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Facing the Shadow Self Reflections On Twin Peaks By Mike Hertenstein
You would have had to have been there. In the darkened front room of the
apartment building on Malden Street that we called "Greystone," before any of
us had kids, or kids out of the crib, back when (in my crowd at least) you
still felt somewhat guilty about tv watching of any kind, let alone
this kind: a weekly series as horribly compelling as a train wreck, as
funny as a train wreck caused by a banana peel left on the tracks by a
one-armed shoe salesman or a one-eyed amnesiac. A guilty pleasure.
Quirky? That's the word that gets inevitably applied here. But with
director David Lynch (Eraserhead, et al) you know that you're
going to end up so fast on the far side of "Quirky" it will leave your head spinning.
As for the plot -- the "What happens next?" of Twin Peaks --
well, it was fun while it lasted, as long as we didn't know what happened
next. But long after the mystery stopped being a mystery, long after the
question of "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" ceased to be an issue, many of us
continued to find ourselves drawn back to the scene of the crime not because
of the crime, but because of the scene.
The Pacific Northwest has its own delights, sure (when it stops raining), but
what I'm talking now is the social landscape of Twin
Peaks. Plain and dependable -- like his namesake -- sheriff Harry S
Truman, with Deputies Hawk (mystical) and Andy (sensitive -- boyfriend of
ditsy Lucy -- note the tv sit-com name references, wink-wink.) On the other
side of the law (though the lines aren't always so clear), mean Leo Johnson,
abusive husband to sweet Shelly, who's not so sweet that she can't see on the
side Bobby Briggs, the rebel son of firm-but-decent Major Briggs. Then
there's the likewise decent Ed Hurley (married to crazy one-eyed Nadine),
lover of Norma (owner of the Double R diner), uncle of decent-but-troubled
teen James, who is falling for the- girl-next-door Donna, best friend of
Homecoming Queen Laura Palmer, who even more than the rest is "full of
secrets." And finally, the solid moral center around which all the strange,
new worlds of Twin Peaks orbit: Special Agent Dale Cooper of
the FBI.
True fans will complain that this long list of characters is unfairly
abbreviated if I leave it at that, and justifiably so, for I am and it is,
but I assure you this is only for the sake of brevity, and not because I feel
like there are any "also-rans" in Twin Peaks. Indeed, this is a community of
the most striking individuals this side of the Vanderhof family in Frank
Capra's wacky You Can't Take It With You: but there's no
Capracorn here: creamed corn, yes (inside joke) served up with a much darker
twist.
David Lynch I would describe as a "filmmaker of the grotesque." Among his
influences are, respectively, painter and writer of the grotesque, Francis
Bacon and Franz Kafka. Though here we are speaking of Lynch's television
work on Twin Peaks, he is probably more well known for a
filmography that includes The Elephant Man, Blue
Velvet, Wild At Heart, and a new one,
The
Straight Story. A few of his films I haven't seen, nor would I
recommend for the same reasons I haven't been in a hurry to rush out and rent
them. The ABC tv network shares these reservations, apparently, at least
toward a proposed new series for which Lynch recently made a pilot,
Mulholland Drive, rejected by ABC due to the violence, in the
wake of the recent plague of school violence.
Lynch's reputation for "quirky" and beyond is well-earned. His films are
violent, disturbing, and, some would say, "postmodern" -- which usually means
they don't fit well into any of the available catagories -- including the one
called "postmodern," I'd add. It is true that Lynch seems to share with
other so-called "postmodern" artists a suspicion of cultural structures,
rationality, even language. But such suspicions may also be pre
postmodern, even pre-modern. A distrust for rigid frameworks of the
status quo has been held by Romantics, existentialists, and even orthodox
Christians (Pascal: "The heart has its reasons that reason doesn't know.")
Lynch, like a Romantic, works intuitively, chasing after a particular mood
rather than a plot or theme. He claims he can't account for 90% of his
directorial choices, and he is loathe to try to interpret or explain those
choices later. Likewise is he reluctant to accept anybody else's
interpretations or explanations. Whatever the precise philosophical
motivations, Lynch's mistrust of cultural frameworks and conventional norms
is the dominant point of attack in his work. He homes in on the mismatch
between "ideal" and "real", and leverages the incongruity in the directions
of both satire and shock.
