A David Lynch monograph, part 2: Twin Peaks, "fire walk with me", The Return.
Imagine living in a quiet little town, surrounded by nature, far away from everything and everyone, where “nothing bad ever happens”—a place that’s almost ethereal and increasingly anachronistic.
Now imagine walking along a beach one day and finding, on one of the beaches of your beloved hometown—a true haven for the soul—the body of a girl, a beautiful 17-year-old whom everyone knows and loves.
*Twin Peaks*, the series by Mark Frost and David Lynch that aired between 1990 and 1991, opens exactly like this: a rupture in apparent perfection, a break with an idyllic world that until that moment had seemed untouchable by any evil.
It’s a deeply autobiographical moment for Lynch, who grew up in Missoula convinced that evil didn’t exist in the world—and who, one evening while playing with his brother, found himself face-to-face with a naked, bloodied woman, staggering as she fled from something—who knows what. That day, many of Lynch’s beliefs crumbled, including the sense of security his hometown had led him to believe in.
The event left such a deep mark on Lynch that we see it constantly in *Twin Peaks* as well as in other works like *Blue Velvet*—and he would even base the entire TV series on it.
“Twin Peaks” opens with the murder of Laura Palmer, a 17-year-old girl who, to everyone, represented the ideal of perfection—a good girl, the “prom queen.” Her mother, Sarah, can’t find her that morning; she calls every one of her contacts incessantly and obsessively—and when she calls her husband, Laura’s father, Leland Palmer, she realizes what has happened to her daughter—Sheriff Truman doesn’t need to speak, to say it out loud. Leland and Sarah understand it; they feel it. Sarah screams—a piercing scream that we first hear through the phone receiver, heart-wrenching, shattering the screen and the narrative without the need for dramatic shots: just that scream, and that phone receiver that Leland, distraught, had dropped.
An FBI agent—Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan)—arrives to investigate the murder; he will become one of the series’ main characters.
The first season, consisting of eight episodes, centers on the investigations of Sheriff Truman and those of Cooper, who alternates between orthodox and metaphysical methods—which plunges us directly into Lynch’s worldview, made up of both reality and dreams. Dreams, in fact, are a crucial turning point that Cooper himself uses to solve the case: he sees Laura sitting next to him, wearing a velvet dress, in a room—like a formal waiting room with curtains and red armchairs. A dwarf dances and speaks to him in a disjointed manner, much like Laura does: both speak almost exclusively in riddles, riddles that Cooper will try to decipher to gain clues about the case.
During the first part of the second season, Lynch is very busy filming *Wild at Heart*, so the series is primarily in Frost’s hands, though with clear elements that Lynch wanted to include to remind us that our world cannot be explained by rationality alone. First a giant appears, then an elderly man who seems very absent-minded, and we are drawn deeper and deeper into that atmosphere of complete surrealism.
In the seventh episode of the second season, we discover who really killed Laura (a revelation that, incidentally, initially led to the series’ cancellation for the two creators)—namely, her own father, Leland Palmer, who is “possessed” by an entity that is pure evil, Bob (an entity that becomes central as early as the first season).
From the second half of the second season onward, the metaphysical takes center stage—Major Briggs, Bobby’s father (Laura Palmer’s ex), becomes a very important figure alongside the Log Lady—and the true mystery becomes Twin Peaks itself, a portal to what is good and what is evil: There is talk of the Black Lodge, the White Lodge, Windom Earl, and the theme of choice—a fundamental theme that is closely linked to the series’ core, namely the theme of the double; yes, because ever since the first season, the characters have all been switching back and forth as if they had split personalities—something we sometimes see in a physical sense: I’m referring specifically to what we see in the Black Lodge, where the evil parts of a person are hidden, but also to an evil rooted much more deeply. We also find the theme of the double in Twin Peaks itself, where Laura’s cousin bears an uncanny resemblance to her—both in appearance and in the tragic fate that awaits her.
