cross-posted at Void Wandering
My first awareness of David Lynch came via Dune and The Elephant Man in the early 80s, followed by random exposure to Blue Velvet on a premium cable channel sometime in 1987, when I was 14. By then, Altered States and other phantasmagoria had me primed to receive Lynchworld without too much shock.
My true Lynchian flashpoint was Twin Peaks, which blew the doors off my brain. Something truly strange (but intimately familiar) was coming out of the television set on Saturday nights in 1990. The opening chords of Angelo Badalamenti’s theme song rewired my circuitry as though it were a magic spell, and the show itself blasted me into another mode of being and probably decalcified my pineal gland, or something. Because I started experiencing reality differently.
During this time I had my first collision with “the outside,” moving by light in a dream at such speed that it felt like my heart exploded. Things got stranger after that, but any further elaboration would sound embarrassing and silly. Was it God? A Lynchian xenopulsion? I don’t know. I started wondering if I was a “strong receiver,” to use the parlance of Twin Peaks. I tried to make sense of the ineffable, with David Lynch as my signal processor, perpetually manning the limit.
Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks, both the original series that aired in the 1990s, and 2017’s The Return, are one joint mythology. Stripped to its essence, Twin Peaks is a feral place that pulls the mind into strange geometries. It detonates, warps, and refracts en route to Hell.
From Richard Marshall at 3 a.m. Magazine:
It has become a place of demons. All we register is a prophetic absence, the emptiness, loneliness, vastness, meaningless of signals.
There is a voltage to the storytelling, sending pictures that you can’t help feeling. It hits you hard.
Each scene is a little factory of irreducible detail wielding a story. Each one is like a somnambulant fumbling with ancient stories that are never exhausted.
Twin Peaks’ mythology also contains Fire Walk With Me, which shatters any campy nostalgia from the TV series and places its remains in barbed wire. As Trevor Lynch writes, the trajectory of Fire Walk With Me has a Stygian darkness that was too unsettling for fans and critics alike, even though it lands squarely on the side of angels after passing through Hell.
The darkest and most sacred moments of the Twin Peaks mythology, though, are in The Return and its trap world, where Laura Palmer is a “capacitor” of pain and suffering through which evil things feed. In this desolate place there is such aching emptiness that ritualized sex magic can manifest devils, who move about through crackling transmission towers and electricity pylons.
Truth on the Edges of Perception
On a talk show long ago, Lynch mused about the pleasant smell of gasoline flowing through lake water, presumably because there’s a Proustian element to it. (Twin Peaks’ Proustian equivalent, scorched engine oil, is more infernal). An olfactory trigger summons barely accessible, low-resolution memories and some dangling truth then floats about, just out of grasp, on the edges of perception.
In this world, characters discover themselves through horror e.g., when Diane, in the throes of tulpa death, sobs “I’m not me” and vanishes into oblivion. Or when Nadine Hurley “awakens” from a psychotic break and remembers that she’s not a high-school cheerleader anymore, and her husband is in love with Norma Jennings. “Where’s my drape runners,” she howls, as the balm of delusion wears off.
Both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive play with these concepts as well — that the realest horror is simply the truth.
Cages of Infinity
As with so much great art, we see ourselves in the creation. We see our fallen world as a dead ringer for Twin Peaks, where we are the capacitors of pain and suffering who attract demons.
This equivalency raises questions about reality itself. As blogger David Auerbach writes, the Twin Peaks trap world (which he calls “The Cage”) is such a numbing quasi-reality that Cooper is content to ignore a dead man sitting right in front of him, and acts callous toward some restaurant workers there too.
This is not the folksy Coop who banters with fishermen and cops at the Double R Diner. Coop now has a resolute iciness about him, amplified by the void he wanders, and the nightmares he must conform to as part of his sub-angelic duties. This is disturbing.
And when Coop starts the tail end of his heroic quest with “Carrie Page” (a.k.a. Laura Palmer), the highway they travel together is disenchanted and empty. “Who knows how much of the rest of the world is even filled in?” Auerbach writes.
This is evocative writing; it suggests that the Cage’s environs are ornamental and limited to bare necessity — the Cage is an incomplete cosmos.
Maybe our cage is the same, a lonely half-world where Luciferian angels give chase to earthly prey following their exile from heaven.
Existence as Pathology
Even the most guileless and fair-seeming members of Twin Peaks are complicit in its sin. “In a town like Twin Peaks, no one is innocent.”
Dougie Jones, for all his pure-heartedness, is still part of a dark formula that sees Coop integrate with his shadow self, for the purpose of saving Laura Palmer. “Dougie-level goodness alone is not sufficient to defeat Judy,” writes Auerbach. Confronting Judy requires profound moral ambiguity, which sends Cooper in search of an abstract, and possibly illusory, good.
The ethics of this plan flirt with absurdity, and, depending on your point of view, Coop’s intervention might condemn Laura to a Moebius strip of trauma and suffering.1 In this sense, his abstract love seems like a destructive force, more compatible with cruelty than anything resembling benevolence. True, Laura Palmer may be a weapon of suffering, a “bomb” meant to obliterate Judy, but does she have any say in the matter, and does her well-being count for nothing?
Note too how Dougie is “voided” so that Coop may be rebirthed, at which point everyone confuses Coop for Dougie. Thus, Coop “becomes” Dougie, and eventually abandons that persona altogether, which leaves a broken family in shocked free fall.
For further darkness and confusion, consider the plight of Phillip Jefferies, whom Gordon Cole says “doesn’t really exist anymore.” (Importantly, Gordon doesn’t say Phillip is dead — he says Phillip doesn’t exist anymore. And given Jefferies’ transformation into a tea-kettle hell machine, we can intuit that his fate is not an optimum one.)
Over and over again, in multiple characters, we see identity fragmentation and a ruthless dissolution of the self.
Crystalline Precision
The transition from the original Twin Peaks to The Return underscores this dissolution. The warmth of the original series’ 35mm film, where soft shadows lingered in the frame, gives way to digital film, which “kills the ghost.”
Digital film is so high precision in its capture that sometimes it doesn’t leave enough visual ambiguity for “paranormal” effect. On the other hand, its icy clarity becomes a new sort of nightmare.
The lack of shadows means that, in Twin Peaks, there’s no place left to hide.