Sunday Morning! Twin Peaks Season 1

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving.

-Haruki Murakami

There is a world

underneath, or

on top of,

this one- and

it’s here, now.

-Robert Creeley

I suppose I’m a bit late to the Twin Peaks party. I almost never saw the show when it was on the air back in the early 90s, and briefly became something of a cultural phenomenon. My high school friends would gather and drink coffee and eat pie and enjoy the show together, but I was never much of a television person, and so I missed out. I guess I was just too busy being cool, nerds!

I did see the movie, however, which fans of the show really hated when it was released, although I liked it. As I’ve discussed here before, critical opinion on Fire Walk With Me has almost completely reversed since then, with many now calling it an overlooked masterpiece. I’m not sure it’s quite that (although I can see why it was misunderstood). Nevertheless, because I saw the movie long before the series, I knew from the start “Who killed Laura Palmer?” The film ends with her murder, in fact. And then the show starts.

And, interestingly, David Lynch has said he really wasn’t very interested in who killed Laura Palmer. It was a useful MacGuffin to get people hooked on the program, no doubt, but it’s not really a show about sleuthing. Like the owls, it isn’t what it seems to be at all. And, when I finally got around to watching Twin Peaks in the last few weeks, I was surprised to find it wasn’t the show avid viewers described to me thirty years ago either. Taken chronologically, it’s the somewhat straightforward story of a murder and its aftermath. Well, okay, not quite straightforward…

This happens often with David Lynch. He’s one of those artists that many people claim “not to get”- his work is singular and surreal, and often just plain weird, which many find off-putting. I think it makes a big difference to understand that his work is really quite sincere- it’s not “weird for the sake of weird,” like many of his imitators, and it’s not particularly ironic. It can be absurd, sure. But, in Lynch world, there really is good and there really is evil, and they meet far too often. They’re not in quotation marks; they’re in us.

So, I am an unironic admirer of Lynch, just like I am with Proust, and they’re really not so far removed. I’ve said that Proust’s theme is:

the wonder sparked by the ordinary; let’s call it the “sublime banal”; the way that ordinary details unfold like a paper bird through our focus and attention on them to become things more wonderous and profound. His message seems to be that there really are no superfluous details in life.

With Lynch, it’s really more the uncanny banal: those overlooked corners of the world that turn strange and menacing with closer attention. He has retained that childhood sense of dread that is the flipside of childlike wonder; in his films, maybe there really is a person living in the radiator; maybe Daddy does horrible things to Mommy at night; maybe evil is a force that lives in the woods; and maybe love is not enough.

Granted, Twin Peaks has fun with the conventions of soap operas and mysteries, but only superficially. One of the biggest misinterpretations about the show, in retrospect, were the feminists who thought Lynch was having fun with the murder of a woman; because, once you get past the offbeat side details and eccentric supporting characters, the central tragedy of Laura Palmer’s life and death is treated with complete seriousness.

And the first season of Twin Peaks is perhaps even less weird than viewers remember. Mostly, its dazed and surreal tone comes from the strangeness of the situation: a beloved teenage girl in the small Northern Pacific logging town of Twin Peaks has been brutally murdered, and the community is in shock. Her father is coming unravelled; her best friend is trying to solve the case independently of the police; her two boyfriends are at each other’s throats; everyone is trying to make sense of the senseless act. An FBI agent, Dale Cooper, is brought in to solve the case and is immediately enchanted by the place, which seems to come from a “simpler time.” As he looks closer, its more sordid side shows through, but it’s entwined with genuine goodness. The two are inseparable and these people are equally light and dark. Laura Palmer, like a character in Greek tragedy, was as much the architect of her fate as its victim; and yet, she honestly could have done no different.

One of the really brilliant things about Twin Peaks is the way that nearly every character starts out as a stock noir stereotype and ends as a fleshed-out human being. The teenage sex tease is actually lonely and naive and in over her head. The cheating waitress is trapped in an abusive marriage and looking for help. The thuggish criminal jock is devastated by the self-destructive girlfriend he couldn’t save. The demin-clad bad boy is a child of an alcoholic absentee mother. They’re all broken by grief. The only character who is exactly who he claims to be is the outsider, Agent Cooper, and that will change with time. This place is also the site of his journey from innocence to experience. “Heaven,” he tells us, “is a large and interesting place.”

In fact, it’s not entirely clear that Cooper isn’t in Heaven, or Purgatory, or the Bardo, or in a physical place at all. The show has the character of a dream in which inexplicable things are taken for granted, but could well mean something more profound… or, maybe not. Lynch seems to find meaning in everything, even creamed corn. Of course, this is also the texture of a mystery story, and I think 90s viewers got all wrapped up in solving the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death. At the least, they were certainly ticked off when the first season ended with the mystery unresolved.

What I was struck by, however, was the undercurrent of sadness that permeates this first season. It’s one of the few mysteries I’ve seen to acknowledge that knowing who killed the victim won’t bring her back. Once you stop focusing on solving the case, you realize its mysteries are much more profound ones that we all face, about grief and loss. For a show that people remember as arch, it has some intense emotions. It’s a strange story, oddly funny, frightening, erie, and moody- but really grief is all of those things. Its central mystery is not “who killed Laura Palmer?” but how do we survive when those we love have been taken from us?

And so, what are you watching, playing, pondering, reading, or sleuthing this weekend?