What Year Is It?

Publishing this on the 31st anniversary of the Twin Peaks premier on ABC.

Sorry for the long delay in getting this out. Pandemic, moving, life and whatnot.

Speaking of moving, I was in going through a stack of papers that I discovered this, the original impetus for starting the blog. In 2017, utterly confounded by Twin Peaks: the Return, I made this “timeline” to somehow figure it out. Looking at the timeline today, it’s more puzzling than the show it’s trying to describe. But, as a kind of reset before going forward, I thought it might be fun or helpful to try and explicate it for myself as much as for anyone else.

In order to begin, let’s start at the end (which seems appropriate for Twin Peaks). The entire series ends with the following line of dialogue (actually, the series ends with Laura Palmer’s iconic scream, but that is the beyond-meaning of which we cannot properly speak or interpret):

“What year is it?”

It’s a good question. In order to understand what year it is at the end of the series we have to map out what year it is when the series begins. So at the very top of the paper we have the irl years in which Twin Peaks has been broadcast, filmed, distributed, published and released (1991-2017). At the bottom of the page I have the years in which the narrative of Twin Peaks takes place. Two notes on this: one, and this will be important later on, there is one scene in Twin Peaks: the Return that takes place in 1945. This is significant and ought to be included in the narrative timeline of Twin Peaks, yet almost as a supplement. Two, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am not including any of the books in my analysis. I’m aware that Mark Frost starts his narrative with Louis & Clark. I will not be doing this. So, these two notes aside, the narrative of Twin Peaks begins with the murder of Theresa Banks in 1988 and ends in 2016.

Whereas the horizontal movement of the timeline is chronological, there are any number of points in the timeline that point to moments in the future and past constructing affinities and and loops within that timeline. For example, in the movie Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer has a dream wherein she sees Annie, trapped in the Black Lodge at the end of the original ABC series, lying next to her in bed, bloodied. Annie tells Laura that the good Dale is trapped in the Black Lodge. Of course, this is a warning regarding an event which, chronologically, has not happened yet. It’s a warning from the future, which constructs a temporal loop between that moment and a moment which takes place after the end of the series. That the circularity of the temporality shared by these dead and soon-to-die women at the hands of men is not insignificant.

Reading down the side of the timeline, on the left side there are color coded descriptors of each show or movie: red for Twin Peaks (ABC), Fire Walk With Me in aqua blue, and Twin Peaks: the Return in blue gray. Even clarifying which iteration of Twin Peaks corresponds to which part of the timeline can be tricky. Going back to the previous example: though the scene between Laura and Annie takes place in Fire Walk With Me before Laura Palmer’s murder—the animating event of the original series—it’s inexplicable without the events of the original series, therefore Fire Walk With Me’s narrative incorporates events from both before and after the original series.

What becomes more confusing, if we see all of Twin Peaks as a total work as it has recently been sold (interestingly titled Twin Peaks A-Z—a title that alludes to one of Lynch’s earliest short films the Alphabet), then scenes from Fire Walk With Me are repeated in Twin Peaks: the Return, but not as memories but as experiences that are happening simultaneously. So if you were to map out on a timeline when each of the films take place, you’d have something like: Fire Walk With Me depicts events before the ABC series, immediately after the ABC series—Mr. C has already escaped the Black Lodge—and events that are part of future events in The Return (after Cooper enters room 315).

Lest this appear as a magic trick Lynch imposes on Twin Peaks after the original series, it’s worth noting that the original series has a very similar moments of narrative and temporal disruption: In episode three, we see Cooper’s dream wherein we are told the events are taking place 25 years later. No one actually believed those events would be given a context twenty five years later…but 25 years later (both in the show’s time AND our time) we do see Cooper, much older, and Laura Palmer sitting in the Black Lodge. Much like the dream in Fire Walk With Me, events from the future are transmitted through dreams which create temporal loops. (In one of my favorite little details of the whole series early on The Return reiterates the scene in the Black Lodge with Laura whispering the name of her killer, again, in Cooper’s ear. Instead of boy scout like enthusiasm to be let in on the secret, this time the older Cooper, realizing he’s never getting out of the loop of dead Lauras whispering their horrible secrets in his ears, winces and seems genuinely disgusted at what she’s telling him).

