Yesterday we at the DM brain trust were saddened to hear of the passing of Catherine E. Coulson at the age of 71. Coulson was the actress who portrayed the Log Lady from Twin Peaks, surely one of the most unusual characters ever to reach a mass audience.
You can honor Coulson’s performance, David Lynch’s groundbreaking TV series, and your own innate need to boogie by playing Fire Dance With Me, a video game designed for the Duplicade video game competition that calls for head-to-head simultaneous two-player games. The rules require that the games be Windows-compatible, use the traditional WASD and arrow keys for movement, and have a short duration (30 seconds) before deciding a winner. Furthermore, and amusingly, “The game must tread dangerously into the intellectual property of an existing game or game franchise, but be cleverly altered and culturally mangled enough to not be worth the effort to sue.” The game is downloadable for Windows but you can play it in any desktop browser—I played it on a Mac.
Fire Dance With Me pays homage to the various dancers that populate Lynch’s series. You can choose Special Agent Dale Cooper (holding a coffee mug, natch), the Little Man from Cooper’s hallucinatory dreams, Audrey Home, or the Log Lady’s log (which never moves at all). Once the two players are selected and the game begins, you have to track a scrolling promenade of arrow signs in order to win—the two player’s avatars flank the sad, desperate dance of Leland Palmer in the middle, whom you cannot select.
Whether it’s Audrey’s dreamy sway, Cooper’s jaunty attempt to recapitulate John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, Leland Palmer’s enervating crackup, or the Little Man’s gyrations, these four dances (plus the non-dance of the log) constitute a pretty good intuitive summary of what Twin Peaks the TV series is like, what with the humor and the melodrama and the surrealism and the fabulously successful commitment to style.
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s Audrey’s dance:
The Dance of the Little Man:
Leland’s dance:
via Kill Screen
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Damn good’ postcard portraits of ‘Twin Peaks’ characters
Download ‘Twin Peaks Escape From Black Lodge’ video game for free