It didn't seem like there was a lot going on in the popular arts back in 1990. The top five movies for that year were Home Alone, Ghost, Dances with Wolves, Pretty Woman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The second and fourth film launched Demi Moore and Julia Roberts into stardom, the third will probably be the apex of Kevin Costner's career, and the first and fifth were heralds of the second baby boom. In other words, it's not surprising that the 90's will be remembered as a decade of dumb-ass kid movies, vehicles for movie stars with too much clout and flicks with weepy housewives and tough-and-tender stripper/hookers.

On April 8, 1990, two days after Driving Miss Daisy opened in Sweden, Twin Peaks debuted on American television. It was a 2 hour show on a Sunday night and, for those of us who follow that sort of thing, it started a wrestling match that would last for the next fourteen months; a match pitting the ideas of several artists against no less of an oponent than American pop culture itself, intent on procesing those ideas any way it could.

More than anything else, the struggle of the arts in the 20th Century seems to me to be about the nature of object. Whether it is the modernist anguish of creating artificial objects that threaten to supplant the attention of the audience from the objects of the real world, the postmodern positing of the validity of art's commentary on itself (particularly as the world around us grows more artificial and constructed and less "natural"), or the very first desire to create or replicate what surrounds the artist, art has had to confront its own nature.

I've always appreciated the views of the Russian Formalists, particularly (and I'm recovering his name from memory here, rather than dig up my copy of the excellent Four Russian Formalists, edited by Lemmon and Reiss) Victor Schklovskii. Schklovskii held that the importance of art was to teach the viewer to see the world in a new way. The example he used was that of a bicycle. If we were to give a bicycle to a person who had never seen one before, that person would scrutinize the bicycle closely, trying to figure out how the bicycle is used. The bicycle, in that period of newness, is fully seen. As the person uses the bicycle, he pays less and less attention to it; he knows how it works, he knows what it does, there are no further mysteries to it. As time goes on, he barely notices the bicycle. If that person then goes to a museum, and the artist has presented a sculpture of a bicycle (or bought a bicycle and presented it as a sculpture) the viewer might spend a certain amount of time going "what the hell is this bicycle doing here?" He stares carefully at it, looking to see if it might be a commentary on consumerist nature, or if there might be some alteration to the logo of the bicycle, or the tread of the bicycle, that might point to the reason of it being in the museum. During that time, the viewer examines the bicycle as if seeing it for the very first time. In this way, the artist teaches the viewer to resee the bicycle.

If, instead of the word Schwinn on the side, there is the logo "Schwein" and he learns later in the museum catalogue that the bicycle as we know it exists because Germany had intended to equip its soldiers with light bicycles for charges during World War I, he might take with him something that might forever alter the way that he sees bicycles. (All of the preceding, from when the viewer enters a museum on, is my extrapolation of Schklovskii's theory, and I apologize if it misinterprets or reinterprets Schklovskii's points.)

Thus, for Schklovskii, the more difficult the work of art, and the longer that a person spent trying to figure it out, the better the work of art. For Schklovskii, inscrutability was a reward in itself.

Besides the museum and the art gallery, there is another time, of course, when objects are carefully scrutinized and studied, where their placement in regard to each other or their importance is carefully pondered and measured. This is during the investigation of a crime scene.  Particularly at a murder site, objects take on an importance that can allow the investigator to draw conclusions about the nature of events. In a gallery of yellow tape, objects are examined and re-examined, seen again "as if for the very first time."

So it should be no surprise that a formally trained artist like David Lynch would do a TV show about a murder. In some of his first interviews about television, Lynch mentioned the amiability of the pacing. Unlike a movie that had a set running length, a TV show could be an open-ended experience, depending on how long it ran on TV. You can spend more time on a close-up of a cup of coffee, Lynch said, or a doughnut.

For those of who haven't seen it (and it is hard for me to imagine that person), Twin Peaks is a show about the tiny town of Twin Peaks. In the very first episode, the body of popular cheerleader Laura Palmer is found, dead and wrapped in plastic, and an FBI agent, Dale Cooper, comes to town to investigate. Over the course of 32 hours of television viewing, the TV audience watched a murder investigation that would be like unlike anything else on television.

