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.

Black Lives Matter

Every Cell Screams, (Season Two, Episode Four)

1.

Episode Four begins with an explicit homage/reference to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in reverse: instead of the camera closing into the hole of the ear, we begin in blackness, only to emerge in the light of the police station, observing the booking and initial interview of Leland Palmer for the murder of Jacques Renault. Let Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of Blue Velvet’s opening stand in for this type of sequence in Lynch’s universe:

“Lynch’s entire ‘ontology’ is based upon the discordance or contrast between reality, observed from a safe distance, and the absolute proximity of the real. His elementary procedure consists in moving forward from an establishing shot of reality to a disturbing proximity which renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, the crawling and twinkling of indestructible life.”

From this sequence one can make any number of critical observations: the ideological underpinnings of the “reality” Lynch is portraying; symbolic meaning of said “disgusting substance of enjoyment;” the indestructible life which is represented churning underneath. Here the “black hole” conical figure isn’t the organic flesh of the human ear overtaken by ants, rather it is the artificial industrial tiling of the police station which houses the “absolute proximity of the real,” within our sense of reality. The reversal of the procedure, starting in the absolute void of “the real” and moving to the reality we encounter in everyday life (here the recognizable television conceit of the police station interrogation) suggests, opposite Zizek’s reading of the movement from reality into the real, we start in the void of the real into a more recognizable reality. Blue Velvet is about de-stabilization, while the opening scene of the episode is the stabilization of the viewer from a place of de-stabilization.

What connects the two scenes, besides the mirror camera movements, is the primordial sound heard within the void. Again, Zizek:

“Let us return to the opening sequence of Blue Velvet: its crucial feature is the uncanny noise that emerges when we approach the real. This noise is difficult to locate in reality. In order to determine its status, one is tempted to evoke contemporary cosmology which speaks of noises at the borders of the universe; these noises are not simply internal to the universe—-they are remainders or last echoes of the Big Bang that created the universe itself […] The primordial noise, the last remainder of the Big Bang, is on the contrary constitutive of space itself: it is not a noise ‘in’ space, but a noise that keeps space open as such [….] Along the same lines, the fundamental noise in Lynch’s films is not simply caused by objects that are part of reality; rather, it forms the ontological horizon or frame of reality itself, i.e., the texture that holds reality together. Were this noise to be eradicated, reality itself would collapse, from the “open” infinite universe of Cartesian-Newtonian physics, we are thus back to the pre-modern “closed” universe, encircled, bounded, by a fundamental ‘noise.’”

The sounds heard in the void of the police station’s paneling are not quite as abstract as those found within Blue Velvet’s severed ear. Moreover, it is the closed space of each perforated hole—which, taken together looks like a Cartesian grid—that creates the abstract noise by “capturing” the ambient noise of the room. The viewer hears pieces of muffled dialogue (it sounds like Waldo the bird saying either “Laura/Maddy/Daddy no!” All of which would have meaning within the narrative), Laura’s screams, the beeping of hospital monitors and the ever present ambient noise that Zizek describes above. There’s an added visual echoing of sound in the swirling holes in the tile which, before the reveal that it is a ceiling, look like a phone’s receiver (again, reminding viewers that this was a show shot in the early 90s when such things existed). Rather than purely abstract universal sound, the muffled sound at the beginning of the episode anticipates the reveal that it is Leland Palmer’s interrogation at the other end of the void.

 It’s worth noting that Lynch himself didn’t direct the episode, rather Todd Holland did. As Chion points out, it’s impossible to imagine Twin Peaks as an auteurist effort—this episode had four script writers!—and the interweaving of some thematic elements of Lynch’s larger work demonstrates the collective hive mind that went into shaping the series.

