The Real Night (Season Two, Episode One)

Hey there! Just a quick prefatory note: I'm going to try and drop one of these essays (one essay per episode) every week on Tuesday or Wednesday. These essays are in no way everything that could be said about each of these episodes, nor is all of this culminating in some grand theory about the show or Lynch's work. True to the Chion quotation these essays are built upon, I see each reading as my twig contributing to our collective nest(ing) right now. Safety and health to all!




1.

For a show that willfully un-moors the viewer from a sense of reality, it marks time rather obsessively. The seven episodes that make up the first season mirror the first seven days after the murder of Laura Palmer. The pilot episode ends slightly before the exact moment, twenty four hours earlier, when Laura was killed. This marking of time is also itself an abstraction. A way of organizing something that seems outside of our understanding. Marking the passage of time in this way, and constantly calling attention to it, makes temporality central to the show’s unfolding narrative.

So when the usual golden-to-overcast grey of the credit sequence turns into the darkness of night during the episode credits for Episode one, Season two, the viewer pays attention to the shift. The second season begins one week after the murder of Laura Palmer, therefore exactly the moment (cliff hanger-style with the shooting of Dale Cooper) the first season ended. The only timeframe we have for both Laura’s murder and the attempt on Cooper’s life is somewhere between midnight and 4 a.m. 

I think about this time of the night often, mostly because I was an insomniac as a child due to repeated, vivid nightmares, and would often be awake this late, with the light on, reading, drawing or listening to the radio. Sometime later,  around the airing of Twin Peaks and watching Silence of the Lambs, I had a recurring nightmare about a serial killer communicating through a television-like wall in the house where I grew up. I never saw his face, but I had a distinct image of a knife that he held in his hand, with a butt topped by an ornate, carved skull, which had certain psychic/electrical powers that enabled the communication. The thing about the dream that lingered with me the next day was that, as I was dreaming, I was aware the time of the night these communications would come to me—always at the latest part, always sometime after 3:30 am. I remember thinking—again seemingly in my dream, but I know how dream recollection makes the dream itself—the thought that someone might already be awake and going to work after 4 a.m., when the first light of dawn would appear, prevented me from imagining that something truly terrifying could happen. The regular cycle of the work day, and the reassuring routine of its earliest laborers—like shift workers at a sawmill—even gave a sense of ease to my dreaming self.

I always found an affinity with Lynch’s work because of the way events would take place during this time of the night. Think of Jefferey Beaumont taking Frank’s joyride around this time of the night in Blue Velvet. Bill Pullman returning from the jazz club to his house and staring into the blackness of the hallway around this time of the night in Lost Highway. And think of Laura Palmer’s death and the emergence of BOB around this time of the night in Fire Walk With Me and the first season of Twin Peaks. Lynch clearly has spoken at length about the importance of dreams and dreaming to his work, but you can dream anytime. There must be something particularly terrifying and productive to dream the dreams we dream in the dead of the night.

Or, as Michel Chion writes:

 “From the very first episode, Twin Peaks recreated the night in every house and apartment where the series was seen, the real night and not a night setting, the night with its persistent, deep darkness…[T]he night as a black hole, the day’s negative: the day/night dissolves in Fire Walk With Me are sometimes so sudden that each seems to be already present in the other…[W]hy should night acquire such meanings? Perhaps because its mantle of darkness erases the distinct contours of objects and reconstitutes a lost whole. Darkness unifies and fuses what light separates. Night rejoins what day disjoins.”

2.

I think of Goya’s famous The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters—whether the darkness descends upon, or the nightmares ascend from, the mind of the dreamer is never really determined. All we can know are the figures both perched on the dreamer’s shoulders and those above him in the sky: owls and bats, respectively. Bats have taken on an even more ominous quality right now, but the painting suggests that the owls, so closely associated with reason and the Delphic demand  to “know thyself!,” are not what they seem, and have decided to rejoin (or metamorphose) into the bats.

Metamorphosis will play a big role in the second season: Leland to BOB, Laura to Maddy, Cooper to BOB, even the old waiter bringing warm milk to Cooper in the first episode will transform into the Fireman (aka the Giant). Like Gregor Samsa waking up after his metamorphosis, Cooper, by the end of the episode, will tell us (and himself) “I am not dreaming” this metamorphosis. Therefore, the Fireman is the first supernatural being we see “in the flesh” (so to speak) in Twin Peaks. We could always shrug off the dwarf, Mike and BOB in the first season as being merely the fictions of a dream, the monsters produced by Cooper’s sleep of reason. In season two, those monsters become real.

Cooper isn’t the only one having dreams and visions: twenty minutes into the episode we see Ronette Pulaski dreaming of the night of Laura’s murder only to return, after the original airing’s commercial break, to the domestic scene of the Palmer house. If the third season of Twin Peaks is in fact that last word on the story, then this house will have been its beginning and its ending, the space where all the monsters reside. Maddy informs Sarah Palmer of a dream she had the night before involving a growing blood stain on the Palmer’s carpet. Before Sarah can answer, a monster appears: Leland Palmer with stark white hair, singing the song “Mairzy-Doats.”

