"WHAT IS IT YOU DO, EXACTLY?"

At the dawn of the 1990s, I was a 13-year-old kid growing up in suburban Toronto, obsessed with the music of the 1960s and 1970s — the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and Pink Floyd. Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers were ancient artifacts of a forgotten time. The 1950s seemed like another world entirely, a fantasy place I recognized only thanks to the occasional Happy Days rerun and an enduring love of Back to the Future. Though I was an avid Twin Peaks fan, I didn't realize then that the Double R Diner was a throwback to the malt shops of the past. I didn't view Special Agent Dale Cooper as a modern day G-man, nor did I recognize brooding and pouting biker James Hurley as an embodiment of the iconic greaser of the '50s. As James Marshall, who portrayed the character, told me in 2014, at the time of casting "[Lynch] was looking for what they called the 'James Dean type' ... the gentleman who was representing me back then, funny enough, was the guy who discovered James Dean." The other teens in Twin Peaks, the Audrey Hornes and Donna Haywards, dressed like they'd just walked off American Bandstand, as though the past 40 years hadn't occurred. On Twin Peaks, time often appears to have stood still. While the teen me might have missed it, the 34 million viewers of the show's pilot likely didn't.

The 1950s had been a pivotal point for American pop culture. World War II was over and the Cold War had yet to instill fear in the nation. While the early part of the decade found the crooners of the '40s still thriving with adult listeners, the mid-1950s saw the advent of rock and roll — Elvis, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and his Comets, to name but a few. Parents recoiled while their children embraced the rhythmic sounds of distorted guitar, bass, and drums (music occasionally used as part of the Twin Peaks soundtrack alongside composer Angelo Badalamenti's moody score). Then there was the medium of television itself, which had entered the homes of millions of Americans. In 1948, only 350,000 homes in the U.S. were fitted with TVs. Five years later, that number had leaped to 25,000,000 — nearly 50% of all homes in the country. The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet: all became part of the culture zeitgeist. These were the shows Americans gathered in front of their televisions to watch, welcoming idyllic family values into their homes every night. Canadian sociologist and futurist Marshall McLuhan once said, "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." In the 1950s, television became a common bond for people, breaking into the cultural consciousness by giving audiences an ideal to strive for.

David Keith Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946, but moved around the United States thanks to his father's job for the Department of Agriculture. Unsurprisingly, his father's occupation helped give Lynch his ongoing love of the outdoors, which manifests itself in Lynch's surrogate on Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper. ("Got to find out what kind of trees these are; they're really something," dictates Cooper on his first drive into town.) While the constant movement and upheaval in Lynch's life could have been cause for grief or discontent, the truth was, unlike many of the characters in his art, David Lynch was raised in a loving and supportive environment. In his own words, the 1950s world he grew up in see