Continuing along the left side of the page, there are three other color codings for the three television seasons of Twin Peaks (in this sense the movie doesn’t play a role). On the one hand, this ought to not play a role independent of the narrative presented. Occasionally TV series will go backward and forward in time (I’m thinking of Lost) from season to season, but Twin Peaks seems unique in that each season represents stylistic differences that actually do impact the temporality of the show. This is most obvious in the differences between the original ABC series and the Showtime reboot. But I would argue that even the stylistic differences between seasons one and two have an impact on the narrative.

The original eight episodes that comprise season one unfold with each episode representing one successive day after Laura Palmer’s murder. Other than the aforementioned dream which takes place in the future, one awkward flashback between James and Laura, and, of course, the videotaped picnic from one week earlier, all of the events in season one take place over the course of one week, plotting which serves the murder mystery element of the story well. People have praised the pacing of the first season and have attributed that to Lynch’s active involvement with the show. Yet, when Lynch had total control over the story in Fire Walk With Me and The Return, he leaned heavily on elements first introduced in the second season.

Though there are narrative elements and plotting similar to the first season, already in the first episode of the second season, the 24 hour day is stretched almost beyond recognition: the opening scene with Cooper and the Giant/old man is purposely interminable, with Lynch filming the “world’s most decrepit bellhop” in real time as he shuffles out of the room, down the hall, back down the hall to Cooper’s room, and finally back to the slowly bleeding Cooper, to whom the bell hop gives a thumbs up. It’s the appearance of these supernatural elements: the giant/Fireman, the old woman and her son, the owls, Leland’s white hair, Philip Gerard slipping into the synthesized voice of Mike to identify Bob—suggests that there is a temporality not of this world. These are some of the very excessive elements that turned off viewers and might have eventually gotten the creators to dismiss it. But the chronological temporality promised in the first season’s murder mystery story is undermined by the second season’s increasingly atemporal cosmology. Oddly, between the two seasons, it’s the second season that seem to most closely reflect Lynch’s interests in both the atemporality of the unconscious and the meditative mind.

Clearly, for anyone who’s watched the Return, the non-narrative style of the filmmaking coupled with an even more byzantine iteration of the cosmology already developed in the second season and the movie (along with its missing scenes) has a more direct impact on the narrative—or at least what one can discern from it. Or, to put it another way, the third season of Twin Peaks makes the first season look like Columbo. So, it is important for any analysis of the entirety of Twin Peaks not only treat the TV series and the film as two distinct entities, not only treat the ABC show and Showtime series as two distinct entities, but, I would argue, each season of the show and the movie must be seen as distinct entities as well. Hence the desire to write a blog about the second season.

Moving along horizontally again, I have placed a series of events from the story that are significant in linking to events that will happen or have happened in the narrative. Another note: when I constructed this timeline, I limited my rewatch to those episodes/movies directed by Lynch. Obviously, in my rewatch I’m watching all the episodes from season two, but there’s an argument to be made that the most significant events happen in his episodes and the larger cosmology is largely in place in all of Lynch’s episodes. One could argue that the animating event of the Twin Peaks narrative is the murder of Teresa Banks in 1988. It’s mentioned in the first episode of the ABC series and it’s depicted in the credit sequence of Fire Walk With Me. Her murder links to the murder of Laura Palmer at the end of Fire Walk With Me and the beginning of Twin Peaks. The murder scene at the end of Fire Walk With Me links with both Maddy’s murder in the middle of season two and the repeat of Laura’s murder at the end of the Return, with Cooper and Laura now looking on.

