DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)
By:
May 20, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
When you’re 14, all the cool stuff happens in another room. The better music, more interesting people, and life-changing experiences are always somewhere else. That’s how Twin Peaks felt when it came out. I was aware of it, read about it, heard people talk about it, but never watched it. It was right there on network television, just as accessible as Perfect Strangers and Full House. But entering that sophisticated, stylish, altogether mysterious room just never felt like a possibility.
In time, that room took on a very specific appearance: lined with red curtains, a zig-zag pattern on the floor, populated by strange figures who talked backwards, impending terror always lurking around the edges. People still talked about this room, I saw pictures and clips from it, but it remained foreign, untouchable.
When I was in my mid-20s the show’s first season appeared on DVD, and I received it as a gift. I enjoyed it, but something just didn’t click. It still felt like a broadcast from a distant place — this time, an uncanny room called the past. Its continued existence was a vestige of my teenage alienation — gaining admission was mostly a reminder of my previous sense of loss. The release of the second season was held up by legal issues, and by the time it finally arrived, I’d moved on. The Red Room disappeared again, taking its mysteries with it.
A quarter-century after the original series ended, a third season materialized, and it was an event. Once again, people way more interesting and informed than me raved about its power; once again, it unfolded beyond my grasp. I resented the show’s hold on them, and its lack of hold on me. The whole thing was more accessible and more remote than ever.
In 2024, my wife declared she was ready to try Twin Peaks again — the whole thing, beginning to end. I didn’t expect much, but maybe I didn’t know how much I’d changed in 30-plus years. Because from the first moments of the pilot, I was right there in the room. I was there through all the episodes I’d seen more than two decades earlier, entranced as if I’d never seen them before. I was there through the confounding reveal of Laura Palmer’s killer, and I was there through all the silly follow-up episodes the people in the room before had told me to ignore. And I’ve rarely been in a room with as much presence and attention as I’d been for The Return. Whatever I’d been led to expect was a shadow of what actually transpired. Nothing could have prepared 14-year-old me for the sensation of enduring such cruelty and fear mingled with moments of transcendent humor and grace.
We finished watching in October, just a few weeks before the election. I was devastated. I didn’t know it yet, but we were all in the Red Room now. We’d been there the whole time, really, but some of us couldn’t see it.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | …and more!
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!