SIOBHAN LYONS
David Lynch’s short-lived cult television program Twin Peaks explores the director’s long-held critique of the American Dream, epitomized in the murder of popular prom queen Laura Palmer, a symbol of innocence, at the hands of a malevolent force. Corruption of the young American was a topic of great fascination in the 1990s, with films as eclectic as The Craft (1996), Jawbreaker (1999), Election (1999), and American Pie (1999) sharing similar themes of the search for the American Dream, through naïve or comedic sexuality, as well as the dismantlement of the American Dream due to natural or supernatural forces. Lynch carried this theme of shattered dreams and/or sexual depravity with him into his later films, seen with naïve ingénue Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Dr. and Alice Wakefield in Lost Highway. Lynch’s surreal, often campy, depiction of the veneer of American civilization—which in itself is a way of debunking the seriousness with which such themes have hitherto been explored—parallels previous explorations of the familial/sexual heart of the American nightmare, most notably Stanley Kubrick’s film Lolita (1962) (a favorite of Lynch’s), which captures the social and geographical doubling and deception that defines the American nightmare. Where Dolores Haze is violated by the socially inept and suspect Humbert Humbert, who acts as her stepfather, Laura is the sexual victim of her real father, Leland, possessed by the evil spirit of BOB. This essay addresses Lynch’s body of work with respect to the American nightmare, locating particular significance within Twin Peaks due to its inclusion of the supernatural, and its use of Laura as the embodiment of the American Dream.
David Lynch has a devoted and (pseudo) philosophical investment in the allure of the American Dream. In an interview with David Hughes, Lynch described Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita as a perfect film. When asked if the rumor about his adapting the film were true, Lynch replied, “Why remake a perfect film?” (qtd. in Donlon, 125) Lynch’s interest in Lolita—a story of a young American girl victimized by her stepfather—can be seen throughout Lynch’s oeuvre: the deceptive perfection of American society, the young blonde corrupted by perversion, and the self-loathing related to sexual inadequacy. As Greg Olson notes, “Lolita contains such Lynchland standards as a white small-town picket fence; an eroticized reference to cherry pie; a man desired by both mother and daughter; a person trapped in an intolerable domestic relationship; people leading secret emotional lives” (618). Lynch takes these aspects of everyday secrecy and perversion and pushes the horror factor beyond Nabokov’s (and Kubrick’s) mere suggestive treatment of them. Lynch therefore does not just dismantle the American Dream, but intensifies the disturbing reality of the American nightmare in a similar manner to Nabokov. While Laura suffers incest and murder at the hands of her father (while possessed), Lolita suffers sexual abuse from her step-father, Humbert Humbert.
In an interview concerning the Twin Peaks prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), an interviewer tells Lynch, “I had the impression at the end of it that what I had been watching was perhaps an American nightmare, rather than the American dream” (137). Yet when Lynch is asked whether or not the film attacks the American Dream, Lynch disagrees: “I was trying to make the story of Teresa Banks … and the last seven days of Laura Palmer” (137). The original television series Twin Peaks, on the other hand, with its hook and catalyst being the murder of Laura Palmer (and the events that ensue) explores both the American Dream and the nightmare that follows when the American Dream fails.
The American nightmare is often understood as the American Dream destroyed by male-enacted violence and darkness, well-articulated by the character Courtney Shane in teen film Jawbreaker, when she says, “They’ll believe it because it’s their worst nightmare: Elizabeth Purr, the very picture of teenage perfection, obliterated by perversion.” Such is the way in which Lynch’s work, particularly Twin Peaks, functions, as the picture of teenage perfection—Laura Palmer—is obliterated by her father’s sexual abuse under the control of an evil force. Lynch often incorporates sexual and Oedipal perversion in his work to illustrate the disintegration of the American life. Yet the American Dream is not, indeed, the focal point of Lynch’s overall cinematic project; this is why Twin Peaks focuses instead on the aftermath of Laura Palmer’s death, and by extension America’s wider response to the loss and corruption of innocence, rather than the cause. It is the result, rather than the event, that Lynch is interested in: not the dream, but the nightmare that ensues when the dream fails.