From the time that I first read about Twin Peaks, I always suspected that Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, had no interest in revealing who actually killed Laura Palmer. The mystery was a plot device that would allow Cooper to investigate the secret life of the town itself, and a device that would allow Lynch to linger over the mystery of objects. A diary, a broken-heart pendant, a letter placed under a thumbnail, a pet; all of these would be unlikely clues in the murder. For Lynch, the trees, the cups of coffee and the doughnuts, the movement of a waterfall or a traffic light swaying in the breeze could be shown in long detail and the viewer would have to wonder: are these also part of the mystery? One of my favorite shots that seems to sum this up is from the second season premiere (directed by Lynch). Cooper gives a summary of the investigation up to that point. As he speaks off-camera, the camera pans slowly over several long rows of doughnuts. As the camera does, superimpositions of objects and places crucial to the murder fade in and out on the doughnuts. If you ask me, this is Lynch's manifesto for Twin Peaks, a beautifully precise statement about how (and why) plot and non-sequiteur are perfectly balanced. They are, to his eyes, equal.  As Cooper explores these elements, he uncovers the secret sides of the town's inhabitants--the "good" sides to the "bad" characters, the "bad" sides to the "good" characters.

What's important to point out about Twin Peaks is that it was a collaboration of many people. Out of the thirty-two hours of television that was Twin Peaks (actually less if you count commercials), Lynch directed eight. Roughly 25%. Also important to point out is that Twin Peaks was co-created by Lynch and Mark Frost. Frost wrote most of the episodes of the first season, as well as directing at least one, and the show, I think, was able to achieve its heights for him as much as Lynch. I remember when American Chroncles, the short-lived documentary series that Frost and Lynch did for Fox, came on (and then immediately left) the air. Not only did hardly anyone watch it, the critics hated it. I remember reading with drop-jaw dread as a critic for a Los Angeles paper pinned the blame on Mark Frost. The critic basically did this by starting from the hypothesis that Lynch could do no wrong, so, therefore, by process of elimination....

When asked once if his portrayal of Dale Cooper was in many ways an imitation of Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan admitted that it was, but said that it was also an imitation of Frost as well. I may be remembering it incorrectly, but the gist of what MacLachlan seemed to communicate was that Cooper, like the show, was a careful balance between the two different personalities. Having seen enough interviews and appearances of Lynch to attribute the personable, coffee-swilling, frequently-urinating, easily awed sides of Cooper to him, it would seem that the FBI agent's strange shifts of aloofness, detached brilliance and deductive mind would seem to belong to Frost. And, indeed, the ability to move back and connect the dots and lines of things previously established as non-sequiturs is one of Twin Peak's great strengths, one that hasn't really been exactly a hallmark of Lynch's previous and later works.

If Frost hadn't been around, Twin Peaks might not have held the interest of so many for so long and would have been quickly dismissed by the public as "pointless." Unfortunately, this interest created an expectation that the mystery would be resolved, an interest that Lynch and Frost had little interest in actually satisfying. Critic and public seemed to miss the point alike, as more articles and surveys appeared with the desire that Twin Peaks wrap up the murder of Laura Palmer soon. The balance of Frost and Lynch's interests proved to be so deceptively complete that the audience actually expected a resolution of the murder. Additionally, directors and writers of other episodes in the series had difficulty in catching the tone of, not just one, but two, idiosyncratic artists. This led to an ambience in the second season, as aptly described by a writer for the LA Weekly, that the show was now being handled by a couple of guys who had never seen an episode but had overheard a bunch of people talking about it in a bar.