It could be argued that "ideal" and "real" are the "twin peaks" of Twin
Peaks. To watch the show is to be coaxed out onto a tightrope
stretched between those peaks and then forced to look down to see you're over
a seemingly bottomless pit with no net; the experience is the metaphysical
vertigo of the grotesque. The familiar world is exposed as fragile and
arbitrary, the framework we lean upon is shown to be a house of cards --
whether that familiar world is made up of the ideals of the American dream or
the conventions of American television.
When we first arrive at Twin Peaks, it almost seems like we've reached
Mayberry, or Bedford Falls -- the last stronghold of simple certainty against
the complexities and chaos of modern existence. The reason we've arrived at
Twin Peaks, however, is because there has occurred the grossest violation of
this simple order: the murder of the Twin Peaks High School Homecoming Queen.
But this is only the initial disruption. As Lynch peels back layers over
time, we find more and more dark sides of small town life which are entirely
at odds with the shiny surface ideal. Laura Palmer, the Platonic paragon of
American Beauty, turns out to have been a blond, blue-eyed princess who is
also her own Evil Twin: and so the investigation of her murder becomes a kind
of striptease of the American dream, revealing this American Beauty's
involvement with drugs, kinky sex, hints of even worse.
On Twin Peaks, any public identity is a facade to be torn down
-- which is a clever idea, when you think about it, for a nighttime soap: as
the story goes on, the author keeps peeling back layer after layer and so
continually subverting everything we think we know about a character or their
circumstances -- indefinitely. (Or at least as long as viewers are willing to
put up with it -- which in this case, turned out to be just under two
seasons.)
Just because Lynch is aware of the dark side of Main Street, though, that
doesn't mean he thinks the other side is any less sunny. And here we confront
the fact of the director's own multiple peaks. Analysts who round up the
usual suspects to make the case that either Lynch or Twin Peaks
is "postmodern" run smack into an anomaly that they usually ignore, or fail
to understand: Lynch's cockeyed optimism. One of his producers described
Lynch as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" -- Capra plus Twilight Zone
(throw in Texas Chainsaw Massacre because "Mars" don't convey
the half of it), a man with violent obsessions who has somehow --
miraculously? -- pathetically? -- retained a sense of childlike wonder.
Advance reviews of Lynch's new film,
The Straight Story, which
played to a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, are unanimous in
their praise of one critic describes as "a genuinely sweet, G-rated slice of
Americana." What some may see as a radical departure from violence and
sleaze for Lynch is, in reality, just the opposite number of his ongoing game
of inner ping pong.
The deconstruction in even Lynch's darker work, moreover, has always been
unlike that of true postmoderns, in that it is not infinite, but everywhere
points to some vague yet final answer: Jimmy Stewart from Mars maintains a
stubbornly inexplicable but just as stubborn faith in a real unity beneath
the chaos and illusions of unity -- a bottom where pessimists see only a
bottomless pit. When Twin Peaks reran on the BRAVO network in
1993, Lynch appended new introductions to each episode featuring the wise
woman of Twin Peaks, "the Log Lady". In this case, the Log Lady's cryptic
wisdom seems to represent Lynch's inability to refrain entirely from
explaining or interpreting some of his intuitive choices. Log Lady makes
metaphysical reference to a coming "final answer", an assurance that "One day
the sadness will end," and affirms the existence of "the treasure, that when
found, leaves one eternally happy." As to what form this "answer", "end of
sadness" or "treasure" takes, Lynch would no doubt be loathe to say.
Fortunately, or otherwise, this reviewer is much less shy about interpreting
or explaining and, while he has already had much to say about he calls the "double vision" of Star Trek, he
feels he has little choice in this discussion but to turn the reader's
attention to a similar "double vision" at work in David Lynch and Twin
Peaks. It may turn out that as a media critic, I'm a one trick pony.
Then again, it may turn out that this particular pony can take us a
considerable ways down the road of media criticism. After all, we've made the
case that Twin Peaks is a "grotesque," and double vision has
always been one of the goals and effects of the grotesque. According to
Russian critic Mikhail Bahktin: "The essence of the grotesque is precisely to
present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life." And if I found
Star Trek to be full of paradox and contradiction, I find
Twin Peaks doubly so.
