TWIN PEAKS – Season One & Two (1990-91)

Coming out of Mulholland Drive (2001) at an extravagant Brooklyn dine-in, I half-joked to a friend that “it always amuses me seeing how some cinephiles who are “intellectual” [meaning unimaginative] always try to dumb down works they don’t understand to their own level. If they didn’t get it on a primal, sensual level, what’s the use in making a fake philosopher out of themselves?”

It’s lazy of me to recite Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation as my alibi, and sometimes a work of art does invite the “rational man” in us to make some sense of what we experienced. But David Lynch’s films are very simple—even Eraserhead (1977) and Inland Empire (2006)—and it’s always bewildered me the lengths to which some Lacanian or Freudian “analyses” will lead themselves down the slippery slope into Gordian vapidity. They are, of course, simple deceptively, superficially, by way of mysteries, riddles, and symbologies. But like wordplays in poetry, the puzzles aren’t what it’s about. They’re but part of the illusion, no more than the dreamy décor is part of the show, and those who have sense enough to see through them for the nonsense they are may feel cheated by their obviousness if they didn’t know any better.

“David Lynch is a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Salvador Dalí.” That’s no understatement or hyperbole coming from Mark Frost, his co-creator and co-runner of Twin Peaks. Like Chaplin and Peckinpah, Lynch is one of those personal artists who can work only on his own terms, whose use of genre antics doesn’t distance us away like they ordinarily do—they turn into intimate expressions of their inner conflicts and unresolved attitudes, and their private feelings are as naked and uninhibited as evoked. Whenever he works with someone else’s material, he must transform it into his own, like The Elephant Man (1980), or it becomes impersonal and without conviction, like Dune (1984). He’s that rare kind of sensualist who can travel freely between unadulterated pleasure and clinical formal precision. His worlds, his “dreams”, are only as surrealistic and kinky as they’re erotic and kitschy. What they’re meant to do isn’t to reveal anything that isn’t already there.

Riddles and deductive wit in traditional mysteries follow a premeditated plan, and they all tend to make perfect sense in the end, like pieces that make up a game of chess. Complexity was their makeup, and frivolity their nature. Movies have long grown out of logical sense of this kind, and trying to “decipher” or “interpret” things that weren’t made with literal meaning in mind is no more “rational” than expecting narrative plausibility from a Hitchcock film (“Our old friends, the ‘plausibles’,” Hitchcock himself once derided). It’s driven by the same desire in us when we demand explanations of things such as existence and reality, landing us on ideas about nihilism and cosmic loneliness that are no more compelling as a God or an afterlife. To echo Bertrand Russell, who is to say there is an explanation at all? Even as the modern audience accepts subjectivity and plurality when semiotic meaning is in question, they logic essentially the same way the objectivists do when they suppose that there is indeed at least one interpretation out there somewhere that is sufficient: the only thing left to do is to find it. It doesn’t surprise me that these are usually the same lot who would rather others tell them what they think something meant than to bring their gut reactions out of themselves and try to work with them.

It’s not that there’s an absence of literal meaning in Twin Peaks or in Lynch’s other works, but what they reveal are so trite they’re utterly unremarkable and less than what they appear. The only thing real in a Lynch film, as in those of Cocteau and early Buñuel, is “what’s felt”, not “what’s meant”. There’s no “subtext” hiding behind the owls infesting the Douglas firs or that fish in the percolator. The key isn’t in the layers of meanings you think you dug up. As in Greek mythologies where daughters were born from their fathers’ foreheads, we learn to live with the artistic truth—poetic sense suffices. Sometimes a cherry pie is just a cherry pie. The miracle speaks for itself.

The miracle that was Twin Peaks gave Lynch the big break that he had hoped for with Dune, and much has been written about how it broke the ratings when it debuted against popular sitcoms, but it was never a coincidence that his success would be found in the Peyton Place heartland he grew up in, where your local football teams were the rage and those blue-eyed blonde homecoming queens were the fetish, and not in the barren sand heap of Frank Herbert. Working in as accessible a genre and structure and as close-to-home a milieu as he ever had, Lynch’s reach into the back of his head sent violent ripples down the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, and gave an entire people’s unspoken fears and fantasies the tactility of a daydream. It aimed straight at the weakest parts of the American psyche, and seemed destined to have caught fire. The American obsession with true crime, the private lives and sins of thy neighbours, the sense of local identity and populist spirit were left blazing in consummation.

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” It’s a question that seemed to have been thrown into a mirror, and bounced right back out. People have pursued it with such passion, one could almost say compulsion, that those who were pressed may feel eager to say in answer “Who’s the fairest of them all?” Curiosity alone could not explain the public’s fascination with the whole affair, nor I’m afraid morbid curiosity. The distressed, troubled girl next door leading a double life of crime isn’t the newest gimmick, and though Lynch breathes new life into the idea it’s obviously not the cause of the show’s attention. It’s in her death that has so much of a society’s longing and self-image projected that the question is no longer what it merely seems to mean, not unlike when people asked “Who killed the Kennedys?”

Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was, of course, the high school girl whom everyone knew and loved in and around town, suggestively named Twin Peaks. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that she’s something of a totem, a patron goddess of this northwest town safely tucked away in the waterfall mountains, where everyone sort of knew each other, went out for a drink at the same Roadhouse Bar with the buzzing red neon signs, and for a pie at the same Double R Diner with the yellow-red-blue pop-art landmarks and honeyed waitresses dressed in lush electric blue, where teenage boys parade around the blocks in their fancy cars with their girlfriends, where the ominous wind howls could sound like they came from deep space—it’s a distilled vision of small-town America that actual Americans could’ve wished was theirs.

In this closed-off terrain, Laura was as close a symbol of innocence and virtue as a mortal could be, so her murder naturally took all the townsfolk by surprise and horror. As Laura, Sheryl Lee casts an unusually haunting presence over the show, and the few glimpses of her light up everything around in her lovely wholesomeness that recalls Marilyn Monroe (funnily enough, Lynch’s first creative collaboration with Frost was on a script biopic of Monroe). Like the rest of the young cast, she gives you the feeling that she’s been lifted straight out of a dream you had, a dream that becomes unsettling upon seeing it materialise. Lynch’s women are notorious for their exclusivity. Isabella Rossellini has rarely been more vulnerable and sensuous than in Lynch’s hands, and neither has Lee, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, Lara Flynn Boyle as Laura’s sensitive best friend Donna Hayward, Mädchen Amick as the beautiful waitress Shelley Johnson, or Sherilyn Fenn as a charmingly immature Audrey Horne.

One feels compelled to give Lynch the credit for everything since his contribution to the show’s visual element is so striking, but Frost was the one who kept it all under control. From his experience in television writing, Frost knows how to give his characters just enough depth to exult life and personality, and contrive their arcs and motivations with just enough dimension to suggest complexity, without them becoming so individualised that they lose the kitschy pleasure of their familiarity.

The score, which Lynch wrote with Angelo Badalamenti (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive), has that rare wellspring of pathos and tone that could sustain an elegy way longer than it has any right to. Laura’s theme music swells so much it forms a lump in your throat. Thankfully, the soap opera material doesn’t have to rely on music to uplift it and stand on one leg. Lynch obviously is as addicted to pop art and old movie kitsch as Godard, and he has his own kind of edge for quirky irony “where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter”, to use David Foster Wallace’s phrasing.

Take it from O. Henry: “In Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis.” Well, so is in Lynchland: the normal is seldom taken for granted. He can have a prolonged conversation with his Barbie doll and it’d be a coffee commercial. But Lynch isn’t one of those grotesque-for-grotesque’s-sake simpletons. He doesn’t give entirely over to parody and mockery, and it says a lot about his sensibility that his best films can extend your sense of grace in our common humanity, of beauty in simple, everyday experience.

If “Lynchian” is about one thing, it’s “beauty.” He values it above all, and sometimes a sentimental, homiletic side gets the better of him. John Merrick was peerlessly beautiful in The Elephant Man, and so is the grieving Sarah (Grace Zabriskie) and Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), the good-natured doctor Will Hayward (Warren Frost), Ed (Everett McGill) who loves Norma (Peggy Lipton) and is married to Nadine (Wendy Robie), all the way to Laura’s self-indulgent teenage boyfriend Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), her secret lover biker James (James Marshall), the local big-shot businessman Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), even the scheming Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie).

The love and affection he has for his characters has an authenticity that comes through all the melodramatic artifice. It’s rare for his kind of male auteurs that the only apt comparisons are the likes of Jean Renoir and Vittorio De Sica. “De Sica’s love,” wrote critic André Bazin, “radiates from the people themselves”, adding…

They are what they are, but lit from within by the tenderness he feels for them… De Sica is one of those directors whose sole purpose seems to be to interpret their scenarios faithfully, whose entire talent derives from the love they have for their subject, from their ultimate understanding of it. 

Lynch does something a little different from “interpreting scenarios”. He gives form to his characters’ nightmares and fantasies. Dreams exhilarate and frighten him, but he does far less than moralising against them, and he was never one to shy away from the cheese and saccharine. He certainly doesn’t have the same storytelling strength as Renoir, Visconti, or De Sica, but then again, an artist doesn’t need to be to realise his vision strictly and purely in narrative terms. Correspondingly, though, Twin Peaks is at its weakest without Lynch’s visual inspirations from René Magritte and Francis Bacon, and it’s certainly a huge mistake to have revealed the mystery less than halfway through the second season due to network pressure (Lynch and the others have since expressed regret over it).