Moreover, the figures from the Black Lodge we see in Fire Walk With Me will appear again for the first time in episode three of the ABC series. So there is a second temporal loop set up between the emergence of the Black Lodge in the narrative around the time Theresa Banks is murdered, Cooper’s appearance in the Black Lodge after Laura is murdered in Fire Walk With Me, Annie’s warning to Laura that Cooper’s in the Black Lodge after the ABC finale, and the inexplicable fact that Cooper does not remember the Black Lodge after the dream in the third episode of the ABC series, as if he had never been there. Although no one is murdered (unless Annie is murdered and it’s her corpse that is speaking to Laura in Fire Walk With Me) in the final appearance of the Black Lodge in the ABC series, there is then a connection between the first emergence of the Black Lodge in Fire Walk With Me, the appearance of the Black Lodge in Cooper’s dream, its appearance in the ABC finale and then its reappearance in the Return 25 years later.  

One other significant event for the temporarily affecting the narrative of the show is the character of Philip Jeffries played by David Bowie. Though he only has a small role in the movie, he is a significant character in the overall cosmology, and reemerges in the Return as a piece of industrial machinery. Within Fire Walk With Me, however, Philip is the first character that seems caught in a temporal loop, which produces the first Doppelgänger—at least temporally, Cooper’s first Doppelgänger, Mr. C, had already emerged at the end of the ABC series—as one Philip passes under the security camera while the other enters Gordon Cole’s office.

There’s much to say about Laura Palmer’s murder: it is the impetus for the narrative from our temporal perspective (we, the viewers, don’t find out about Theresa Bank’s murder until Laura’s already dead), it is also the point in which our möbius strip folds in on itself. Laura’s murder is both has and, from the perspective of the Return’s ending, has not happened yet. It is also echoed, with explicit homage to Vertigo, in Maddy’s murder in the middle of the second season. Lynch uses the narrative device of the möbius strip in a number of his films: think of the “Dick Laurant is dead” moment from Lost Highway or Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive. It’s where the character we have been following sees or hears him or herself from the outside. Much like the non-Euclidean shape for which it is named, the ability of a person to see themselves from the outside is logically impossible, though, in one of the beautiful aspects of film, spatially it can be represented. Moreover, within the analogical world of Twin Peaks, I’m not certain that seeing yourself automatically results in a Doppelgänger. Rather, what is produced when the möbius strip of identity shows up in Lynch’s works, is a temporal disruption. It means the character or characters are about to experience their temporal loop again.

This temporal loop also applies to Cooper’s arrival in the town of Twin Peaks which occurs once at the beginning of the ABC series and then, again, at the end of the Return. It’s this temporal loop and the repetition of the murder and arrival in Twin Peaks that disjoins time for Cooper by the end (hence the initial “what year is it?” Question).

The final discreet event on the timeline I wish to address is Cooper’s original imprisonment in the Black Lodge at the end of the ABC series. Lynch has said in more than one interview that Cooper’s imprisonment in the Black Lodge was punishment not only for his character who had lost his way, but the creators and Lynch himself who felt that the original aim of the series had been lost. Of course, Cooper’s appearance in the Black Lodge at the end of the ABC series recalls his original visit to the BL in the series (episode 3’s dream) and will anticipate his various appearances in the BL in Fire Walk With Me (which take place prior to the events of the ABC series…you see how confusing this gets?) In both of those other instances, however, he seems to go in and out unless, as is suggested by the dream appearance in episode three, these are only glimpses into his 25 year imprisonment between 1991-2016. It’s significant that Cooper isn’t immediately released from the BL after 25 years but must stay there, reemerging in the world as both the fool and the devil. As the references to archetypes show, there is a greater emphasis on spirituality and growth—influenced by Lynch’s interest in TM no doubt—than the rather dark view of the original series and film. Dougie is a genuinely funny and moving character who is allowed the boring, joy filled familial life that Cooper claims to have wanted before entering the BL.

As for Cooper himself, he also continues on after the reemergence and defeat of Mr. C., but arguably has learned nothing from his imprisonment, because he continues down the same path of rescuing Laura from murder—an impossible task according to the laws of temporality. It may appear as if the möbius strip allows you a return to an event, but it’s only a single strip of time folding back in on itself. Laura will be murdered. You will fail to stop it. The only thing you will insure is that another girl gets murdered. What year is it?