My own father used to sing this song to me as a child, so I knew it before seeing it in Twin Peaks. I remember him being fond of the Spike Jones recording, with its sound effect substitutions for the lyrics. The appeal of the song is the jumble of words that seem “queer” and “funny to the ear” when you first hear them, especially as a child: “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey/ A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?” Though silly now, I have a memory of the reveal that these jumbled words contain meaning as significant. The indistinct words becoming distinct is the linguistic analogy and inverse of Chion’s real night going from the distinct to the indistinct. The day, during which the scene between Maddy, Leland and Sarah take place, erases the distinct contours of words, fusing language to an indecipherable unity. The day too has its shadows as the bloodstain and the nonsense of the lyrics suggest, then there is even less distinction to be made at the end of the day.

3.

“Bobby, may I share something with you? A vision I had in my sleep last night, as distinguished from a dream which is merely a cataloging and sorting of the days events by the subconscious.”

I don’t think I can properly speak of the Major’s vision: it’s too much right now, and the time is not right. I think the Major’s on to something, though, when he makes the distinction between the vision he has and a dream. Not a scientific truth, but a truth about the mind’s relationship to vision and clarity. Cooper has a dream, and then he is not dreaming. He and the viewer experience it as an either/or distinction. Maddy has a dream, and in waking life it becomes real. These instances are the clarity necessary to know when we’re dreaming and when we are awake. The one distinguishes itself from the other. These other instances of dreaming and not dreaming can be mistaken as necessary to the plot itself…clues to the murder of Laura Palmer that need to be deciphered and solved.  The Major’s vision is “the mind revealing itself to itself […] a reunion with the deepest wellsprings of my being.” Dreams are where the night and day are present in the other—the monsters invading the sleep of reason. The Major’s vision—no longer cataloging, nor sorting—is ultimately about the self’s relationship to the wellspring of light that comes from the people we love and the space we have created for ourselves in which they reside. It demands no interpretation. But that’s enough of that. I can’t really talk about the rest of this scene right now, if you’ll forgive me, it’s far too painful and emotional and I really need to keep this on an intellectual level at this moment especially. 

4.

We see the night and water again at the end of the episode: rain falling outside of Doctor Hayward’s house. It’s dark again, but not as late. Inside the Haywards and the Palmers are having a “supper club.”  Everyone is in casual dress, except for Leland Palmer/BOB in a tuxedo and, directly opposite him,  Gersten Hayward, who is dressed as a fairy princess (she had just gotten the part in the school play). Were it not for these two figures positioned opposite one another, we might not think anything unusual was going on.  Just two families enjoying each others company for dinner. With the two costumed characters, however,  everything takes on, again, an unreal quality.

Because this is Lynch, and because everyone knows how important sound is to him, notice how the piano is mixed in this scene. Notice the persistent crackles in the background—it might be the rain outside—and how they echo the inner groove of the record playing as Leland is revealed to be BOB later in the season. It's no wonder Lynch's best interpreter would be a composer.

Harriet Hayward, older sister of the fairy princess, reads a poem about Laura. Poetry in Twin Peaks communicates something that can’t be expressed either in everyday language or life—a more refined version of the gobbledygook of “Mairzy Doats”—think of the “Fire Walk With Me” poem Mike recites in the first season and its relationship to both solving the murder and discovering the Black Lodge.  Lynch is nothing if not a Romantic at heart. Laura’s murder will eventually be lumped in with Gordon Cole’s blaue Blume cases: Novalis’ ubiquitous “blue rose,” a stand in for the infinite approximation of absolute, and, concomitantly, the unknowable (it’s more complicated than that but dear God just trust me on this).

“Living in my dreams,
It was Laura.
The glow was life.
Her smile was to say
It was alright to cry.
The woods was our sadness,
The dance was her calling.”


The poem is set in a dream, like Cooper’s dream of the Black Lodge in season one, or perhaps more in common with the vision that Major Briggs has earlier in the episode: a revealing of “our” selves to ourselves, a reunion with the deepest wellsprings of our being. People were so obsessed with the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer, that we forgot to ask ourselves: how are we doing with all this sadness? It’s easy to see the figure of Laura Palmer as just another dead girl on a murder mystery show. However, by the second season, Laura Palmer’s death has taken on a cosmic dimension: it is the suffering upon which we build our nest and bring our little twigs. The woods, so much a part of this show’s mythos as well as the mythos surrounding the show, has now become our sadness, while Laura is called away by the dance.

Tragically, she won’t have the last dance in the episode. Not yet. Before we leave the “supper club,” Leland/BOB will make sure of that. In speaking about his hair turning white, he mentions that seeing it in the mirror helped him turn a corner: “a great deal of sadness still, yes, but it wasn’t as overwhelming to me. I physically felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my heart…” When the show was first aired, the viewer had no idea Leland was the murderer. From our perspective, now, it’s hard not to see this mocking the very poem we’ve just heard. Just as it asks us to follow Laura’s calling away from sadness into the dance, Leland asks us to relieve the weight of Laura’s death from our hearts and into the dance as well:

“God! I feel like singing! No I really feel like singing a song! C’mon everybody get happy!”

And again we’re back to the cyclical nature of the darkness and light: the day that’s present in the night and the night that’s present in the day. The calling to the dance that brings us to the light appears again as that which manically draws us into the darkness. The other characters are laughing, just as Laura asks us to in Harriet’s poem, as Leland manically sings his song. By the end of Twin Peaks we’ll know why he’s manically singing. Gersten’s playing tries to keep up with Leland/BOB’s increasingly frenzied version of “Get Happy,” but eventually devolves into cacophony as Leland collapses to the ground. In the final, cruel twisting of the knife that is this truly unheimlich scene, Leland/BOB eventually revives, only to ask for another number: “‘Begin the Beguine!,” he shouts—a song about a dance.