David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was initially advertised for network television as a murder mystery. The show ran for two seasons between 1990 and 1991, but an initial decline in popularity amongst its ABC viewers led to a cancellation. Like many of its on-screen symbols, Twin Peaks was not what it seemed. As the first two seasons progressed, the show became an investigation beyond a specific murder case and entered a realm of indefinite philosophy: the mystery of the origins of murder, violence, and evil itself. Through the essential question that laid Twin Peaks’ plot — “Who killed Laura Palmer?” — Lynch and Frost treaded these waters.
Laura Palmer, Twin Peaks’ crown-jewel homecoming queen, was brutally murdered by an unknown killer, who was eventually revealed at the end of Season 2. “Revealed” is a misleading word, however: audiences realize the killer’s earthly form, but become starkly aware that the true killer is a complex entity, an incarnate demon and the representation of the world’s evil — human evil, specifically. With this first reveal, it became apparent that Twin Peaks answers audience questions with more questions: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” transforms to “What is the demonic force inside Laura’s killer?” This mystery surrounding the nature of evil is communicated primarily through recurring symbols, sound, and image sequences, a series of visual language more tantalizing than the show’s dialogue. The best example of this unconventional, Lynchian storytelling, what truly separates Twin Peaks from other murder mysteries, is Season Three, Episode 8, a 58-minute long experimental demonstration of the birth of evil in the modern world.
David Lynch is known for his distrustful attitude to language, both in other works and in interviews. His experimental horror film and first major work, Eraserhead, is composed of minimal words and dark, disturbing images, the plot unfolding slowly in a style later mirrored by Twin Peaks. He’s actively refused to define the film beyond “a dream of dark and troubling things”or his “most spiritual film,” the latter a statement which he was asked to elaborate on before cutting the interviewer short with a simple “no.” Lynch’s works are consistently surreal, dreamlike in the sense that they cannot be decoded or explained but hardly fail to leave the viewer with an emotional reaction, often eerie or uncanny. In a sense, they appeal to the unconscious. Thus, a major theme of his work is the necessity of reliance on symbols, colors, and sounds as much as, if not more than, dialogue to follow various plots. We find this in Twin Peaks consistently, especially in the third season, which aired on Showtime 25 years after the end of Season 2, which conveniently came to a close with a very important character uttering the words “I’ll see you in 25 years” to the camera lens, their words reverberating in alarming, static chaos.
By the third season, the origins of evil are ill-defined beyond harbingers in the form of recurring faces and places. The narrative remains unconventional, but the artistic force of the project was amplified: no longer required to appeal to commercial broadcast television, Lynch was able to venture into new depths of auteurism and cinematic experimentation. Nearly halfway through the season in Episode 8, “Got a Light?”, the seemingly-linear plot dissolves for an episode into what critics have referred to as an “origin story” of evil. This particular episode, in Lynch’s unarticulated fashion, provides what can be interpreted as a foundation of the horrors that plagued the show since the beginning. By viewing this episode as a foundational episode — disregarding linear structure, of course — one can most closely find answers, or at least a basis, to the ultimately unanswerable question Twin Peaks poses: despite the existence of all things good and lofty in the world, why do humans consistently tend towards the nefarious?
I’m choosing to discuss “Got A Light?” as an introduction to the show as a whole, because it can aptly be described as an allegory for Twin Peaks in its entirety. The episode encapsulates the ominous, inconceivable beauty that viewers have been equally enraptured and appalled by since 1990. Like many fragments of Twin Peaks, the episode moves slowly in the style of an experimental art film, yet the events that occur are of massive importance regarding the birth of evil. We witness symbolism in the form of music, — a performance by Nine Inch Nails and a tasteful application of Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” — faces, — Mr. Cooper, Dale Cooper’s unsavory doppelgänger, Killer Bob, played by Mike Silva, the Giant, played by Carel Struycken, and even Laura Palmer, the face of all things good and lofty appearing again — and symbols, most notably the slow build of an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud.