As a side note: I don’t think Ray Wise gets enough credit for the acting he does as Leland Palmer. And, fascinatingly, for a scene that ultimately won’t mean much to the overall series, Wise does some of his best, most affecting, acting in this scene. The murder of Renault will eventually be revealed as a way for Bob/Leland to have covered up the murder, but within the context of the scene we are never uncertain that this is a father’s rage at his daughter’s  death. It serves as a counterpoint to Leland’s behavior in the previous episodes of the season: absurd, alienating, menacing. There’s an added layer to the scene insofar as Leland, as a lawyer, is not only familiar with his Miranda rights, but looks foolish arguing that his reason for killing Jacques Renault was because he was arrested for the crime. In adding to the topsy-turvy tragedy of the scene, Leland, the lawyer, has mistaken the law of Wonderland (verdict first, then evidence) for the law of Twin Peaks.

2. 

The only other plot point of any significance in this otherwise pretty insignificant episode of Twin Peaks is the ongoing saga of Laura Palmer’s secret diary and the involvement of the reclusive Harold Smith. It is astounding to me how anyone can see the scene between Harold and Donna as anything but highly disturbing: Harold, an adult male, is drinking wine with a high school student, while reading her recently deceased best friend’s soft-core diary. The whole thing is shot with the same type of nighttime soap opera aesthetic that could have been found on ABC any other night of the week. What he reads is also disturbing, introducing the passage with a creepy, half-laughed “seems appropriate!”:

"But still I'm afraid to tell her of my fantasies and my nightmares; sometimes she's good at understanding, other times she just giggles, and I don't have the nerve to ask why things like that are funny to her. So I feel badly again and shut up about it for a long time. I love Donna very much, but sometimes I worry that she wouldn't be around me at all if she knew what my insides were like. Black and dark, and soaked with dreams of big, big men and different ways they might hold me and take me into their control …”

The passage itself comes from The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a tie-in book published in-between seasons one and two. I’ve never read it—though written by Jennifer Lynch, David Lynch’s daughter, it seemed even in my fandom too crassly commercial to be taken seriously—but the following quotation from a Guardian article seems to be a fair assessment:

“‘It is a confident book,’ says Dr Kirsty Fairclough, a senior lecturer in film and media at Salford University. ‘But it is highly problematic.’ For Fairclough, one of the most unsettling things about the book is how it was marketed to and read primarily by teenage girls. ‘I was a kid when I read this,’ she says. ‘It was a status symbol, a sort of rebellion. I totally connected with Laura Palmer. The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer fills in the blanks in a way that can feel exploitative. It’s deeply disturbing.’”

Turning Laura’s abuse and rape into a product tie-in for a television show on the ABC network is going to seem exploitative no matter how sensitively the material is dealt with. I’ve watched Twin Peaks with victims of sexual abuse and many of the details a non-abused viewer might pass over they noticed with both positive and negative reactions. Overall, and I will have more to say about this as I continue writing, I think that Lynch and Frost generally understand the horror of the underlying story. I think that Ray Wise does a good job of making Leland Palmer both a monster and a sympathetic character. Whether or not you believe Leland is possessed by BOB and turned into a child rapist, or that BOB is a metaphor for the incomprehensible horror of what he is doing, the ability of Ray Wise to move between watery eyed grieving father to show tune singing serial killer makes Leland one of the more fascinating early gray characters on television.  

Likewise, Sheryl Lee is very good as Laura Palmer/Maddy. By the time we get to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the viewer is able to see Laura’s actions and reactions to her father’s abuse, she isn’t a mere cadaver onto which the detective/viewer can project his/her fantasies/fears/sympathies. Gobble gobble. But at this point in the show, with ABC willing to milk the “who shot Laura Palmer” campaign for all it’s worth, the diary tie-in has a different feel and cheapens the very real sexual horror at the heart of her murder. On the level of plot, the idea of a secret diary seems lazy (“oh you thought you saw the diary…well, here’s a SECRET diary”) even though I’m sure, returning to the beginning of this essay, I can probably concoct a Lacanian reading of the second diary. 

