In the wake of David Lynch’s passing, we look back at one of his most-loved works – the singular TV series, Twin Peaks…
NB: The following contains spoilers for all three seasons of Twin Peaks and the movie, Fire Walk With Me.
“The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art”.
So said Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Housekeeping and Gilead. And while she wasn’t directly referencing Twin Peaks, her point is key to the experience of watching David Lynch’s unique, mind-bending series.
First airing in 1990, Twin Peaks ran for just two seasons on ABC and later BBC2 in the UK, becoming a cult hit that latched onto the public’s and never quite let go. It was the confluence of two distinctive creative forces: the avant garde auteur (Lynch) and the skilled television writer Mark Frost, who came out of the celebrated Hill Street Blues stable in the 1980s.
It’s quite remarkable that two such different visionaries managed to pool together their resources and make something like Twin Peaks, which in many respects is built on the tension between Lynch’s refusal to discuss his art, allowing his ideas to speak for themselves, and Frost’s more grounded instinct. That’s clear across what we now must reference as the original run of Twin Peaks and the prequel movie Fire Walk With Me in 1992, where the shorter first season – primarily developed by Frost as Lynch went off to make Wild At Heart – is narratively more coherent than the longer but often listless second.
Twin Peaks is an experience of two halves, and what you take from it depends on what interests you the most. Is it the mystery of what happened to Laura Palmer, the murdered homecoming queen, and Dale Cooper’s investigation? Is it the haunting weirdness of the so-called ‘Black Lodge’, with the backwards talking effigy of The Man From Another Place and the terrifying, demonic Bob? Or is it the sometimes comic escapades of the town’s locals?
For me, it was the mythology and mystery where Twin Peaks compelled. It’s perhaps why 2017’s The Return – the 25-years-later series revival – became my favourite of the run. It chooses to foreground such internal myth and legend, putting the oddball character drama and comedy in the background as it worked to both tie up and expand the strange questions the original two seasons posed. The Return, across its 18 episodes, doubles down on the Lynchian oddness that has characterised much of his cinematic work.
This piece is will focus on The Return, aka Season 3, simply because it was what drew me into watching Twin Peaks in the first place. Anyone who hasn’t seen Twin Peaks will have a blind spot in how they appreciate modern American prestige TV, simply because it has influenced – if not directly inspired – so much over the last 30 years. The Return was an enormous deal when it arrived – a must-see weekly experience akin to Lost, or Game of Thrones. Shows with such rich mythological underpinnings don’t come along every day.
Nothing quite compares To The Return when it comes to its surrealist imagery and open-ended plotting, not to mention narrative structure. Many at the time, and since, have characterised it as a bridge between TV and film, and perhaps even categorise it as both simultaneously. Daniel Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter said as much:
I generally bristle at the showrunners who claim their series is a 13- or 22-hour movie, but it’s obvious this Twin Peaks is going to be an 18-hour unit. There was no discernible separation between hours and if credits hadn’t rolled, the second hour could probably just as easily have flowed into the third. This isn’t episodic TV. It’s another thing.
It was written as one large continuous screenplay and broken into episodic chunks, listed originally as ‘Parts’ before they were later given episode titles (and evocative ones at that), which explains why The Return doesn’t end every episode in a conventional way. Lynch cuts to a different band performing as the credits roll in almost every part, which may be a cheeky nod to network TV executives’ insistence that famous bands should be somehow woven into a show. That, or maybe it’s because much Lynch just really loved music.
When it came to The Return, lines were often blurred. Sight & Sound magazine ranked it second in its top 10 films of the year, for example. Cahiers du Cinema also gave it the top spot. That doesn’t usually happen to TV shows, even if you consider Lynch to be one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation. Fire Walk With Me, which tells the backstory leading up to Laura’s death, swaps the perky haze of the town’s oddball inhabitants for a deeply nihilistic exploration of sexual and domestic abuse, vulnerability and exploitation. It was lambasted when it emerged in 1992, and in recent years has experienced such a cultural reappraisal that it even had a Criterion release. People perhaps weren’t ready for the sadness and Garmonbozia of Laura’s last week on Earth in a way they are now.
The Return, as a result, faced an enormous challenge. It needed to satisfy decades-old Twin Peaks fans, who dared hope they might learn what happened to Cooper, but it also needed to appeal to new audiences who might wish to jump on board. Lynch, however, showed no real sign he was worried about appeasing newcomers. From the opening part, The Return fully immerses audiences in it’s world’s lore and texture even as it expanded on it. A remarkable amount of The Return doesn’t actually take place in Twin Peaks at all, which wasn’t the case with the original two seasons. It was unafraid to broaden the canvas.
One episode in particular was singled out for praise: Part 8, also titled ‘Gotta Light?’. That was the one, fans said, that stood apart and truly fried the brain. Such claims are often hyperbole, but in this case, they were well-founded. ‘Gotta Light?’ is the extraordinary standout in a season that ebbs and flows, as Twin Peaks always did, between offbeat character comedy and the deepest of esoteric mythology. Though much of it defies one simple explanation, it appears that Lynch is making a direct link between the creation of the atomic bomb and the release of pure evil which manifests in the killer of Laura Palmer.
