twin peaks

10 October 1990
David Lynch's Twin Peaks

Some analysis of the supernatural in recent episodes of Twin Peaks:

I. It's risky to introduce the supernatural and UFO-ial because these are essentially proletarian concepts that when explored to any depth are revealed to be very stupid. I once read a book called by Stanislaw Lem called His Master's Voice—which the scifi-heads amongst us may have also read, and let me be perfectly clear, I HATE science fiction—but the point was this: a man, selling recorded extra-T transmissions as random numbers, is confronted by a customer who points out that these bits, put forward as random, in fact repeat themselves after some large number of gigabytes.

A Los Alamos-type effort is struck up to determine what the hell these bits are and the mathematician-narrator and indeed none of the most-qualified scientific personnel described in the book are ever able to figure out what the bits mean, although they are able to interpret some homomorphism of the bits as chemical formulas and they synthesize some sort of slime out of it that has odd properties.

II. Now one's interest in this story may indicate nerd tendencies but I for one found it at least mildly compelling, particularly because the right note—that of never really figuring out what the bits mean—is struck.

These outerspace phenomena, if explained, lose much of their force so that the narrative motive force eventually causes them to become, as I have already said, very stupid.

III. So then, take for example Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now that was a typical case. The movie is quite interesting to the point when things are being explained—when the spaceships appear we begin to feel an ennui, a thickness, a (how should I say it) Very Stupidness.

When the extra-terrestrials themselves are seen, we feel silly indeed to have even entered the theatre. The best plan, the only plan, once these concepts have been brought into play, is to forever postpone explanation or clarification, and it is in this sense that they may succeed in Twin Peaks.

What we have here, ultimately, of course, is a SYMBOL of what is unanswered in our lives, whatever that may be. An explanation, once offered and accepted, in effect destroys that thing which it explains. The little green man is of course, a fetus, an origin, or a place unexplained. [let me recommend this rhetorical technique, that of spraying `of course' into your writing at random, unexplained points, to you. The habit of CAPITALIZING words, on the other hand, demeans the reader and let me offer my apology before continuing...].

IV. Fiction, then, is false; Science, explaining; Science Fiction, explaining the false. We are not interested in science because it explains, but because it delineates the unexplained more clearly. We would see the UFO photo, but not a description of what these extra-T's really are, because then we have science, we have an explanation, and we are not interested in explanations, and particularly in explanations of what we already understand to be in false framework (art is representational).

There are riddles of this sort—a man is dead in a closed room and the floor is wet—for which we are asked to guess an explanation—and the so-called answers go something like this—he tied a rope around his neck while standing on a block of ice and as it melted, he strangled. I would say that to the extent one is interested in these sort of riddles, one is unable to adopt what I would call the True Critical Viewpoint: art is what it offers, and no more, and the greatest sin is to bring one's own biases or inventions to the critical effort. Such a riddle could in effect have any solution: why am I being asked to provide one?

V. One might think naively that to distinguish between what is ESP, paranormal, Bigfoot, Kirlian photography or whatever and what is science, say Fourier series, superconductivity or a Ph.D. thesis would be a difficult thing, but we know it to be trivial. Only in the lower reaches of the prole press (National Enquirer) do we encounter any confusion about what's what, and this only in the context of appropriating the scientist's authority for headlining: ("Top researchers baffled by Zebra's Haiku"). I own a two volume "Research Study" on Bigfoot but the emphasis throughout is on what is unknown or mysterious about the creature, and not on what evidence, even if fabricated, really exists. For example, many pages are devoted to "possible sightings," but none to "sightings." There are big apes and the lines are not long at the zoo—but this is irrelevant because it is the unknown dimension that we are being asked to respond to.

Let's agree then on this point and move on. Taking a closer look at the UFO, extra-t's etc. in our culture reveals some interesting points. (See next message if I continue typing....)

VI. Take the UFO encounter as we find it in movies, in books, in television commercials. At the prole level (National Enquirer) we find the abduction theme. The aliens seize a victim who is returned unharmed with vague and usually not altogether unpleasant recollections. Higher up the cultural ladder (but not too high) we find the man, isolated in a rural environment, suddenly illuminated by a bright, mesmerizing light. The aliens inspect the human and move on, and the man understands himself to have been in considerable danger, perhaps because bright fireballs that burned circular patches into a nearby wheatfield may just have well have burned him alive and indeed looking at his fishing waders we find them to be singed at the seams. Still higher on the cultural ladder we have what is known as "the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence" with radio waves, space-craft messages on records, and the musings of Carl Sagan. At the top we have Twin Peaks, where the ineluctable core of the idea is yanked out and thrown in with its true company, the unexplained murder, the mentally half-sane, the inscrutable closed community with symbolic visitor (agent cooper), prostitution, shady investment practices, and the far east.

VII. If Twin Peaks is about anything it is about messages, messages sent but not received, messages by phone, messages as clues, messages as dreams, messages as massages (one-eyed jacks). We have messages from logs, messages from birds, messages going on to recording tape for diane, messages to iceland, messages from outerspace, messages from a giant in the middle of the night with UFO bright light metaphor, strange accent and token of proof (missing ring).

The best scene in the last Twin Peaks was between the military man and the log lady—the log's message was "deliver the message," the log lady's question was "do you understand that?"—and his answer was "Yes, I believe I do." It was a gratifying scene for the viewer precisely because this moment distilled the act of reception from our own understanding of the information conveyed—we know none of the message, the sender, the receiver or the mechanism by which it is conveyed, but that it is confirmed as received is gratifying to us. Modern man desires community and a sense of belonging and even this highly reduced communal feeling or understanding strikes a deep chord.

Note added later in response to a question, what was the Twin Peaks finale really about:

The Twin Peaks finale: As I said before, once the supernatural is brought into play there is no choice but to leave things unexplained or otherwise your book, play, movie, TV show or whatever becomes very stupid. It becomes ET or Close Encounters or something equally proletarian.

       The spirit world is not closed to you:  it is your mind that
       is closed, your brain that is dead.

Now that is a Knitwear Goethe translation (Carlyle certainly has it better). Anyway I think it is from Faust. If there was a message I think it might have been somewhere on these lines?