Twin Peaks: Dead destinies are still alive
Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.
This article is also available in Portuguese: Destinos mortos continuam vivos.
In his book ‘Ghosts of My Life’ (Zero Books, 2014), Mark Fisher explores the term ‘hauntology.’ It’s a pun/concept (‘puncept’, suggests Fisher) coined by Jacques Derrida from the words ‘haunt’ and ‘ontology’ (the philosophical study of what can be said to exist). For Derrida, ‘to haunt does not mean to be present’. Fisher writes, ‘Everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede it and surround it, allowing it to possess the consistency and intelligibility that it does.’ ‘Hauntology,’ therefore, is the study of absences that exist. It is the observation of virtuality acting on reality. And there is nothing supernatural about this realm of existence. Haunting here is a metaphor, signaling something that exists only by not being there. According to Fisher, hauntological art and culture evoke past ages, but unlike nostalgia and pastiche, they refuse to abandon an intrinsic desire for the future, or for a different future. Fisher’s book is a careful study of hauntology and how it manifests in popular culture, methodologically and formally.
My interest here (contrary to what I did earlier when I wrote about nostalgia as the aesthetic principle of T2 Trainspotting) is not a formal analysis of Twin Peaks, but to elucidate some of the themes developed over the eighteen episodes of its new incarnation, Twin Peaks: The Return.
The first time I saw Twin Peaks I was thirteen and lived with my parents in a small town called Tapes, population 17,000, located by the southern coast of Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil. It was Summer, 2006. At the time I was an idealistic teenager with artistic inclinations — it’s difficult to write this without sounding a little pedantic and/or naive — and I hated that place. During early childhood, living in Tapes was simply living in Tapes, it was a fact about my life and about my parents’ and my whole family’s. When I reached adolescence and began to discover either who I was or what could I be, driven by literature and cinema, living in Tapes ceased to be a fact and became a condition, an obstacle I felt destined to trespass. I no longer felt at home, no longer felt that my schoolmates were truly my peers. I no longer saw the community ties that bound me to that place. There were many emotions aroused by my first contact with the work of David Lynch and Mark Frost. Delight, curiosity, fascination. However, the one emotion that struck me the most was communion. The heart of the series was not its hypnagogic imagery, the investigation of a brutal murder, the cups of coffee or slices of cherry pie. The heart of the series was its atmosphere, an atmosphere both immaterial and real, the omnipresent atmosphere surrounding small towns in the Brazilian South or in the American North. This feeling of communion was amplified by the dense mist that covers the Patos Lagoon during the winter and obstructs the landscape of the pine forest that circumscribes the town, the indigenous artifacts exhibited at the Pontal Tapes Hotel and the Clube Náutico Tapense. Human figures and owls carved in wood, expressions of a way of understanding our universe older than the town, older than ‘Brazil’ itself, from when there was no town or nation and everything was mist, lagoon and forest.
In a small town, social behavior is something between hospitality, distrust and discomfort. It is difficult to explain it to someone who has never lived in one of these strange communities, but think of any relationship between two people. However minimal, these relationships hold an infinity of previous relationships. Your father and my mother were schoolmates. Your father and my mother almost got married. What would become of me if my mother had married your father? Your grandfather and my grandfather hated each other. Your grandfather got drunk one night and tried to kill my grandfather. What would become of me if your grandfather had killed my grandfather? When you live in a small town, you are aware of these past collective events in which you were not a character, you are aware that the whole town only is what it is now because what happened in the past could not have been otherwise. There are futures that never materialized, hopes murdered by reality. Each inhabitant cultivates their own version of the same feeling, that everything could have been different. My mother still thinking about your father. However, if we open the door of our house and go into the streets, we are confronted with material evidence that convinces us otherwise. Nothing could have been different. It is as if the town lived in a particular, fabricated reality of mental multiverses. If reality is defined by our purely subjective experience, then it’s the physical world that appears to be an anomaly, a rip in the fabric of space-time rendered as a haunting. My mother drives to the supermarket and passes in front of the house where your father lives with your mother, a house that had previously belonged to the teacher of the second grade class in which the two of them met, decades ago. Every relationship between two inhabitants, even mine and yours, even if we are four or fourteen years old and have met only twice, is ancestral and complex from the beginning. The most ancestral and complex relationship is between any given inhabitant and the town itself, an ocean of pleasurable or traumatic memories, of houses holding destinies left behind.