So on the surface of things, the episode named after Laura’s secret diary seems to be stacked against the original owner of the diary: her rapist father is proudly defending his daughter’s honor by killing the man he wants the police to believe he believes is his daughter’s killer. Her former agoraphobic lover is reading dirty passages in her secret diary to bed her best friend Donna (“she wouldn’t be around me if she knew what my insides are like”). Yet, while acknowledging the tricky relationship between Lynch’s world, women and the violence done to them, this constant de-centering of the dead female for the benefit of the men who did violence to her (all the way up to and including Cooper) will be repeated again and again throughout the story.

A Strange and Difficult Path, (Season Two, Episode Three)

Quick note: As you‘ve no doubt noticed (if you‘ve read this far), I have no interest in doing an interpretation of the episodes, rather I like writing essays inspired by/influenced by the episode in question (although I do think that each of my essays addresses concerns within and without the show). If that‘s not your thing, I get it. W/r/t this particular one, I spend a long time on essentially one part of one scene in the episode. However, since I believe this scene addresses some of the core values and failures of the show, I thought it was worth a discussion. Safety and health to all!



1.

There’s no way to discuss this episode without talking about Miguel Ferrer's brilliant performance as Albert Rosenfield. By the third season, as we begin to realize that Cooper will be playing out his violent fantasies over and over again in a loop under the guise of “fixing the past and saving the girl,” Albert appears as the moral center of the show, and possibly has been the whole time. Just as the second season premier laid the foundation for the posthumous reconciliation between Bobby and his father, this episode introduces Albert’s moral complexity. After telling sheriff Truman that he ought to work on not dragging his knuckles on the floor, Truman grabs Albert and threatens to beat him up. This is Albert’s response, worth quoting in full:

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet man in the fight against vioIence. I pride myseIf in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absoIuteIy revenge, aggression and retaIiation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

It’s worth noting Truman’s original comments from a draft script by the episode writer Robert Engels:

“Albert, you make fun of everyone and everything and then act like you deserve an award for it. That’s just not right. Get out of here before I do something I won’t regret. Again.”

I’m torn between which of these two versions I prefer: on the one hand, the televised script sticks closer to Truman’s character with a gruff, “Now, the Iast time, I knocked you down. I feIt bad about it. The next time’s gonna be a real pleasure,” but the draft comments do a better job setting up Albert’s speech, and the ethos from which Albert opposes the very cynicism and superiority Truman claims to see in him.

But what is Albert’s speech saying? And, because we can’t forget the context of the scene, what does it mean for two men, members of the law and white, to be evoking the names of King and Gandhi, both of whom specifically disobeyed racist/colonialist  law so that a more just world could be realized?

2.

When we are introduced to Albert in the third episode of the first season, he seems to represent the stereotypical authority within the FBI, as opposed to Cooper who, as we had seen from the previous episode, uses intuition and a loosely defined (and orientalist) Tibetan/Buddhist approach to solving crimes. Our sympathies immediately lie with Cooper and Truman—who represent both spiritual and folk wisdom tied to nature and the woods—against Albert’s insistence on the superiority of forensic science, professionalism and reason. This culminates into a physical altercation between Albert and Truman over—and it should be remembered that, like the third episode of season two, the fourth episode of season one was directed by a woman—Laura Palmer’s dead and naked body. Though never truly an antagonist in the first season, the viewer is given no opportunity to really sympathize or identify with Albert.

By the second season, there’s been a subtle shift. In the first episode of the second season, Ed Hurley explains how, during his honeymoon to his wife Nadine, he accidentally shot her eye out. Though the characters to whom Ed is telling the story have the “appropriate” reaction of solemn surprise, Albert, off to the side with Truman, begins laughing. Though this reaction might seem jarring, the truth is, Everette McGill’s delivery of the revelation, the surprise at learning that Ed himself caused Nadine to lose her eye, what we already know about their marriage, and the overall absurdity of the hospital story line in general during that episode, makes Albert’s reaction more natural than it would be otherwise. I laughed then and still laugh whenever McGill says “my god! I shot Nadine’s eye out on that trip!” In this scene, Lynch and Frost evoke one of Bertolt Brecht’s more famous definition of epic theater:

“[T]he theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art — nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.”

