Some Notes on a TWIN PEAKS Rewatch

1. These are undigested notes coming fast on the heels of me finishing my third or fourth rewatch of the original run of Twin Peaks.

2. Conventional wisdom says that season 2 of Twin Peaks is the bad season. This is certainly an impression that David Lynch is happy to support--he was barely active in the second half of the season, after Laura's killer was revealed. I'm not so sure it's accurate, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that, as I see it, there's only about four bad episodes in the second season. That's a hefty number but it isn't unusual; your average season of Star Trek has more duds. Now, these bad episodes are bad. These are the episodes where James goes off and gets involved in a pastel noir and Ben Horne goes slightly mad and thinks he's Robert E. Lee. There's not really anything redemptive that can be said about these interludes.

3. On the other hand, lots of things that I've seen pointed out as "bad" really aren't. Super Nadine is goofy, but it's fine. Heather Graham has a certain dry humor about her that matches well with Kyle MacLachlan. Billy Zane acts like he's wandered in out of another show, mumbling his way through the episodes; it's charming. The Windom Earle plotline isn't great, but it's hardly an abomination.

4. Oh, yes. The second half of season two introduces Denise Bryson, who is objectively one of the best things about the show.

5. Now, this isn't to say that season 2 is nearly to the level of season 1 (or, more accurately, that the post-reveal series is to the level of the pre-reveal series). But it isn't for the reason a lot of people, including David Lynch, suggest. Lynch is convinced that the death of Laura was the engine of the series and that removing the mystery destroyed the show. And perhaps he's right. But the precise way that works is less concrete than "they killed the mystery." Put simply--Twin Peaks without the Laura Palmer mystery is less nasty. Twin Peaks pre-reveal is a thick stew of sex, incest, abuse. There's not really a morally pure character here; even Pete has his cruel streak. After the reveal, the town cleans up. To take one obvious example, Ben Horne--the abusive sexual predator (remember, he had a relationship with the teenage Laura for *years*)--drops his cigars and starts trying to be a good person (a plotline revisited, to greater success, in The Return). The evil at the heart of the town becomes mere eccentricity. I think this is why Windom Earle comes off as a cartoon: he's an outside parody of an evil villain rather than an internal reality.

6. Because if BOB is "the evil that men do," that means that he's really Twin Peaks itself. Much like the creature in Stephen King's IT is foundational to the community it terrorizes, so BOB is the outgrowth of all the horrors committed by the people in this small town.

7. I would like to make a paradoxical suggestion, though. If the reveal led to a lightening of the darker elements of Twin Peaks, Lynch is wrong that it killed the show. In fact, there's an important sense in which Twin Peaks could only be itself once the revelation had been made. This is literal in the sense that Lynch, when he got the opportunity to make a movie, chose to return the focus to Laura Palmer, making a prequel (apparently against the wishes of co-creator Mark Frost). But there's a deeper sense in which this is true. As long as the truth of Laura's killer remained a secret, the show couldn't really be about the thing it's really about, which is not only abuse (and not only Lynch's favorite theme of women in trouble) but about abuse within the nuclear family.

8. I've not said it in so many words, partly because I assume anyone who's read this far knows it, but Laura Palmer is murdered by her father after years of sexual abuse. I've written about the centrality of incest to American small-town narratives, so if you want more of my thoughts on this--better-developed and copyedited--check out my book. Laura Palmer is a lot of things, but one thing is an heir to a whole line of girls abused by their fathers. The ur-text, by my estimation, is Henry Bellamann's Kings Row. Closely on its heels follows Grace Metalious's Peyton Place. In both of these novels an important plotline is precisely the abuse of a young girl by her father (or stepfather in Peyton Place, a choice forced on Metalious by her publisher). Laura Palmer is directly in this line. However, she's different in an important way: while the abused girls in the two older works are side characters whose stories are designed to reflect or influence the protagonists' journeys, Laura is (as Margaret Lanterman would say) "the one." Her spectral presence guides the entire narrative.

9. But here's what's important here: until we know the truth of Laura's murder, we can't really see what the show's doing. We can guess, we can intuit, but we can't put it in so many words: that the central evil haunting the small town of Twin Peaks is abuse within the nuclear family. That the very structure that seems to promise stability and morality is itself the origin of all the evils it claims to oppose. This is an important observation, and one that can be extended upward; insofar as the nuclear family is conceived of as a mirror to the town, and the town as the mirror to the country (this is the core thesis of my book), we have to say that Twin Peaks is making larger claims about America itself--that it generates the very evils it fights. Such an argument would take more time to develop than I have here.

10. This is what I mean when I say that Twin Peaks could not be Twin Peaks until it was "killed" by revealing that Leland Palmer murdered his daughter. The revelation forces the story finally to be upfront about its central thesis. Everything afterward becomes a working-out of this central thesis, from the remarkable Fire Walk With Me to the astounding third season. I think it would not be an overstatement to say that, had Lynch and Frost gotten their wish, the show would never have been able to live up to the potential of the first season-and-a-half.