Before Twin Peaks, Lynch tested the waters of sexual depravity beneath the social veneer of suburban society in his acclaimed work Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet’s nightmarish vision is realized in Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a violent sociopath who inflicts his bizarre sexual proclivities upon Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), whose name and blue dress conjure images of a fanciful and innocent Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, but in a depraved setting. In a pivotal scene that examines the disillusionment with evil, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) asks his love interest Sandy (Laura Dern), “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?” to which Sandy recounts a dream she had. She says, “In the dream the world was dark because there weren’t any robins. You know, birds. Robins stood for love. And all of a sudden thousands of robins flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it felt like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. I guess. Until the robins come there is trouble.” Blue Velvet shares many aesthetic similarities with Lynch’s other work, and is considered “hallucinated and hyperreal” (Atkinson, 235). Within Lynch’s films, the “colours are oversaturated”’ (235), a feature which resonates with much of Lynch’s work (from the famous extra-dimensional Red Room of Twin Peaks, to the mysterious blue box that appears in Mulholland Dr.). The most recognizable color trait that appears in Lynch’s work is the notorious red of the curtains which appear in Twin Peaks’ Red Room, the Silencio theater in Mulholland Dr. and the bedroom in Lost Highway. In The Wizard of Oz, the colors are also over-saturated when Dorothy arrives in the fantasy world (ruby slippers, yellow brick road, emerald city), yet Lynch’s colors are accompanied by darker elements and a menacing force seemingly incompatible with these childhood fantasies of innocence and the simple desire to return home, seen with Dorothy’s blue dress and the appearance of the Yellow Man. The Wizard of Oz motif is also prominently seen in Wild at Heart, featuring Sheryl Lee as Glinda in a vision.
Furthermore, the famous red curtain represents the notion of performance that permeates Lynch’s thematic treatment of society. We see this with the singing performance of Julee Cruise in Twin Peaks, the singing performance of Dorothy in Blue Velvet and Rebekah Del Rio in Mulholland Dr., and the saxophone performance of Fred in Lost Highway, with each performance obscuring another, darker, reality.
By the end of Blue Velvet, Atkinson writes that “Jeffrey and Sandy enjoy the recovered suburban paradise of Lynch’s dreams, complete with a beetle-chewing clockwork robin” (70). Shaun Mir argues that the robin “marks the end of the surreal and nightmarish events experienced by those small town characters.” The end scene of Blue Velvet can be seen to act as a teaser for Twin Peaks four years later, which features a Bewick’s wren in the very first scene of the opening credits.
Although the film was acclaimed by most critics, renowned film critic Roger Ebert gave the film only one star, arguing that the film essentially sabotaged its potential to be a sincere and honest look at suburban violence and depravity. He furthermore writes that the characters of Blue Velvet and their cliché dialogue appear to come straight out of 1950s sitcoms and that, furthermore, “everyday town life is depicted with a deadpan irony; characters use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes.”
These same claims of a lack of seriousness would also be leveled at Twin Peaks for its soap-opera tendencies and refusal to succumb to what seemed the eventual goal of sincerity—a criticism that can be traced to much earlier in Lynch’s career. For instance, American film critic J. Hoberman argues that even Lynch’s script for Dune is “a morass of clichés” (206). The lack of seriousness is where Hoberman finds viewer dissatisfaction, at least on the level of mass consumption, as many viewers have felt misplaced amongst the dramatic irony and postmodern satire, unsure, exactly, of how to feel. Discussing Dune, Hoberman argues that unlike Lucas’ Star Wars, Dune demands to be taken seriously: “[Lynch] lacks the pop genius for pre-camp innocence and mindless rat-a-tat” (207). Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, argues that Lynch’s work is the epitome of postmodernism, and is “‘simultaneously comical, provoking laughter; unbearably naïve; and yet to be taken thoroughly ‘seriously.’ The ‘seriousness’ [of Lynch’s films] does not signal a deeper spiritual level underlying superficial clichés as such” (3).
