Following David Lynch’s sad passing this year, I decided to revisit that distant town in the Pacific Northwest of Twin Peaks.
Released in 1990, it appeared a rather unassuming soap opera murder mystery.
Yet as with much of his work, Lynch’s obsession with the shadowy underbelly of polite society creepingly revealed itself.
We begin with the tragic demise of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, found wrapped in plastic underneath the Great Northern Hotel.
FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by the wonderful Kyle MacLachlan, is sent to investigate, with the enthusiasm of a boy scout for Zen Buddhism, cherry pie and damn good coffee.
Cooper, with his mystical intuition, and orphic visitations to the ethereal Black Lodge, effectively represents our own speculations into the show, our man across the veil.
Lynch’s hypnotic direction is perverse, and an uncanny sense of dread permeates the town.
Twin Peaks tapped so beautifully into the creeping anxiety that emanated across America.
Despite its picturesque diners, lawns neatly trimmed, and picket fences standing firm, a deep paranoia ‘was in the trees’.
The question that frustrated so many viewers, ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’, is not in fact a demand to find some specific suspect in the town.
Rather, it is we who have killed her, with our morbid demand for televised violence to intrigue and delight.
The second season admittedly stumbles, compromised by the network’s demand that viewers needed everything explained, an attitude that forced Lynch to withdraw from production.
Season 3, eponymously named ‘The Return’, arrived decades later, while audiences had been left with great frustration that the mystery would remain unsolved.
The Return, ironically, refuses to give in to comforting nostalgia.
It instead argues, brutally, that time has passed, and you can’t in fact ‘go back all the way’.
It’s some of the most confrontational, avant-garde television ever broadcast, daring viewers to face themselves, as we now live in a world that is utterly alien to the one Cooper was in.
Lynch condemns us to a Black Lodge of our own, our heroes it seems cannot save us now.
