Scattered thoughts from rewatching Twin Peaks

I just rewatched all of Twin Peaks with my boyfriend, who had never seen it! Here are some random musings on the series.

This post will contain full spoilers throughout for the original run of Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, and The Return.

Season 1

Twin Peaks can be a bit overwhelming on your first watch just because there are so many characters to keep track of, and for a while you're not really sure how it all connects. On a rewatch, though, I already know who all these people are and how the murder mystery plays out, so I just get to sit back, relax, and let all the weird little scenes with my favorite weirdos wash over me. It's great. I understand why Twin Peaks became a cult hit that people rewatch religiously as their comfort show.

What really stood out to me the most about the first season this time, though, is how different the show could have turned out—specifically with regards to the magical elements. There's so little magic in the first season outside of the original Red Room scene, which at the time could've been written off as nothing more than a weird prophetic dream. In fact, the first season keeps going out of its way to tie aesthetic choices and lines from the Red Room to elements of the investigation in the real world. The red drapes match the ones at Jacques Renault's cabin, the shadowy shape flying by is his bird, etc. Everything has a literal meaning that the show spells out for you as bluntly as possible. It's bizarre and unrealistic, sure, but it isn't a fantasy series.

It's only in season 2 that Twin Peaks starts leaning more heavily into the idea that literal magic is involved, with spirits from a realm beyond space and time possessing people and whatnot. It comes off as a total retcon. Obviously I'm not complaining about that, as a Lynch fan who absolutely loves that he got to turn Twin Peaks into more of a work of surrealist fantasy over time. But you can't help but imagine a world where none of that happened, and it ran for years as a soap opera where sometimes something odd happens.

Anthony's theories

One of the most fun things about this revisit was getting Anthony's perspective on things. For example, early on, he had a completely wild theory about who the killer was. He thought it was Ed Hurley.

I'd never even considered this, but I can see his logic. He immediately ruled out all of the "obvious" suspects the show was setting up—Bobby, James, Leo, Jacques Renault, Jacobi—and tried to sort of reverse engineer who the killer might be based on what he thought the point of the story would be. Well, it's not gonna be someone who's obviously evil, because then the story is just "this horrible violent criminal did it." No, the story is about revealing the seedy underbelly of this seemingly perfect small town, shining a light on the darkness that everyone turns a blind eye to. And who seems to be the most normal person here, to an almost suspicious degree? Ed. Why's he here, aside from the fact that he's James's legal guardian? Why do we spend so much time with him? It makes a lot of sense from that angle, to see him next to a bunch of weirdos and wonder what he could be hiding.

Of course, this theory only lasted so long. I think after a few episodes we were having a discussion about whether or not the case of Laura Palmer's murder followed the rules of a good mystery that were outlined in Umineko. (It was inevitable that Anthony would interpret much of the show through the lens of Umineko since we just finished reading that. He would describe certain characters like Mike or the Log Lady as "meta-world characters," which I loved.) I told him that, yes, the mystery was solvable, but it didn't necessarily have to follow real world logic all the way through. Fantasy elements are clearly involved, as the story is driven forward by Cooper having his prophetic Red Room dream. From there, the dominoes all fell immediately. Oh yeah, if magic can be involved, then maybe this "Bob" character people keep seeing is an evil spirit. Did he possess someone and have them kill Laura? Hey, wait a second, you know who's been acting like he's fucking possessed? Leland! I bit my tongue and refused to confirm it, but by the time Leland was smothering Jacques Renault with a pillow it was pretty damn obvious to Anthony.

Other story developments Anthony correctly guessed, sometimes very early, included:

• The little man in the Red Room being the embodiment of Mike's severed arm
• Bob wanting to possess Laura and Laura resisting it, leading to her death
• Bob possessing Dale (technically it was his doppelganger, but close enough)
• Bob being a product of the nuclear bomb, mankind's most evil creation (a thought that occurred to him the moment he saw the giant photo of a nuclear explosion on the wall in Gordon's office)
• Phillip Jeffries receiving an abstract redesign like the Arm, since David Bowie had passed away and couldn't reprise his role
• The Diane we see for most of The Return actually being a tulpa created by Mr. C
• Freddie existing just so that he could use his magic glove to punch the Bob Orb into oblivion
• And last but not least, Dale traveling back in time to try and prevent Laura's murder

But we're jumping ahead a bit with these theories.