Another problem is one I believe Lynch frequently runs across in his other works as well; that although Lynch's works constantly address the desire to know the secret lives of others, those secret lives have absolutely no weight when the people being explored are flat and cartoonish. Flat characters are, by nature, generally useful only as caricaturing single elements of a complex personality, and even in the rare circumstance that they can uncover something deeper than the single context they examine, they don't provide a basis for emotional empathy which would allow the audience to care. Lynch, for his part, dodges this whole problem by moving to a different context- - myth, the supernatural and the occult- - to fill in for a psychological subtext he cannot deliver (interestingly enough, books like The Greeks and The Irrational posit that "primitive cultures" such as the ancient Greeks developed the idea of the gods and the spirits to similarly provide a way of understanding irrational or complex behavior). Lynch is a brilliant artist, and his portrait of the worlds of dream and irrationality are acutely observed. Not only have I had nightmares like the visions people have in Twin Peaks, but I persist in having them, sometimes with Twin Peaks related plots and characters. Lynch has changed my perception of the way I dream, the way Duchamp changed the way the world saw a shovel or a urinal.

Sadly, there was little choice for Twin Peaks but to go in the direction it did; its comical characters grew flatter and flatter, its bad characters showed good sides (while, interestingly, its good characters seemed unable to show bad sides), and, as the dream-like and the surreal stood in for deeper emotional resonsance, Lynch, Frost, and the other writers and directors, started trying to solve a mystery that they had never intended to (it has been claimed in interviews that Frost and Lynch knew from before the first episode who killed Laura Palmer, a claim that I find somewhat dubious at best. There seem to be very few instances in the first season that substantially point to the solution they posited. I still think it more likely they started casting around for a solution sometime between the end of the first season and the starting of the second).

Why did they solve the murder if they never intended to? It reminds me of a perfect answer that illuminates the nature of American television as well as anything else I've read. At a press conference a few years back, somebody asked David Duchovny what the aliens' goal in the X-Files was. Duchovny, with wit and honesty, replied, "the goal is syndication." To keep Twin Peaks on, it was necessaary to solve the murder of Laura Palmer.

To me, one of the most important things about Schklovskii's theory of the bicycle, and one that he doesn't discuss in greater detail in the article I read, is that although the person in the museum might see the bicycle there as if for very first time, it is not the first time. Art may teach one to see the world again with new eyes, but in order to do so, a very special process is occurring. The person looking at the bicycle is learning to resee it. What interests me is how this process, the act of looking at art, of reseeing, parallels that of looking at a thing, or seeing. More to the point, I find it fascinating when the problems and challenges brought by art mirror those of similar processes in life.

For example, look at the pressure exerted on Lynch and Frost to solve the murder of Laura Palmer. This pressure increased the more time passed, and the more time passed, the harder it would be to find a solution that would both sufficiently shock and satisfy the audience.   Compare this, if you will, to a real murder. If the murder gets sufficient attention in the press, the police and authorities investigating the murder are pressured from the community to solve the murder. And the more time passes, the harder it becomes to do so as trails grow colder and clues become harder to find.

I remember talking about Twin Peaks with Joyce, a New York Travel Agent. She and I talked on the phone frequently, as her job was to book clients in my hotel, and my job was to make the reservations.   The crux of the discussions we had was that she would not be satisfied if Laura's killer turned out to be the mysterious BOB, and out of everyone in the town I suggested, she dismissed them as well. "No, that would be too obvious. They're acting too weird. It can't be them." She was right. There seemed to be no answer that would satisfy.

What I think is telling about this conversation is, again, the parallels it might have with real life. When a murder occurs, the populace is forced to consider two disquieting propositions; either the murder was committed by a total stranger, or the murder was committed by someone that people knew, but do not know as a killer. The killer is hiding their guilt from the community. Neither idea seems acceptable. The idea of a stranger descending at random and killing in their community puts to the lie one of the crucial reasons why they formed their community in the first place; security. Likewise, the idea that the killer is one of them puts to the lie the idea that any of them could actually know the other. The dilemna of the small community was not the same as my dilemna with Joyce, but they are oddly similar. As long as we pondered such questions about Twin Peaks the show, we were, in a strange way, also members of Twin Peaks, the town.

What is tragically different about a murder and a TV show is that not all murders are solved. I've seen several pages and explanations positing that one episode of Twin Peaks was equivalent to one day, so that although it seemed a long time before the killer was actually caught, in fact it was only about three weeks (in the time of the show) after the death of Laura Palmer. Sadly, murder investigations drag on for months and months, draining the investigators, the family of the victims, the media. The quickest and probably most unfair comparison would be Jack the Ripper. Books and theories about the real identity of The Ripper are published every year, and new and strange facts are uncovered at every turn. After more than a hundred seasons, Jack the Ripper: the Television Show is still running, as cast members come and go.