Yet many fans have heralded Lynch’s aversion to seriousness as demonstrative of his ability to subvert clichés precisely by enacting them in order to illuminate their ridiculousness. Lynch often relies on clichés throughout his work, as a way to parody the melodramatic soap opera genre, and takes as his cinematic guinea pig the veneer of civilization, eagerly subverting and debunking clichés as he vicariously indulges and partakes in them at the same time. This melodramatic and comedic friction is seen not only in the fractured and morbidly tortured love scenes in Twin Peaks between Donna and James, and Harry and Josie, but also in Mulholland Dr., with Naomi Watts’ painfully naïve and star-dazzled Betty. Hoberman describes this as Lynch’s “continuous subversion of apple-pie normalcy” (233), which brings to mind the image of the immensely popular cherry pie that Twin Peaks fans will no doubt be starkly familiar with. Special agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) is, as are the rest of the residents of the small town, gastronomically enamored of the cherry pie, seemingly representing the opposite of the “American as apple pie” rhetoric that goes along with the normal, innocent, if not banal concept of the America-next-door ideal. Cult fans will remember Cooper’s exclamation early in the series “They got a cherry pie here that’ll kill ya!” delivered almost with the voice and face of a smiling addict.
That the audience feels misplaced appears to be, at least for some, a purposeful gesture on Lynch’s part, producing a homelessness of genre that challenges the audience’s understanding of America. The danger comes when the viewer attempts to take the subject too seriously. While various critics seek to unearth some semblance of sincerity, Lynch keeps the sincere elements of his films buried beneath a camp fantasy.
Although there exist many similarities between Lynch’s films, in comparison to Blue Velvet in particular, Twin Peaks emerges as one of Lynch’s safer pieces, as I will come to discuss, working on a level that is comparatively less threatening than his suburban nightmares.
Critic Michael Atkinson writes that Lynch “proceeds from dreams toward ideas” (9), and that “his best films don’t resemble dreams as much as a version of reality sick with the poison of dream making” (9). Where the robin acts as the hope for humanity and the dream emerging from chaos in Blue Velvet, the wren in Twin Peaks appears to signal the reappearance of the American Dream, as epitomized in the quaint small town, which is no longer Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, but now the Twin Peaks Lumber Mill, a possible symbolic nod to the saying “can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Yet the picturesque view at the beginning of the series, announced by the wren, is soon replaced by the revelation that “the owls are not what they seem,” a phrase which signifies a shift in the atmosphere and encourages the audience to rethink certain figures and elements in Twin Peaks. Žižek argues that Lynch’s phrases (such as Blue Velvet’s “Daddy wants to fuck,” Lost Highway’s “Dick Laurent is dead,” Mulholland Dr.’s “This is the girl,” and Twin Peaks’ “the owls are not what they seem”) are a crucial ingredient in the Lynch universe and function as a “signifying chain” or “a kind of basic formula that suspends and cuts across time” (17). Furthermore, Lynch’s avian interests are rife with symbolic undertones of the dream/nightmare binary, from the dreamlike robin to the suspicious wren and the threatening owl. Also of interest is the presence of lumber. Willa Brown argues in The Atlantic that the lumberjack “looms large in the American imagination” and acts as “a symbol of American manhood” (2014), something which is greatly at stake in Lynch’s work, where the men struggle to sustain and defend their manhood (such as Andy in Twin Peaks, Fred in Lost Highway, and Frank in Blue Velvet).
The lumberjack, for Brown, was a romantic hero in America in times of financial and economic crisis. This re-contextualization of well-known American tropes and identities is common with Lynch, seen with the presence of the strange cowboy in Mulholland Dr., who possesses an unusual but threatening sense of authority. The re-contextualization of American tropes was also a common trait in Nabokov’s Lolita; in his work Nabokov satirizes many American tropes including the Romantic novel, the phenomenon of psychiatry, the American landscape, and the “wholesome” image of the middle-class American family. Further, as theorist Ewa Mazierska argues discussing the similarities between Nabokov and Lynch, “unlike Kubrick and [Adrian] Lyne, who privilege the male perspective, Lynch identifies with Laura and even affords her a diary, in which she describes her sexual life and dreams. Although he shows the girl as sexually active, even promiscuous, this does not make her any less a victim of paedophilia and incest” (46). Moreover, Mazierska argues that “the father, like Humbert, is a respected citizen, but it does not exonerate him or obscure his sins; rather, it renders him even more monstrous” (46–47).