Let's roll those opening credits. We begin with a shot of a bird on a tree
branch. Dissolve to the smokestacks of a saw mill, and one wonders if this
mill is viewed by Lynch as one of William Blake's "satanic mills". (Blake
was a Romantic poet who lashed out against English Industrialism.) Certainly
the close shots of saw blades ripping through wood have some significance in
a series in which the Log Lady is the only one who really knows what's going
on, and much of the mischief in Lynch's burg seems to be traced to the
violent imposition of cultural patterns. We come to the shot of two
mountains, a white one and a black one, a natural vista with a man-made
object in the in the foreground -- a sign, "Welcome to Twin Peaks." Finally,
we dissolve to twin waterfalls, which are shown to merge into a single
stream. And in that last shot we see the entire moral of Lynch's story.
But before we talk about whatever unity Lynch is trying to (however
intuitively) lead us to, let's discuss that initial split. What Bakhtin may
have been getting at when he talked about the "double-face" of the grotesque
is the characteristic embodyment of grotesque imagery -- juxtaposition, that
unexpected, even shocking, mixing of apparent unlikes. It has been suggested
that human beings react strongly to juxtaposed images -- from sphinxes and
mermaids to centaurs -- because human beings are themselves juxtaposed. Man
is half-animal, half-angel: half submerged in nature, half transcending
nature -- and that transcendence is achieved by virtue of man's use of
symbols: we rise above nature by means of culture.
So humans are organic creatures who use symbols to find their place in
nature. At the same time, however, human beings are alone in nature in
knowing well in advance what is the end the ultimate end of organic
processes: wormfood -- which seems a grotesque fate indeed for creatures
capable of transcending nature, at least in their symbol-making. And so
human beings have always devoted considerable energies to making and
surrounding themselves with symbols that might serve to neutralize
their knowledge of their place in nature, i.e. of their natural end. The
denial of death, says Ernest Becker, in his book of that title, is the means
by which human beings maintain their sanity -- even their humanity -- in a
world in which they already know they are going to die. In Becker's view, it
is repression which actually makes it makes it possible for humans to
live in world in which they already know too much. "Culture," says Becker,
"is in its most intimate intent a heroic denial of creature-liness" -- of our
organic nature, of our bodies, of our insignificance in the great cosmic
scheme of things.
But a terrible price must be paid for using culture as a shield against
nature, the psychotherapists (and, as we'll see, David Lynch) would tell us.
Sigmund Freud, in fact, insisted that repression was the source of the mighty
river of neuroses that flows through human history -- though in Freud's
analysis, this repression was related not to our knowledge of the
inevitability of death, but to carnal knowledge. The root problems of the
people of Twin Peaks tend, sure enough, to be sexual. This
very diagnosis is made on the show by the local shrink -- an odd enough duck
himself -- the very groovy Dr. Jacoby. And certainly if the human body is
something to be both denied (because as an organic entity it is destined to
decay) but at the same time has its own pleasures, then it is no wonder that
our species is subject to chronic confusion with regard to sex. Dr. Becker,
as we have seen, disagrees with his highly esteemed colleague, the groovy Dr.
Freud, on the issue of what humans are most anxious to repress. But both
would agree that what we pretend we don't know can hurt us.
And, in case you're wondering, this has everything to do with David
Lynch and Twin Peaks. For clearly, Lynch believes that the
imposition of culturally-created identities can inflict a sort of violence on
creatures who, ultimately, do not reduce to the sum total of their own
symbols. Think of those saw blades ripping those logs. Now think of a girl
named Laura Palmer who -- because she seems to embody what her culture has
decided is Ideal Beauty (she's the Homecoming Queen) or Value (she's the
girlfriend of the football team captain) or Virtuousness (she's a volunteer
with the Meals on Wheels) -- is trapped within cultural expectations, and
seeks escape in ways that have tragic consequences. The conversion of our
experience into familiar symbols may give human beings a sense of control,
but only at the cost of amputating those elements of human reality or
individual identity which do not fit into conventional symbols, forms, or "norms".
"Superficially, Laura [Palmer] is the standard of ordinary life," says Martha
Nochimson in her book on David Lynch,
One doesn't have to be a "postmodernist" to believe that clinging too tightly
to our symbols, i.e. some cultural means for holding onto personal
significance and holding back the night -- work, success, gunning our sports
car, consumption of products or media -- can result in our living
"inauthentic" lives or consequences much worse. Most of us, if we are honest
with ourselves, are all too conscious that burbling somewhere beneath the
culturally-constructed mask -- in our dreams -- or nightmares -- is a "Shadow
Self," to use the name employed by Deputy Hawk. This Shadow Self, Lynch
intuits, emerges from beneath our chosen means of repression, not just in
dreams or nightmares, but in life -- in the perpetration of violence which is
really one more effort to gain control, to transcend our natural fate.