This alienating effect is just one of the many the writers and directors will use throughout Twin Peaks. It’s referred to in the aforementioned poem “It Was Laura” from the first episode of the second season: "We were crying// And I saw her laughing.” Is it more appropriate to cry with Ed and Nadine in the moment to keep them stuck in a loveless marriage based on nothing more than guilt for an accidental crime? Or should we, like Albert, laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation and hope that the characters, too, can see it as well? The third season will have an answer to that.

This scene allows the viewer to find Albert’s skepticism about the town of Twin Peaks more relatable than in the first season. Maybe these people are absurd? And given the underlying violence of Ed’s story, parodying the underlying violence of the BOB story, maybe there IS something wrong with Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks for sentimentalizing these monsters?

This lays the groundwork for Albert’s speech in the third episode of the second season. Even before we’ve heard everything Albert has to say in his speech, the musical cue of “Laura’s Theme” playing in the background clues the viewer into Albert’s inherent sympathy and goodness here. And by his final “I love you sheriff Truman,” the viewer’s sympathies are completely on Albert’s side.

3.

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet man in the fight against violence.”

In what are some of his final writings, Michel Foucault concluded his lectures from March 26th, 1984, collected in the The Courage of Truth volume, with undelivered remarks regarding parrhesia (“the courage to tell the truth without concealing anything and regardless of the dangers this involves”) and its connection to cynicism:

“Parrhesia […] appears in two aspects: the courage to tell the truth to the person one wants to help and direct in the ethical formation of himself. The courage to manifest the truth about oneself, to show oneself as one is, in the face of all opposition. It is on this point that the Cynic appears: he has the insolent courage to show himself as he is; he has the boldness to tell the truth; and in his criticism of rules, conventions, customs, and habits, addressing himself off-handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful, he reverses the functions of political parrhesia and dramatizes also the philosophical life.”

Albert begins his speech by aligning himself with the cynics cautiously, but reveals that his cynicism is in service of a greater ethos: naysaying and being a hatchet man in the fight against violence. His cynicism can only be partial because of his position of authority: to truly give in to cynicism would be to go against the very reason and professionalism—all the way up to the legitimacy of the law he is sworn to uphold—he continuously shows with regard to his FBI work. Rather, he balances the need to show the world the FBI agent he is with a tension that acknowledges the righteous justice he seeks in aligning himself with King, Gandhi and the global non-violent protest movement.

As I wrote about last week, these slang terms evoke a certain phrasing that I associate with the 1950s and film noir. In reality, the term hatchet man comes from the late 19th century as a racist term for hired Chinese assassins. In searching the etymology of the word, I found the following transcription from testimony given on 25th October 1876 by Michael A. Smith, a San Francisco police officer, before the joint special committee of the Senate and House of Representatives (the law always looms) appointed to investigate the character, extent, and effect of Chinese immigration:

“Q. Why are they called hatchet men?—A. A great many of them carry a hatchet with the handle cut off; it may be about six inches long, with a handle and a hole cut in it; they have the handle sawed off a little, leaving just enough to keep a good hold. Those are called among the Chinamen bad men or hatchet-men.” —from Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1877)

So not only does Albert identify with the cynics, he also identifies with those who carry with them a hatchet, a weapon and, perhaps unconsciously, the immigrant. Rather than as a racist boogeyman, however,  Albert redefines the term as something heroic. Rather than the nameless, faceless petty criminal who commits crimes for hire, Albert‘s willing to do the dirty work in the name of non-violence: “I choose to Iive my Iife in the company of Ghandi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Cooper expresses his global concerns in the guise of a wide-eyed optimist that does not chaff against his outward appearance as the straight-edged lawman. Yet his clearly expressed sympathy for the people of Tibet demonstrates that he too has global concerns. This juxtaposition, or possibly dissonance, between the FBI lawman and the empathetic globalist, presents Cooper as, according to Chion among others, a cross between an alien (neither relatable, nor believable) and a boy scout (an innocent).