Season 2

I have to confess that, on my first viewing of Twin Peaks, I skipped most of season 2. After the resolution of the Laura Palmer case I think I just looked up a synopsis of what else happened, and then I skipped to the finale and Fire Walk with Me. In my defense, I had a reason: I was trying to binge through the show so I could catch up with The Return before the finale aired, and I'd heard that stretch of season 2 was neither particularly good nor particularly relevant to what came later.

But this time through I was ready to watch the whole thing, to find those diamonds in the rough. So, do I think the slump era of Twin Peaks is worth watching after all? Eh... yes and no.

There are some good bits here and there. Especially the scenes with David Duchovny's Denise, who aside from the famous "fix your hearts or die" scene in The Return only exists in this slump era. I love Denise. She's great, and portrayed surprisingly sympathetically for the time, with Cooper immediately rolling with her new name and gender. I love the scene where she leaves a hostage situation in boymode and then comes back in a waitress uniform as a trick to save Cooper. Just some straight up Bugs Bunny shit. This era of the show does also establish the mythology of the Lodges, as fans are always eager to point out. But, like... the stuff you learn about the Lodges in that span of episodes can be summarized in one sentence. Bob and Mike come from a realm of evil spirits called the Black Lodge that has an entrance near Twin Peaks, and there's also a White Lodge that good spirits come from, which Major Briggs briefly visits. There, done. The rest is mostly just a bunch of random nonsense that gets memory holed. It's the show visibly stalling for time as the writers try to figure out what to do with the cast after resolving Laura's murder at the behest of the network. (Thanks, Bob Iger.)

Twin Peaks is often called a parody of the soap opera genre by fans, but I really don't think that's true. I'm honestly not even sure why people think it's satirizing the genre when the vast majority of its soap opera drama is played with aching sincerity. It kind of feels like people just don't want to admit they like a soap opera, and so decide it must be a deconstruction of the genre, even though most of the original show's runtime is spent on a tangled web of romantic and family drama, business rivalries, revenge schemes, and combinations of all of the above. The show-within-a-show "Invitation to Love" makes it slightly self-aware about its genre trappings, I guess?

Really, I think it's more accurate to call the original run of Twin Peaks a soap opera that devolves into self-parody in the weaker part of its run.

Now sure, as mid-season 2 defenders will argue, Twin Peaks had oddball characters and subplots before season 2. But they all felt like they were in service of a bigger thematic picture. Everything tied back to the central plot of the Laura Palmer case either directly or indirectly, helping you understand the darkness lurking beneath the picturesque surface of the town and narrow down your mental list of potential suspects. Or, if it was just something weird and goofy that had nothing to do with anything else, it was usually just a brief bit of comic relief. Which is fine! But most subplots were connected to others, and were at most two steps removed from Laura. The drama over the mill with Catherine, Pete, and Josie doesn't have much to do with Laura, but Ben Horne is a key player in that storyline, and he's also one of the prime suspects for Laura's murder. Andy and Lucy get up to a lot of shenanigans, but they're also working on the case. Norma and Shelly at the diner? Both married to known criminals with ties back to Laura's death. Harold the agoraphobe? Laura's confidant! It's all connected!

But for the middle section of season 2, a majority of the runtime of each episode is taken up by random absurd subplots that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, or any greater story. We've got multiple episodes in a row where we just check in on James's side quest with the mysterious milf where it's like he accidentally wandered onto the set of a different soap opera, Catherine blackmailing Josie into being her maid, Nadine age regressing and going to high school and having super strength, the Milford brother drama with the girl who's so good at sex it can kill an elderly man, or Andy and Dick Tremaine thinking that Little Nicky is a devil who murdered his parents. Sometimes there isn't even any development within these plots! We'll just check in on them and go yup, they're still doing this bit. Perhaps the worst of the bunch is the subplot where Ben Horne roleplays as Robert E. Lee and cooks up a scenario where the south wins the Civil War, which is completely insufferable and feels like it goes on for fucking ever with very little payoff. I wish they'd just skipped to his quest to save the pine weasel.

By the last few episodes of the season the show does at least begin to right its course, as the Windom Earle subplot and the search for the Black Lodge begin to coalesce to give the show some momentum again. Earle is no less absurd than those other season 2 ideas, turning a show about the evils the people of Twin Peaks are capable of into a show about a crazy guy from out of town showing up to do Batman villain crimes while wearing wacky disguises, but at least the performance is absurd enough to make it entertaining.

