We've been doing a Twin Peaks Rewatch (well, for me, my partner never watched it, and I haven't seen the 2017 3rd season) and man, that show made me a writer in many ways, partially by making me SO ANGRY that heaps of teenage girls were assessed as grown women, & then murdered.

Also, though, the natural world has POV in that show in a major way, and stone cold weirdos are everywhere. Much of it is beautiful. I cannot figure out how it managed to be on network TV, though. It is intense watching.

Watching it as a teenage girl, I was fascinated and tempted by how important and mysterious the teenage girls were to everyone. Watching it as a 43 year old, I'm even more furious at how sacrificial they are.

Like, the premise of the show contains the notion that teenage girls must be thr bearers of "wild" darkness. That concept has a very long history, but good fucking lord.

I can say that it caused me to look at the entire history of myth and folklore, pull out the girls and women and girl monsters and have a closer look at them. Because the entire history of patriarchal myth is just...kill, rape and monsterize those wild girls, who deserve it.

Lots of things that make me angry have made me a writer, but good god. I can't believe I watched this when I was 13. Everyone was watching it. It's horrific and terrifying, and comic and peculiar right next to the horrific. But the horrific is graphic.

Anyone who wants to know why I got interested in writing about Grendel's mother as a war vet in the Mere Wife and as a warrior woman in my Beowulf translation, yeah. I watched Twin Peaks when I was 13, and got angry at how young girl warriors were converted into dead monsters.

Also, another complaint here is that evil is fought almost exclusively by secret crews of men, while the women characters in the story have to keep the secret of evil, hold evil, FORGIVE EVIL. There are a couple of exceptions to this, but mostly, sacrificial unvirgins.

The characters who get to engage intellectually w/Good & Evil are almost all men, while the women just die/get tranquilizers/wiggle toward doom/are forced to translate for a log. There's a lot to be said about all of this, if Twin Peaks had chosen to analyze Patriarchy. But no.

It's so weird to me that you could use all the building blocks of a deep analysis of folklore and monster myth when it comes to gender, and then...just not do the analysis.

You could also get into a kind of Ovidian metamorphoses meets Canterbury Tales situation with this material, all the characters, each with their own story, all the people transforming, plus the log which is like the OE poem Dream of the Rood, but...unanalyzed sacrificial girls.

In short, it's been a puzzling and intriguing and infuriating experience doing this rewatch, and we're only at episode 10 of Season 2, before the show legendarily derails into a compendium of chaos and UFOs, before re-railing into lodges of good and evil.