The Marvelously, Impossibly Dark Magic of Twin Peaks

I’m all for escapism at the moment, and recently I managed to dig out my DVD set of the original David Lynch Twin Peaks series that became such a cult classic. And it drew me in all over again. I’m not a film-maker, but I am a fellow storyteller, and this time around I didn’t just immerse myself in its magic, but tried to analyze how it did what it did.

The show, which made its debut in the far more innocent and Netflix-free world of 1990, had it all: occultism, irony, horror, deadpan humor, soap opera, canned narrative, dream logic, gorgeous scenery, beautiful young people, and postmodern adultery. Where else can you find all that in one place?

And Twin Peaks was a shared experience. Long before Amazon was around to recommend your next Prime binge, people talked about the show. “Wrapped in plastic” became a password as well as a buzzword, a signal to the other initiated that you were One Of Us. You didn’t tune in the same way you tuned in to Murder, She Wrote. You tuned in obsessively, ready to be transported.

Master storyteller David Lynch did something transformative with Twin Peaks. On one level was the story and its central question: Who killed Laura Palmer? But on an equally important level—perhaps on an even more important level—was a celebration of everything irrational, everything nocturnal, everything that ever went bump in the night. And the question behind that level? Can you take it? How much more can you take?  

Stranger Things couldn’t have been written if Twin Peaks hadn’t shown the way. The Walking Dead wouldn’t have happened. Fringe wouldn’t have scared anyone.

Lynch loaded each frame with impossible-to-pinpoint preconscious material—cameras crawling around lush rooms, a ceiling fan whirring repetitively, the roaring of the waterfall—so that without understanding why you felt that way, you had a sense that something untoward out there was trying to get in here. I thought it had to be the times themselves (the clothing definitely screams ‘80s unfortunate fashion decisions) and that I wouldn’t react the way I had originally. I thought I’d be levelheaded. I thought it wouldn’t be that scary. And then Bob showed up and I got scared silly all over again.

It’s been a weird and wonderful journey back in time, and I can’t image better escape from our own dark days. As a recent article in the New York Times in celebration of the show’s 30th anniversary noted, the owls are not what they seem, the log does not judge… and the coffee is damn fine.