David Lynch and the Forest of Symbols
Rest in peace, sir.
Today would’ve been David Lynch’s 79th birthday, and there’s just no way to say what his work and spirit meant to me and so many others.
His children have invited us all to honor him today. “David Lynch, our beloved dad, was a guiding light of creativity, love, and peace,” they write. Lynch was an advocate of Transcendental Meditation and practiced it for 20 minutes every day from 1979 until his passing last week. Their statement continues: “On Monday, January 20th—what would have been his 79th birthday—we invite you all to join us in a worldwide group meditation at 12:00 NOON PST for 10 minutes.” Join in!
I’m sending you this brief bit I wrote about one of his many masterpieces, Twin Peaks. Happy birthday. Rest easy, sir.
How in the hell Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was ever a hit is one of its many mysteries. The show invaded the living rooms of America just as the Zeitgeist was shaking off the awkward, neon discomfort of the 1980s. I first watched it on appropriately scratchy old VHS tapes, recorded straight off the television. The world was “wild at heart and weird on top,” in the words of Barry Gifford, and even if everyone knew it, no one was saying it. We let Frost and Lynch make our unease explicit. Collective pre-millennium tension notwithstanding, our anxiety never really relented.
Setting the screen for shows such as Picket Fences (1992-1996), The X-Files (1994-2003), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), Veronica Mars (2004-2007), Pushing Daisies (2007-2009), The Killing (2011-2013), and games like Alan Wake (2010), Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was easily the oddest hit show in television history. Set among the trees and mountains of my once adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, the show hosted themes of dangerous dreams, reckless teens, and the paranormal, parallel, and perpendicular.
Incest and child molestation are as American as apple pie. Or should I rather say cherry pie, the dessert choice of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks? Leland Palmer is the all-American Dad if there ever was one, so it’s more than appropriate that he is the one to be possessed by the evil spirit BOB, and to rape and murder his daughter Laura. This deed is necessarily something of a ritual, the founding gesture of the American nuclear family. — Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols
Ritual abounds in Twin Peaks. Its liminality, the “between and betwixt” of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, is evident in Laura Palmer’s double life, “none-more-purposeful” (as Daniel Neofetou describes him) Special Agent Dale Cooper’s limbo while investigating her death, the transubstantiation of BOB, and his toggling of Leland Palmer’s consciousness. The ephemeral existence of the Black Lodge is itself a flickering signifier of ritual. The coffee and doughnuts, the family dinner, even the recording and sending of messages are imbued with the gestures of ceremony.
The time of Twin Peaks wasn’t run by social media and cellphones. Secrets traveled via letters and landlines, diaries and cassette tapes. The latter of these played very important roles in the show and helped define the drama surrounding the two main characters. Laura Palmer’s secret diary and Special Agent Dale Cooper’s microcassettes respectively recorded the weaving mysteries of Laura’s short life and their postmortem unraveling. Both have been published as companions to the show. In addition, Frost and Lynch collaborated with Richard Saul Wurman to put together an Access Guide to the town of Twin Peaks. More than mere merchandising, these books prefigured the internet-enabled transmedia narrative of many 21st-century television shows.
The book Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks, edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Franck Boulègue (Intellect Books, 2013), expands the between and betwixt of Twin Peaks-inspired writings by fans and critics alike. It’s the first such collection aimed at fans rather than academics. For instance, In his Fan Phenomena essay, Andrew Howe catalogs the cultural artifacts of the series: posters, coffee cups, dolls, sculptures, and so on, while David Griffith confronts the show’s misogynist aspects with waves of feminism, what Diana Hume George (1995) facetiously calls a “double-breasted approach.” Fran Pheasant-Kelly explores the physical spaces of Twin Peaks, and there are three Fan Appreciation interludes in between the essays.
Of course since Fan Phenomena came out, there's been a whole other season of Twin Peaks, and Mark Frost has written and compiled two more books of dossiers, documents, and backstories. Subtitled The Return, season three is just that, a return to the world of Twin Peaks, though it takes half of its 18 episodes to start feeling that way. The turning point is one of the best hours of television ever produced. Part 8, known colloquially as “Gotta Light?,” is a post-atomic fever dream. Where his co-writers, Mark Frost in this case, seem to ground him in some semblance of structure, Part 8 is Lynch at his unhinged best.
After the extant mythology is thoroughly explored and comes to a (mushroom) head, the second half of the season cleaves more closely to the drama of the original show. New characters mix with old and for the most part, it's not in that especially 21st-century way where the latter drags down the pace with the nostalgic weight of the past (cf. Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Scream, etc.). For one thing, the last episode of season two set this one up by predicting a reunion 25 years later, so the place was already holding. It has its missteps, but it'll do In lieu of a full-on cinematic feature from Lynch.
Bibliography:
Frost, Scott. (1991). The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. New York: Pocket Books.
George, Diana Hume. (1995). Lynching Women: A Feminist Reading of Twin Peaks. In, David Lavery (Ed.), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp 109-119.
Lynch, David, Frost, Mark, & Wurman, Richard Saul. (1991). Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books/Twin Peaks Prod./Access Press.
Lynch, Jennifer. (1990). The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. New York: Pocket Books.
Neofetou, Daniel. (2012). Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilises the Spectator. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, p. 77.
Shaviro, Steven. (1997). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail, p. 147.
Turner, Victor. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Turner, Victor. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
von Gennep, Arnold. (1961). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
We never got that full-on cinematic return, but, as Lynch always said,
“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole.”
Rest in peace.
Thank you for reading,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com
I participated in the ten-minute mass meditation in honor of Lynch's birthday. I was on a call with my girlfriend, so we both did it. Just after I closed my laptop and closed my eyes, I realized that I had no way to tell how long I'd be meditating. I let it go and cleared my head.
When I came back, I was flying through floating text -- like if you could delete all of the negative space out of a book and just leave the letters. Anyway, when I emerged, opened my eyes, and opened my laptop, it was exactly ten minutes later.
Rest in peace, David Lynch. "Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole."