Column 07/19/2023: Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

[Warning: the following contains spoilers for the shows and movie Twin Peaks. I would highly advise watching it first, as it's quite good and very worth watching.]

There is something very strange about the human mind. 

One thing that, for me, makes Chesterton such a valuable thinker is that he is one of the very few authors I have ever read who actually seems to understand modernity--because he sees it, properly, not in terms of technology or mythical historical processes or even more mythical economic discoveries, but in terms of fundamental anthropology and human psychology, which is perhaps the only way to ever understand any human epoch or civilization. 

One of his more misunderstood quotes is the famous tag that the world is divided not between dogmatists and anti-dogmatists, but between conscious dogmatists and unconscious dogmatists. This is not merely, as it may seem, an ironically clever taunt, but a reflection of a much broader anthropological theme. Man, as Chesterton puts it, is defined by the making of dogmas; he is homo dogmaticus; which does not mean merely a creature that has beliefs or that codifies them, but first and foremost an entity whose mind, in some strange way, cannot think at all, cannot function at all, cannot even exist, without an entire universe to sustain it. Mind implies, desires, demands world: in his Thomas Aquinas he compares the meeting of the two to a marriage. As in a human marriage, in seeking the world, the mind becomes one flesh with it, incorporating it into itself and itself into it, relating to it as the defining context and atmosphere and background and content for all its own acts of thought and apprehension and speech. World in this sense is not merely a mechanical or abstract construct, an equation in physics: it is all those materials of reality and being and atmosphere and emotion and, in short, content, within and through which the mind moves and acts and exists.

A marriage between real world and mind is the ideal, the telos--but it is not always achieved. Even when the marriage fails, when the mind is cut off from the real world, it does not cease to dream dreams, see visions, and construct, out of its own desire and lack and disappointment, worlds of its own. The mind must exist in a world to exist at all--if only in a world of its own making. And yet, even in their deformities and absences, such universes reflect, inevitably, the shape of the one real world.

It is based on this background anthropology that Chesterton critiques the modern world. While past societies had existed in shared universes, in his own day universes had begun to multiply like flies, attaching themselves not to whole societies, but to sects, philosophies, classes, movements, and, increasingly, individuals. As he put it in one place, in the future, it seemed that every individual person would have to be dealt with on the principle of "love me, love my universe." And indeed, few people were quite so willing to view with charity the universes of others. Chesterton claims that he can perceive quite clearly the different universes belonging to his contemporaries, and then sets out to describe them, including the "spiral universe" up which the Theosophists climbed and the clockwork cosmos of contemporary materialists. In the Father Brown stories, he does some of his best work, describing not merely the psychologies, but the whole mental universes of his murderers--atmospheres and contexts that do not merely incriminate but also explain and exculpate evil. 

One of the more obvious illustrations of the human mind's need for context, the need to receive a world from without, are dreams--worlds which the dormant mind is forced to make to exist in as it sleeps. 

While false universes held consciously or unconsciously by the waking mind merely separate and divide, dreams play, in themselves, a positive role in human cognition. Out of our dreams and their internalization and reflection and contrasting of reality emerges those poetic and atmospheric and emotional and creative qualities that help our minds, not merely exist in the world, but become one with it. In dreams, our minds help us receive and make sense of and hopefully find rest in our experience of the world. They incorporate the world into us, and us into the world, showing us the possibilities we imagine, the hidden details we have overlooked, and above all the atmospheres and emotions and shades and colors and smells generated by our relation with it, our presence within it. As all societies throughout history have known, dreams bring us, at times, communications from beyond, from God or angels or other spirits. And even in their frequent fragmentedness, their darkness, their nonsensical qualities, they show us, at a distance, set apart from the real world, and more or less harmlessly the sharpened detritus of our own consciousness, our own unconscious preoccupations and desires and fears and absurdities, and at times even the false worlds in which we live our waking lives. In all this they protect the real world from its false shadows and reveal it.

When we fail to sleep, on the other hand, our experience of the world rapidly becomes merely external, fragmented, featureless, distant and imposing and even violent, and soon ceases to cohere into a world for us at all. Its reality and our interactions with it cease to be structured by underlying truths and relationships, but become more or less random and, frequently, adversarial. We react with fear to one thing, or sorrow to another, or anger to another, without any reason at all. We are overwhelmed by the detritus of our own minds, and lose the power to make that detritus submit to the world as it is. We cease to be in the world at all, and it becomes our enemy.

