Twin Peaks presents the atomic original sin
Eighth installment of the revival is like witnessing Genesis through Apocalypse
This is a translation of my previous article, “Twin Peaks: O pecado original é atômico”, published originally in Portuguese earlier this week. I’m publishing it in English — which is not my mother tongue — to meet the interest of non-Portuguese readers who have visited this blog over the last few days.
Some portions of the original text have been changed for reasons of clarity.
In its eighth part, ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ presented some of the most important events in the history of the show. At least, it showed us something that felt like that. By defining this episode as a series of ‘events’, I risk diminishing its impact on my experience as a viewer and on my notions of film language. And that’s because by treating what happened in this hour of television as ‘events’, I’d be implying ‘Part 8’ can be understood in a logical way, in a way most dramaturgical works can be appreciated.
Throughout his filmography, David Lynch has specialized in encouraging the viewer to reach for another kind of understanding, one that has little to do with traditions established by American narrative cinema. Still, the director frequently employs signs of this cinema to build a bridge between worlds. His films make us contemplate the abyss of human language. Throughout his work, images serve to a purpose other than illustrating a story being told — they communicate with us through stimuli the logical thinking is unable to process. Having this in mind, what follows is a collection of loose thoughts that may or may not get anywhere.
These thoughts were inspired by ‘Part 8’ and relate to some of its imagery and themes — especially the nuclear bomb. I won’t, however, try to explain anything or propose a new theory on how to watch ‘Twin Peaks’ correctly. There’s no point in trying to impose logic to what’s not really logical.
Horror movies in the Atomic Age
The first half of the twentieth century marked the beginning of what we currently understand by film genres, horror among them. In this initial period, horror movies were primarily conceived by transposing to the new medium stories and themes already explored in literature and other forms of popular culture. However, Dracula, Frankenstein, witches and mummies were monsters that haunted a world left behind, in the past. These evil characters lived in haunted medieval castles, abandoned gothic graveyards, lost cities from Ancient history. Horror was largely a matter of the past. Although such stories helped to construct the aesthetics of what would be established as horror movies in the following years, they carried the preoccupations of bygone days, a fear that was not an adequate fear to the twentieth century. The horror of the century could only be contemplated in August 1945, when Little Boy and Fat Man descended from the skies and decimated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gigantic mushrooms took over the horizon in every corner of the world. The nightmare of a century was there for anyone who wanted to see it, in photographs and newsreels. Apocalypse manufactured on an industrial scale, produced jointly by scientists, the government and military organizations. From then on, the horror of the century could not be personified by a vampire or a werewolf. To do so would be to assert that a fictitious supernatural creature is more frightening than the actual human ability to impose genocide through science.
The function of cinema, this other offspring of the Industrial Revolution, was to reinvent its signs of fright and direct them to the newfound, god-like, evil of humanity. This process can be seen as the opposite of that initial stage of building horror as a cinematic genre. Previously, cinema had appropriated preexisting symbols to produce a contemporary functional fear. Now it was time to find the right symbols to represent a newly created fear. And yet, what could be more gruesome than the bomb? What could be more symbolic if not the bomb, which was already Death by itself?
Before the discovery of the nuclear bomb, humanity had had enough time to elaborate its symbols for elemental fears. And then, the Atomic Age brought with it a new kind of horror, in which symbol and fear had been born at the same time. They were inseparable.
The breaking of symbols
In the eighth installment of ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, Lynch and Frost lead the viewer to a pre- and post-symbolic journey to the horror of the Atomic Age. If observed as something isolated from the series, this episode works perfectly as a visual essay on the post-industrial mythology of fear. But, if considered within a larger context, 37 episodes and a film, all of them dedicated to exploring how communities react to forces of evil and their many forms, watching ‘Part 8’ is like witnessing Genesis through Apocalypse — post-modern Genesis through nuclear Apocalypse.
We see the desert. July 16, 1945. White Sands, New Mexico. 5:29 a.m. This is the first time in history a nuclear bomb will explode. As the camera slowly approaches the horizon, the gigantic atomic mushroom rises up against the sky. We are engulfed by the smoke of death. Penderecki’s music dedicated to the victims of Little Boy grows louder and louder. High-frequency, shrieking strings explode inside our ears. We travel through a succession of unnatural landscapes, roads made of light and steam.
Now we see the world from a subatomic, inhuman point of view. We contemplate the pre-symbolic substance of horror in its raw state. This is something that can’t really be seen by us, mortals. This is the inverted creation, capable of causing deformities, cancer, death and destruction. From now on, the end of the entire planet is in human hands. The explosion of the first nuclear bomb is the original sin in the Twin Peaks universe. It is also the only explosion that does not work as a symbol. From now on, everything is contaminated — both by horror and symbols.
This long sequence comes after a performance by “the” Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor and his band wear black military garment and sunglasses. Their music is brutal and confrontational. Reznor is one of the greatest names in the industrial music scene — loud, angry, electronic music fascinated by machines and violence. The very existence of this contemporary genre of popular music is also derived from the collective trauma experienced by the human race in the face of war fueled by technological advances and the use of science as part of the war industry.
The presence of Reznor and his bandmates in ‘Part 8’ is not the result of chance. It indicates that, more than anything, it was culture the most contaminated by the symbols of atomic horror.
