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In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he Tell that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would not be able Io recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Inferno" I, 32
To Rick Rhcingans and PcIc Varsalona, incorrigible "Peak Freaks"
The basic narrative structure of Twin Peaks had started to get as complicated as the question ABC's Programming Department was facing: should the show be discontinued or not?1 During its first season, the Thursday-night program had a good chance to carve itself a solid niche in mainstream television and popular culture. But as it had been predicted by fans and detractors alike, the series did not last beyond the second round of episodes in the dooming "Saturday-night graveyard slot" in which it was placed (Altman 47; Corliss 86). Looking back now, those were rocky times for the fans who faithfully parked themselves in front of their sets on Saturdays expecting to follow the show and, instead, kept finding a different program on their screens. As for the concluding two-hour solo episode aired in June, it did not seem to offer a significant sense of an ending for Twin Peaks. In fact, the managerial decision to kill the show was ,amply parodied by the final scene, which left an unequivocal feeling of "we shall return" in the viewers' minds. Despite the problematic issues of gender and violence that convinced different audiences to condemn the series, many spectators still could not understand the network's final verdict against the program.2
The complexity of the stories that composed Twin Peaks, the replication of identities and its arrogant, self-conscious style have been blamed for its disappearance. Perhaps people got tired of self-contained sarcasm, and audiences found what Corliss calls "cliff-hanging leases" a tiring item, an obstacle to following the story line (86). By the end of the first season, however, the stuff that Twin Peaks was made of was not the closure of a simple murder story. By then it...