In one of his most incisive fragments, then, Chesterton compares the modern world, not to dreams, but to insomnia. 

"We Live Inside a Dream"

The above is a seemingly random way to begin a discussion of the television show Twin Peaks. Yet if you have watched the show in its entirety, and especially absorbed David Lynch's idiosyncratic views and visions, you know what I mean when I say that the very heart of his corpus is the question of dreams and reality, the world without and the worlds within.

Popular entertainment is frequently akin to dreams, in precisely the sense that it tends to (unconsciously) reflect the concerns and preoccupations and obsessions of the broader society and time and place it emerges from. Twin Peaks plays this role in an even more incisive way, however, precisely because it is the work of someone who is truly, deeply attuned to dreams, their structure, their logic, and their meaning. 

It is difficult to overstate the impact the original Twin Peaks series on popular culture over the last thirty years; it is also difficult to overstate how deeply insightful both the original Twin Peaks and its 2017 successor have been about contemporary America, its mythology, and its fundamental social and personal realities.

From its first frames, the original Twin Peaks feels like a dream of American pop culture, like an American myth. The beautiful murdered blonde girl; the idyllic small American town; "high school" in its filmic (and very much not real life) cliches, 30-year-olds playing 17-year-old archetypes, bad boys and nerds and beautifully-dressed women; the slimy local businessman; the friendly country doctor; the heroic, straight-shooting small-town sheriff; and above all else, the lawman/detective/federal agent as spiritual and social hero, defender of the weak and pursuer of evil and maintainer of the boundary between order and chaos. 

All of these elements are American cliches, found in thousands of films and television shows--but what Twin Peaks does with them was to take them precisely as the subjects of dreams: that is, as things for the mind itself to exist within as world and so incorporate into itself. The characters in Twin Peaks are not precisely these characters as they appear in most media, cardboard cut-outs unconsciously pulled out of a closet and unthinkingly deployed onstage. They are these characters as reflected on and obsessed over by the mind as it sleeps, turning over these images and scenes and atmospheres until overlooked details, strange possibilities, inexplicably arresting images and atmospheres, and even hidden realities start to emerge, like a strange, sudden presence in the darkness of the bedroom.

Twin Peaks, WA

Thus the town of Twin Peaks: the archetypal mass-media small town, derived from memories of the period when most majority of Americans did live in such towns, spread all across America, but mostly "white," which is to say deriving their culture and politics largely from central Imperial sources. By 1990, though, these small towns had been largely devastated and abandoned; and by 2017, they were hollow shells full of despair and violence and opioid addiction. Twin Peaks is not precisely a town in either time and place. In the 90s Twin Peaks television show, people dress as though it were the 1950s. People speak and act with values and turns of phrase that would have been as out of place in 1975 as in 1990. There is an inexplicable James-Dean cosplayer with a leather jacket and a motorcycle roaming the streets and taken seriously as cool. And yet, even in this idyllic, anachronistic setting, something is terribly wrong. Everything is wrong. What?

To begin with, the archetypes themselves have gone, sometimes subtly, wrong. The town is owned and dominated by a few pockets of generational wealth, overseen by a local businessman who is both a moral monster, conscienceless liar and brothel-owner and pimp of teenage girls, and also a moral and emotional child. In the shadows, hardened criminals, also childish, also terrifying, swarm and kill and sell drugs to teenagers--and work for the local businesspeople. This is not merely accidentally, but almost essentially, a cannibal society, eating itself, exploiting and destroying its own youth and its own future, for short-term profit and utterly reason-less, childish pleasure.

These economic processes, too, are not local, contained; they are national and Imperial and global. The local mill sells to the world, and is presided over by a widow-mobster-prostitute from China. The local businessman desperately woos investors from Norway and Iceland to support continual expansion. And most tellingly of all, perhaps, the lives these people lead echo eerily national, global media and social patterns communicated through mass media. This is to a degree merely knowing references to the show's own status as imitative media product; but as the show emerges, it becomes much more than that.