Albert expresses his global concerns in the guise of a cynic, who fights for the same global concerns as Cooper, but does so by picking fights with figures of authority (“I’ll gladly take a punch”), speaking “off-handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful,” and generally being an asshole but in the name of love. If we return to Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, this is the truth that Cooper’s wide-eyed optimism and metaphysics cannot admit: that the world is essentially as violent and random as accidentally getting shot in the eye by your husband and must be confronted as such. In allowing the cracks into Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks, Albert lets the light get in…albeit a different one than the robins bring when they return.

4.

And yet, perhaps because he evokes King’s name, it’s time for us to ask this beloved show what it means that three white officers of the law are listening in awe as the path of Gandhi and King are being rhapsodized as a manifestation of agape. We all know what the FBI did to MLK Jr. throughout his life. Even if we were to grant the idea that Cooper and Albert walk a “strange and difficult” path, the institution of the bureau and its authority is fully intact. Obviously, this is reading against Albert’s very message of agape: dole out and take the punches in the name of the long arc of justice and love. But justice and love, to paraphrase William Gaddis, are what you get in the next life. In this life you get the law. Which is why King and Gandhi were far more radical than Albert Rosenfield: they‘re commitment to the power of non-violence undermining the very law Albert is set to defend.  And while the show might have many strange and difficult things to say about justice and the cosmos, it’s pretty conservative when it comes to the law.

The institutions of the law in the show are never really called into question. Moreover, they are made more homely than not: sheriff Truman, deputy Hawk, deputy Andy, Lucy, Cooper, Albert, the eventual appearance of Lynch as Gordon Cole, David Bowie as Philip Jeffreys, even the secondary characters like the public defender played by Van Dyke Parks, or the quirky, nomadic judge and his Native American female law clerk, all of these characters come to represent the earthly law in its various manifestations. None of them seem in the least to be corrupted or cruel. In fact, the cruelest of all of them seems to be Albert, and now we know that his cruelty is in the service of love.

What does it mean for a show that is so willing to represent the very unheimlich world of the domestic space that the institutions of the law become so homely? The detective’s tool kit of deduction can become an intuitive spiritual practice, but the very institutions by which the lawman does his work (the police, the FBI, the arrests, the jails, the judges, etc) are never really called into question. Their foundations and general correctness are presented throughout all three seasons of the show as well as Fire Walk With Me. If there is a discordant conservative streak that runs through Lynch’s often radical work, it’s that the only reason we are allowed to sink into our dreams is that the social functioning—of which dreams are merely a sorting and cataloging according to Major Briggs—circumscribed by the institutions of law, is allowed to go on undisturbed while our nightmare owls ascend and descend before its well-guarded doors.

The Happy Generations (Season Two, Episode Two)

1.

Barbershop Quartets are an invention of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like many American musical inventions, they are a mixture of white and African-American musical traditions and, also like many American musical inventions, most African-American pioneers of the style have been written out of its history. Its most popular period can be traced from the late 1930s off and on up until the late 1950s. The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA) held its first meeting in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1938—home to the race massacre of “Black Wall Street” seventeen years earlier. The last massive interest in barbershop quartets might have come with the 1957 musical The Music Man. In the musical, the confidence man thwarts a number of school board members in seeking out his credentials. He teaches them to sing barbershop style to distract them, and, unwittingly, brings about social harmony between the men, who have been quarreling for decades. The lesson is: all anybody needs is a collective identity in which to submit and the confidence man can continue his grift unnoticed.

Season 2, Episode 2 begins with a barbershop quartet in the background, practicing in the dining room of the Great Northern hotel. Like so many details of the show (the taxidermy on the table on the police station in the pilot episode, the fish stuck in the percolator in episode 2 of season 1) we don’t know why they’re there and they’re never brought back again. But if I were to guess which era of the barbershop Lynch is evoking by having them in the background, I would bet it’s the 1950s iteration from the Music Man and their subsequent popularity.

