In preparation for a course I am teaching on teenage movies, I watched High School Confidential earlier today. In addition to the many-times mentioned hip lingo that permeates the movie [Youtube below], there are also more than a few connections to Twin Peaks, which as anyone who has read this site knows, is pretty high up there on the stuff that we watch when we aren’t adventuring or playing thrash list.

• Russ Tamblyn is the star of High School and plays the incomparable Dr Jacoby in TP.
• Joan Staples, the daughter of a local businessman, is a weedhead [their term, not mine]. Replace Joan with Laura and weed with Bolivian marching powder.
• During one scene, a beatnik girl that looks disturbingly like Audrey Horne gets up and rattles off  her poem, “Tomorrow is a king sized drag.” I am sure that on jazz night at the Roadhouse, Audrey dug into her little book of poems and recited something similar.
• High school plays prominently in Confidential [duh], much like it does in TP. The local heroin kingpins use the students to deal the goodies; replace kingpins with the Renault brothers and Bobby Briggs and Mike for The Wheelers and Dealers [the actual name of the gang in Confidential] and behold, we are Peaking.
• The insinuation that Mimi Van Doren//Tamblyn are more than kissing aunts/nephews, is weird and extremely difficult to believe that it made it past the censors. It has a similar feeling to when Ben is about to make out with Audrey at One Eyed Jacks.

Here is a hip lesson in history:

And since there isn’t a good picture of Joan Staples on the internet, here is one when she is jonesing for a marijuana cigarette

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