In The Return and Fire Walk with Me alike, Lynch identifies spiritual evil with electricity, natural energy harnessed to give machines the power to act and move on their own, spiralled out into endlessly interconnected webs covering the world and entering into the most intimate parts of human lives. In the Return, it is made clearer that this electricity, good in itself, even identified with angelic forces, has in some way been corrupted and made the ubiquitous carrier of evil. This, as with so many dream-like elements of the show, is at once an allegory and a kind of cosmic-religious claim: for in dreams the two modes are often confused. After all, the enormous power and possible hubris of man in harnessing this fundamental natural force to do his own will, the ubiquitous presence of electricity in every room and street, its permeation into the most intimate parts of lives through television and the Internet and even electric lighting, and its harnessing to do so much evil throughout the world, are precisely the kind of hidden, real, but un-reflected-on reality that the dreaming mind will naturally latch onto. 

Twin Peaks, however, is at its best when it goes beyond merely the cosmic-religious and into the factual and the historical. As the show points out in a stunningly surreal and horrifying sequence in episode 8 of the 2017 revival, not only the town of Twin Peaks itself, but the whole American golden age it shared in and exemplified was built on the brutal, overpowering, almost supernatural violence of the Atomic Bomb. Through nuclear weapons, the show asserts, supernatural evil entered the world, evil that festered and incubated at the heart of this seemingly idyllic society--and evil that, in a striking, surreal sequence, is shown taking over the airwaves of the new media to lull its listeners to sleep and deliver a bizarre, poetic message: "This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the whites of the eyes, and dark within." 

Taken together, then, at the heart of Twin Peaks is a striking, central claim about post-WW2 America as a whole: that at the heart of this new, wealthy, powerful, Imperial, almost utopian society, has from the beginning lain an enormous, deliberate blindness--a blindness to its own bases, its own origins, its own means, and above all to the evil carried and contained in and bred by all these things. Americans are in their essence sleepwalkers--or, as Chesterton would have it, insomniacs. They are lulled and directed by voices from beyond, voices from they know not where; they are infinitely distracted, unable to notice or process or take control of where they are, and what is going on around them, and what they are doing. They live in fractured, tormented consciousness, unable to confront or overcome evil, but unable to forget it also.

Laura Palmer

For the saga as a whole, this evil, this original sin of America, is focalized not primarily through the atomic bomb, or capitalism, or electricity, but through the murder of Laura Palmer. As it emerges over the course of the original show, cemented by the brilliant film Fire Walk With Me, Laura is simply the archetypal victim of the hidden evil, and the willful ignorance, of America. Outwardly beautiful and happy, homecoming queen and star student and socially-conscious advocate, she is in reality the victim of brutal sexual violence in her own family, from her own father--violence actively ignored and enabled by almost everyone in her life, from her distraught, psychic, chain-smoking mother on.

In the original Twin Peaks, the reveal of the killer as her own sexually-abusive father was a fundamental moment in American popular culture--and, in retrospect, a fundamental moment of revelation for America as a whole. In the early '90s reckonings with or even acknowledgments of American's plague of sexual violence and abuse, carried out everywhere from the family to schools to churches to the highest levels of business and politics, was quite far in the future. To an extent, it still is. Far from a universal human reality, this plague was, as Twin Peaks intuits, uniquely tied in both extent and means to the post-WW2 American order, its collective trauma from the world wars, its staggering new degree of global wealth and power, its newfound sexual liberation, its obsession with money and power and pleasure and the endless expansion of all these things, its overpowering and pornographic mass-media culture. There were, and are, many victims of these things. 

What makes Laura Palmer an arresting and compelling Christ-figure for post-WW2 America, however, is precisely the degree to which she corresponds to the media archetypes of American grandeur and glamour. A beautiful blonde girl in '50s clothing--who is at heart a miserable, traumatized, isolated victim. It is precisely the hiddenness of her suffering and powerlessness, its total inextricability from her socially-validated success and power, that makes the Laura Palmer of Fire Walk With Me so compelling--and heart-breaking.

