“The owls are not what they seem:” Uncovering the Cultural Mystique of TWIN PEAKS
**THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR TWIN PEAKS THROUGHOUT- YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED**
Out of all of the television shows that have been fortunate enough to get on the air, it’s hard to think of one that is more idiosyncratic than Twin Peaks. An amalgamation of various styles, tones, and ingredients originating from the bizarre mind of David Lynch, Twin Peaks is unlike anything else on television before or since it was made. Twin Peaks was an anomaly when it aired for two seasons from 1990-1991, during a time when the landscape of television was drastically different from what it is today. Television as a medium appeared to be a dying breed, or at the very least, a declining one. Ratings of most series produced by the three major American networks were steadily dropping, a result of the oversaturation of episodic television series at the time that were “formulaic, unimaginative, repetitive, and simply plain boring.” (Moldovan 49). In this context, the status of cultural phenomenon that Twin Peaks attained during its first season, with its serialized form, shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. Just when network programming as a whole was drying up, along came this new show that offered something fresh, bold, and exciting that caught the interest of viewers and provided television with the jolt that it was so desperately in need of.
As it would turn out, Twin Peaks's shelf life would be short. After the big mystery of the show, “Who killed Laura Palmer?,” was solved just seven episodes into the second season at the behest of ABC executives, the ratings for Twin Peaks plummeted. The novelty, it seemed, had worn off, and by the time the final episode of season two aired, the show only drew six million viewers (a staggering drop from the 35 million people who tuned in to the pilot) (Moldovan 50-51), prompting ABC to abruptly cancel the series after it had only been on the air for a little over a year. This would not be the end of Twin Peaks though; in the 25 plus years since the last episode was broadcast, the show has endured over time as a cult classic, evident in the fact that it will be returning to television as a limited series on Showtime tomorrow night.
Today, Twin Peaks is often regarded by film critics and television aficionados alike as a revolutionary show that was ahead of its time, and a number of articles have been written on how Twin Peaks has influenced countless shows that have come after it in terms of acting as a blueprint for similarly unconventional and mysterious character-driven narratives, and elevating the aesthetic quality of television to the place it is now, which many see as being on par with the best Hollywood films. However, I am more interested in the show’s engagement with important cultural issues. No work of art is born out of a vacuum, and as eloquently stated by Dianne Shoos, Diana George, and Joseph Comprone in their journal article on visual literacy, “A culture's values and fears are often embedded in its stories, and today television relates most of our stories. A careful examination of what those stories say and how they are told can give us insight into contemporary moods, values and frustrations.” (474) With this in mind, I argue that Twin Peaks is best understood as a reflection of our society’s deep-seated fears and desires, particularly in relation to family and the mythical idea of small-town America respectively.
A recurring idea that runs throughout David Lynch’s filmography is family and what it ideally should represent versus what it actually is. From Lynch’s perspective, the American family is one that is “dysfunctional, unstable, and secretive” (Moldovan 52), a unit that is just as capable of inducing terror and discomfort as it is affection and care. Lynch has been preoccupied with this conflict of family dating all the way back to his 1977 debut Eraserhead, an experimental horror film whose abstract narrative is usually thought to be about Lynch’s own anxiety over becoming a father and taking care of a newborn child, but nowhere in his work does family play a larger role than in Twin Peaks.
As indicated by its title, Twin Peaks is about a town that is made up of a community of individuals. Even though the show has a clearly defined protagonist that we follow in FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, it has more than 30 major characters who all serve an integral purpose to the narrative, making it an ensemble piece. The average episode of Twin Peaks doesn’t just cut between two or three subplots, but multiple interconnected plotlines (Shoos et al. 465), going great lengths to fully explore the dynamics of the town. Within Twin Peaks, there are 9 families- the Palmer’s, the Hayward’s, the Horne’s, the Packard’s, the Martell’s, the Briggs’, the Hurley’s, the Jennings’, and the Johnson’s- and each of the families has some type of domestic trouble going on in them. For instance, Audrey Horne has grown up in a privileged, rich family where she seemingly has everything a teenage girl her age could want, but she still feels an underlying dissatisfaction with her life due to being neglected by her businessman father, Ben Horne, who is not only having an affair and tied to a drug trafficking and prostitution ring, but also (unknowingly) almost rapes Audrey in one episode when she is disguised as a prostitute. Other characters at the center of familial problems include Shelley Johnson, who finds herself the victim of her abusive and violent husband Leo, Josie Packard, who attempted to kill her husband Andrew Packard so that she could inherit the Packard saw mill, and James Hurley, who has to live with his uncle Ed and aunt Nadine because his father left after he was born and his mother is a wandering alcoholic. Even in what appears to be the one relatively “stable” family, the Hayward’s, the eldest daughter in the family, Donna, is the illegitimate child of Ben Horne and Donna’s mother Eileen, and the revelation of this secret threatens to tear the Hayward family apart (Moldovan 53).