None of this I realized by watching Twin Peaks, none of this I realized while I was a teenager. Finding this ancestral and complex relationship with my hometown was a process that took years, a process that required me to move away from Tapes for ever-increasing periods of time. At each return, the town revealed itself ever more distant, increasingly empty and mysterious. Distant because I see the long lost landscape of my childhood and adolescence. Empty because the scenarios of old were demolished or transformed into evangelical churches, drugstores and beauty parlors. Mysterious because this landscape is now occupied by other faces. Faces very much like the faces I knew in childhood. Extremely different faces. Faded memories superimposed over a corrupted scenery populated by faces I don’t recognize. The reality is hard, my position is no longer as a participant, but an observer. Despite this, the atmosphere is still intact and I can feel it. I know it’s there and it feels even stronger now, precisely due to the imposed condition of being a witness. I thought about it a lot when I saw the first episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, which continues the story twenty-five years after the original series. Much of what we understand by ‘atmosphere’ in Twin Peaks is the extradiegetic music composed by Angelo Badalamenti, melancholic and mysterious. In Twin Peaks: The Return, however, there are only hints of this once omnipresent music. Dialogues take place inside cars and rooms and the only sound we hear is of the human voice. Enigmatic scenes are packed with mechanical buzzing and electrical impulses. And silence, lots of it. To amplify the silence, a null reverberating ambience lingers in the background of almost every scene. Silence is created by your perceiving of it. Silence makes you feel the indifference. Silence makes you feel uncomfortable. The reality is hard, you are no longer here as a participant, but an observer. Of course this town went on without you, who do you think you are? It was you that left us in the first place. After that we realized we didn’t need you anymore. Who the hell are you, anyway? When you leave the small town behind, it’s not up to you to decide if you’ll return. It’s up to them to whether accept you back or not. And you are now a different person.
The first Twin Peaks invited the viewer to play detective and try to solve its mysteries. The new one row enigmas and scenes of the daily life, confident that we pay equal attention to all of these moments. One week, Deputy Hawke (Michael Horse) finds three out of four missing pages of Laura Palmer’s diary. The next, Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton) advises one of his tenants to stop selling his own blood. Despite this, the atmosphere is still there and sometimes you can feel it, perhaps even more intensely than ever before. From time to time we are reminded that beyond atmosphere, beyond the harshness of facts, beyond even the indifference, there is emotion. There’s Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) standing in front of the iconic portrait of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), crying over his ex-girlfriend’s death for the first time in nearly three decades. And it is in this moment, when present recognizes the past, a past that both you and good old Bobby remember vividly, that’s the moment you experience the music of Badalamenti coming back.
My grandmother Tereza’s house is all made of wood. That’s a good thing, according to Twin Peaks. In the mythology of the series, wood is an element associated with supernatural forces acting in the benefit of reality. After all, in Twin Peaks, evil travels by electricity and wood is not a conductive material. My grandmother Tereza’s house is all made of wood and across the street there is another house. When I was younger, still a child, there was an old lady who lived in this house across the street and her name was Luci. She was a nice, very thin lady, bent over due to severe spinal conditions. She waved at me out her window every time she saw me passing by. I approached the gate to her house and we exchanged a few words. The kind of dialogue that only exists between a small child and an elderly lady. Once I was coming home from the grocery store with a bottle of redcurrant syrup and the bag ripped itself apart while I walked across Ms. Luci’s sidewalk. The cheap plastic bottle cracked open and covered the concrete in bright red. Frightened, Mrs. Luci ran to the window to see if I was all right. She thought the redcurrant syrup was blood and I had hurt myself. I was fine. Just a little embarrassed by that mess.
Mrs. Luci came to my mind on a couple of occasions during Twin Peaks: The Return, in the scenes in which Margaret Lanterman (Catherine E. Coulson) telephones Hawke to tell him about the imminent approach of mysterious forces. Coulson was very sick when her scenes were filmed, literally in the last days of her life. Her scenes are framed economically, it almost feels like one continuous shot, extended and divided through several episodes. There’s only Margaret, wearing an oxygen mask, and her log. Besides her, a telephone and a lamp. In her last appearance, she calls Hawke to inform the officer that she will die that night. Margaret speaks slowly, hesitantly, with the calm urgency of someone who knows she is on the verge of death. Hawke nods, solemnly, knowing she’s telling the truth, and then we see the lights going out inside her cabin.