I lost my fucking mind at the scene where he dresses up as a horse (with Leo dragged along as the rear end)...

...and pulls out a gun to shoot Major Briggs with a tranquilizer.

Speaking of weirdness, there's also these odd bits in season 2 episode 15, near the end of the James and the Milf Arc. For some reason cops in this episode keep getting... lined up? In one otherwise serious scene a cop goes to leave, and two more appear and follow directly behind him in single file like they're an RPG party.

  

(I was going to post a gif, but I have to share a video clip for the sake of preserving the sound of them marching in unison.)

...And then we cut to the next scene, and we see three DIFFERENT cops all sitting in identical poses with cigars in their mouths at the bar? And the camera pans as Donna and James walk by and we see even more of them?

I don't know what the hell is up with this episode, but I love it. For a brief moment the show became a Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker movie. I wish this whole arc was this odd.

Really, though, perhaps the true value of watching all of season 2 is just getting to spend more time with the original cast before things change in The Return. There's a finite amount of time we have with Dale Cooper, so it feels kind of wrong to skip any of it. A few other characters won't return at all. It's for this reason that I don't regret sitting through all of the slump era, even though some of it was pretty dire.

Season 2 also prepared Anthony for the fact that Twin Peaks would sometimes have one of its characters develop a completely different personality via amnesia and pivot into some absurd comedy subplot. Like, y'know. Dougie.

But before that, the movie and its 90 minutes of deleted scenes!

Fire Walk with Me

The Missing Pieces

A feature length collection of deleted scenes that, with maybe one or two exceptions, made me go "huh, neat, but it was the right call to cut that."

Fire Walk with Me certainly would have felt more like the show if this stuff was left in. Maybe it would've landed a little better with audiences at the time. But I also think it would've made for a worse, more disjointed movie. The relentlessly oppressive tone of Laura's life would have been diluted if more of these lighthearted moments were left in, lessening the impact of the movie as a whole. And as a fan of the show I might like having these extra scenes with characters like Andy, Lucy, Pete, and Major Briggs, but they have nothing to do with the story FWWM was trying to tell, and they don't really add much to the show either. They're pure fanservice, just additional scenes going through the motions for the sake of getting these characters on camera. And the ending of the movie would have been SO much worse if they'd left in the continuation of the final scene of season 2, teasing a sequel movie that never got made. None of that stuff matters to Laura's story.

That being said, it was still fun to watch this as a fan of the series. I'm glad this material got released. But I'm also glad that it was separated from the rest of the movie.

Now for the real important stuff.

Teach me how to Dougie

Like many viewers, I was confused about the point of the Dougie arc on my first viewing of The Return. Why have your awesome protagonist come back just to put him in a state of catatonia for most of the show, shuffling around in a stupor and parroting random phrases he hears with no idea what's going on? Was Lynch just trolling the audience? Was he just trying to tell him that things change and that you can't always get what you want? Was it stupid on purpose?

After the first Dougie episode, Anthony, too, was confused. He thought it kinda sucked and disrespected Dale as a character, and almost wanted to give up on The Return.

After another episode, he started to see the vision.

After three episodes with Dougie, it became his favorite part of every episode, and he was calling Lynch a genius.

The thing about the Las Vegas subplot is that it's sometimes the most classic Twin Peaks part of The Return, just in an incredibly oblique way. Cooper is still wandering around and following magic clues he doesn't really understand, but now as Dougie he doesn't understand anything. The whole world is now as confusing to him as the Black Lodge is, and Mike has to guide our hapless protagonist around indirectly like he's playing Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures. Over time we come to love the colorful cast of strange characters that surround Dougie!Coop in Vegas in the same way that we loved the strange characters in Twin Peaks. Dougie's hardass wife who falls madly in love with Cooper even though he can't even process what she's saying to him. Anthony Sinclair, the shady insurance agent who tries to poison Dougie only to break down into tears before he can go through with it. And who could forget the Mitchum Brothers, those casino mobsters with hearts of gold, who can't seem to go anywhere without their trio of cocktail waitresses in tow? This idea that the vibe of the original show is being recaptured better in Vegas than in Washington is further supported by the fact that more scenes in Vegas feature that familiar jazz soundtrack, while scenes in Twin Peaks are often uncomfortably silent. Something is missing up there. But down in Vegas, we're playing all the hits! Look, Cooper's getting his damn good coffee and cherry pie!