As with all things in the original show, Twin Peaks: The Return elevates this symbolism into truly cosmic realms. Laura Palmer, the sequel show suggests, is not merely an archetypal victim, but a kind of divine being, sent from above for some mysterious purpose as the divine answer to the evil of the Atom Bomb and America, who must in some way be saved and complete her mission and be reunited with her true parents on high. But how, we ask in our dark dreams, can this be done? How can someone who is already dead and murdered and in the grips of supernatural evil be saved?

Angels

Fire Walk With Me, perhaps the best single part of Twin Peaks as a whole, ends with what can only be called the barest suggestions of a supernatural, and somewhat Christian, answer to this question. Even in her death caught and imprisoned in a dark supernatural domain, Laura Palmer is reunited with her white knight, Agent Cooper, and the two of them look on, in silence, as an angel appears to them, hands folded in prayer, looking upward at divine light. As the two gaze at this manifestation of divine care, Laura weeps, and smiles, and seems in some strange way consoled. Then the film fades to black.

For many years now, I have used David Lynch's filmography as an example of the specific human need, not merely for a metaphysics or even theology, but for religion. As it emerges throughout his work, and as he has himself confirmed in interviews, David Lynch believes, in some sense, in God--that is, in an ultimate, ultimately good metaphysical basis for the universe and everything in it. He also believes very literally in angels, in good spiritual powers trying to work good for us. He also most emphatically believes in demons.

What he does not believe in, however, or at least have any clear ability to conceptualize and portray in his films, is any means by which ultimate metaphysical goodness, or even intermediate spiritual and supernatural goodness, can in fact be incorporated into, made actual and effectual and compelling and real for human life and society. This is what I mean in this context by religion. 

This is not to say that Lynch does not have even the inkling of such a concept. In fact, central to many of his works is precisely a sense of the necessity of such a thing, and its sorrowful, unfortunate, almost unaccountable absence from the world as he perceives it. In one of his first films, a character played by Laura Dern explains that evil is proliferating in the world unchecked because of the mysterious absence of robins, embodiments of divine love--who will one day return. In Fire Walk With Me, likewise, Laura Palmer laments the abandonment of the world by the angels, who have left her alone, falling, in the darkness. In The Return, the Fireman tells Cooper, sorrowfully, that the evil "is in our house." Whether because of divine abandonment or human evil or electricity or the Atom Bomb, heaven and earth have become estranged from one another. As Chesterton puts it in his The Everlasting Man, one sees in Twin Peaks nothing so plainly as the presence of the absence of God, the overpowering vision of a great back turned to the world. 

In this, Lynch is certainly wise enough to realize that believing in God is emphatically not enough to make any great difference in regards to our world. God is ultimate, transcendent, more real than all his rivals; we, on the other hand, are limited, corruptible beings frequently lost in our own dreams and our own desires. Violence, evil, demonic power, are not, for Lynch, in any way ultimate--in fact, he is one of the best artists I have encountered in his ability to make evil, even supernatural evil, appear as it truly is, incoherent, childish, small, meaningless, pointless, self-contradictory, self-defeating.

This is not, however, in itself enough to save a single human being. Evil is small, incoherent, contradictory--but so, frequently, are we. Above all, evil for Lynch is not primarily external, but internal: its real power comes in its ability to captivate us, obsess us, control us, use us. This sort of evil emerges out of the detritus of ourselves that we meet in dreams; it insinuates itself not so much into our conscious, rational mind as into our unconscious selves, our hidden desires, our hidden fears, our atmospheres and contexts, our blind-spots, the places we dare not look, in short, our dreams. And it is for this reason, almost above all else, that we find that we cannot, of ourselves, defeat it.

This is emphatically the moral that emerges out of all of David Lynch's works, taken together: that human good cannot defeat evil, because that evil is not only without, but within, not only in the world outside, but in our hearts, and even in our dreams. 

David Lynch emphatically believes in human good--even in specifically American, specifically post-WW2, specifically small-town good. He delights in the taste of pie, in the beauty of women, the savor of coffee, the joy of personality. He even participates to a large extent in the great, collective myths of American culture, which are myths precisely about the heroic defeat of evil as purely externalized, purely other reality. The lawman defeats the criminal; the revolutionary defeats the oppressor; the colonist defeats the wilderness; the American defeats the Nazi; evil is driven away, and truth and justice prevail. 

David Lynch participates in these myths--but he does not believe them. This becomes most clear in the closing of the original Twin Peaks show, as well as even more emphatically in the final episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return. 