If Jack the Ripper had been a television show, focussing perhaps on the odd and brave investigators that studied the world of Victorian England and explored the lives the female victims led, it would not be very long before the critics would demand that the killer be caught, before the ratings started slipping and the networks would begin pestering the creators of the show: "Say, uh, have you guys thought about wrapping this thing up? I mean, there's no reason why you can't have some other killer bump off a couple of other prostitutes, right? Maybe he could eat them or something. This 'serial killer' thing seems like too good an idea to waste on just one killer, right? I mean, it gets old after a while if you never catch the guy."

The TV show The Fugitive ran from September 1963 to August 1967, and the concluding episode which resolved the storyline was one of the highest rated TV shows of all time. I've always wondered if the reasons why people watch TV have changed. Many TV shows in the past were on the air a long time without ever resolving the initial dilemna that powered the series. The castaways were never rescued off Gilligan's Island, for example, until years after the original show ended.  Perhaps people, in the times of unrest that were the sixties, wanted the illusion of a situation that never ended, a state of timelessness. And maybe now, television audiences watch TV shows because they want things to happen. Sam goes to bed with Diane, Superman marries Lois Lane, Coop and Sheriff Truman catch Laura's killer. And maybe we want those things from TV for the same reasons people in the 60's wanted stability in their television; to get what we don't have in our lives. Maybe our lives in the 80's and the 90's feel static; they don't change.  And so our TV must do the changing for us, the characters on TV move through the growth and the birth and the death. Goodbye to timelessness.

As for Twin Peaks, it ended for most of us. For most of the country, it ended before the show ever finished showing all 32 hours. For Lynch, it seemed to end sometime before or after the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which not only didn't tie up any loose ends from the series, it seemed to yank the stitches out of the few things that did seem resolved. By the way, I talk about the ending of the last televised episode of Twin Peaks in the next few paragraphs. If you don't want me to give stuff away about it, stop reading now.

As for me, Twin Peaks ended (as much it can ever end) in that very last episode shown on TV. The last episode, directed by Lynch and co-written by Frost, was shown side by side with one that was not (and if you ever want to see how unsuccessful others were in trying to catch the show's unique tone, that's the perfect way to see it). In that last episode, Cooper enters the Black Lodge, the mystical place where BOB seems to reside. In that place, he meets Laura Palmer, Laura's killer (dead for several episodes), and an evil version of Cooper himself. "I didn't kill anyone," Laura's killer tells Cooper. Later, Cooper escapes from the Black Lodge. Or maybe he doesn't.

The ending, extremely disturbing even if it had gone on to be resolved in the movie, has Cooper seemingly possessed by BOB and ready to commit mayhem. But is this the real Cooper, or is it his doppelganger, which BOB can inhabit? "I didn't kill anyone," Laura's killer tells Cooper in the Black Lodge. But is it the killer, or is it his doppelganger, saying this? Is he innocent for the crimes he was (literally) possessed to commit? In contemplating this, we are left contemplating one of the basic quandries of self: are we evil? Or is evil something that can possess us, soemthing that we we are powerless to resist? And which is worse?

There's another theory, of course. (Isn't there always?) And it's one that I just thought of when writing this.   The actor who plays BOB was discovered by Lynch; he was in fact a crew member on Twin Peaks that Lynch decided would be the perfect BOB (I know, by the way, that it is annoying as hell that BOB is spelled in all caps, but I seems to remember that was the way of the show and of Laura Palmer's diary. I merely follow it here). So BOB was someone who worked on Twin Peaks, the show. A creator, if you will. Was the killer of Laura Palmer, established by the creators after her death, made guilty by BOB/Lynch/Frost/the audience? Was it the audience and the creators that made that character a killer? Many complained, as my friend Joyce did, that BOB was a plot device, one that took the focus off who the real killer was. But if Lynch and Frost never intended to solve the murder, then it was the demands of the plot and the audience that was actually the murderer. The killer of Laura Palmer killed Laura because we, the audience, needed somebody to do it.