The presence of all these elements doesn’t answer the show’s essential question regarding the human tendency towards evil, but it does explicitly portray it. Trent Reznor’s grim assertion of “She’s Gone Away,” which regards infection, disease and darkness, goes on inexplicably for five minutes during the episode’s first half and sets a promising and ominous undertone for the following encounters with evil. After the show’s quintessential villainous face escapes the stomach of a main character, Lynch and Frost take the audience back to July 16th, 1945 in the form of a clip of an atom bomb test in White Sands, New Mexico: if evil itself defies time and linear narrative, why shouldn’t the show’s plot? This temporal regression is especially necessary when the atom bomb is regarded as the ultimate representation of man’s intention to harm and destroy. Enter the astoundingly impressive and terrifyingly beautiful special effects that haunt the show’s third season — thanks, new millennium technology — as we’re transported inside the atomic explosion, black and white graphics exploding into flame and ember as the initial, shocking string instrument screams of “Threnody” fade into an amplified chaos and whooshing. The rest of the episode plays out as a dream sequence of contrasting scenes symbolizing evil and good.
Dreams, like Twin Peaks, often contain details that offer themselves up for interpretation, allowing the dreamer, or viewer, just enough of a grasp of the occurence to effect a feeling. In this episode, this occurs when a golden orb with Laura Palmer’s face inside of it is sent through a crane-like machine as a previously-unseen woman of zest watches with a look of hope and contentment. The orb transcends a movie screen into the Earth, inhabiting it with the show’s symbol for good. By the end of the episode, Twin Peaks answers its essential question with another question: despite the existence of evil and violence, will the good, pure, and lofty win, or at least survive?
The inexplicable, symbol-driven nature of Twin Peaks is well-received by audiences who enjoy being left with more questions with answers, and especially by those who can treat questions themselves as answers. It’s quite possible to resonate with, and feel touched by, character’s expressions and vague utterances in the face of consistently-crumbling order all around us. In Twin Peaks, symbols are immensely more powerful than words, because they force the viewer to confront their own innermost emotions and associations. Thus, the show is a tool for reflection of the self by way of reflection on the world. Words serve to drive Twin Peaks’ plot in a literal sense, but image associations, sounds, and faces, each allegories for evil, chaos, and apathy, as well as purity, hope, determination, and good, drive the viewer’s urge to confront their own doubts and hopes for humankind’s very nature. The final words of the episode encapsulate the mystifying philosophy of the whole show:
This is the water, and this is the well.
The horse is the white of the eyes and the dark within.
Descension and ascension, the water and the well, the light and dark, void and compensation: Twin Peaks’ paradoxes and elemental contradictions fully represent the existing dualities in the totality of the Universe as we can comprehend it. The show addresses the human tendency for evil, but never provides answers to its true origin. It does, however, demonstrate its existence in a devastatingly beautiful, symbolic manner that speaks to the unconscious minds and aesthetic tastes of the viewers. Evil itself may not speak to the loftiest of beauty, but its portrayal in Twin Peaks is ultimately admirable — as considered by philosopher Charles Peirce, perhaps unexplainable admiration is what truly defines beauty: “We appeal to the aesthete, to tell us what it is that is admirable without any reason for being admirable beyond its inherent character. Why, that, he replies, is the beautiful.”
Works Cited:
Chateau, Dominique. “The Film That Dreams: About David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Season 3.” In Stories, edited by Christie Ian and Van Den Oever Annie, 119-42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. doi:10.2307/j.ctv5rf6vf.12.
Gregg, Carl. “The Spirituality of Twin Peaks.” Pluralism, Pragmatism, Progressivism. May 31, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2019. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2017/05/spirituality-twin-peaks/
Lim, Dennis. “David Lynch’s Elusive Language.” The New Yorker. June 19, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/david-lynchs-elusive-language.
Murray, Noel. “‘Twin Peaks’ Season 3, Episode 8: White Light White Heat.” The New York Times. June 26, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/arts/television/twin-peaks-season-3-episode-8-recap.html.
Twin Peaks: The Return. “Got a Light?” Season 3, Episode 8. Directed by David Lynch. Written by Mark Frost, David Lynch. Showtime, June 25 2017.
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