“It is happening… again”

Twin Peaks, geology, and facing a dark future

Hope and I have devoted much of this year to watching Twin Peaks. I don’t like bingeing, so we started at the beginning with 1-2 episodes a week - from the first season, which we’d seen on DVD about 20 years ago, through the much-maligned but still very enjoyable second season, and the cinematic prequel Fire Walk with Me, finally wrapping a couple of weeks ago with 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return. 

When we set out, I had no idea that David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult TV masterpiece would be the lens through which I’d be viewing the election and its aftermath. But after the credits stopped rolling on the final episode, I could still see its chilly light bathing on the world around us - a world that, frankly, we were too blinded by our illusions and fantasies to recognize. 

Even people who have never watched an episode of Twin Peaks know that it revolves around the question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Laura was a high-school beauty in the small Northwest town that gives the series its name, a symbol of innocence and promise who harbored dark, hidden depths. It would be glib to call her a stand-in for America itself, but that potential was clearly a part of the mix. The series protagonist, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, is also an American archetype - powerful, decent, unafraid to break the rules in pursuit of justice. But his image turns out to be as much of a fairy tale as Laura’s, the destruction of which proves just as painful. 

It’s no coincidence that the first run of Twin Peaks had such an impact on the cultural psyche of America in 1990-91. Earlier this fall I read an eye-opening book about those years, John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Ganz persuasively traces today’s polarization and dysfunction to the period right after the fall of the Soviet Union, a moment that should have been a triumphant victory for America but instead splintered us further apart in the absence of a shared boogeyman, sped up by the concurrent collapse of the destructive daydream that was Reagonomics. Through these cracks began to flow a bubbling crude of conspiracy and resentment, as exemplified by the rise of KKK leader David Duke to gubernatorial candidate, the bullshit populism of Ross Perot’s third-party run, and the wacko standoffs of Ruby Ridge and Waco, botched by bloody-minded assholes on both sides. 

This is the America that proved so receptive to the mind-bending phenomenon of Twin Peaks. Despite the show’s familiar structure - part soap opera, part crime procedural - its willingness to toy with audience expectations by gleefully juggling of humor and horror made it unlike anything else on mainstream television. For many viewers, it was the first time that TV made them question the rules that stories play by, and that the revelation came not from the fringes of the avant garde but from the sanctified safe space of prime-time network programming made it all the more disturbing. Its sprawling narrative and tantalizingly unanswered questions reflected in popular fiction a wider world where the old rules no longer seemed to apply, where darkness could creep in from anywhere - especially in places like the pastoral town of Twin Peaks, where it had perhaps been better hidden than elsewhere. 

But for all that, you could still choose to ignore the implications of the show’s undercurrents and glide across its more polished surface. This surface congealed to a shell after the producers pushed for a resolution to the Laura Palmer murder - a bitter, uncomfortable resolution, to be sure, which was explored at greater depth in the almost unendurably painful prequel Fire Walk With Me. But looking back at the ‘90s Twin Peaks corpus overall, a kind of quivering balance reigned, providing a level of nostalgic comfort only somewhat disturbed by the abrupt and violent transformation of Agent Cooper in the series finale from the Good Cop to the Enemy Within. 

When Lynch and Frost returned to the series in 2017, any semblance of that balance was long gone. Exactly 25 years after the original series, the sort of consensus culture that the first series rode in on had forever shattered, splintered to atoms by sweeping trends that made manifest in the internet and 9/11 and America’s increased and irrevocable polarization.

Twin Peaks: The Return isn’t quite a sequel. As the subtitle implies, it’s more of a reckoning. What is the cost of trying to go back? What can be salvaged, and what is lost forever? What happens to the person who looks backward while being pushed unwillingly into the void of the future?

The narrative brings these questions to life in disorienting and alarming ways. (There are spoilers here, if that matters to you.) The characters from the previous series appear fitfully, rarely connecting, occasionally starring in story arcs that flare up before disappearing without a trace. Our main man, Dale Cooper, is split into two bodies, a psychotic criminal and a comical simpleton, and the gratification of seeing him whole is delayed across 17 episodes, and then only offered fleetingly before the story takes a final wrenching turn. 

It’s that last episode that’s been haunting me most these past few weeks. Cooper knocks on a door in Texas in search of Laura, whose life he believes he saved through a metaphysical loophole. The woman who answers sure looks like Laura, but she has a different name. Still, Cooper persuades her to join him on a road trip to Twin Peaks, where she claims she’s never been. On the drive, it sinks in that this is an older, more exhausted, more somber Cooper than the original - is it only age, or has something else happened? When they arrive, “Laura” doesn’t recognize the house, and the person who answers the door claims no knowledge of Cooper’s remembered past. Assessing this inexplicable loss, Cooper stands in the street, trying to understand what went wrong - when his companion suddenly erupts in a piercing, dead-awakening shriek. End series. 

This is the “Return” we were promised - a place where things look similar, but nothing is the same. A darker, stranger place, with a terrifying new mystery to solve. Are we up to the challenge? 

Lynch and Frost had already been working on this series when Trump was first elected president in 2016, but had they clearly tapped into the deeper currents that led to that outcome. Though I didn’t watch it at the time, The Return seems perfectly tailored for those years of paranoia and dread. Unfortunately, it seems even more well-suited to the era we’re entering this week. If we can’t go back - and we absolutely cannot - what does it meant to try and Make America Great Again? 