In her later years, Mrs. Luci had been also curled up in one of these chairs, sitting next to a table not unlike the one supporting Margaret’s phone. It happened five years ago, maybe six. I was at my grandma’s and my aunt appeared at the door saying that Mrs. Luci would like to see me. We went to her house and there she was, sitting in her chair, wearing a heavy wool sweater, wrapped in blankets. I sat down beside her and we talked for a while. I do not remember what we talked about, but I remember feeling that the moment was a replica of those fleeting conversations we used to have when I was younger. The child and the old lady, again. When I got up to leave, Mrs. Luci gave me a bittersweet smile. ‘This is the last time we see each other’, she said. I did not know how to react. I did not know how to react because somehow I knew it was true. A week later, she died. I knew this when I passed by her house and the window was closed.
The last time I visited my grandmother Tereza, I saw that Mrs. Luci’s house has been renovated and repainted. I saw a car parked in the garage and some new faces unloading grocery bags. More than that, I saw myself with that torn bag in my hands, standing on the sidewalk with a river of redcurrant syrup flooding my sneakers.
Fantasy and science fiction appeal to our subjectivity, while realistic fiction appeal to our objectivity. It seems an obvious thing to say, but I do not think it is. What moves us in a realistic drama — say The Straight Story, to remain on Lynch’s land of representation — is its capacity for verisimilitude in representing a possible situation. Put yourself in the position of an old man who sets out on a long journey over a lawnmower to reconcile with his estranged brother. In a fantastic narrative, or in a chapter of it, as is the final scene of Twin Peaks: The Return, what moves us is the verisimilitude with which it expresses, or synthesizes, one or several emotions. Put yourself in the shoes of an FBI agent who sets out on a long journey alongside a woman who may or may not be the victim of a murder committed twenty-five years ago. Put yourself in their skin and understand what’s at stake. The stability of the universe. We can say that the scene, within that specific context, serves the purposes of a larger narrative. And yet, what can we say about the larger narrative itself? To what purpose does this narrative serve? Or, more importantly: to whom?
In Part 18, Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) tries to restore the order of the universe. By all accounts, this order had already been restored. Already gone are the known main antagonists of the series, the original and the new ones — BOB (Frank Silva) and the doppëlganger (also played by MacLachlan). Cooper, however, like Hamlet, believes that time is still out of joint and fixing it is part of his fate. He decides to go back in time (or something like that), prevent the murder of Laura Palmer (or something like that) and put her safely in a new timeline (or something like that). Then, Laura is kidnapped by an evil entity named Judy who may or may not have possessed the body of her mother, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie). After crossing an interdimensional portal (or something like that) and being abandoned by his secretary/lover, Diane (Laura Dern), who does not recognize him anymore, Cooper arrives in the state of Texas and finds Laura, who is now called Carrie Paige — probably an allusion to the one last page missing from Laura’s diary. Carrie, however, has never heard of Laura, never heard of Twin Peaks. Carrie wants to run away, leave that life behind. We don’t know much about her, but she is now a waitress and there’s a dead man sitting in her living room (really). She accepts Cooper’s invitation and the two depart on a long drive to her home in Twin Peaks, kicking off the series’ titular return. The journey is a long, somber, silent sequence, full of shots of the highway at night. We feel like actually traveling into the darkness, towards somewhere familiar. Somewhere both wonderful and strange. The sequence leaves the mind free to float, provokes us to anticipate the outcome the journey. This is not the first time this happens in Twin Peaks: The Return. The entire series has numerous similar sequences, dark roads at night that seem to lead nowhere. All of these images invite us to the same state of silent speculation about their destinies/destinations. None of the previous sequences is as long as this one.
They reach Twin Peaks and park in front of the Palmer residence. Who opens the door, to Cooper’s surprise, is not Sarah. In fact, there is no Sarah there. There never was a Sarah, there never was a Palmer family in that house. There never was Laura, because Laura is Carrie. Not in Twin Peaks, but in Odessa, Texas. Stunned, Cooper wonders what year is this. Carrie hears an ethereal voice whispering the name ‘Laura’. She screams. It’s the cry of a collective past in which you are not a character anymore. The whole town only is what it is now because what happened in the past could not have been otherwise. Futures never materialized, hopes murdered by reality. Each inhabitant cultivates their own version of the same feeling, that everything could have been different. However, Carrie’s version is too much for anyone. Nothing could have been different. The town exists in a particular, fabricated reality of mental multiverses. If reality is defined by our purely subjective experience, then it’s the physical world that appears to be an anomaly, a rip in the fabric of space-time rendered as a haunting. The most ancestral and complex relationship is between any inhabitant and the town itself, an ocean of pleasurable or traumatic memories, of houses holding destinies left behind. All the lights go out inside the Palmer residence. Everything turns dark. Here is another destiny that has just died.
Read also my article on Part 8: Twin Peaks presents the atomic original sin.