Let's borrow one of Lynch's favorite devices here to juxtapose against our
discussion of the Twin Peaks community a quote from Jean
Vanier, a Catholic priest and writer on the subject of community living, on
this issue of Shadow Selves, their repression, and the results:
Pretending the Shadow Self isn't there doesn't make it go away: it releases
the Shadow Self to walk the earth.
In a moment we'll talk about Shadow Selves on Twin Peaks, how
they are released, how they are confronted, and what lessons we might
learn from these illustrations of a dynamic that touches us all. But first, at
the risk of not speaking about the Shadow Self and so giving it more
power, I'd like to move on to a second duality we find on Twin
Peaks: that of mystery and its twin, knowledge.
The conventional route the detective story follows is linear, between the
twin peaks of mystery and knowledge, innocence and experience, puzzle and
solution. The direction is one-way, starting with problem, ending with sum.
When it comes to the "greater mystery," that of human existence itself,
however, Lynch has already demonstrated his skepticism with regard to our
ability to boil the phenomena of life down to a quantifiable sum or symbol.
Some part of the human mystery, he seems to be saying, is unsolveable. The
sawmill chops up nature into bites called "culture", but there's always
something left over: likewise does "knowledge" have its own Shadow Self.
Any depiction of the tug-of-war between "knowledge" of the quantifiable or
scientific type and some Shadow Self of such knowledge seems to touch a chord
deep within us: in any case, it always manages to draw a huge crowd. On
Star Trek, for example, the conflict between abstract, rational
knowledge and Something Beyond abstraction and rationality was depicted in
its purest form as an ongoing struggle between the logical Vulcan, Mr. Spock,
and the "intuitive" human, Captain Kirk (or as a conflict between the Vulcan
and human halves of the racially-mixed Spock.) We see the same split and
attempted balance on The X-Files: the skeptical FBI Agent Dana
Scully has a scientific explanation for any phenomena she encounters, but her
partner, Fox Mulder, is driven (and nearly driven mad) by the ungraspable
demons of phenomena which resist explanation.
Mention of The X-Files is relevant to a discussion of
Twin Peaks for many reasons, but our main interest for now is
in the way in which Scully and Mulder have reversed traditional gender roles
in their depiction of the Self/Shadow Self conflict. Usually, the impulse
to conquer and divide the Unknown has been seen as a "masculine" one, while
the more emotional or mystical approach has been deemed "feminine". The
conventional detective is both rationalist and male -- and, in its most
pristine incarnation, i.e. Sherlock Holmes, something of a woman-phobe. Much
of the delight of The X-Files has been the fact that it is the
very feminine Agent Dana Scully who in this show has been given the
traditionally "masculine" traits, while her male partner Agent Mulder is the
one who seems to be in touch with what may be called his "feminine" side
(though not nearly as in touch as the actor who plays Mulder, David
Duchovney, seemed in his earlier guest role on Twin Peaks, the
cross-dressing Agent Dennis/Denise Bryson. It was these appearances that
brought Duchovney to the eye of X-Files creator, Chris Carter.)
The X-Files violates the traditional canons of the detective
story in other ways, of course, but in these Carter and company are merely
following through the breach in tradition originally made by David Lynch and
Twin Peaks.
Various sins against genre orthodoxy by Twin Peaks are cited by
critic Angela Hague, who uses as her measuring stick Ronald Knox's 1929 "Ten
Commandments of Detective Stories." According to Knox's Second Commandment,
notes Hague, "All supernatural and preternatural agencies are ruled out as a
matter of course" -- a commandment Twin Peaks, like the
X-Files, seems to violate as a matter of course. (And even if
somebody can come up with a rational explanation, both shows leave
room for a shadow of a doubt, an ambiguity that adds to the effect.)