More Abstract Stuff:

Above the timeline there are what I would call “modes” of reading. I think there are multiple and varied modes of reading and these are not the only ones. First, as is true with Lynch’s films in general and murder mysteries as well, psychoanalysis has proven an historically significant mode by which to interpret Twin Peaks. Leland Palmer and Cooper represent two forms of the father for Laura: Leland the perverse father who is ever present, violent and, by shedding his human skin when need to, omnipotent. He watches her when she doesn’t know and reads her diary when she isn’t home. Cooper represents the father as Law, as order and, throughout most of the ABC series and Fire Walk With Me, as a compassionate and empathetic father.

But Lynch, like Hitchcock before him, blurs the lines between the two fathers. Cooper pops open Laura’s diary in the pilot episode without a key. He gleefully inserts his tweezers into her dead, blue fingers. In his search for truth and justice, he interrogates  Ronette Pulaski just as she emerges from a coma and, most significantly, he can’t prevent women from dying every time he attempts the wrongs embodied by something as ineffable as the Black Lodge. We are conditioned by the narrative to see Leland Palmer, his daughter’s rapist and murderer, as a somewhat innocent victim of Bob’s manipulation only to be reminded that the real crime that he committed wasn’t enacted by a spirit. Whatever commitment Cooper holds to the Law cannot continue beyond the logic of cause and effect. When he emerges from the Black Lodge only to continue solving the murder of Laura Palmer—who isn’t even Laura Palmer any longer—the logic of the Law embodied by Agent Cooper breaks down.

This is where Morality, the mode of interpretation above psychoanalysis, comes in. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis subscribes to a morality—psychoanalysis only asks for interpretation, understanding and hopefully something like normality for one’s life—but the psychoanalytic topography of the narrative (the crime of a father raping his daughter) suggests moral culpability and failure for the viewer. The Peyton Place-like narrative of a small town with secrets often of a sexual nature, mirrors the Freudian argument that coexisted along side of the repressive culture in 1950s America. Freud’s own thoughts about this repressive structure underlies his Civilization and Its Discontents among any number of other texts. We can also see this in the special agent who cannot recognize his own desires and flaws. While clearly not as culpable as the rapist father, nevertheless falls trap to his own moral failings. There is also the old psychoanalytic trope, represented by the double as well, of the face that the monster shows to the world and the interior life. Both Leland and Cooper show faces to the world that are at odds with the men they are interiorly and are judged accordingly.

Though Cooper is imprisoned at the beginning of Twin Peaks: the Return, much of the show follows another duplicate of Cooper—his Dreifachgänger—Dougie, whose simplicity, stupidity, but, as is evident in his interactions with his son and wife, deeply loving being, appears as the opposite of Cooper’s other duplicate, Mr. C. But Dougie is also different than Cooper himself: in a radical suggestion: it isn’t the FBI agent, on the side of the Law and “good,” who represents the Ethical side of the show. He even changes the hearts of the Vegas crime boss brothers, the Mitchum Brothers. He generously, if unknowingly, uses his magical powers to enrich others. He seems guileless and clueless as to the functioning of “good” and “evil,” unlike Cooper who, upon waking from his coma, proudly declares his continued allegiance to the FBI.

On the lower right side of the page, I have color coded some of the genre conventions the show exhibits even though, as has been pointed out, it doesn’t quite stick to any of them. For the ABC show the dominant genres featured are melodrama (self consciously mocked in the Invitation to Love segments) and murder mystery. What doesn’t get talked about as much, simply because it resists some of the understanding we place on the first two genres, is the supernatural and science fiction genre echoes that the ABC show—especially in the second season—exhibits. Moreover, and related to both the supernatural and science fiction, Fire Walk With Me and The Return have moments that evoke the horror genre and its conventions. This is most explicit in the scene early on in The Return where two young lovers, mid-coitus, are attacked by the creature which emerges from the clear box they’re observing. Obviously, if we extend the horror genre to the more proper thriller genre, then Bob’s story fits in as well. Finally, though not a genre, Twin Peaks: the Return, to a much greater extent than either the ABC series or Fire Walk With Me, uses surrealism and non-narrative filmmaking in a much more explicit way.  The apex of this is the eighth hour of the Return, one of Lynch’s finest works in any medium.