Thus Lynch, like Nabokov, takes icons of the American landscape and imagination and subverts them, makes them strange, and places them within an even stranger context. The normality and innocence with which these icons are usually associated is abruptly challenged, with the presence or threat of death suddenly intruding on them, and the idea of America suddenly made unstable.
And hence the nightmare begins, where normality is disrupted by the presence of a disturbing force. Yet what makes Twin Peaks different, as I will later elaborate, is that it operates within an other-worldly realm that allows the audience a safer experience that surrounds juveniles, in contrast to the fundamentally adult, marital worlds of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr., all of which focus on or take place in a more mature, very human-centered world, and thus are more terrifying since there is no supernatural element that alleviates the evil actions that occur. The evil acts are conducted by supernatural figures, rather than humans.
The name Twin Peaks itself acts as the first indicator of this mirrored narrative. The notion of “the double” is present in a number of ways throughout the series, beginning first with Laura Palmer herself, who engaged in a secret life of sex and drugs prior to her death. As her friend Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) investigates Laura’s murder, the truth of Laura’s life is slowly unraveled, as well as the dark forces at work in the small town. Numerous affairs, as well as affairs-within-affairs, are revealed: Hank and Norma, Harry and Josie, Laura and James, Donna and James, James and Maddy, Bobby and Shelly, Laura and Leo, Laura and Benjamin, Catharine and Benjamin, Andy and Lucy, Lucy and Dick, etc. The convoluted dalliances mirror those of well-known American sitcoms and soap operas which, as previously discussed, Lynch is eagerly parodying. As Lynch exposes the darker nature of the deceptively innocent town, he unearths a darkness that transcends human acts of evil. Lynch uses this element to link the American Dream with a sense of innocence (and thereby destroying it in the exposure and revelation of the town’s deception). This is where Lynch departs from Nabokov’s narrative on the American Dream; while his approach is similarly postmodern in his subversion of well-known tropes, the revelation that Laura’s father, Leland, was possessed by a supernatural figure undermines, in part, the ethical responsibility attached to his abhorrent actions. Importantly both Laura and Lolita die in the respective narratives, whether directly or indirectly as a result of a fatherly figure. Both works therefore offer an analysis of the perversion of the American Dream through patriarchal abuse.
Twin Peaks is a particularly useful work in which to examine the American Dream since Laura Palmer is seen to represent the American Dream in various ways, the innocent prom queen stereotype being but one of them. As Todd McGowan observes, Laura “seems to represent perfectly the predominant fantasy of femininity. She is popular, smart, generous, attractive, and sexy, yet she retains a sense of innocence” (130). McGowan furthermore notes that Twin Peaks “has the appearance of being a mythically perfect American small town,” in which Laura Palmer exists at the center in order to “explore the fantasy structure that continues to shape American society” (130).
Yet Laura is not entirely a substantial identity, seemingly too ethereal and airy to be believed, her perfection somewhat tiresome and false. Her unreality is accentuated in the way in which viewers see her when she was alive, and even through her tone of voice which is babyish and light. In one of James Hurley’s flashbacks, we see a starry-eyed Laura dreamily tell James, “I’m so happy today … I really believe you love me” (Pilot). As McGowan notes, Laura occupies various roles that seem to obscure the emptiness of her identity: “At the core of her subjectivity exists a fundamental emptiness” (131). Laura’s emptiness is heightened through her role as friend, lover, daughter, student, volunteer, prom queen, English teacher, and prostitute. In contrast to modernism’s value of a sense of “inner self,” Laura Palmer’s various identities exhibit a distinctly postmodern lack of self, in which any true sense of identity is illusory. These identities, moreover, correlate to American ideals of beauty and innocence. Laura “embodies the idea of contemporary American female beauty” (McGowan 131). And, by extension, she symbolizes the exact traits of the American Dream. Her death therefore signals the failure of that dream.
