With the whole of our realm under lockdown due to a sickness that
is spreading, I found myself at last with time enough to devote to
the 275 minutes of the YouTube video
Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED(No, Really), which had garnered some respect and, of course,
plenty of hate in fandomland. I didn't watch it in one stretch, but
fortunately the theorist named Rosseter (according to the
description, he doesn't introduce himself) is methodical enough that
it's easy to pick up again an hour, or a day, later. I'll say a bit
about Rosseter's theory before getting on to a mostly (but not
entirely) rehash of my own.
Rosseter makes a good case for a rather lackluster theory, that
Twin Peaks is a parable demonstrating that the banality of
television is rotting our brains. And he might be right. Or at least,
he's not entirely right and he's not entirely wrong.
Twin Peaks
is certainly at least in part “a show about the concept of
television,” as he says. One need point to no further evidence than
the mirror serial
Invitation to Love in
the first run of the show. The first two seasons (or season
and a half, if you prefer) are clearly Lynch's critique of television
in much the same way that his brilliant
Inland Empire is
a critique of Hollywood. But both of those explanations are pretty
disappointing. The realms Lynch created in those two stories are far
too fertile to be explained away that easily. So why leave it there?
A critique of television may have been the starting point for Twin
Peaks, but it wasn’t the end
game. It might have been Lynch's code, but it’s not the story he
wrote with the code.
Lynch clearly loves to make stuff. He lets his subconscious drive
his creation (or certainly seems to, anyway). He is motivated by
dreams, meditation, myth and symbolism. He loves the editing process
and does not feel compelled to make strict sense. These seem obvious
to me. It's not hard to imagine him abandoning a linear narrative
thread in favor of something that suggests a strong but unclear
connection of plot or visual elements.
That's where I'm coming from in this response that Rosseter
triggered. I'm not going to try to pull his YouTube seminar apart.
It's fun to watch and only occasionally belabored. Disagreeing with
other people’s ideas is instructive, and after all, there are no
wrong theories except for some of them.
Twin Peaks is
remarkably fertile ground for theorizing. It's a fantastically blank,
and busy, canvas. Equally well-delineated theories have been posited,
for example, suggesting that the whole story is about petroleum
dependence. As FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (portrayed in Twin
Peaks by Lynch) tells us more than once, it's all very interesting to
think about. I'm more interested, however, in making the narrative
work than unpacking the symbolism.
I write this with full awareness that I'm overlooking the crucial
contributions of Mark Frost, who was often responsible for providing
what narrative there was to the tale. I don’t do that to discount
his involvement, but the enigma of
Twin Peaks is the enigma of
Lynch. It’s his yarn that wants unraveling, although the truly epic
piece of storytelling is to both of their credit.
* * *
Food is interesting; For instance, why do we need to eat? Why
are we never satisfied with just the right amount of food to maintain
good health and proper energy? We always seem to want more and more.
When eating too much the proper balance is disturbed, and ill health
follows. Of course, eating too little food throws the balance off in
the opposite direction, and there is the ill health coming at us
again.
Balance is the key. Balance is the key to many things. Do we
understand balance? The word 'balance' has seven letters. Seven is
difficult to balance, but not impossible – we are able to divide.
There are, of course, the pros and cons of division.
— Margaret Lancaster (“The Log
Lady”), introduction to Episode 15
The first thing I want to suggest is that in understanding the
multiple realms of
Twin Peaks, it's best to give up
preconceptions of right and wrong. This isn’t to say that there’s
no such thing as good or bad, but that taking a stance of moral
relativism helps to understand the layers of complexity at work.
What’s acceptable among insects, for example, doesn’t play among
people.
Twin Peaks is a story
about entities who shouldn't be interacting.
The different sorts of entities depicted in
Twin Peaks
inhabit different realms and, in some cases, can traverse realms.
Their realms have different mores, different codes of conduct,
different moralities. Those realms used to be separate; a being from
one realm stayed in that realm. But that was before the walls came
down, the membranes were torn, the atoms were smashed. In 1945, a
force was released on Earth that violated the laws of all realms. It
was something manmade, something which should not have existed in any
realm and which in a flash existed in them all. With the detonation
of the atomic bomb, some entities saw and seized the ability to move
between realms. Some found ways to use that ability for their own
benefit. Others began working to restore an imbalance created by
beings from one realm taking what they could from another.