Even more to the present point, however, is Knox's commandment, "No accident
must ever help the detective, nor must he have an unaccountable intuition
which proves to be right". Against the convention of the rationalist
"Holmsian" detective who solves crimes using empirical evidence and reason,
Twin Peaks introduces a detective who uses both "mind" but
also "intuition" -- a detective in whom for the first time the split --
whether cast as "reason vs. intuition", "science vs. supernatural", "head vs.
heart", or "mind vs body" -- is healed. We're speaking, of course, of
Special Agent Dale Cooper.
(In passing we note that Hague mistakenly numbers the commandment against
"intuition" as Knox's Fifth; it's actually the Sixth. The Fifth Commandment
is "No Chinaman must figure in the story" -- but Twin Peaks, of
course, manages to violate that commandment, too.)
In the performance of a lifetime, longtime Lynch stock player Kyle McLaughlin
literally embodied the unforgettable Agent Dale Cooper. Unlike the
coldly rational -- almost disembodied -- sleuths we are accustomed to,
Agent Cooper is in tune with his body. But he understands -- unlike physical
nihilists like Agent 007 -- that the body involves a dimension other than the
material; and so he is sensitive to clues from that realm as well. There's
no doubt about his intellectual acuity; he's the sharpest thinker on the
series. And yet the classic Twin Peaks moment remains the shot
of Coop's face all lit up with wonder and delight as he enjoys a piece of
cherry pie at Norma's Double R Diner, along with a"damned fine" cup of
coffee. And note well: it's a very different thing for Dale Cooper to
describe something with such words than, say, Sam Spade. For the world-weary
Spade, virtually everything in life is "damned"; for Agent Cooper, this
resort to eternal solemnities is only the handiest means of translating the
depths of his appreciation into the vernacular of a secularlized society; in
Coop's mouth, "damned fine" is an acknowledgement of the reality of the
sacred.
It must be emphasized, again, that Agent Cooper's method of crime solving
does not spurn the use of reason, the gathering of material evidence and
witnesses, the employment of logic. On the contrary. The glory of Lynch's
dualistic Twin Peaks is his centering of the series in the
"both/and" character of Agent Cooper: Coop listens to reason, yes, and much
more carefully than anybody else; but he never lets reason drown out other
sources of information. Along with "witnesses" and "evidence" Cooper gives
equal respectful attention to "dreams". Cooper's frequent visits to a
subconscious "Red Room" represent visionary experiences in a mythic-intuitive
realm -- which strikes me as the sort of place the left-brained (only) Agent
Scully could never find, or from which the right-brained (mostly) Agent
Mulder would find it difficult to escape. Indeed, even the ostensibly
balanced Agent Cooper finds it a challenge to survive his investigation with
both sides of his brain intact.
But before we continue in that direction, there's one more duality within
Twin Peaks of which the reader needs to be aware. I'm probably
already late in mentioning that Twin Peaks was not only the
creation of David Lynch; the series was co-created and overseen by Lynch and
veteran television producer Mark Frost. The duality of "Lynch/Frost
Productions" seems just as odd a juxtoposition as any connected to Twin
Peaks. In contrast to Lynch's reputation for "quirky" (translation:
"less-than-mass- appeal"), Frost was known for straight, if progressive, and
popular tv dramas -- including his cop show, Hill Street Blues.
It could be argued that the magic of Twin Peaks was of the
Lennon/McCartney kind: a product of two creative people who, however
creative, could not have made that particular kind of magic alone.
During the second season of Twin Peaks, Lynch became less
"hands on" in his relationship to the show while he attended to various film
projects. Even without knowing this fact, or drawing hasty conclusions from
it, most viewers would agree the middle episodes of Twin Peaks
drift, becoming at times less a parody of a soap opera than the real deal.
Long after the solution to the murder of Laura Palmer, the action finally
comes to focus on a showdown between Agent Cooper and his arch-enemy, a
super-rational criminal ala Sherlock Holmes' notorious nemesis, Moriarity.
Yet the Cooper who prepares to face down renegade FBI Agent Windom Earle
seems less the mind-body balance we knew earlier than a more conventional
detective conforming to the Holmsian mold.
Mark Frost, not surprisingly, turns out to be a big fan of Sherlock Holmes,
and later wrote a novel about Arthur Conan Doyle called The List of the
Seven. And during Frost's solo tenure at the helm of Twin
Peaks, the contrast of Earle and Cooper fell into essentially a
binary opposition -- of sanity versus insanity, reason versus unreason --
which seemed to be at philosophical odds with the original balance already
supposedly achieved in Agent Cooper. This tendency toward imbalance in
Cooper was heightened during the show's second season when Cooper was given a
girlfriend and the story seemed to be arcing itself toward a conventional
ending -- "rational masculine detective finds completion in woman."