This absence of identity is, as Richard Dyer argues, a key feature of the film noir genre, in which the male perspective overtakes the female identity. For Dyer, “women in film noir are above all else unknowable…. To the degree that culture is defined by men, what is, and is known, is male. Film noir thus divides the world into that which is unknown and unknowable” (92). The predominant lens through which Twin Peaks functions is the authoritative view of Dale Cooper, while Laura Palmer is mainly known through the memories and accounts of everyone else except Laura herself. The only fragments we have of Laura’s psyche are exhibited through her diary. As previously discussed, Mazierska argues that unlike Stanley Kubrick’s and Adrian Lyne’s adaptations of Lolita, in which the male perspective dominates, Laura’s diary is a way in which the viewer can identify with Laura and through which her identity is partially established (46). Her presence in Twin Peaks, though, is as a specter—her diary fragments, the appearance of Maddy Ferguson, the flashbacks and the memories. Maddy Ferguson, also played by Sheryl Lee, appears unsettlingly similar to Laura in the series, with characters frequently drawn to her in the same way they were drawn to Laura.
While most of Lynch’s work looks at “what goes on behind closed doors” (234), Twin Peaks invariably explores these themes of innocence and social veneers in arguably a much more light-hearted way than in Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr. The themes of incest and murder notwithstanding, these elements are partially alleviated by the inclusion of the supernatural, as the town’s inhabitants are, for the most part, struggling earnestly with their moral compasses at various points, with characters such as Ben Horne and Catherine Martell attempting to redeem themselves. In Lolita, conversely, Humbert is possessed only by his passion and obsessions, which emerge only from his own perversions. What is common to both patriarchal characters, however, is that they are at times depicted as victims of their own abuse; while Leland has been under the control of BOB since he was a child, Humbert’s obsession with nymphets stems from the death of his childhood lover, Annabel Leigh. Leigh never got the opportunity to grow old, contributing to Humbert’s idealization of youth. And, like Leigh, neither Laura nor Lolita survives past their teens, their lives taken and their innocence corrupted by perverse, patriarchal obsession. While they do indeed at times manage to exert some control in their relationships with their respective abusers, ultimately they are destroyed.
Because the presence of evil in Twin Peaks is externalized with the figure BOB incorporating “the evil that men do,” as FBI agent Albert Rosenfield puts it, Twin Peaks is comparatively more morally digestible than both Lolita and Lynch’s other work because it doesn’t compromise morality in the process of exposing its absence, since it is the evil force of BOB, and not Leland, who murders Laura.1 Even at the end of the series, the “sympathy for the devil” rhetoric is played out when Shelly’s abusive husband Leo is held hostage by Windom Earle. The evil that exists in Lolita, as well as in the starkly adult and unbearably human worlds of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, is of greater consequence since the sadistic characters are unable to hide behind supernatural impulses and unable to unburden their evil into an exterior force.
This supernatural/natural binary alleviates the brutal tension of human-enacted evil, made explicit when Cooper asks, in a scene that resembles the robin-dream scene in Blue Velvet, “Is it any easier to believe that a father would rape and murder his own daughter?” This alternate reality finds its footing in Lynch’s other work. Thus the burden of humanity, its unnerving errors and flaws, is substituted for an evil that is barbaric but conceptually less threatening since it comes from an out-of-world place of darkness that is not explicitly present in humanity. There is a lightness to Twin Peaks that makes its deception more bearable than in Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr. or Lost Highway, since the inhabitants of Twin Peaks are more often portrayed in either a melodramatic or comedic manner. Although Hoberman argues that Lynch’s lack of seriousness has caused viewer dissatisfaction, it is through this very element of Lynch not taking his show too seriously that Twin Peaks emerges as a more uplifting work than, say, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr., its cult status an evident mark of its enduring popularity.
What differentiates Twin Peaks from Lynch’s other work in terms of the American nightmare is that, in Twin Peaks, the audience is able to wake up from the nightmare. Further, the only seemingly evil (as opposed to bad) human character—Windom Earle—ironically, is killed by the very personification of evil, BOB. There appears to be no sustained evil amongst the ordinary citizens, even those who audiences know are the “bad guys,” such as Leo and Ben Horne. By aligning the morally ambiguous acts of the characters with a supernatural source, Twin Peaks does not force the audience to encounter or contemplate, to the same degree as does Lynch’s other work, the severity of the characters’ actions.