Cooper

In the original Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper is introduced as a dream-like, utterly compelling embodiment of the archetypal American hero. A lawman, an FBI agent, direct representative of the central ruling powers of the American Empire, enforcing the law and imposing order on chaos with heroic violence--but also a spiritual hero, an embodiment of pure human innocence and goodness and delight who looks to dreams for knowledge and insight to detect and put evil to flight. It is this partnership with supernatural good that ultimately allows him to detect Laura Palmer's killer, her own father, Leland Palmer--and so drive the evil spirit hidden with him, the chaotic BOB, at least temporarily away.

Yet as the show nears its climax, this pure hero is undone, gradually, by his own desires. As so often with Lynch's heroes, this flaw is above all sexual and relational, as his falling-for and romancing and ultimately having sex with the beautiful, innocent Annie makes both him and her vulnerable to evil. She is kidnapped and taken to a realm of supernatural evil; he follows her desperately and without preparation; and in this domain, he finds and loses a spiritual battle with his doppelganger, the embodiment of his own rapacious hidden desires and hidden evil, such that he remains imprisoned and his doppelganger reenters the world in his place. And so the original run of Twin Peaks ends. 

In the final few episodes of the 2017 revival, this fatal flaw is extended and brought home as never before. Cooper returns to the real world after 25 years trapped in supernatural limbo, and, again in tandem with the good spirit "The Fireman" (a joking name capturing both the connection between spirits and electricity and the concept of a spirit overseeing the world to put out its fires and the archetypal American hero the firefighter in tandem with Dale Cooper's lawman), successfully aids in the defeat of his hideously evil double and the evil BOB within him.

Here, though, Cooper again refuses to settle for mere cooperation with higher powers: he is going to "kill two birds with one stone," finally defeat the true evil behind all these evils, and finally save the archetypal victim of all victims. With the help of more ambiguous spiritual forces, evil or near-evil, he returns in time to the night of Laura Palmer's death--and saves her. Leading her away from her waiting father, he tries to reunite her, seemingly, with her parents (earthly and/or heavenly), and in so doing instead exposes her to spiritual evil, which pulls her away from him into the void. And here, again, he follows. 

In Twin Peaks: The Return, Dale's target and the ultimate embodiment of evil is not the lawless chaotic murderer and rapist BOB, but BOB's originator and "mother," the enigmatic Judy.  Over the course of the sequel show, Judy is identified with "the Experiment" of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb, and so with all the unconscious, hidden evil of post-WW2 American society. As the lawman, Cooper is determined to unmask and defeat her in an externalized way--but instead finds himself travelling, in some strange way, into the realms within, realms where Judy is more knowledgeable and experienced and powerful than he. In the process he finds Laura Palmer, hidden away under another name, but loses his own identity, including his name, as well. 

Still determined or perhaps merely desperate, he persuades her to return to Twin Peaks, the idyllic small town where she belongs, and to the house where her mother lives. When they arrive at this house, however, they find it already occupied by hidden spiritual evil--and in the show's closing moments, the voice of Laura Palmer's mother is heard, and Laura recognizes it, and screams. 

In the end, then, Judy is identified in some way with Laura's human mother, as BOB had been with her father. The point of this identification is not to undercut the tragedy of Sarah Palmer, who we meet in the sequel show as a decayed, traumatized old woman who lives alone and smokes and drinks constantly to forget and not feel. It is, rather, to make the point made above: that the fundamental evil of American society and the world is not so much chaotic violence as our deliberate blindness to it and our own lives and the world around us. Judy is identified throughout the show not only with the Atomic Bomb, but also with cigarettes, alcohol, television, mass-media: everything, in other words, that people use to numb and blind themselves to evil. And so of course she inhabits Sarah Palmer, who for years and years drank and smoked and took opium to ignore the violence committed in her house by her husband against her daughter. 

This, then, is Cooper's fundamental error, the error of the whole heroic archetype he embodies: that evil can be finally externalized and finally defeated by human strength or human cleverness. 