A few years later the Simpsons aired an episode that revolved around Homer’s barbershop quartet. Ostensibly a Beatles allegory, it also becomes an allegory for Nirvana and grunge which had just broken a few years earlier. Barbershop quartets, it seems, based on these early 90s examples, carry with them a trace of the historical as a then contemporary allegory. Or, as Fredrick Jameson describes it through the concept of “historicity,” “Historicity […] can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history: that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.” This is perfectly illustrated in the Simpsons barbershop quartet episode: the ascent and marketing of the Beatles is just like the ascent and marketing of Nirvana and, if taken to its extreme—like making the musty and unhip barbershop quartet into a pop sensation—then we can see how these cycles repeat themselves and make geniuses out of even talentless barflies like Barney and Homer.

Because Lynch is not explicit as to why or how the barbershop quartet features in the episode, its historical function in the scene and the show remains more opaque than in the Simpsons. Since the barbershop quartet is only in the background harmonizing without words, its the dialog in the foreground that draws our attention:

“Cooper: Buddhist tradition first came to the land of snow in the 5th century A.D.
The first Tibetan king to be touched by the dharma was King Hathatha Rignamputsan.
He and succeeding kings were collectively known as the Happy Generations. Now, some historians place them in a Water Snake year, 213 A.D. Others in the year of a Water Ox, 173 A.D. Amazing, isn't it? The Happy Generations.”

It’s not the first time Tibet and Buddhism had been mentioned on the show. In Season 1, Episode 3 Cooper had discussed his interest in Tibet before starting his mind body deductive technique for finding Laura Palmer’s killer:

“Cooper: In 1950, Communist China invaded Tibet and, while leaving the Dalai Lama nominally in charge, they in fact seized control of the entire country. Following a Tibetan uprising against the Chinese in 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced to flee for his life to India and has lived in exile ever since.”

The quaint small-town America embodied by the barbershop quartet and its evocation of 1950s and the Music Man is properly historicized by Tibet, its 1959 invasion by the PRC’s forces and the eventual exile of the Dalai Lama. As Jameson writes: “[t]he sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality: that the existential may be absolutely distinct […] from the structural and social significance of a collective phenomenon […] Eisenhower wore a well-known smile for us but an equally well-known scowl for foreigners beyond our borders….” The barbershop quartet of the background becomes the history of buddhist Tibet, and its eventual invasion, in the foreground, both historical reflections of the 1950s.

2.

This scene is not alone in Lynch's work. If there is one decade and place that Lynch seems most interested in evoking, it is the United States in the 1950s. Twin Peaks is least immune to this: the diner, Audrey’s bobby socks, James Hurley’s biker image…all of these recall easily comprehended short-hand for the 50s. But it extends beyond the content: the formal mystery of Twin Peaks, the death of homecoming queen Laura Palmer and her many secrets, recalls the 1950’s popular culture’s revolt against (again Jameson, who also analyzes this aspect of Lynch’s work): “the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and non-deviant everyday life.”

There’s also another 1950s element of the show that’s less obvious: the notion that the boom economy reflected in the centrality of the sawmill and its profitability, as well as the manual labor needed to run it, could sustain Twin Peaks’ local economy indefinitely. An argument about whether or not to close the mill down out of respect to both Laura Palmer and Ronette Pulaski (her father works at the mill), versus the profits lost from such actions, is already a plot point in the pilot. By the time the show premiered in 1990, there had been a massive decline in employment within the lumber industry in the Pacific Northwest as more and more mills became automated. The third season opening shows the once operating mill (we see it still humming along in the second season opening credits, though it has already burned down) now as a burnt out shell, a ghost that haunts the doppelgängers, giants, dwarfs and other supernatural beings that already inhabit the town.

The barbershop quartet isn’t the only musical cues from the 1950s that show up in the episode: in a brief scene, we see Shelly Johnson and Bobby Briggs enjoying a Ventures’ style guitar instrumental in a car, while discussing an insurance scam against her abusive husband that could have come straight out of a film noir. Two scenes later, devoid of any narrative context, James Hurley, Maddy Ferguson (Laura’s cousin) and Donny Hayward perform a song on the Hayward’s living room rug, with the cloyingly simple 1950s refrain “Just you/ and I/ together/ in love,” while an arpeggiating guitar figure flutters in the background. A drum keeping time comes in from somewhere, recalling those Elvis films where entire bands and orchestras would manifest themselves out of nowhere on the soundtracks.

