Queerguru reviews “I Know Catherine, The Log Lady” about one of our favorite TWIN PEAKS stars

Sometimes with movies, it’s all about timing.  Certainly, in the case of Richard Green‘s heart-tugging documentary  “I Know Catherine, The Log Lady,” focusing on actress and filmmaker Catherine Coulson and her final days working on Twin Peaks before her untimely death.   She also worked regularly with her great friend the legendary filmmaker David Lynch, known for his surrealist and experimental films, who we are reminded died earlier this year.  Watching the story unfold on the screen in a week when the current resident in the White House (the one time winner of a Razzie award for Bad acting ) is insisting that life is just like one big movie,  really hits home.  After a despairing 100 days during which we have watched a very extreme and dangerous farce play out, attempting to undermine all our values, it’s refreshing to see  ‘I Know Catherine’ to remind us not just of the reality of life, but also of the extraordinary wonderful people whose very being enriches all our lives.

Director Green tells the narrative by whizzing back and forth between years and even opening with a taped conversation of a very calm Coulson phoning a mortuary asking for advice on what she should do as her death is imminent.  She did die a few days later, aged just 71.  The stage-four cancer had finally ‘won’.   Although the film deals with her ending, it is very much a celebration of life.  As a testament to her work in front and behind, camera, she had amassed a very tight band of close friends, and it is they who line up to share tales of how she had impacted their lives

Coulson was a highly accomplished stage actress, part of the Bay Area’s experimental Circus Theater in the Sixties, and of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland for decades.  Yet she was equally at home behind the camera, working as an assistant director, assistant camera, and general factotum with Lynch on his debut feature Eraserhead(1977).  She went on to worked regularly as focus puller to Eraserhead’s cinematographer Frederick Elmes on films like John Cassavetes’ The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977) and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), and served as first assistant camera on Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).  

When Lynch started to work on Twin Peaks he was determined to write a part for Coulson and thus together they created the brilliantly eccentric  ‘woman wth a log‘  whch  co-writer Mark Frost insists was nothing like the Log Lady in real life, but rather “lively, fun and present”.  The show was a major success but by the time that Lynch got the greenlight to film a third series in 2015, Coulson was already sick.  She was determined to conceal her condition and keep performing to the very end and so they agreed to fly a crew down to her home to film what would be her final apperance, She was a dying women playing a dying women on screen with her best friends there to both encourage and suopport  her,  Lynch, in what he knew would be his final conversation with his old friend, “gave her tips about dying, knowing that she would find out what it was like first, before him”.

“I Know Catherine, The Log Lady”  is a genuine affectionate profile as a ‘must-see’ for every Lynch/Coulson fan and a prod to others to start viewing Twin Peaks : you are missing some of the best TV EVER