At the end of September I decided to try watching Twin Peaks. I really only knew about it because it gets referenced as a major influence any time a piece of media has creepy, inexplicable supernatural mysteries, but I honestly didn’t really know anything about it other than that. I was really surprised when I started it up and found out it was just a soap opera. I feel like I see it only referenced in very specific contexts so it was also really surprising to learn it wasn’t this kind of cult classic but instead was the most popular show in America at that time.
So for a period of two weeks I did nothing in my free time but watch Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, and Season 3. At the beginning, I kept waiting for the “weird stuff” to happen, wondering “when does this turn into the show everyone seems to say it is?” When the red room first appears in episode 3 or 4, it was really, really intriguing- just such a weird turn from the fairly normal (by today’s standards anyway) soap drama. I loved just how off the wall it was compared to the show I had been watching for the previous four hours. It was a really mysterious moment.
But then I waited for the red room to appear again for another couple of episodes until I realized that no, I shouldn’t expect this thing to come back any time soon. This show is mostly just a soap opera, and that’s why you’re watching it. All the weird stuff is kind of on the edges, coloring the story a little bit but not really the point. I don’t think it even gets back to anything supernatural until the end of the first season.
Once I came to that realization, I just rolled with it and really didn’t think too much about the supernatural elements anymore. Overall, a lot of it just works as what felt like deus ex machina, providing an easy way to establish the next goal in the murder mystery. So I never really connected with the central murder mystery plot, if you were supposed to. It felt like the show was really about the interpersonal drama of the town’s inhabitants and the murder mystery was more just setup to get the show started.
So I was also really surprised by Fire Walk With Me. This was where I thought “oh, this is the Twin Peaks I thought this show was going to be”, but I was absolutely blown away by it. I don’t think I’ve actually seen much, if any of Lynch’s stuff (I thought I watched Eraserhead up until a week or two ago when I found out it was a full 90 minute movie and not a 10 minute short like I remembered it was, so I don’t think I just imagined watching it after reading about it over the years). It’s such an intense portrayal of trauma and the actor for Laura was absolutely amazing, as were the rest of the Palmers. The actors say so much with their physical acting in this movie (such as that intense dinner scene where Leland wants Laura to wash her hands).
The movie also really floored me with how well it fused the human drama with the supernatural elements. It creates this world where there are these otherworldly beings that are influencing the lives of people, but the story is still centered squarely on very human stories. And it’s probably the most interesting integration of distorted time I’ve seen. The Philip Jeffries scene, starting with that moment where Cooper watches sees himself in the security footage, is one of my favorite scenes in the series due to it’s absolutely frenzied paced that doesn’t give you any time to process what you’re looking at while you’re recognizing that logic has gone out the window. And the scene where Annie appears on Laura’s bed is also really great.
The supernatural bits always felt like they not ever going to be understood, and that they communicate the world is being influenced by these outside forces but the plot is strictly about the characters dealing with human problems. So I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be taking away from Season 3 emotionally or thematically. It goes in much harder on showing off, and also somewhat demystifying, the supernatural for most of its run, at least until the end where you once again lose a grasp on that understand. But there’s so much of it throughout Season 3 that I don’t really know what else to take from it. I liked it as a tonal piece, and it’s clearly a very different, more muted kind of drama. But I don’t think I really latched onto any of the emotional narratives that were there, or I didn’t understand what the show was trying to be about.
Reading about it, all of the writing I’ve seen about Season 3 has been saying it’s a meta-commentary on the show, on fans, on how people have been waiting for a Season 3 for so long and now it’s trying to show them that the characters’ lives are ending and there’s never going to be closure. But as someone who marathoned this entire series in two weeks, that’s a context I didn’t experience. I don’t know what that longing for a return to this beloved show feels like. In my context, I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about it other than it’s got some good moods going on.
P.S. I now understand how people see ghosts. You know how when you close your eyes at night you can still see this kind of morphing light as your brain is trying to interpret the darkness and whatever little light you might be getting through your eyelids? Usually I just see this as that- faint, morphing colors of light. After two weeks of straight of Twin Peaks, and finishing Season 3 at 2am, I woke up in the middle of the night and my brain was imaging those lights not as colors, but as Cooper’s face. Cooper’s face everywhere, morphing into other Cooper’s faces. Also that big smiley monster in Sarah’s face was appearing too. And I quickly realized it wasn’t going to go away, not for a while.
It finally started subsiding after around a week. But I can totally see how people’s subconscious can make you see things in the dark.