The X-Files, by the way, seems headed for such a finish.
Viewers have certainly been teased of late with clues that the show will end
its run by resolving its "reason"/"other-than-reason" split (Agents Scully
and Mulder) in a unity. That is to say, we keep getting hints that Agents
Left and Right Brain will end up together, in marriage or an otherwise
committed relationship. If so, despite Scully and Mulder's reversal of what
have been conventionally seen as "masculine" and "feminine" roles, the show
will resolve its own trademark unresolution in a conventional way: opposite
tendencies achieving completion and balance by uniting. "The Truth", as it
would turn out, was right under their noses all the time.
This would be despite recent attacks on that particular tv/film convention by
feminist critics. Such a perspective views the use of male-female
relationships as a symbol for "two-halves-making- a-whole" as a threat: an
insinuation that either half on its own is less-than-whole, a reinforcment of
patriarchical domination. It makes sense that such symbolism might be viewed
as a threat to radical feminists who view all heterosexual relationships as
rape. Likewise, if such a joining brings about "patriarchical" domination,
it certainly seems less a unity than a conquest.
But, to my mind, jettisoning the ideal of marriage because bad marriages
exist suggests we must also jettison the ideal of feminism because of bad
feminists or film criticism because of bad critics. Surely it would be a
tragedy for human beings to surrender the most tangible symbol they've ever
known for the most elusive thing they've ever grasped after -- with all
their broken hearts, throughout all their broken history: diversity held
within mysterious unity, a community that does not diminish the individual, a
belonging that does not obliterate the Self.
On Twin Peaks, curiously, all the marriages are bad, and nearly
every individual is broken, fragmented, incomplete -- like the two halves of
the broken heart locket that belongs to Laura Palmer. The exception to this
characteristic "halfness" of the one-eyed, one- armed denizens of Lynch's
burg is, of course, Agent Cooper, the mind-body detective. That's why when
it came time for Twin Peaks to end as a series, David Lynch
refused to allow Mark Frost to bring things to a climax with a wedding --
that would be bigamy, symbolically-speaking.
At the last moment, Lynch returned to the show and rewrote his partner's
finale episode. The would-be showdown between Cooper and Windom Earle,
along with Cooper's impending union with the woman Annie Blackburn, were
quickly and utterly dissolved -- rendered irrelevent to the main action. The
flow of the subplots of Twin Peaks was redirected by Lynch away
from a confrontation between "good" and "evil" to where it had been aimed
from the start -- a showdown between Dale Cooper and his true Shadow Self:
Dale Cooper.
Let's take the answer to the seemingly simple question, "Who killed Laura
Palmer?" Without dropping names, let me just say that, even after the big
revelation, there remains a certain ambiguity over the murderer's identity
and/or nature. Some viewers feel they were led to conclude that the killer
was a supernatural entity who temporarily incarnated a human being -- that
Twin Peaks was, after all, in the words of a friend, "just a
straight-forward demon-possession story". (The actor who played the
"possessed" character says this is what he was told.) But if this is so, than
the human being involved would seem thus to have been freed from any
responsibility for a most horrific crime -- a turn of events many viewers
found infuriating. In fact, David Lynch was criticized hotly by feminists who
were apalled that a series which had seemed so attuned to the nature of
violence to women could have been so stupid as to end up providing
perpetrators with an excuse to commit more -- not just any, but the lamest
one, "the devil made me do it."
On the other hand, I've read Lynch's own words on the subject and find him to
be -- surprise -- cagey rather than straight-forward about the identity
and/or nature of Laura Palmer's killer. As usual, Lynch seems uncomfortable
with meanings imposed by others, and loathe to impose his own. But he does
offer hints that the entity in question was not so much a literal being as a
metaphorical abstraction -- a symbol for something. Meanwhile, we
should keep in mind that the climactic moment of the Laura Palmer subplot
happened while Lynch was on hiatus, with Mark Frost at the helm of the show.