What I'm saying here even I'm a little unsure of, with regards to a real world parallel. If we made Laura's killer be the killer, by desiring and clamoring for such a killer to be caught, then what does that say about the real world we inhabit? There are times when society, in the form of a jury, decides who is guilty and who is innocent. But, beyond that, what if we made evil? "God created us," the saying goes, "after we created him." What if we created evil as a way to understand a process too complex to ever really be understood?

In the last episode of Twin Peaks, the Man From Another Place, who has been dancing in Cooper's dreams since the second or third episode, moves his hand over a formica table. "This is a formica table," he tells Cooper. "A formica table." As in a murder, as in art, the objects in the Black Lodge must be examined closely to see what they mean. ( I wonder sometimes if the MFAP was saying, "Here is an object" which means that there are objects in the spirit world (and how could that be, unless objects have spirits, too?)) Whether it is a good object or bad, we can't tell. In fact, we can't tell if the people in the Black Lodge are evil (they seem to be) or are capable of becoming the White Lodge and objects of good. Other characters earlier in the series say that The Black Lodge and the White Lodge are, in fact, one and the same place.

The formica table exists, and whether it is good  or evil depends on which Lodge it is in.

One of Lynch's main images for Twin Peaks is the traffic light, alone in the night, changing color. It is red (as is the White/Black Lodge) and yellow (as are the interiors of the Ben Horne's majestic hotel where many scenes take place) and green (as are the woods of Twin Peaks). It is all these colors, but we define it by the color of the light shining through it. We say, "the light's red," or "Go, it's green."  But a traffic light has all of those colors.  We only talk about the light currently shining.

Twin Peaks set out showing the underside of a town, the dark secret life of a bright girl. Then it tried to show the objects of original disdain (Bobby Briggs, his father, for example) in different lights (notice how that phrase 'showing things in different lights' seems applicable to what I said above about the traffic light?) We are both good and evil, of course. That does not seem particularly new. But what does seem new and disturbing to me is the idea that whether we are good or we are evil depends, not on the light one is seen in, nor by the acts other judge us by, but rather by which light is shining through us, a good one or an evil one. And we have very little say in the matter, just as the traffic light can't stop itself from turning red, nor can the formica table become something else. Laura Palmer, as remembered in Twin Peaks (and shown in the movie Fire Walk With Me) is a liar, a hero, a victim of a familial crime, a corrupter of other lives, a high school girl. She was all of these things. But what seems disturbing is that she had no choice to be all of these things. The lights, like fires, burned through her at their will. A light shines through a prism, and the prism might think, "Look how bright I am. See how many colors I generate." But the light is what causes all of that; the prism merely splits the light up into different colors to be seen and named. Red, blue, good, evil.

Lynch walked away from Twin Peaks leaving behind things other shows picked up and used in in ways the public wanted. Northern Exposure took the quirkiness, X-Files took the paranoia, but I don't know if or how anyone could take that final link, that uningestable idea that passed cleanly through the digestive system of American Pop; that we have only the slightest say, not just in our destiny (we are used to that and, to some extent, can handle it), but in our actions, too. If we are objects that are acted through, then what we do makes us what we are. But that defintion might change, the way a dresser can become a desk, the way a paperweight can become a doorstop, and a killer can become a pitiable person, doused in water, dying on the floor.

A swinging traffic light. A cup of coffee. A spinning ceiling fan. A formica table. A dancing man. A laughing woman. What can they mean, if they are not defined by the events and the things around them? They can mean anything without a context and, with an infinite number of contexts, they can mean. . .anything. That context is assigned, perhaps, by someone else, or by something else, not by the thing itself. By the inhabitants of a lodge. By the critics of the medium. By the public at large. By the artist, or by the person who leaves the gallery to examine, again, their bicycle. Twin Peaks has been off the air for almost ten years now. It is still acting upon me, doing things to me, which makes me wonder, every once in a while, whether it is the object--or I am.

Email me at groder@red.org

All material on these pages (with the exception of the photos) is © 1997-2001 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.