Anthony also pointed out the very odd parallel between Dougie and Laura Palmer. Both are people beloved by their communities while clearly being in need of help, but everyone just kind of goes "eh, not my problem, hope that gets sorted out." The difference, of course, is that for Laura it's a heartbreaking tragedy. As Bobby puts it in the fourth episode of the original series: "Everybody knew she was in trouble, but we didn’t do anything. All you good people. You want to know who killed Laura? You did! We all did." But for Dougie, it's a farcical comedy. Nobody seems to even really notice that he can barely talk. They just treat his parroted responses like they're totally normal. And yet everything works out comically well for Dougie every time. He completely turns the original Dougie's life around, he gets his family out of debt, and all of his enemies either end up loving him or end up dead of their own accord.

The Dougie arc is a shockingly rich text with many possible interpretations. Really, though, at the end of the day, it's just really fucking funny. So I have to love it. It makes me wish Lynch had found the time to do more full-blown comedy projects.

Scattered thoughts

• The fake name in the opening credits to conceal the fact that "Mr. Tojamura" isn't some Japanese guy but is actually Catherine in disguise is still nuts
• Dougie!Coop suddenly locking in to stop Ike the Spike from shooting him is so goddamn funny, it just comes out of nowhere. So does the part in the boardroom meeting scene where out of nowhere he says "He's lying." in a stern tone, even though that is NOT one of the phrases he's picked up
• Lucy being the one to shoot Mr. C is still one of my favorite things ever. That ALSO just comes out of nowhere
• Hawk remains the MVP of the Twin Peaks Sheriff's Department. He's like the only one of them who ever gets anything done. I'm glad he got a good deal of screentime in The Return
• Part 8 still rules. I don't have anything to add there, it's just great
• The Nine Inch Nails
• I forgot that Annie was played by the same actress who played Felicity Shagwell in Austin Powers

The ending

There's much more I could talk about with The Return, as it's a great show through and through, but it's the ending that always sticks with me.

It was a shockingly abrupt ending at the time, leaving us with more questions than answers. But I think that's the beauty of it. If Lynch really wanted to go back and explore the life of Carrie Page, I would've been down for that, but I also don't mind leaving the story here. The questions might be more interesting than the answers.

Dale was always Laura's failed guardian angel, who couldn't save her because he didn't even know who she was until after she'd already been killed. So there's perhaps no more fitting way for the series to end than for him to go back in time and try to save Laura, rather than leaving well enough alone after Bob's climactic defeat. But the two of them are mere pawns in a much larger battle between the forces of good and evil that they can never fully understand. And we, the audience, are right there with them. Was Sarah the enigmatic Judy, seemingly the evil spirit that birthed Bob, all along? What is the significance of Richard and Linda? What timeline are we in? Is this all a loop? Is it future, or is it past? Dale doesn't understand these things before he tries to play god, and neither do we. And so he completely and utterly fails. He only realizes at the last moment how little he understands, when he asks "What year is it?" He perhaps would've been better off if he just went back to being Dougie.

And then there's Laura's perspective here. Dale thinks he's going to be the big hero, inserting himself into the events of Fire Walk with Me, preventing the course of events that leads to her death, and bringing her home. But from her perspective, he's just prolonging her suffering, returning her to the place that made her want to die in the first place. She's violently ripped out of the afterlife and placed in an altered reality. At least there she doesn't remember her traumatic childhood, even if there's unexplained dark shit still going on in her life. (We'll never know why there was a corpse in her living room.) But then a man she's never met shows up, tells her she's actually Laura Palmer, and offers to take her home. They drive across the country in uncomfortable silence and complete darkness. He takes her to an unfamiliar home where nobody recognizes her. And then she hears Sarah calling her name, and the horrible memories of her suffering under that roof seem to all come flooding back to her. And she lets out one final blood-curdling scream. The end.

It's a haunting ending, one that's stuck with me ever since it aired. It sealed the deal on Twin Peaks being one of my favorite shows ever. Sometimes being left unsatisfied is more satisfying than being satisfied.