Damn Fine Cups of Coffee

‘Twin Peaks’ is 20 years old. So is Sophia Satchell-Baeza. Already a writer and illustrator, Sophia is presently reading English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford, where – like Michael Palin, Rowan Atkinson and Armando Ianucci before her – she became a member of the famed Oxford Revue. She also edits her own magazine, blogs on matters cinematic and repeatedly ‘watches “Twin Peaks”, falling in love time and again with Special Agent Cooper and mourning the lack of such totty at Oxford University.’ On that seminal show’s 20^th anniversary, she takes a break from all that activity to share some damn fine cups of coffee with the readers of TFAD. – SJH

Over to Sophia:

After a busy day murdering, even a gangster needs a cup of coffee: ‘C’mon, make that coffee to go!’ barks Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in ‘Goodfellas’. The coffee break in film is a moment in which time is suspended and the normal laws of physics, or social norms, fail to operate. For directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Darren Aronofsky, and from Jim Jarmusch to David Lynch, the coffee cup becomes a portal to another world. On the 20^th anniversary of David Lynch’s cult television series ‘Twin Peaks’, we celebrate the ‘damn fine cup of coffee’ on screen.

In the famous coffee shop scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Her’ (1967), the black cup of coffee takes on a metaphorical, as well as visual importance. The swirling bubbles on the surface of the coffee become, apart from just an intriguing visual example of chaos theory, the background for Godard’s Marxist and existentialist ramblings. As Godard, in his characteristic throaty whisper, breathes, ‘since I cannot escape crushing objectivity or isolating subjectivity’, bubbles begin to appear in the swirling cup of black coffee.

Godard asks “Where is the beginning? But what beginning?”, as a white sugar lump is dropped into the cup, clearing the surface until bubbles start to reappear, growing and expanding, then compressing. The bubbles in the cup at once resemble clouds, a galaxy, amoebae or atoms, the coffee a black hole. The visuals are simple but impressive – a fabulous example of 60s psychedelia, blended with Existentialist philosophy and sweetened with Gallic pretention. The narrator tells us that he looks intently at ordinary things to gain a greater understanding of the universe, and through the shot of the coffee cup, Godard encourages us to do the same.

In ‘Pi’, Darren Aronofsky uses a cup of coffee in a similar way to Godard. When the white milk is slowly poured into the black coffee, a marbling effect is created, representing the many thousands of examples in the film of patterns in nature, something for which the mathematician Maximillian Cohen is trying to find a formula. In Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, as in ‘Pi’, the camera focuses on bird’s eye shots of white cups of black coffee on black and white chequered cloths, and becomes the central space for the characters to talk.

David Lynch’s cult series ‘Twin Peaks’ revolves around coffee. Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is a coffee obsessive; his choice on the menu is always a ‘damn fine cup of coffee’ and some home-made cherry pie. How does he take it? ‘Black as midnight on a moonless night.’ The corner coffee shop is a recurring presence in Lynch’s work – from ‘Mulholland Drive’ to ‘Twin Peaks’, the kitsch aesthetic of the 50s diner seems to embody everything about America that preoccupies Lynch. The 50s coffee shop is timeless, creating a sense of Americana that is indestructible. In this abstract space, Lynch can juxtapose scenes of extreme weirdness with homely everyday innocence.

Special Agent Cooper places coffee firmly within the structure of a perfect life: ‘Harry, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just ... let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store; a catnap in your office chair; or two cups of good, hot, black coffee.’ Coffee in Twin Peaks is strongly linked with pie – and the town’s diner (‘Where pies go when they die’) provides excellent examples of both. The diner in the show is real, and was discovered by Lynch while scouting for a location for his new show. Known then as Mar-T Cafe and now as Twede’s Cafe, you can visit the Snoqualmie valley and get your own slice of ‘Twin Peaks cherry pie’ and a damn fine coffee. The show has even created a specific breed of fan known as the ‘Twin Freaks’, many of whom still meet to eat cherry pie and drink coffee.

Mark Frost and David Lynch came up with the idea for ‘Twin Peaks’ in Du Pars, in a coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura. While drinking a cup of coffee, Lynch and Frost saw a vision of a body washed up on a lake, and the basic plot of the programme was formed. Today, Lynch even has his own brand of coffee, and drinks around 15 cappuccinos and two packs of American Spirit cigarettes a day. As Iggy Pop says in ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’, ‘Cigarettes and coffee, man, that’s a combination.’

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