Honestly, the mention of Lovecraftian sinuses is plenty bad enough. Jubel saves the day by defining Liminality, allowing us to ride the Lost Highway all the way to a paradoxical shoreline by way of CS Lewis’ alternate dimensions of Christian Allegory, Altered States of consciousness like Beyond the Black Rainbow, Dreamscape, and in a fortunately family friendly way, Stranger Things. Our indulgence in nostalgia takes a Naval turn with Jubel’s mention of Battleship Potemkin and Karl’s incoherent babble about the horizontal time-traveling hurricane that swallows the USS Nimitz in The Final Countdown.
From the warmth of the South Pacific in 1941, we turn our attention to one cold night in February of 1989, and how the roads we travel matter. Even when they aren’t matter and don’t behave as roads. Those equivocal paths may lead to you to a set of freestanding curtains or a Scary Door, but there is no reason to be afraid. After all, fear is the mind-killer that gets you eaten by the Lurker On The Threshold. If you let the path pass through you, and turn your mind’s eye back toward the shimmering aperture you will realize that,
So, your hosts will be talking about Aliens. We talk a lot about how very, very similar our modern abduction narratives are to 17th Century fairy stories, and a little about how Twin Peaks‘ concept of lodge denizens as aliens (or aliens as the lodge entities?) Heralded the modern state of the folklore.
In order to do so, it was necessary to time-travel to the beginning of human culture, tracing down the path of daylight disks and flying saucers through the ages until H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Fort hitch us to Chariots of the Gods? The gods contained in that dog eared and yellowed paperback conveyance entice us, beckon us on through the final and most dangerous leg of our journey toward final and horrible truth.
That truth is a gaping maw. A yawning Stargate leading not only your hosts, but also you true believer, to fictionalization and beyond! There, in that gulf of ultimate chaos, we have arranged for you to have a Close Encounter (kind currently unclassified) with a mysterious Blue Book crammed ever so deeply In the Mouth of Madness. A mouth constantly burbling infinite inanities in the long-lost language of….
The holidays are holiday-rific as they say, and their multi-spectral horror and insane blandishments have had certain “insalubrious” effects upon your humble hosts. Rallying against this tinseled terror, we present for your hopeful approval, the initial results, interpretations, commentary and tangential matters arising from Jubel’s academic study of folklore.
We asked for your help to fill out our understanding of how Peaks viewers understood and processed modern folklore, and your support and responses just blew us away. Over a hundred of you took the time out of your day to answer a survey to a level of completeness and deep thought that I have never before witnessed–and as a former pollster, I’ve witnessed more than I can say.
Both Jubel and myself pondered how to best process your exquisite thoughts, but in the end the load was too heavy for just the two of us. We’ve therefore asked a few members of the Twin Peaks community to be surprise guests on today’s show, and they have very generously agreed. For this reason, Michael Wilson and Caemeron Crain of the Drink Full and Descend podcast, and Eileen G. Mykkels of the 25 Years Later site deserve some seriously good slices of cake, they are fabulous human beings and incredibly knowledgeable scholars.
Thank you again for lending us your expertise and insight!
After some major technical issues, your intrepid hosts are back and talking about Twin Peaks: The Return, with a focus on Parts 9 through 12. True to form, we live up to the “tangents” part of our title, talking about everything from the intricacies of story structure in modern premium television, to why we love Dougie so damn much. We discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” as a key Weird text, and some intriguing parallels between that story and The Return’s approach to sound and energy as a way to split the barrier Between Two Worlds.