Perhaps the revelation of the killer would have been less literal in Lynch's
hands. Then again, that "angel" which makes an appearance in the
Lynch-directed Twin Peaks "prequel" theatrical film, Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which we don't need to talk much about
here) seems literal enough -- or at least, conventional enough. Nevertheless,
Martha Nochimson reads that image, too, as a symbol -- in this case for the
vague realm of "wholeness" that the cockeyed optimist Lynch always seems to
keep trying to point us toward, something beyond all social constructions.
From what we know of how Lynch makes movies (very similar to how Cooper
investigates crimes), we can't rule out the possibility that even David Lynch
doesn't know exactly what the point is he is trying to make. And since it
doesn't keep him from going on, we won't let it stop us.
For me, I find it extremely hard to believe that David Lynch, with his
pinpoint accuracy for sniping culturally-constructed images, would cause
Twin Peaks -- a series designed as his very own cultural skeet
shoot -- to turn on symbols of good and evil as conventional as a devil and
an angel. I lean toward the less-literal interpretations. The clue I keep
coming back to -- both in understanding the Laura Palmer murder, and also in
understanding what happens to Cooper in the finale episode of the series, is
Lynch's concept of the "Shadow Self." I can't help but think that a show
that seems so intent on exposing hidden doubles is less interested in devils
below or angels above than in locating the shadows of our selves within. The
truth is "in here" on Twin Peaks.
Here is the basic action of the finale episode. Seeking to save his
girlfriend Annie Blackburn after she is kidnapped by renegade Agent Windom
Earle, Cooper must follow the two into "the Black Lodge," a paranormal limbo
zone where -- depending on your own interpretive biases -- Coop has either a
supernatural or a psychological showdown with his own evil twin. Deputy
Hawk, when he first told Coooper about the Black Lodge, evoked all the New
Age spookiness we have come to expect from Hollywood depictions of Native
American spirituality. At that time, Hawk told Cooper that anyone who enters
the Black Lodge will there confront his own Shadow Self. Hawk also warned
that such a person in such a situation must not walk in "imperfect courage,"
else dire consequences should result. Sound familiar? It should.
The descent into darkness as a part of the initiation into maturity is a
classic episode of the so-called "monomyth," the notion that under all our
stories and mythologies lies a single story that we're all trying to tell,
and that all cultures everywhere manage to get bits and pieces of in their
stories. In the hands of a pop mythologist like Joseph Campbell, the
monomyth theory sounds compelling at times, but at other times sounds like
its part of a larger myth to which even Campbell doesn't have all the pieces.
Nevertheless, this particular episode rings true in broad strokes, and rings
familiar enough in our own stories. In The Empire Strikes
Back, another mystical guide, Yoda, tells a different spiritual
seeker almost the same thing -- though, of course, speaks he in a much more
roundabout way. To complete his Jedi training, young Luke Skywalker must
enter -- not a Black Lodge -- but a dark cave on Degobah, where he has a
vision of his worst enemy -- Darth Vader. In fear and anger (imperfect
courage?) Luke lops off the apparition's 's head with his light-saber, and
finds the decapitated head wears not his enemy's face, but his own. This is
just one more lesson on Luke's spiritual journey and he eventually does
become a Jedi Knight. Agent Cooper, alas, doesn't seem to get any second
chances. Because of his own imperfect courage on his vision quest, the
once-balanced Cooper is split in two, and only the Mr. Hyde portion of his
psyche escapes. "The good Dale is in the lodge and he can't leave," Lynch
makes it clear in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
It's hard to find fault with somebody who speaks in universal myths -- not
unless you want to pick a fight with the entire history of literature and art
(not to mention psychology and religion). Nearly every tradition agrees on
the need to break thru denial and confront one's Shadow Self (death,
existential nothingness, the body and its processes, the feminine side,
instinct or appetite, sin and/or evil, "the Other"). Lynch is in the
mainstream of the prophetic tradition when he targets our comforting
illusions -- whether Victorian, Suburban, "the Fifties", TV-land -- and warns
that blocking out the darkness with a smiley face only gives the darkness
power. This has always been the message of the grotesque, in which we are
"confronted with the demonic from which we wish to pull back while knowing
that we must engage its power to maintain our well-being..." (Kayser)
It is equally true that we must have great courage when we finally choose to
face the darkness. Let's not be too quick to judge Dale Cooper in his
imperfect courage or assume that just because we're able to ramble on here
about facing our Shadow Selves that we've been there and done that.
