Sunday Morning! “Twin Peaks: Season 2”

It was late one night during the worst winter of my life: one of those seasons up north where everything seems to be lost in a blizzard that came from nowhere. I was just trying to remain standing. I would go to my office at the university once or twice a week to be seen, and end up spending all night writing empty words having to do with my dissertation. This particular evening- really, it was 3 a.m.- I left the office and walked to the nearest all-night budget grocery store for some sort of food. It was bleak and snowy outside and the grocery store felt purgatorial; there was no one else there.

I retrieved a loaf of bread and a few other items and found the checkout aisle; there was no self-service checkout at this point. I looked around and waited for someone to arrive and, after a few minutes of thoughts of stealing, heard a voice from the back yell “I’ll be right there!” I was so tired, I felt nearly dead and the flourescent lights gave the store the aura of a microwave oven. I stood and waited and realized there was now another customer standing behind me. i hadn’t heard them coming. I turned around and nodded to an old man. Except it wasn’t an old man, exactly. It was someone short and nondescript wearing a fairly shoddy latex full-head old man mask. Uncomfortably, I turned around and obediently walked to the waiting cashier, too nervous to look back.

The thing about this situation is it was 3 a.m. on a Tuesday night in the middle of nowhere Buffalo. I could think of no logical reason for there to be a man in a bad full-head latex mask in a grocery store. It wasn’t close to Halloween and I wasn’t close to the fraternity houses. I stress that there was no one else around but myself, the cashier, and the man in the latex mask. It didn’t seem like a joke and nobody was amused. Neither of them acted as if there was anything strange about this, but all I could think was: Jesus, I’m in a David Lynch movie!

Admittedly, in a David Lynch movie, the latex-mask man would probably be singing a 50s doo-wop song. But none of this would be any more explicable there- in fact, it likely would have been treated as banal. Lynch has said, repeatedly, that he doesn’t believe in explaining everything in his films because there are things in life that are never explained.

Which is pretty damn “Lynchian” of him to say. There aren’t many artists who merit their own adjective, but Lynch actually has this one (from the Oxford Dictionary):

Lynchian: adjective. Cinema. Characteristic, reminiscent, or imitative of the films or television work of David Lynch. Lynch is noted for juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.

What they don’t tell you is it’s apparently very hard to achieve a “Lynchian” quality in television or cinema if you’re not David Lynch. Anyone who’s seen the second season of Twin Peaks knows what I mean. The first seven episodes, in which Lynch was intimately involved, seem more Lynchian than the first season. In fact, I would say the first ten episodes are better than the first season. After that, it’s like a car with the engine removed that still looks very pretty. More than that, it’s like someone tried to rebuild an engine with many of the parts, but having no experience with auto mechanics.

But those first ten episodes expand on the first season in ways that make Twin Peaks something enduring. The first season was a mysterious, strange depiction of collective grief in the aftermath of a brutal small town murder. Here, we get weirder and maybe more frustrating for some viewers, who liked the soapy, straightforward aspects of the first season.

Right in the first episode, there’s a scene I supect you will either love or hate, depending on your sensiblities. Agent Cooper, the chipper, handsome hero of the show, has been shot in the belly by an unseen assailant as part of the Season 1 cliffhanger, and lies on the floor of his hotel room. An elderly waiter, played by the cowboy actor Hank Worden, enters his room with a glass of milk. Cooper tries to get the dottering man to help him, but the cheerful waiter thinks he wants the phone hung up or wants the milk. He keeps giving the ever-polite Coop the thumbs up, smiling, and telling him “I’ve heard about you.” It’s strangely reassuring, frustratingly drawn out, and there’s nothing he or we can do in the face of this little, slightly menacing, absurdity.* I love this scene, though, because it tells the viewer: Yes, we know you want us to get to the point. We’ll get there when we get there. Or, maybe never at all.

There are lots of weird little touches in those early episodes that still resonate with me: David Lynch’s (eerily Lynchian) son doing a “magic trick” that involves creamed corn is certainly memorable, as are the lovely, semi-explicable musical performances. I even like Harold, the agoraphobic who, like David Lynch and Mark Frost, has created a somewhat claustrophobic, but lovely world around an absent woman, Laura Palmer; before being destroyed when that world is shared with others.

Season Two is when we finally get to who killed Laura Palmer, something viewers had been clamoring for throughout the first season. Lynch has said solving the mystery was like killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and I think he’s right; it saps the narrative of any momentum. But that reveal, in episode 7, has to be the most frightening third act ever aired on television. The empty house, the record still playing at the end of its grooves, the vision of a white horse, the walzing murderer, the victim who knows the situation has gotten much worse than she expected- it all sticks with you. Lynch is great at scenes of domestic comfort turned extremely uncomfortable- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me has a dinner scene with some of the same people that is equally chilling. There is an old philosophical question of how, if God created the world, does evil get into the world. Lynch doesn’t answer this, naturally, but he suggests it does and it can enter wherever it wants, even the places we feel safest.

So, the mystery is now solved and unsolved. We find out “who killed Laura Palmer” and he is brought to “justice,” but the evil that entered him is still out there somewhere, still looking to enter our world. This was at the heart of the story all along, and will propel the end of the second season and third season entirely. However, once we know the “solution” to the mystery, most of what we’re left with is the red herrings. Imagine if Agatha Cristie had let Poirot solve the mystery and then decided Let’s fill another book with whatever became of those subplots and red herrings!

It gets tedious, and it gets silly, and once Lynch was gone (filming Wild at Heart), it seems like a bad imitation of Twin Peaks. They get some of the notes right and there are some interesting melodies; but it’s not the same music.

The really perplexing thing is David Lynch can shoot scenes that would seem saccharine for anyone else and make them seem sincere; he can shoot scenes that would seem dull and confusing for anyone else and make them seem like a dream intruding on reality. But, watching a handful of (really very talented) others staging faux-Lynch quickly becomes an endurance test. I’ll be honest: I gave up after episode 12 and came back for the season finale, which Lynch did direct, and which has a famously bleak and mind-bending open-ended conclusion. I would actually recommend stopping with episode 10 and skipping to the final episode 22.

So, did I miss a few good things in the ten episodes I skipped? Probably. Do I understand everything that happened along the way? Well, no… I don’t. But I don’t need to, right?

So, what are YOU trying to figure out, pondering, playing, watching, reading, or creating this weekend?

(*Naturally, the waiter will later turn out to be more important than we know, as well as delivering the immortal line: “That gum you like is going to come back in style.”)