All of these families are essential to what Twin Peaks is doing, but the most important one is the Palmer household, due to the fact that the death of high school homecoming queen Laura Palmer is what sparks the FBI investigation led by Cooper and sets in motion the events of the whole show. Just as the other families in Twin Peaks are depicted as being fractured, deceitful, and malicious, so too is the Palmer family, but to an even more sinister and disturbing degree. It is slowly revealed that Laura was tormented and killed by her own father Leland Palmer, and though the word “incest” is never uttered aloud in the show (Lafsky 15), Laura’s diary entries and mementos that are found by Cooper, as well as her past behavior that is described by other characters, all point to her being the victim of a long-standing incestuous relationship at the hands of her father before he finally murdered her. Interestingly, Leland killing Laura goes against all that we have known about him up to that point in the show. Leland was previously shown to be a loving, caring family man who is having the hardest time dealing with grief in the aftermath of Laura’s death- he suffers severe emotional breakdowns which include him having to be pulled off of the casket during Laura’s funeral- and he genuinely doesn’t seem to have any conscious memory of killing Laura until he is arrested by Cooper and confesses right before he dies. It is at this point that the show veers into supernatural territory, as Leland killed Laura because he was apparently inhabited by a malevolent spirit known as BOB that comes from the extradimensional “Black Lodge.”
Crucially though, “Twin Peaks leaves open multiple interpretations of BOB’s identity” (Lafsky 15) (something that is made even murkier by Lynch's prequel film Fire Walk With Me), meaning that he could be interpreted literally as a demonic spirit that possessed Leland, operating as the show’s deus ex machina device that explains away Leland’s culpability and “allows Cooper to ask evasively: ‘Is it easier to believe that a man would rape and kill his own daughter (than to believe in spirit possession)?’” (Baderoon 102), or he could be interpreted as the doppelganger/other side of Leland as a metaphor for “the evil that men do,” as speculated by forensic analyst Albert Rosenfield. But irrespective of whether we think Twin Peaks handles the topic of incest in a progressive manner (in how it defines Laura as an innocent victim and expresses a great amount of empathy toward her) or frustratingly upholds the status quo of the patriarchy, one thing that is clear is that, “Twin Peaks is a place where women constantly live with the threat of violence at the hands of men” (Lafsky 11), and its depiction of how this goes on in white, middle class American families was a rather radical idea to present at the time it aired. Although Twin Peaks was by no means the only tv show to have ever dared to tackle a taboo subject, the way that it presented the subject matter by implying that sexual violence in families not only occurs, but that it is a common, “even banal” practice (Davenport 256), had never been framed in such a way before.
