Introduction

These essays on the second season of Twin Peaks are first and foremost dedicated to my parents, who are now both dead. Both of them loved Twin Peaks and neither of them got to see Twin Peaks come to an end. I did. And now I have an obligation to write about that.


These essays are also dedicated to my friend and brother Cory E. Card, who passed away last month and always believed I’d see this project to fruition.



1.

By way of an introduction, I’ll begin with a quotation from the film theorist and composer Michel Chion about Twin Peaks from his 1992 monograph on Lynch:

"As a whole, the series transcends its authors, including Lynch. The superimposition of multiple story layers and levels of meaning, culminates in giving the series the astonishing power of composite compilations such as epic poems or sacred books. Twin Peaks is both private frenzy and collective outbreak of madness, a myth, a nest to ease our suffering, to which everyone brings his or her little twig."


From the perspective of thirty years, Chion's quotation takes on a new meaning: the private frenzy and collective outbreak of madness that has been created by thirty years of Twin Peaks should also be taken into account. With the announcement and airing of the third season in 2017, this collective madness and private frenzy reached an apex. There are any number of secondary works, monographs on Lynch and his work, as well as books like The Secret History of Twin Peaks that only add to the madness, frenzy and nest of obsession for Twin Peaks’ fans. I’m not very interested in this aspect of the spectacle and commodity of the show (yes I own the Funko dolls), although I’ll touch on it.  Certainly, the significance of Twin Peaks being the possible final film/television project of its director and co-creator David Lynch, a figure who, regardless of one’s opinion of his work, has fundamentally changed film as well as television, is cause enough for serious thought and reevaluation.

Yet, at this moment I’m not particularly interested in Twin Peak’s relationship to Lynch’s body of work or cinema/television in general either. Rather, at this moment of both crisis and pause, I want to celebrate thirty years of Twin Peaks by taking seriously Chion’s argument that it, perhaps, for us, is a mythic and sacred text. The collective madness and personal frenzy of Twin Peaks is tied to its relationship to the world it depicts, not the world into which it finds itself broadcasted. Chion understands that Twin Peaks, like other sacred and epic texts, explicates something about our relationship to a world we only opaquely understand, as more stories make any attempt at clarity impossible. It might be a good time to reflect upon that, thirtieth anniversary of Twin Peaks or no.

In a sense, Chion’s reading of the series, which I still find to be one of the more compelling even though it has nothing to say about the third season, goes against the popular interpretive framing of Lynch’s films and TV shows: both the psychological and its relationship to authorship and craft:

“Twin Peaks presents a non-psychological world. When someone goes mad and loses all sense of reality, and then recovers, the change is accepted without the other characters interpreting it psychologically. It is the structure of Twin Peaks which is mad.”

This is not too dissimilar to Lynch’s regular work, the structure of Eraserhead’s world could be described as equally mad (the visual motif of the Black Lodge shows up there), but Twin Peaks represents a composite work both because of its episodic and multi-storied structure, as well as the number of people involved in its realization. The form and construction mirror one another in a way Lynch’s film work does not. Chion highlights this throughout his essay: “In joining each and every level without blending them together, and defining itself by this very act, Twin Peaks becomes both mythical and epic […]”

In this quality of the epic poem—it’s ability to represent a reality and its character’s places within it, rather than psychologically explicate character’s relation to the world—I am reminded of what Erich Auerbach wrote in Mimesis w/r/t Odysseus’ scar: 

“The oft-repeated reproach that Homer is a liar takes nothing from his effectiveness, he does not need to base his story on historical reality, his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its web around us and that suffices him. And this ‘real’ world into which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed […] but he cannot be interpreted.”

The epic poem might very well be understood as the opposite model for Twin Peaks. The viewer of Twin Peaks, steeped in media often facilely creating cause and effect so the viewer/reader won’t get lost, could interpret the natural surrounding as a psychological reflection of the characters in the series. The characters suggest over and over again that there’s “an evil in the woods” that haunts them. Yet, it also seems totally indifferent to the characters, flowing in its movements (the falls, the bird turning its head, the tree swaying in the breeze), indifferent to the reality that surrounds them, like the dance movements of the students at high school in Fire Walk With Me. Perhaps this is the real fear, the real night, that these objects we encounter everyday belong to an “archiac” world with “unbridled forces,” independent of us. And yet each of the characters, in its way, takes time to enjoy this world, regardless. This is ultimately what Chion means by the “private frenzy” and “collective outbreak of madness” that is Twin Peaks. It a lesson that the viewers of the show, now, thirty years later, might be beginning to learn.

2.

Like many epic poems and collective myths, the unity of the whole is constructed after the fact. This is absolutely true for Twin Peaks. Chion attempts to make an argument, throughout his essay, that Twin Peaks is, both literally and metaphorically, a collective endeavor. The reception of the show, however, would suggest that those parts of Twin Peaks which were least successful, were the aspects of the show, in which Lynch had the least participation. The generally accepted narrative of the show’s production is that Lynch and Frost had no desire to solve Laura Palmer’s murder, the network insisted that they do, the mystery was wrapped up by the middle of the second season, Lynch lost interest and, by the time Chion wrote his book, seemed to be ready to move on from Twin Peaks. This has led to an overestimation of both the first and third seasons of the show, due to Lynch’s constant involvement with the series, and a pretty sharp criticism of the second season—the sharpest of which coming from Lynch himself.

Twin Peaks has clearly slipped into the auteur canon of David Lynch. This has unfortunately obscured the qualities that Chion describes in his chapter on Twin Peaks. An auteurist interpretation seems at odds with the composite, collective myth or epic poem Chion sees within it. It’s no coincidence that Chion wrote his analysis in 1992, shortly after the second season concluded the series’ first life on television. With the introduction of the Fireman, Doppelgängers, David Bowie, SETI, Blue Rose cases, Chris Issak and a million other things, Twin Peaks in the second season and Fire Walk With Me developed its own cosmology, literally.

When Werner S. Pluhar started his translations of Immanuel Kant’s three critiques, he chose to start with the Critique of Judgment due to its neglected status. With its appearance in English, more scholars started understanding the third critique as a capstone as well as an essential part to the critical edifice of Kant’s work. After Fire Walk With Me, the outtakes from that movie, as well as the third season of Twin Peaks, it seems more obvious that the second season—with its introduction of a much larger mythology within the universe—seems far more important to the overall text than previously thought.

Therefore, to analyze this under-analyzed aspect of Twin Peaks, its epic, mythic quality, its non-psychological quality, one has to live with the second season of Twin Peaks as not only an essential part of the story and its meaning, but might be the best illustration of its epic and sacred qualities. This is why I have chosen to only focus on the second season of the show: the first season takes the form of a murder mystery, the third season a non-narrative reflection on time and history. Only the second season seems orphaned, or at least from another narrative universe entirely. And it is this orphaned universe, wherein the archaic and the alien meet up in the unbridled everyday, in which we seem to find ourselves.