In the lead-up to Trump’s second presidency (I still can’t believe I’m typing that), we’ve seen many of the familiar elements spring back up - the xenophobia, the frothing rage, the inept con that millions are eager to embrace. But this time it’s worse, because we all knew what it meant, and we still signed up for it. The stakes are higher, and the means to fight it are more dispersed. The white-hat heroes have been revealed for the illusion they always were. We’re left standing in the street, staring at a world that has changed in ways that make absolutely no sense. 

Of course, even the Cooper of the original series was fallible. The quote that makes the title of this piece is spoken to him in a vision as Laura’s identical cousin is murdered elsewhere by the exact same killer. In its reflection of a repetition unimpeded, this scene foreshadows the end of The Return, as well as our current predicament. What connects them all is a sensation of impotent despair - KNOWING that something terrible is happening, and that you are utterly powerless to stop it. 

Of course, Twin Peaks wouldn’t be as resonant as it remains if it were just a long wallow in shit. Lynch’s world is highly spiritual, and, while its dark half gets most of the headlines, it wouldn’t be what it is without its corresponding peak of light. The players in this cosmology pierce through time and space. Evil exists - it is ineffable, irreducible, mysterious, untiring. It can never be fully eradicated. At times, it will prevail, and there will seem to be no hope. But it’s not the only force in the universe. Decency and hope still fuel most people’s actions. These forces get mixed up, rearranged, and contorted in ways that defy our expectations. It’s never as simple as “a battle of good versus evil.” Both pieces are inside all of us, and each day brings with it the potential to grapple with them in a fresh configuration. 

It’s not especially comfortable to look at this pattern up close - if you’re stuck in one of the uglier parts, it seems like nothing else exists. And so it can be edifying to zoom out - in this case, from the human events that occur between the series’ titular mountains to the larger forces that raised them above the landscape in the first place. 

A second work I’ve been contending with this fall is Annals of the Former World, the 700-page magnum opus by longtime New Yorker writer John McPhee. Released in 1998 - astride the retrospectively unsteady interregnum between When the Clock Stopped and the collapse of the Twin Towers - it’s actually an omnibus of four related books that McPhee released from 1982 to 1993, with a new fifth section added to tie them together. Together, they constitute a journey into the deeper past - a few billion years or so. 

Over the course of his extended narrative, McPhee accompanies a handful of geologists on trips across Interstate 80, a highway that starts on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge and terminates in downtown San Francisco. Along the way, the road covers pretty much every type of terrain through every era of geological history the North American continent has endured. It turns out the Appalachians are the third and perhaps least impressive mountain chain to cover that piece of ground; that the western U.S. has been an ocean on more than one occasion; that the craton, or base bedrock, of the Midwest has changed remarkably little over the countless millennia, even as the coastal areas have experienced spectacular, relentless change (well, maybe not much of a surprise there). 

In one of the recurring rituals of the book, McPhee and a given geologist speed down the highway until the geologist demands to pull over and examine an especially promising roadcut. These are the sections of hills and mountains that were blasted apart to make way for the road, exposing the otherwise hidden strata of history within. The geologist hops out with a hammer and other tools to tell a story of the fossil teeth or inchoate coal that helps to determine the age and origin of the many layers before them. 

The most immediate and predictable takeaway from these visits is the vastness of time - a quarter-inch of compressed alluvial deposits might have taken millions of years to form, layer upon layer, a “happening again” that happens again and again on the scale incomprehensible to our experience. But perhaps more surprising is the fact that these layers are by no means linear. Tectonic activity crumples the surface of the earth like tissue, and it’s not uncommon for the newer rock to get buried deep beneath formations that arose hundreds of millions of years earlier. History is not a straight path, these sites are telling us - the story is always deeper and more complex than the surface, and you can never imagine its ending in real time. As in Twin Peaks: The Return, the individual pieces endure, but they shuffle and transform beyond comprehension. It takes a very, very, very long view to bring any of it into focus. 

Thinking about this isn’t exactly a consolation, but it’s helped to cushion the shock of this spectacularly ugly moment. The results of this election resound so clearly that we can’t just wring our hands and say, “We should have done more!” No, this is a result of larger forces, which we can barely begin to comprehend. Whether they reflect the otherworldly energies of Lynch’s occult cosmology or the seismic forces that rip the earth apart in slow-motion, they are beyond our immediate control. 

Perversely, I find this freeing. There are some things you can’t fight or fix, which releases you to focus on what you can. This is not an abdication of responsibility, but a reprioritization. As we struggle to understand the bigger picture, we can find ways to improve the world immediately around us. We can choose, like Agent Cooper, to act decently and bravely in the interests of others - our friends, our families, the communities where we live. Sure, we will fail on occasion, we will age, we will change. But maybe we don’t need to rise to the mythologized level of a Cooper. There are other good souls in Twin Peaks. Maybe we’ll be a buffoonish but bighearted Deputy Andy, who cries at crime scenes but bravely keeps showing up. Maybe we’ll be a Donna Hayward, who takes great risks to understand the fate of her best friend. Maybe we’ll be a Pete Martell, who calls the alarm when he discovers Laura’s body, even though he just wants to go fishing. 

The world - in its messy incomprehensibility, its mud and dust - is right here in front of us, and we each have a role to play as we enter one of its darker phases. This process has been going on long before we arrived, and will continue long after we leave. Change and confusion have always been our lot - we can’t stop that. But we can build our lives on top of that shifting bedrock and be there for ourselves and each other as the skies darken and the valleys echo with ominous sounds. What other choice do we have?