Such a suggestion would usually be thought of as being distressing for viewers and make Twin Peaks “hard to watch” (Davenport 256), but this way of thinking is only half true. Since so much of the show is about the horrors of both incest and “the secret life of the American family” (Davenport 258), I propose that many viewers who latched on to the show were responding to its portrayal of family because they recognized that it was true to a certain extent. Hopefully most American families aren’t as hideous and cruel as the ones depicted in Twin Peaks, but incest, domestic violence, and sexual abuse all occur a lot more than we would like to believe, and even if the majority of us haven’t experienced any of these firsthand, we have all heard about or known people who have gone through them. A trademark of almost all of Lynch’s films is the Freudian sense of the uncanny (Moldovan 46), where something feels strange and unsettling to us because it is simultaneously here and there, familiar and unfamiliar, and the representation of family in Twin Peaks works along these same lines. On the one hand, the world of Twin Peaks is very surreal and twisted, but on the other, it has many similar qualities to the real world. There are, homes, owls, cherry pies, toxic interpersonal relationships, love, lust, criminal activities, and deaths, just like there are in our reality. Underneath all of the supernatural elements, absurd situations, eccentric characters, and quirky humor that appear on the surface, the world of Twin Peaks is actually almost exactly the same as ours, just slightly skewed. Because of this, we feel a strange distance from the show, but we also feel close to it, and the combination of the two produces the uncanny. The dysfunctional family unit in the world of Twin Peaks acts as both a mirror and a distortion of average, middle class American families, and viewers can choose to either reject the off-putting feeling that comes with it or recognize what the show is trying to accomplish and embrace the uncanny. Either way, the relevancy that Twin Peaks has sustained demonstrates that these concerns over family are still ever-present in American society, and it’s no coincidence that so many television shows of today and the last 10-15 years have similarly depicted family as a site of conflict and contention (though not to the same extreme as in Twin Peaks).
The unapologetically dark portrait of familial strife that Twin Peaks exhibits begs the question: where exactly does the spectator’s pleasure in watching the show come from? Even for those who are able to appreciate what it is going for with its uncanny vision of family, the effect isn’t outright pleasurable. Turning our attention elsewhere, one possibility could lie in the postmodern sensibilities that can found all over Twin Peaks, specifically in its repackaging of disparate elements to create “a cultural compost heap” with intertextual references that call back to older films and television (Lafsky 9), such as its connection to the 1944 film noir Laura which also follows a police detective investigating the death of a woman named Laura. Nevertheless, understanding these intertexts and pastiches is not necessary for enjoying the show, and it’s likely that they went over the heads of most viewers. The other major innovation made by Twin Peaks lies in the way it played with genre to engage its audience; as noted in an article from the Journal of Literary Studies titled “Happy Endings: The story of Twin Peaks,” “Viewers were electrified by the stylized manner in which the series assumed the habit of generic codes; and its presumptions of a media-conscious audience.” (100) In its depiction of a murder investigation, the genre that Twin Peaks fits most neatly into is the detective story. But the show subverts expectations of this genre by raising more questions than answers during the investigation thanks to the strange ways that clues are revealed to Cooper and the audience through dreams and supernatural forces, as well as the fact that the show keeps going even after the investigation is completed. Thus, even though the detective investigation is the hook of the show and the primary plot point for the first season and a half, it is used more as a means to an end to explore “the complex subterranean network of relationships among the inhabitants of the deceptively sleepy northwestern town.” (Charney 54) This brings us back to all of the different families we see in the show, as Twin Peaks is really a melodramatic soap opera (not far off from a show like Dallas), though not a conventional one nor a parody of the genre. Since soap operas feature a seemingly limitless number of diversions, they would seem to be in direct tension with the promise of progression and closure offered by detective stories, but Twin Peaks’ tweaking of the detective story makes it so that the two are actually much more alike than different (Baderoon 102). In their examination of the emotional relationships of people’s lives, soap operas generate pleasure for spectators not from finding out the answers, but seeing “what further complications will defer the resolutions and introduce new questions” (Modleski 12), just as the detective investigation in Twin Peaks continuously opens up more mysteries.
In general, the formula that soap operas adhere to involves following the intersecting lives of multiple characters (who are all usually part of the same familial unit) as they attempt to navigate through numerous personal and domestic struggles. Soap operas mainly appeal to women, convincing them that they should try their best to preserve the peace of their families, while also making them feel better about their inability to do so by showing them a family that is in a constant state of disorder and mayhem (Modleski 14-15). Due to this, soap operas are often looked down upon as conservative and unrealistic by many (male) critics, but Tania Modleski persuasively writes that soap operas provide a “collective fantasy” of extended family and a sense of community for women, and there is value in their ability to “allay real anxieties” and “satisfy real needs and desires, even while it may distort them.” (20) As a soap opera, Twin Peaks fits this mold, but it also makes several significant revisions to the soap opera formula. Not only does Twin Peaks exacerbate rather than assuage viewers’ fears of a dysfunctional family (as previously discussed), it also changes the “collective fantasy” from an extended family community to our idealized cultural understanding of 1950’s small-town America, only to disrupt and complicate that understanding and leave our desire stuck in limbo.