At the time the episode aired, someone compared the song to the 1950s musical group the Fleetwoods, a group that, like our group here, contained two women and one man. Promotional pictures of the group at the time seemed to imply some kind of rivalry between the two women for the male singer’s affection, much like the scene in the show. I have a very distinct memory of my parents playing the Fleetwoods for me and strongly disliking it. Though I’m not a big fan, their two most famous songs, “Mr. Blue,” and “Come Softly to Me” are now two of my favorite songs from the 1950s. The former especially fits into Lynch’s obsession (see Roy Orbison) with popular music from this period that hides dark cosmic truths:

Our guardian star lost all his glow
The day that I lost you
He lost all his glitter the day you said "No"
And his silver turned to blue

What’s banally a song about a guy missing the girl who dumped him, turns into a star turning into a blue dwarf and dying away at the end of the universe.

Returning to the Hayward’s living room, the song itself falls apart as Donna notices James looking at Maddy longingly and runs away crying. And as one love triangle develops into another love triangle between Donna, James and now Harold Smith (so much melodrama!) We return to Maddy sitting on the living room floor.

What happens next is my favorite sequence of the second season and one of my favorites in the show overall. First thing you notice is that Maddy is looking from the floor into the kitchen with the kitchen framed by both the doorway and the furniture in the living room. The shot freezes on this framing for a few seconds before we notice BOB enter the shot looking directly at Maddy. Not only are we in Maddy’s point of view, but Lynch does this thing where the objects closest to us are out of focus, thus giving us the perspective of possibly hiding behind these objects out of BOB’s line of view. But he sees Maddy/us and, without pausing or diverting his gaze directly at Maddy/us, moves closer, manically smiling, crawling over whatever gets in his way, to get whatever is in/behind the camera. He comes so close that his face distorts and fills the entire frame until it becomes a black hole at the center of the screen until Maddy’s scream breaks the shot.

It’s frightening. And it’s frightening in a way that only Lynch can be: taking the most homely setting—the comforting coziness of white vocal groups, 1950s nostalgia, living rooms, carpet, kitchens—and turning them into the stuff of nightmares. And Lynch is a master at so many other things that make scenes like this terrifying: like the noontime lunch at Winkie’s in Mulholland Dr., with it’s terrible truths about the monsters which lurk in the corners of where we eat, the scene in Twin Peaks is brightly lit. The sound design, again, rumbles in the background for added anxiety. And Lynch purposely designs, as he does in all of his projects, the furniture himself. Here all of the furniture has had the legs shortened to give an almost German Expressionist disproportionality. Maddy and you, the viewer, are in a child-like perspective as Bob comes for you. The furniture is tinier, thus making it harder to hide behind. The only thing left to say about this scene is what has struck me upon watching it again: I had misremembered all of this taking place in the Palmer’s house but, like the “supper club” from our last episode, this monstrous scene of domesticity takes place in the far more idyllic Hayward household. The blood stains run deep in the carpets of small town America.

3.

It’s been 30 years since this episode aired and now we must historicize Twin Peaks itself. The second season of Twin Peaks runs parallel with the launch of Operation Desert Shield and the presidency of George W. Bush. The horrors that the series evokes in the Peyton Place-like mysteries of the unheimlich small town America it presents, can’t encompass the horrors that are occurring in the world at the time we were watching Twin Peaks. Even the horrors of small-town America are preferable to losing that very narrative of the small town we rely on to tell stories about ourselves here.  Lynch’s work has always had an uneasy relationship to this ideology—no one has ever been really able to deduce whether he critiques or idealizes the small town life that occupies his work, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the retreat into the horrors of small town living rooms straight out of 1950s Disneyland seems to me, from the historical perspective of 30 years, either (at best) a reflection of the horrors, or (at worst) a retreat from the horrors, broadcast on CNN every night at the same time.

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.

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.