One of the most commonly used themes throughout the cinematic oeuvre of David Lynch is that of dual identities. The theme of the double, or the mirror, is used to reflect other worlds and identities that lurk beneath the surface, essentially problematizing the notion of truthfulness and illuminating the role of deception in identity and reality. This double appears in Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., and is an explicit narrative maneuver throughout Twin Peaks, seen with characters who either look similar or have the same names, as well as the presence of mirrors and reflections in the series, such as the reflection of the Black Lodge.
Furthermore, Lynch’s notable interest in disturbing doubles—of reality and identity—can be linked to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846) and Nabokov’s Despair (1934), both of which feature identity doubles. Lynch’s work continues this tradition of excavating the darker depths of a civilized veneer, focusing on individuals’ self-destructive tendencies, the disturbing relationship between the self and the alter ego, and civilization and the seedier elements therein. It is this focus on doubling that illuminates the rivalry (but inevitably the arcane similarities) between the American Dream and nightmare that functions as the ultimate double in Lynch’s work.
These doubles are used to contrast the fairly simplistic binary oppositions of light and dark, and beauty and ugliness, or the ugliness within beauty, all of which define the American Dream. The White Lodge and the Black Lodge most notably represent the dual forces of good and evil, while notions of beauty and ugliness are shown through Laura’s Palmer’s physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. What is most significant, though, is that Lynch expertly blurs these distinctions so that audiences are unsure of where the line is that separates and divides the double.
Schuy R. Weishaar describes this doubling in regards to the grotesque, arguing, “If there is a deep-seated grotesquery among these doubles it is a moral one” (151). Furthermore, Weishaar notes, “Lynch’s doubles are frequently constructed through fantasies by characters whose primitive passions have overtaken them and driven them to commit foul deeds, for which their doubles serve as temporary denouements” (151–52). By enabling the characters to split the self into two distinctly opposing forces of good and evil rather than seeing the human as embodying both traits, the double offers an escape from the dreaded moral ambiguity that confronts the characters.
The double appears frequently in Lolita, both in the novel and in Kubrick’s adaptation. While the novel itself features recurring motifs such as mirrors, particularly the presence of Hourglass Lake, and twins who attend school with Lolita, Kubrick’s adaptation sees the double typified in the casting of the mercurial Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty. Sellers is known for his ability to portray several different characters in the same film, notably Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Robert Stam argues that Sellers’ “shape-shifting capacity to mimic personages … makes him an ambulatory intertext, a body of quotations whose very modus operandi is parodic in the best Nabokovian sense” (162).
In the novel itself, Lolita initially appears to Humbert as a double of his beloved childhood love Annabel Leigh, while Humbert himself is considered the double of Quilty. In the 2000 annotated edition of Lolita, for instance, Nabokov scholar Alfred Appel argues that while readers are well aware of Humbert’s perversions, the readers’ “desire for highbrow pornography is ‘doubled’ in Clare Quilty, whose main habit is making pornographic films” (441). Priscilla Meyer similarly deconstructs the figure of Quilty, proposing the possibility that Quilty may not, in fact, exist. She argues: “Only Humbert and Quilty fulfill the criteria of the well-defined nineteenth-century genre of the literary double in which the boundaries between host and double are blurred, dialectic, and the conflict between them unresolvable” (4). Both Humbert and Quilty lust after young girls, though Humbert is seen, at least to a discerning reader, to be a lesser evil. Frank Langella, who played the part of Clare Quilty in Lyne’s adaptation, similarly notes that Quilty is presented as the true villain or antagonist while Humbert, by comparison, is nevertheless a more genuine figure, describing Quilty as “Humbert without a conscience, Humbert without any sense of soul” (Lyne, 1997).