A quick final note related to this episode that has to be the main reading of the third season: in the top right corner of of the timeline I have written “World Historical Time.” What is undeniable about the ABC show and Fire Walk With Me, there’s nothing that really tethers us to the contemporary world. Though made in the late 80s and early 90s, TP evokes 1950s America more than anything. This has placed Twin Peaks in the larger canon of “post-modern” texts that use history as a playground, borrowing from past symbols, narratives and tropes in constructing itself. The Return isn’t like that. World historical time, not its post-modern bricolage, erupts, literally, in the very real nuclear test at Los Alamos in 1945. What does it mean for this show, so interested in a multi-decade American culture pastiche, to place its origins squarely in such a notable, “real,” historical event.

As the cosmology of the Twin Peaks universe expanded over the second season, Fire Walk With Me and the third season, it became harder not to see the show as science fiction or supernatural fiction. One of the aspects of this type of reading that would need to be elucidated is the movement from mystery/melodrama/horror/science fiction/supernatural fiction along both the temporal horizon as well as the interpretive axis (i.e. is there something about the moral register that lends itself to the genres of melodrama and murder mystery, and is there something about the ethical register that pushes us both in a less narrative, more uncanny and unreal direction. I’m using “real” here to suggest, as with much of Lynch’s work, there is a rejection of realism to evoke something more subconscious. This is where I believe Lynch’s own interests in Transcendental Meditation might be significant. I don’t feel like I know enough about his own beliefs in this arena to comment yet.

Final notes:

In the underside of the temporal bubbles I have placed two different modes of interpretive systems. The ABC show, perhaps because of both its failure to temporally place it in its own time as well as its story about American society, labor, the FBI, etc, Twin Peaks can be read as an allegory—a story, here the murder of a girl in a small town, which stands in for another story. Again, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m wary to include books like The Secret History in my analysis, but it seems clear, from a fast read through, that Frost, if not Lynch, saw the Twin Peaks narrative as a larger allegory for the U.S. and the settling of the Pacific Northwest.

The Return invites a different interpretive system. Hermeneutics has always been a feature of Twin Peaks: before the revelation of Leland Palmer as Bob in the ABC series, it was up to the viewer to piece together the clues in order to figure out what was going on (not just solving the crime). Who is the giant? The attempt to understand this question, as if the hermeneutics of the enterprise weren’t clear enough, it is the ring off of Cooper’s finger that is stolen, only to have the completed circle returned to him when he has solved the crime. Though the ABC series had its share of inexplicable moments, the story itself (“FBI agent comes to small town to solve the murder of a high school student’) is pretty understandable. Starting with Fire Walk With Me and definitely continuing in The Return, understanding the basic plot of the narrative becomes an interpretive task. I’ll take a rather banal example: at the beginning of The Return we boxes of shovels being delivered to Dr. Jacobi in his trailer. We have no idea why they are being delivered or what use he has for them. It only isn’t until later that we see him spray painting the shovels gold. Then, a little while after that, we get the full story that he is painting the shovels and selling them to actually promote his radio talk show. This is one of the less surreal moments that function like this. For all of the confusion of the original show, Lynch and his associates still often worked within the traditional television forms of establishing shots, shot matches, etc. In the Return this all goes out the window for a narrative in which each scene is a fractured part of a whole that only becomes more explicable (although not always) the more information the viewer is given.

Yet, unlike the nod to hermeneutics and interpretation the original ABC show had, there is no complete circle to Twin Peaks: the Return. To return to the beginning, as it were, if the last line of your complete work—as the title Twin Peaks: A to Z would suggest—is “what year is it?” You haven’t completed any hermeneutic circles of meaning and interpretation.