Matt Zoller Seitz, who considered the episode one of the finest examples of TV in decades, wrote of the sequence:
It is the highest praise to say that, of all the filmmakers who’ve referenced the final section of 2001, Lynch seems to me the only one to have created something that equals it even as it humbly bows to its example. The post-bomb sequence takes us through what appears to be a series of tunnels, some comprised of nuclear hellfire but others of a more tantalizingly organic texture (as if to literalize the idea, expressed in Kubrick’s tunnels of light, that humanity was “reborn” after 1945). The use of the bomb claimed hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives, and was justified retroactively as necessary to make Japan surrender, but even in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians, tacticians, philosophers, and pundits questioned whether any strategic objective could justify unleashing a genocidal monstrosity of science, the likes of which not even the prophet Mary Shelley could have imagined.
It’s a dizzying array of imagery, symbolism and the plain unfathomable, and poses a great deal more questions than it answers. A year before The Return, Mark Frost published a book called The Secret History O Twin Peaks, which forensically examines the legend of the town alongside American myth-making from the expeditions of Lewis & Clark in the early 19th century through to the modern day, encompassing UFOlogy and other American arcanum along the way. None of that tracks with the surrealist spectacle that Lynch considers part of the foundation text of, if not the origin of Twin Peaks the town, then some kind of myth-making for the evil that punctuates and shatters it. ‘Gotta Light?’ blows that wide open while leaving plenty open to interpretation.
Ultimately, there is little point in expressly attempting to make sense of Twin Peaks at its most avant-garde (say, the ‘arm’ in the Black Lodge for example), but there are themes, ideas and concepts that can be read from it. As a composite of both the detective drama and the melodramatic soap opera, Peyton Place being an inspiration, Twin Peaks is possibly best seen as an attempt to depict through the town the echoes of a quaint, post-war Americana that the savage murder of Laura rips apart.
Everyone in the town becomes a suspect, even though many of them operate only tangentially on the fringes of Laura’s life, but Cooper and the FBI end up following all kinds of leads and dead ends which dig into the personal histories and enmities of the residents rather than find Laura’s killer. Perhaps this is why in ‘Gotta Light?’, Lynch goes back to the 1950s as part of the origin for both Bob and the other demonic force Jowday (or Judy). He understands that’s where the core of the show lies.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Twin Peaks debuted in the wake of Reaganite America in the 1980s which had tried to reinstate wholesome family values to American life that recalled the decades before Watergate, or Vietnam, or JFK that had poisoned American belief in government and truth. Yet conversely, crime rates in major cities had spiralled, the media was caught up in the ‘satanic panic’ mass hysteria and several serial killers emerged – such as Jeffrey Dahmer or Richard ‘the Night Stalker’ Ramirez – to ensure Americans kept their doors locked.
Bob is the supernatural construct of that, the terrifying amoral killer creeping into people’s houses. But the gut punch of Twin Peaks was that Laura’s killer came from inside of the home. If The X-Files picked up the show’s baton in exposing the dark side of mythical, arcane America, Twin Peaks found it by travelling inward. Laura Palmer wasn’t just killed by her father, but by the neglect of everyone around her. It’s a tragic and potent message.
It could be said that The Return seeks to undo that in the final few episodes, such as ‘The Past Dictates the Future’, where Cooper is shunted back to 1989 to rescue Laura from her fate and bring her ‘home’, only to find himself inside an alternate timeline of sorts where the events of Twin Peaks didn’t (or maybe did) happen. But while it feels like a plot device designed to give Cooper a sense of heroic closure – that he manages to save Laura – the season, and probably the entire series, ends on a punctuation mark of pure horror.
Sarah Palmer, Laura’s mother, is probably inhabited by Judy. There is still evil in the Palmer home. The nightmare is likely to begin again. It is both a titanic cliffhanger and a perfect, abstract ending.
“Is it future? Or is it past?” asks Mike, one of the denizens of the Black Lodge, of Cooper – and that’s perhaps the point. Twin Peaks has no past or future. It is perpetually unchanging. It is America.
“We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream,” Monica Bellucci, the Italian actress, tells Lynch’s partially deaf FBI director Gordon Cole during the recollection of a dream, and that to me feels the perfect encapsulation of watching Twin Peaks. It’s like a dream, one you understand on a functional level, but the pieces never quite neatly fit together. Therein lies its power and its beauty. We’re not meant to know. We are simply meant to experience it, and that makes it as much art as narrative. It should be cherished as storytelling where we are both left to theorise but also imagine and create our own end to the dream. Twin Peaks’ original run allowed us to do that and so did The Return.
I can only quote Dale Cooper when thinking about Twin Peaks, both past and future: “I hope I see all of you again. Each and every one of you”.
We’ll never see the like of David Lynch again. To sleep, perchance to dream.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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