In Season 1, we meet BOB and MIKE, two such realm-traversing
entities. MIKE had once been in league with BOB as a sort of
realm-traversing pirate until he saw the errors in his ways. In
Season 3, we see MIKE working to restore the balance. The Fireman (as
he is named in Season 3) is another such entity concerned with
righting the imbalance.
At the end of Season 2, Cooper is shown entering the Waiting Room,
where he remains for 25 years. When he leaves, it is not as the human
he was when he entered. (O
ne doesn't
leave the rooms between realms the same person they went in as.
Phillip Jeffries sure didn't.) As a Lodge entity, Cooper has
gained the ability to travel between realms. His re-entry is by no
means simple, but I'm only considering the Cooper of the final
episodes of Season 3. The beings manufactured by lodge entities are a
different matter, but not one that contradicts the premise here.
Having gained the ability to traverse realms, Cooper (at the end
of Season 3) goes rogue. He begins acting outside of the norms of the
realm he is in, and does so for personal gain. The gains Cooper seeks
are more relatable to us than those sought by BOB, seeing as Cooper
(still) has the drives of a person of our realm. BOB’s drives are
germaine to his realm and are, to us, barbaric. Cooper's drives are
(what we see as) heroic. He is compelled to be perfect, to never do
or never have done wrong. He
uses the power he gains through the Lodge in an effort to satisfy
that drive, to rearrange the world so that he won't be responsible
for the deaths of Caroline Earle, Annie Blackburn and Laura Palmer.
Because Dale Cooper is a hero. He saves women. He doesn't let them
die. From a moral-neutral perspective, however, Cooper is no better
than BOB. This is key, I think, to putting Twin Peaks into
perspective. Good and bad are relative. Cooper and BOB both act
outside their realms to satisfy inner drives. Cooper is no better
than BOB.
By destroying BOB at the end of Season 3 (in what might be my
least favorite visual sequences of the
TP/FWWM/TP:TR trilogy), Cooper
is attempting to kill himself, or at least he is acting out of the
compulsion to kill himself, but his own drives overwhem that act and
he goes on to create “bad” by doing “good,” by interfering
with the reality of the town of Twin Peaks, WA. To borrow a line from
the movie
Network, he is
meddling with the primal forces of nature. He (apparently) saves
Laura from being killed, but trips a timeline in which she (Laura
Palmer/Carrie Page) is a killer. He falls into a different realm,
because the divisions between realms are breaking down. And despite
the fact that Cooper is (still?) a law enforcement agent, he ignores
the fact that she apparently has been involved in a murder. He
ignores the corpse in her living room because he has his own agenda.
It's more important to him to save her (Laura) from being killed than
to get involved in the killing (note: of a man) that she (Carrie)
seems to be implicated in. He doesn't so much as ask a question about
it. Cooper wants (he doesn't need, he wants) to be the hero that
saves Laura. Carrie the killer gets in the way of Laura the innocent,
so he only acknowledges the part of Carrie that might be Laura.
* * *
Here's the cop-out that makes my take on
Twin Peaks
undisprovable: All of the realms
exist. All possibilities are real. Why are there so many
inconsistencies in what we're shown? Why does Diane send a text in
all caps but Mr. C. receives it in lower case? Because both of those
sequences happened. The walls between realms are breaking down as a
result of the atom bomb explosion and subsequent bombs that literally
broke apart the fundamentals of existence.
So, then, there's a realm where
Laura's mother takes off her face and kills would-be rapists with a
bite to the neck? Well, maybe. But there's a meta-explanation that I
like better. Some academics have suggested that the depiction of
Hindu gods with multiple arms or animal heads wasn't intended as a
literal depiction but was a way of showing that their greatness was
beyond our comprehension, that it was as if
they had eight arms or the head of an elephant. Certainly there was a
thread of Hindu thought and influence throughout Twin
Peaks, one of the many belief
systems drawn upon in the storyline. Maybe there are certain things
in the story that are too horrible, too incomprehensible, to be
shown. Maybe. In any event, it's all very interesting to think about.
There's so much symbology in
Twin Peaks that
once you commit yourself to a theory, you can pick and choose from
hundreds of pieces of evidence in order to prove it. Twin
Peaks is television and it's
petroleum. This isn't the problem with the series, it's the fun of
it. It's the brilliance of it. All theories become true in the
symbiology of the symbolism. Twin Peaks
is the water and it's the well. It's both the white of the eye and
the dark within. How you see it is what it is.
