Twin Peaks: Where Everyday Meets Evil

(Warning: This article not only contains spoilers, but also a brief discussion of sexual assault)
This week on Twin Peaks, deputy director Gordon Cole and the hapless detective Dave Mackley — along with the adorably misanthropic one-two punch of Albert and Diane, and, for some reason, a lost-looking runway model named Tammy — undertook a journey to find a rift between our everyday world and a mysterious parallel dimension inhabited by great evil. They found it in an abandoned shack in a rundown tract of rural development in Nowheresville, South Dakota (okay, it’s actually called Buckhorn).

Isn’t that awesome? I mean, come on. That place just screams white trash. It’s not even night time. They’re investigating this place in broad daylight. I love it.
If this were Game of Thrones (Twin Peaks’ current ratings rival), the portal to a terrifying hell dimension would be located in a desolate cave surrounded by talon-like mountain peaks by the coast, and not only would it be the dead of night, but there would be a howling storm all about, with the wind whipping and waves crashing, and by God you would just feel the evil.
But Twin Peaks is something else entirely, and that is what’s spectacular about it.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Game of Thrones. A significant portion of my day is spent grinning at moronic Facebook memes featuring Sansa’s deadpan or Rickon’s linearity.
And I also love Twin Peaks. I’ve loved Twin Peaks since my teen years; i.e. the early 2000s, long after season two had ended. I was intrigued by Lost Highway, seduced by Blue Velvet, and charmed by Wild At Heart, but I was completely consumed by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I must’ve watched it at least thirty times in the space of a year. I forced all my friends to watch it, too. It became the cinematic cultural touchstone of my high school years. One of my favorite heavy metal musicians, the virtuosic throat mutant known as Mike Patton, happened to cover a song from the movie with his band Fantomas. Then the first season of the TV show was re-released on DVD, and shortly thereafter, I discovered that my local public library had the entire second season on VHS.
Clearly the universe was coalescing around my Twin Peaks obsession. I absorbed every moment, from Agent Cooper’s gleeful use of the word “damn” re: cherry pie to the backwards talking midget over-enunciating the (inexplicably unsettling) word “garmonbozia.” I even tolerated the James Hurley crap! But even though I knew who killed Laura Palmer, one question remained.
Why does this crazy Twin Peaks stuff speak to me this way?

The first time I saw Bob, the emissary of evil in the Twin Peaks universe, my first response was “Really? Denim jacket, huh?” I mean, how on earth could a transdimensional being of pure malice have the name “Bob”? Bob is the name of a prematurely balding accountant. It’s the name of an artificially cheerful customer service rep who will be with you shortly. It’s the name of a guy who lives down the street and sells cheap cars, but used to play football real good.
And that’s exactly the point.
Twin Peaks is all about the jarring intersection of mystical evil and every day reality, and that is what makes it so entrancing. Take another look at that iconic Red Room floor.

Our daily lives are peppered, if not permeated, with blotches of evil that none of us can explain, and that most of us want to ignore. For example, we all know people who’ve been raped. I’m sorry, we do. We interact with them, perhaps even on a daily basis, and may never see the signs of it. Maybe it’s your friendly waitress, bringing the beer to your table. Maybe it’s your easy-going co-worker who suddenly turns cold when her boundaries are threatened. Maybe it’s Bob, who lives down the street and sells cars, and was molested by his JV football coach when he was fourteen. And maybe now, because of that experience, Bob himself has become a rapist. Because we also all know people who are rapists, just like we know people who abuse their children and spouses, and people who take hard drugs to keep their pain at bay. We may never see it happen ourselves, and we certainly don’t want to believe that it happens, so we pretend that it doesn’t. We pretend there’s no dark secret behind the friendly waitress’ smile. We pretend there’s nothing wrong with Bob.

Human minds like simplicity. We like our good guys in white hats and our bad guys in black hats (looking at you, Westworld). Even in a fictional world as nuanced as GoT’s Westeros, we know that Sandor Clegane is essentially a good man on the path to redemption and that Jamie Lannister is essentially a rich bastard who smirks too much. But the real world is disturbingly complex. Any given individual can (and will) show compassion to some and cruelty to others. It’s hard for our brains to reconcile the two. We seek to simplify, to categorize some people as good (for us) and other people as bad (for us). But it’s always a projection, always a lie.
And it’s a lie that Twin Peaks attempts to tackle, in its own crazy way. David Lynch is clearly a believer in human decency. When people do bad things in the world of Twin Peaks, it’s often either because of drugs, or otherworldly demonic influence, or both (by the way, can you imagine an anti-drug PSA directed by David Lynch? “This is your brain on garmonbozia…”). Drugs are his way of explaining how Laura Palmer can be a charming high school prom queen by day and a promiscuous, nihilistic harlot by night. Demons are his way of explaining how Leland Palmer can rape his own daughter for years, and yet thoroughly compartmentalize his monstrous behavior. But Lynch never lets us forget that these things aren’t happening in some fantasy world like Westeros. They’re happening in Twin Peaks, that little town down the road.
This past weekend, when I saw Gordon and company pull up to that abandoned little nowhere shack in Povertyville (I mean Buckhorn) USA, I felt a profound rush of nostalgia. I was reminded immediately of the petty crimes my friends and I would indulge in on the weekends (that is, when I wasn’t forcing them to watch David Lynch movies with me). When we couldn’t steal cheap booze from somewhere or find a decent metal show within driving distance, we’d pile into the car and drive around impoverished rural areas looking for abandoned homes to break into and investigate. We were looking for diversion, but we were also looking for mystery. We were hunting for the other half of our world, and I think, on some level, we all quietly believed that around some crumbling corner in some decaying house in the dead center of absolute nowhere, we’d find a portal to the unknown that would justify all of our confusion, and all of our dark impulses, and all of our pain.

But we never did. At least, we’ll always have Twin Peaks.