And this brings us to the very title of the series—“Twin” Peaks, something that seems identical but can be profoundly different from what it resembles.
What we choose—the very decisions we make—are precisely what dictate who we truly are, for we all have an evil side: And so Bob doesn’t become a mere demon or Leland’s alter ego, but Leland himself—and so the series’ conclusion, with the image of Cooper—whom we immediately see as the perfect, good hero—shatters like the mirror in the final scene—Cooper’s choices lead him to that point, to seeing evil for so long that he (or at least a part of him) eventually embraces it.
The theme of choice is also deeply connected to “Fire, Walk with Me” and to Laura’s own death: Abused by her father since childhood and confused by that evil presence she identifies as Bob—but which ultimately becomes one and the same with her father—she risks following in his footsteps, harming others in turn—and she certainly harms herself, through self-destructive and dangerous behaviors. But when the people she loves are involved, she holds back. She chooses death as liberation from dreams and nightmares that are becoming increasingly real, but also as a sacrifice to try to eradicate the root of that evil that threatened to be passed down through her as well.
The 1992 film is wonderfully brutal; it draws us into Laura’s death but also into her life, so that we can empathize with her and understand her once and for all.
The scene where she is abused by her father is cruel, and I personally find myself thinking more and more often about how much I’d like to embrace that poor girl, to try to save her from herself and from that world that’s so cruel to her, to make her feel loved.
But we also realize the necessity of Laura’s death, as she takes on that evil and tries to free us all from it—an illusion, since evil is as much a part of Twin Peaks as it is of the world itself.
The second season of *Twin Peaks* ends with a line from Laura:
Twenty-five years later comes *Twin Peaks: The Return*—which aims to bring things full circle, but never offers us any answers (a classic Lynch move, since he knows that no one can have answers to existential questions).
Dale Cooper is out there as his own evil double; his good self remains, in a sense, in a state of dormancy—as if a part of him were still in the lodge.
We also return to the town of Twin Peaks, increasingly infected by evil—a perennial evil that worsens year after year.
Laura Palmer’s death was, in an intrinsic sense, the martyrdom of beauty, and now we’re left to come to terms with the doubles of all of us.
Audrey, a central character in the series, is now in a profound state of illness and distress—she was raped in the past by the evil Cooper and gave birth to a son—an offshoot of the evil part of herself, which is, in fact, cruel to the core.
Almost all the characters return, but now, more than ever, time becomes the protagonist, and with it, the entities we’ve already encountered in the Lodge.
Time becomes so central that it drives the “good” Cooper to try to save Laura from that atrocious fate, only to lose her time and again—but something breaks; there is a tear in the continuum of things, just like in the fourth wall itself: and now we are in the world—perhaps our world, perhaps an era that once existed, perhaps an era that never existed.
Laura isn't Laura anymore; she doesn't remember *Twin Peaks* even when Cooper brings her to the front door of her house—a house that, as we discover, neither Laura nor her parents have ever seen before. Everything seems suspended in the final scene; Cooper is confused, almost bewildered—but then he pauses, reflects, standing in front of the door of that little white house, and asks, “What year is it?”
And then Laura, who has been left behind, looks at that house again; she stands there for a moment with her mouth agape—and then screams, a piercing scream, the same scream her mother let out when she learned of her daughter’s death.
In *The Return*, Lynch is more critical—perhaps simply because he is older—and views the world in a darker light, yet he continues to uphold his critical thinking and his faith in human beings as emotional, social, and transcendental individuals. He brings the entity of Bob to life with the detonation of the atomic bomb—the moment of the birth of evil itself—and, more than ever, reveals to us what he truly thinks.
I can’t call the ending open-ended, because *Twin Peaks* couldn’t have had an ending given the way it was written in the 1990s: *Twin Peaks* is about us, our traumas, and how we choose to live as a result; it’s about our dreams and our darkest parts, without ever pointing a finger at our mistakes, but always leaving us with what we hold most dear: choice.
