In a recent interview, Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan said that everything on the show would eventually make sense. Later, on Twitter, he clarified that the show would make sense “in a general sense of the word… very general.” Director David Lynch’s surreal and creatively obtuse approach to film and television helped to redefine a cinematic sensibility to the point where we now use the adjective “Lynchian” to describe anything remotely weird in the medium.
Even knowing the director’s extensive filmography of mind-boggling oddities, many fans have found the new season of Twin Peaks to be an abrasive and perplexing watch. We are now halfway into the eighteen episode run, and very little time has been spent in the town of Twin Peaks itself. Familiar faces have appeared but Agent Dale Cooper is in a confusing new form, his evil doppelganger is on a murderous quest, and old favorites from the series’ original run have taken a back-seat to a labyrinthine tangle of plots and ideas. All in all, it’s very David Lynch, but fans looking for something a little more linear have been left wanting.
It may seem absurd to expect something as simple as a straightforward answer from a David Lynch show – after all, this is the guy who made Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive – but viewers love a good mystery and humans have a natural inclination to try and solve any puzzles that come out way. It’s the reason the crime genre is so popular and why there are swathes of online message boards dedicated to investigating unsolved crimes. In the latest episode, the show returned to a more conventional structure following the dazzling experimentation of episode eight. Some answers were given in this exposition-heavy hour of TV, but seldom in the expected manner. It may have been one of the more “normal” episodes of the show’s latest season, but it still featured a random scene in which a drugged up man in the woods hallucinated that his foot was talking to him. All of this has made for one of the year’s most thrilling television experiences – one that may never make sense, and may actually benefit from that.
![Twin Peaks May Never Make Sense – And That’s OK!](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Twin-Peaks-Birth-of-Laura-Palmer.jpg)
When Twin Peaks debuted on ABC in 1990, David Lynch was already an accomplished director of feature-length and short films. His debut, Eraserhead, spent five years in principal photography, as the cash-strapped Lynch struggled to work within his already tight budget. The end result divided critics but found success on the midnight movie circuit and has since become a cult favourite. The film is tough to describe in terms of plot, but can most succinctly be summarized as the story of a man who is forced to care for his inexplicably deformed child while suffering from strange hallucinations (even that doesn’t do it justice). Lynch himself has always avoided confirming or denying critical or fan interpretations of the film, noting in the interview series Lynch on Lynch that he prefers not to “confess his own thinking behind the many abstractions in the film.” This is the driving force behind his most artistically valuable works: Why offer answers when the questions themselves are satisfying enough?
In the following forty years, Lynch has continued to push the boundaries of narrative storytelling, both in film and television. By the time Twin Peaks premiered, Lynch had been nominated for Best Director at the Oscars twice (for The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet), and he was a mere month away from winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Wild at Heart (a decision that led many attendees, including film critic Roger Ebert, to boo him). It can be easy to overlook just how major a cultural phenomenon Twin Peaks became in 1990. 33% of the TV viewing audience at the time tuned in to watch the two-hour long pilot, and the rest of the first season brought ABC some of its highest ratings ever in the 9pm time slot on Thursdays.
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![David Lynch and Laura Dern in Twin Peaks Part 9](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/David-Lynch-and-Laura-Dern-in-Twin-Peaks-Part-9.jpg)
A decade after audiences fell into a frenzy over who killed J.R. on Dallas, the same conversations took place over who killed Laura Palmer. ABC’s own advertising leaned heavily into that central question. Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, however, admitted that Laura’s death was more a MacGuffin – a hook for audiences to care about the lives of the townsfolk. For a generation of television viewers, several decades before prestige TV became the norm, this proved a pill too tough for some to swallow. By the show’s second season, with ratings sharply declining and viewers’ patience waning, ABC forced the show to conclude its initial mystery. Media advertising for the show even emphasised that the time for answers had come, as posters said, “Find out who killed Laura Palmer. Really.”
As thrilling as that discovery is, Lynch himself regretted letting the show solve the murder because it had never intended to do so. Like Eraserhead, and the many films before and after Twin Peaks, sometimes giving the audiences what they want ruins the whole point of the tale. Lynch may not want to expand upon his abstract world for quick and easy solutions, but sometimes the outside world demands it, and Lynch is forced to relent. ABC wanted an answer, and so they got it. The DVD release for Mulholland Dr., the film that saw Lynch receive his third Best Director Oscar nomination, came with a sheet of “10 Clues to Unlocking This Thriller” (although in typical Lynch form, some of them seem to be red herrings). For Lynch, there’s no fun in making it easy for the viewer.
It’s easy to watch a Lynch work and assume that there is no story going on, or that a plot takes second billing to his distinctive aesthetics, but that thinking ignores his deftly handled storytelling that frequently defies conventional thinking. Episode eight of this season of Twin Peaks is a breath-taking feat of creativity that nonetheless offers more backstory to the show than any of the preceding episodes. It’s all there if you’re willing to pay attention to the details and fill in the gaps. It’s demanding viewing, but therein lies the excitement. Of course, sometimes there’s nothing to solve, and scratching your head for hours wondering what just happened can be infuriating. Forcing yourself as a viewer to find new and challenging ways to consume pop culture is part of the thrill in being in the audience.
Twin Peaks is consistently baffling. Indeed, it invites confusion, revelling in the joys of leaving its audience hanging with three minute, uninterrupted scenes of floor-sweeping and leaving its iconic protagonist catatonic in the Las Vegas suburbs. Some fans may decry the lack of twisted Americana that made the first season so striking, thus changing the landscape and ambitions of modern television, but there’s something undeniably thrilling in watching a show so unconcerned with satisfying demands for closure. The show has nine episodes to go, and while Kyle MacLachlan has promised something resembling answers, it’s no guarantee, and that’s what makes Twin Peaks the best TV show of the year.