A jumping off point for a larger discussion.
“Now that I’ve watched all of Twin Peaks and understand its very strange—and occasionally horrific—emotional tone, I’d expect young me to have had nightmares. But the show just doesn’t work for someone who isn’t willing to bring themselves to fully experience it. It’s couched in so much dream symbolism and weird mythology and soap opera parody that you need a steady diet of the American pop universe it’s digesting to make any sense of the damn thing. At 9, I didn’t yet speak its language, and I found it boring, pointless, and sort of silly.
I suspect co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost would agree with young me on the last point at least. Twin Peaks is often very funny, even in this episode, which contains some of the series’ most horrific moments. It is always, always daring you to have about five or six multiple emotional reactions at once, usually one being abject horror and the other being ironic laughter. That the series is able to handle these tonal shifts with aplomb—as opposed to simply settling in favor of one or another—is what sets it apart from its many imitators. So many shows that aim to be Twin Peaks end up only aping the visual style—hello, The Killing—or the messiness of its tone—that would be Bates Motel. What they miss is that Twin Peaks used these tools in service of something deeper. There’s a rich emotion to this show that is vast and mournful, but it sits in a reservoir the series itself has yet to dive into. It holds the emotion at a distance, daring the audience to dive in before it does, and it always wins the fake out.
See, Twin Peaks probably should have scared me at that age. I came from a small town, filled with secrets, much like the series’ setting, and the show is at its most effective when it indulges in the ever-existent terror of the middle of the night out in the middle of nowhere. (I’ve stood in the middle of a cornfield at midnight and been stuck in a bad neighborhood waiting for a bus. Give me the bad neighborhood every time.) It is, first and foremost, an attempt to puncture the ironic remove and the stoicism Lynch perceived in his own childhood in Missoula, Montana, and it finds that the most effective ways to do that are first laughing at the self-seriousness of such a place and second pulling up the carpet to reveal its horrors. It is, in a way, Lynch’s entire filmmaking career in a nutshell.
What strikes me most about the episode’s most horrifying sequence, in which Leland Palmer (Ray Wise), under full control of the evil spirit Bob (Frank Silva), kills his niece Maddy (Sheryl Lee), is how it unlocks the secret terrors of a fairly normal living room. Lynch’s career has often been marked by a slow-building dread, by the way that he can take utterly ordinary circumstances and unlock the terror that lives within them, and this is a prime example of that. Listen to the continued hiss of the record that’s reached its end. Watch the way his camera roams low, over the carpet, closing in on what’s about to happen. See the luxuriant close-ups of Leland/Bob inserting a tiny letter beneath Maddy’s fingernail. It’s horrifying, but it’s also rich with other emotions—regret, sadness, and even a touch of amusement. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”