Self-knowledge can turn the strongest, most courageous heros in to quivvering
children. One can't help but wonder what sorts of things David Lynch was
thinking (or intuiting) about his own courage or lack therof or his own
Shadow Self when he sent Agent Cooper -- with whom Lynch clearly identified
himself -- to his tragic fate.
Self-knowledge in the extreme can be dangerous. Taking away someone's
illusory anchor, awakening them to what may be a truly vulnerable condition,
can be a form of cruelty, not kindness. On a practical level, for example, I
prefer neighbors with a vague if unfounded belief in moral reality than ones
who understand the ethical implications of their materialist presuppositions.
One among our recent and horrifying epidemic of teenage killers (this one
beat and suffocated his computer pal) said at his sentencing, "In high school
we were required to read Nietzche and Sartre. When I realized nihilism was
true, I realized that we all just die -- and so nothing matters and no one is
significant." Urging people to face their Shadow Self without giving them
some kind of answer seems to me bound to let loose as many evils as mere
repression.
Which is why I can go with Lynch thus far, into the Black Lodge, but he loses
me somewhere short of "the White Lodge" -- his symbolic place of spiritual
perfection (of which the Black Lodge is the Shadow Self). That is to say,
Lynch loses me when he tries -- against his own usual instincts -- to boil
his metaphysics down into words. "Balance is the key" says the Log Lady in
one of those BRAVO introductions -- and we recall the two waterfalls in the
credit sequence merging into one. We also recall the many similarities
between Lynch and Lucas, as in Star Wars in Episode
One where they look for a Messiah who will bring "balance" to the
Force (which, like the Black and White Lodges, has a dark and light side.)
And for those who are so hard of hearing they still don't get it,
Lynch has one Log Lady introduction feature the story of the two-headed
schizophrenic: "Both heads thought the other was following itself. Finally,
when one head wasn't looking, the other shot the other right between the
eyes, and, of course, killed himself." The moral of Twin
Peaks, apparently, is that both peaks are necessary for a whole. To
which I reply: only half the time. A "balance" of culture and nature,
of reason and intuition, of mind and body -- okay, that sounds right. But a
"balance" of reality and unreality? Or a "balance" of meaning and
meaninglessness? Or -- and here is the kicker for the yin/yang approach -- a
"balance" of good and evil? Call my courage imperfect if you will, but I
just can't go there.
"Balance" -- in the metaphysics of both Lucas and Lynch, seems to be the last
refuge of somebody who, when you get down to it, doesn't have the complete
answer after all. "Balance" -- if that's your only answer -- is just one
more culturally-constructed ideal, one more smiley-face facade waiting for
some Lynchian debunker to tear down. Even "Balance" needs to be "balanced"
-- against a Shadow Self neither Lynch nor Lucas seem to have ever faced.
Nevertheless, bearing in mind the winsome ideal of the "balanced" pre-Black
Lodge Dale Cooper, delighting in his pie and coffee, I fear we have erred
here on the side of rational analysis. Therefore, I think it best we bring
this essay to a close well short of reducing my own responses to Twin
Peaks to a few summary sentences. Instead, I leave my fellow
Twin Peaks fans with a knowing wink that goes beyond words, and
a reminder of our common understanding that "The owls are not what they
seem."
For those readers who have not yet seen Twin Peaks, I trust I
haven't given away too much of the mystery to hamper your enjoyment of the
series. The caveat we fans always pass on when urging people to check out
the series is that while things slow down after the main mystery is solved,
the story picks up again right at the end. And therein lies the built-in
problem of all mystery stories, that they lose a certain something when the
mystery is solved. This is the very point Twin Peaks makes in
fine fashion: that, as Chesterton tells us, we must preserve mystery if we
are to preserve our humanity -- which is not the same thing as maintaining
repression. On the contrary, we must face the mystery, then rest in it,
without trying to conquer and dominate all that seems beyond our control.
|
... blonde, blue-eyed, and beautiful; she is, theoretically, just as Lynch
has described her, "the classic American girl." But her very synchronicity
with the portrait of the perfect girl -- daddy's princess -- afflicts her.
Her living energies are as alienated as were those of the freak John Merrick
[aka The Elephant Man], although for exactly the opposite reason. She is cut
off from culture as well as from reality by being the cultural image of
desire. Trapped within the stereotype, she lives an alienated life, peering
frantically at the world through her desirable shell... (174) 