Even though it is technically set in 1989, Twin Peaks feels like a timeless place that doesn’t belong to any one particular era, much like the town of Lumberton in Blue Velvet. Still, the simple and innocent vibe of a small-town in the Pacific Northwest, marked by iconography such as the local Double R diner, the décor of houses, Audrey Horne’s striking resemblance to pin-up girls and femme fatales, James Hurley’s motorcycle bike, the soap opera tv show called "Invitation to Love" that many of the characters watch, and Angelo Badalamenti’s score with its serene guitars and jazzy instrumentation, all evoke a nostalgia for 1950’s Americana. More broadly, Twin Peaks is a “metonymy for America” (Pollard 297), corresponding with the idea of America being this utopian space where everyone is friendly and hardworking and lives in their nice suburban homes. This feeling of mythical nostalgia is best exemplified through Cooper, who takes a liking to almost everyone and constantly expresses a sense of childlike wonder to many things he encounters in town, like when he compliments the coffee served at the Great Northern hotel as “damn good” and says that it’s “one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had.” Cooper’s reverent attitude toward Twin Peaks is summed up in the following monologue he delivers to Rosenfield (Shoos et al 470):
Albert, I hope you can hear me. I have only been in Twin Peaks a short time. But in that time I have seen decency, honor, and dignity. Murder is not a faceless event here. It is not a statistic to be tallied up at the end of the day. Laura Palmer's death has affected each and every man, woman, and child because life has meaning here- every life. That's a way of living I thought had vanished from the earth but it hasn't, Albert. It's right here in Twin Peaks.
To Cooper, Twin Peaks is the shining ray of light in an otherwise morally decaying world, “the home we’ve dreamed of since we were old enough to turn on the tv.” (Hampton 48) Of course as we quickly figure out, the Twin Peaks envisioned by Cooper does not and has never existed, but his blind idealism forces him to cling to his unwavering belief in the myth of small-town America, “even though that myth is contradicted for him in every episode” (Shoos et al. 472). From Cooper’s dogmatic point of view, the horrors of Twin Peaks are a result of the supernatural evil emanating from BOB and the evil spirit world of the Black Lodge, and Cooper sees it as his mission to protect this evil from infecting the inherently good community of Twin Peaks. But even if we go along with Cooper’s assumption that BOB is a real spirit that took control of Leland and killed Laura, the fact of the matter is that the domestic disputes, secret affairs, sexual violence, drug running, and prostitution would all still be going on regardless of supernatural forces. Like the seedy underbelly trope that we find in film noir, the show peels back the layers of the town to reveal the sleazy immorality its human inhabitants possess. Ultimately, Twin Peaks has a dark side just like any other town or city, and the collective fantasy of idyllic small-town America is shown to be nothing more than just that- a fantasy.
While Twin Peaks may be read as a show that defends Cooper’s vision of the town and actively supports his binary worldview (as illustrated in Scott Pollard’s article on “the patriotic mission of Twin Peaks”), such a reading fails to take into account the show’s connection to the cynicism of noir and the ending of the series finale. Cooper is unquestionably set up as a character who we are meant to love, but just because Cooper thinks about Twin Peaks in mythical terms doesn’t mean that the show agrees with him. On the contrary, Twin Peaks undermines Cooper’s position by revealing a dark secret from his own past, showing us that the world is not as black and white as Cooper thinks it is. In episode 18, Cooper has a conversation with Audrey where he explains how he was once protecting a girl during a case but he failed to save her from being killed, resulting in his partner going insane and him losing the love of his life. Later, we find out that this woman was the wife of his partner at the time, Windom Earle, and Earle killed his wife apparently out of anger and/or jealousy once he found out that she was having an affair with Cooper. Prior to this point, we had known Cooper to only be an upstanding law enforcement officer who never does anything amoral, but this reveal introduces shades of grey into his own morality that he had been hiding. More importantly, this scene almost directly mirrors a conversation from Chinatown where Jack Nicholson’s character tells Faye Dunaway that he hurt a woman he was trying to keep from being hurt, and Twin Peaks’ link to Chinatown continues in the way that the past is doomed to repeat itself at the end of the show (Nickerson 273).
