On Continually Revisiting Twin Peaks

This is the inaugural essay for the Twin Peaks Project—a series of investigations, reflections, and reminiscences by writers who were influenced by David Lynch’s seminal television show. The project will begin August 1st. To learn about participation, visit www.twinpeaksproject.com.

By Shya Scanlon

In episode four of the first season of Twin Peaks, Sheriff Harry Truman and Deputy Andy enter the police station looking for Agent Cooper, and find receptionist Lucy Moran watching a soap opera called Invitation to Love on the television at her desk. When Truman asks her what’s going on, she launches into a breathless recap of the goings on within the show-within-a-show, a series of shenanigans and backstabbings and double crossings fairly typical for the genre.

Truman clarifies, “What’s going on here?”

Modestly funny, but what’s funnier is that the plot of Invitation to Love mirrors the action in Twin Peaks itself, so Lucy is actually providing a decent—if abstract—overview of the shenanigans and general soapiness we’re tuning in for.

A David Lynch noob might mistake this for a subtle wink at the audience, a sign to resist taking the show too seriously—it’s a melodrama, after all. How else should we perceive the overwrought yet strangely wooden acting of the stock characters inhabiting this idyllic sawmill town in the Pacific Northwest?

But a viewer familiar with the eerie, epic melodramas Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart would have a different interpretation: it’s clearly playful, this self-reflexivity, but it’s no sly, pomo effort at self-sabotage. Those two now-classic films—the former became a critical darling; the latter won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1991—clearly established the concerns still presiding over the production of Twin Peaks: chief among them the struggle between good and evil within the context of kitsch, camp, and nostalgia. All three are set in a present heavily inflected by attitudes and aesthetics normally associated with the 50s, as though Grease were reskinned as a supernatural thriller. As with Twin Peaks, the challenge for the viewer is always that, faced with the superficiality of camp, one is tempted to laugh off the intensity and depth of the struggle. But it was truly the juxtaposition itself that interested Lynch.

Newsweek pronounced 1995 “The Year of the Internet.” It was also the year of the Oklahoma City bombing; Aum Shinrikyo claimed responsibility for a sarin gas attack in Tokyo’s subway; and both The New York Times and The Washington Post published an anti-technology manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future written by one Theodore John Kaczynski, AKA “The Unabomber.” That same year, all twenty-nine episodes of Twin Peaks were released as a VHS box set, fully rentable at any sufficiently well-stocked video...