The American lawman, the American masculine hero, cowboy or police officer or soldier or scientist, embodies this idea of the externalization of evil and its defeat by violence above almost everything else. The central myth of the American Empire has been and remains the defeat of the Nazis in WW2 (imagined, contrary to reality, as the truly and totally foreign and unrelated externalization and otherization of evil) by heroic soldiers and generals overcoming that evil with sheer force through guns and tanks and carpet-bombing and the nuclear annihilation of entire cities. Many other American myths focus not so much on violence as on cleverness and knowledge, our overwhelming belief that the mere increase in knowledge and its accessibility, embodied in numerous heroic scientists and scholars and activists, will inevitably put evil to flight and bring about a utopian future.

Cooper, then, in his closing moments, appears at once as a figure of violence--overpowering a bar full of n'er-do-wells with comical ease and unquestioned brutality--and a figure of cleverness--imagined, not in a scientific, but rather in a magical mode, communicating with and using spirits and spiritual powers to do his bidding and travel in time. In so doing, he aims to succeed according to the lights of such a figure: to rescue his victim by force and cleverness and bring her home to the domain of goodness, the family home in the small town in the great nation in the global Empire of America. In so doing, though, he finds finally that, after all, he has not understood the problem at all. The evil he has been fighting is in fact inside the house; and inside of him. It was there from the beginning, and if he wishes to defeat it he must begin again, with another method entirely.

Insomnia and Waking Up

What is this method? For Lynch in real life, it would appear to be Transcendental Meditation, a practice to which he is wildly committed and which he has poured enormous amounts of money into promoting. Yet, tellingly, no trace of such a pathway appears, so far as I can tell, anywhere in his art. Lynchian heroes who peer inward do not dream of Nirvana or domains of light, but of evil and their own impotence in the face of it.

For, after all, here is the great flaw of dreams as such: that we cannot dream of God. In Lynch there are frequent imaginative embodiments of spiritual evil, but very few imaginative embodiments of spiritual good, growing less common and less compelling as his career continues. And this is perfectly logical, since that which is truly transcendent is not something that can be contained within ourselves, incorporated into ourselves, by our own conscious or unconscious powers. Evil captivates us because it is, in a sense, below us, made out of the detritus of our being, and so easily incorporated into our dreams and our insomniac waking selves. 

Yet here is the fundamental crux: if we are to stop being insomniacs, we must be able to find rest and contentment in our dreams, and so in our basic, fundamental experience of the world, with all its hidden realities and its horrors. If we are to find rest in our dreams, in the world and in ourselves, it can only be because we have found not merely evil there, not even merely human good there, but supernatural and ultimate and foundational good there: which is to say, God. And if God is to be found in our dreams, and in ourselves, it can only be because he makes himself present there, beyond our imagination and beyond our power.

This, then, is the great sense in which Lynch's work, while profoundly insightful, remains profoundly non-Christian: it knows of no means by which it might be even possible for human beings to be united to supernatural goodness, to embody it, cooperate with it, propitiate its wrath or serve its mercy or carry out its will or act with its power. There is no Incarnation in Lynch's world, no holy water, no Sacraments, no human saints, no Virgin Mary; not even any prophets or priests or philosophers or Brahmins or Bodhisattvas--only failed lawmen, and failed magicians.

Yet this religious sense, this specifically Christian sense, of the need for divine revelation and divine action and divine unity with man through religion and institution and Incarnation, is more conspicuous in Lynch and Twin Peaks than in much allegedly Christian art, precisely through its absence, precisely through the desperate need of Lynch's characters for precisely such a joining of God and man, human life and supernatural life, the world without and the worlds within. 

If Laura Palmer is to find salvation from her hidden victimhood, if she is to be the divine savior and answer to evil that Lynch tentatively poses her as, it can only be as someone whose suffering and horror and fundamental defeat is in some strange way redeemed, made meaningful, beautiful, and effectual, for herself and others. If Cooper is to be a hero, if he is to rescue Laura Palmer, if he is to be saved at all from the darkness within, it can only be as a very different figure from the heroic American lawman, magician, rescuer of women, and enactor of violence. 

Both can only be what they must be, what David Lynch wishes them to be, if they become the saint, who by action and suffering alike unites heaven and earth, incorporates God into the world, the very substance and atmosphere and context of human life, the very dreams and desires and unconsciousness of man, and in so doing in the only way possible truly and finally overcomes evil.