After wrapping up the investigation of Laura Palmer, Cooper is set to leave Twin Peaks, but his love for the town causes him to stay. This decision comes back to haunt him, as for much of the second half of season two, his insane old partner Windom Earle shows up and starts terrorizing the town, and the new woman that Cooper falls in love with, Annie Blackburn, is kidnapped by Earle and ends up hospitalized as a result. The show ends on a pitch-black note in the last scene as Cooper rams his head into a mirror, bloodying himself and laughing maniacally, as he is apparently now possessed by BOB. This ending understandably frustrated and perplexed many viewers, but if we read the show as a deconstruction of the myth of small-town America, Cooper’s arc actually makes sense. His naiveté and unwillingness to see the town for what it really is prevents him from leaving Twin Peaks, and it’s both ironic and fitting that the darkness of the town that Cooper has spent the entire time trying to deny consumes him and leads to his downfall. At the same time though, we understand why Cooper has gone on believing the myth anyways, because on some level, we desperately want it to be true too. Like Cooper, we can’t help but be drawn to the town and keep wanting to return to the mystical world of Twin Peaks with every new episode. The mirror in the final scene, then, is not only meant for Cooper, it is for us, the spectators, who have been implicated in our desire of the myth of small-town America even when we know it to be false. We want to believe that a man had to have been possessed by an evil spirit to rape and kill his daughter, that the world is a fundamentally good place, and that good always triumphs over evil, but this simply is not the case, even for a place as seemingly charming and innocent as Twin Peaks. Our longing and desire may be real, but what we desire, the myth of small-town America, is anything but real. Twin Peaks, in recreating a nostalgic, idealized past to satisfy our desire while simultaneously exposing it as a fraud to destabilize that desire, critiques and perpetuates the collective cultural myth that it is based on, and that unresolved paradox is why I believe its strange power continues to resonate with its dedicated cult of viewers.
References
Baderoon, Gabeba. "Happy endings: The story of Twin Peaks." Journal of Literary Studies 15.1-2 (1999): 94-107. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.
Charney, Mark J. "Invitation to Love: The Influence of Soap Opera on David Lynch's "Twin Peaks"." Studies in Popular Culture 14.1 (1991): 53-59. JSTOR. Web. 7 Apr. 2017.
Davenport, Randi. "The Knowing Spectator of "Twin Peaks": Culture, Feminism, and Family Violence." Literature Film Quarterly 21.4 (1993): 255-59. ProQuest. Web. 6 Apr. 2017.
Hampton, Howard. "Unwavering belief in the myth of small-town America." Film Comment 29.3 (1993): 38. JSTOR. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.
Lafsky, Sue. "Gender, Power, and Culture in the Televisual World of Twin Peaks: A Feminist Critique." Journal of Film and Video 51.3-4 (1999): 5-19. JSTOR. Web. 19 Apr. 2017.
Modleski, Tania. "The Search for Tomorrow in Today's Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form." Film Quarterly 33.1 (1979): 12-21. JSTOR. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
Moldovan, Raluca. "“That Show You Like Might Be Coming Back in Style”: How Twin Peaks Changed the Face of Contemporary Television." American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 24.1 (2015): 44-68. Web. 5 Apr. 2017.
Nickerson, Catherine. "Serial detection and serial killers in Twin Peaks." Literature Film Quarterly 21.4 (1993): 271-76. Academic Search Premier. Web. 6 Apr. 2017.
Pollard, Scott. "Cooper, Details, and the Patriotic Mission of "Twin Peaks"." Literature Film Quarterly 21.4 (1993): 296-304. ProQuest. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.
Shoos, Dianne, Diana George, and Joseph Comprone. "Twin Peaks and the Look of Television: Visual Literacy in the Writing Class." Journal of Advanced Composition 13.2 (1993): 459-76. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.