It didn’t take long before we realised Laura’s murder was a MacGuffin. In Blue Velvet (1986), Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) stumbles upon the dark and violent underside of a peaceful town by a severed ear. Writing of Blue Velvet, Pauline Kael observed:

A viewer knows intuitively that this is a coming-of-age picture—that Jeffrey’s discovery of this criminal, sadomasochistic network has everything to do with his father’s becoming an invalid and his own new status as an adult. It’s as if David Lynch were saying, “It’s a frightening world out there, and”—tapping his head—“in here.”

Here, the dirty little secrets underneath this small, quiet country have everything to do with Laura’s death, the pretext for our foray into these characters’ lives. It was Twin Peaks that came of age the morning that Laura was found, and the evil machinations set themselves in motion when the FBI came into town. Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by MacLachlan, is well-groomed, tucked neatly into a suit, and loves himself some pies and black coffee (who does this remind you of?). He’s the man sent to investigate. His elocution falls somewhere between Robert Taylor and David Lynch himself, and it breezes a smooth, professional charm. Every syllable coming from his mouth could sound as if it’s daybreak.

Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) is his buddy cop sheriff, a straight, unassuming man for his foil. George Fenneman did get Groucho Marx’ jokes, and he played along with an uprightness that juxtaposed Marx’s obscenities. Margaret Dumont didn’t, so she reacted the way she would’ve anyhow, and her unconsciousness gives weight to the excitement in seeing Marx’s wit play out. Playing opposite what is essentially a distillation of Lynch himself, Ontkean has both the unconsciousness and the appearance of rectitude. You wonder if a double entendre will ever work on him, and whether the actor is aware of his deadpan (and most of the time, you’re convinced that he’s not).

I’m not qualified to speak on how exactly this was “hauntingly original” as a primetime show, except that it added more cinematic flavours than most TV watchers had gotten used to and were just getting around to. But Twin Peaks hasn’t been without its detractors. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ever the self-appointed bourgeois-liberal moralist, contrasts Lynch unfavourably to Buñuel when he knew perfectly well that their enterprise couldn’t be further apart; where Buñuel consciously creates distance between his surrealism and our perception for bitter satire, Lynch eliminates that distance: the strangeness speaks to us more directly, more purely, involving us at a level deeper than the rational. If Kenneth Anger or Bruce Baillie also tried their hands at popular filmmaking, and if they were as daring in their treatment of their subconscious content as they were in their abstract works, would Rosenbaum have whined as much as he did? Had he been a literary critic, no doubt he’d dismissed the works of Jean Genet and D.H Lawrence without a second thought. It takes a certain amount of wilful self-deceit to write something as stupid as “Lynch’s brand of antihumanism, which is characterised by the preoccupations of male adolescence” is “Part of what so far seems to make the show a “winner” in terms of contemporary taste”.

When Lynch died in 2025, one could’ve wished the response had been stronger. But with decades of extraordinary art and filmmaking behind him, and with hardly anything new since the mid-2000s except Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), it certainly didn’t feel like the huge loss that it actually was. Within three decades, he has made his way from coast to coast from the industrial nightmare of the Northeast in Eraserhead, which lent an adjacent aesthetic framework to The Elephant Man and Dune in their exceedingly industrial décor, to the small town heartland America of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart (1990), and The Straight Story (1999), and then finally to the sleazy recursive horror of Los Angeles and Hollywood in Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire.

There’s no way I can discuss the plot in depth. Firstly, it’s so straightforward that it would rob you of the pleasure of letting even the most banal detail sink you down into your comfortable couch. Secondly, it’s no fun, and largely beside the point anyway. Let it be said that you shouldn’t expect it to be “Lynchian” or “Primetime TV” or anything else except for what it is as you’re seeing it. Writing for The Atlantic in 1984, critic Lloyd Rose wrote that “describing the plots of [Lynch films], even though it gives some idea of their strangeness, fails absolutely to convey what they are like when seen. They’re not exactly not about their stories, but the story elements bob on them like driftwood on the surface of a dark sea.” His films all have their own physicalities, and Twin Peaks’ texture is the most melodious. When you touch it, enjoy the synaesthesia. Lynch sometimes said that we’re like spiders, weaving our life and moving along its threads, dreaming to the point that our dreams become reality and our reality turns into dreams. I didn’t care that we lost an artist, however major. I did that we lost a man who loved, who suffered, who dreamed. My hope is that he’s found the light.

USA | 1990-91 | 30 EPISODES | 1.33:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • ICELANDIC • AFRIKAANS • NORWEGIAN

Cast & Crew

writers: Mark Frost, David Lynch, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, Jerry Stahl, Barry Pullman, Scott Frost & Tricia Brock.
directors: David Lynch, Duwayne Dunham, Tina Rathborne, Tim Hunter, Lesli Linka Glatter, Caleb Deschanel, Mark Frost, Todd Holland, Graeme Clifford, Uli Edel, Diane Keaton, James Foley, Jonathan Sanger & Stephen Gyllenhaal.
starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Everett McGill, Jack Nance, Ray Wise, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Kimmy Robertson, Eric Da Re, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee & Russ Tamblyn.