David Lynch has clearly been inspired by Kubrick’s use of the double, incorporating it heavily within his own work. In Twin Peaks, the double is similarly exhibited in several incidents, both for unnerving and comedic effect. In the first episode of the series, Cooper has a dream that he is in the Black Lodge, where he sees a girl who, according to the dwarf, looks “exactly like Laura Palmer.” We are told, however, that the girl is the dwarf’s cousin. Not long after Laura is killed, her cousin Madeline (also played by Sheryl Lee) arrives in Twin Peaks, and the similarity of her appearance to Laura’s is noted by many including James, Donna, and notably Leland Palmer. Leland is once again a Lynchian extension of Kubrick’s Humbert, in the sense that he is considered the lesser of two evils, becoming Lynch’s version of Humbert, while BOB parallels the mysterious Quilty.
The characters Mike and Bobby (the ex-boyfriends of Donna and Laura respectively) are doubled in MIKE and BOB, the evil but opposing forces in the town, their names adding to the confusion in the investigation. Another, more humorous double, occurs with Nadine, when she attempts to kill herself by overdosing on pills, eventually waking up from a coma with the personality of her teenage self and a new, powerful level of strength.
Lynch’s doubles occur, ironically, on two fundamental levels; the one in which viewers can plainly see the double being performed (Laura and Maddy; Betty and Diane; Mike and Bobby; Renee and Alice; Fred and Pete), and those doubles of a more sinister nature that are subtle and confront expectations of distinction and difference. Lynch’s particular use of the double, in these instances, functions by avoiding the necessary but altogether troubling space between good and evil that is often too confronting to accept. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the two are not juxtaposed in any concrete sense but are fundamentally part of the same matrix of humanity. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche asks, ‘Where does that synthesis of god and billy goat in the satyr point?’ (21). Nietzsche’s point here reflects the notion that the human is composed of both benevolent and negative traits, with anger and kindness functioning within the same human. Discussing the opposing forces of Dionysus and Apollo, Nietzsche claims, “We are therefore to regard the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself[….] In this existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus possesses the dual nature of a cruel, barbarized demon and a mild, gentle ruler” (73–74). Nietzsche’s argument that there is a symbiosis between good and evil within each human individual suitably parallels Lynch’s exploration of his characters in Twin Peaks. While Lynch does indeed separate the elements of good and evil in his narrative of the White Lodge and the Black Lodge (good and evil respectively), he is wary of separating these two elements entirely. The character of Maddy, for instance, expresses exasperation at being constantly compared to Laura, while other characters such as Dale Cooper try to stress the importance of seeing humans as being capable of both good and evil. Viewers can observe the subtleties of humanity and the ambiguity of good and evil inherent in Twin Peaks (the television format more easily able to flesh out this fusion of characteristics within its characters), that more closely conforms to Nietzsche’s views on the necessary evil within good (and by extension the potential good within evil). The use of doubling as a code of moral ambiguity is more successfully realized in Twin Peaks than it is in Lynch’s films, since, due to its length as a series and to its almost laborious, slow-paced development, viewers are better equipped at engaging with the characters in an appreciative, even sympathetic manner that challenges Lynch’s critics, who believe that seriousness is not a concern for Lynch. Yet as Sheli Ayers writes in Sheen and Davison’s The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions (2004), the audience of Twin Peaks is indeed often granted the luxury of seriousness. This occurs, suitably enough, within the Double R Diner after Norma Jennings has just discovered that her mother is the food critic M.T. Wentz, who has given her restaurant a bad review. Norma’s hurt response to her mother’s actions provokes great sympathy. Ayers notes that “suddenly the comic subplot turns to pathos” and that “this scene from the second season calls for an empathetic response quite unlike the self-conscious formal distantiation that many critics saw as the series’ trademark device, and in fact seems to answer to such a criticism” (98).
This sudden move from self-aware melodrama to pathos for Lynch’s audience, who have witnessed Norma’s “decency episode after episode” (98), again reflects Lynch’s use of the double and the ability to move successfully from one form to another, and to disrupt the certainty upon which these notions frequently stand. Lynch therefore does not solely deal in doubles of beauty and ugliness, love and fear, kindness and cruelty, and, indeed, comedy and seriousness. These fragile doubles are used to illuminate the inherent ambiguity that defines the American Dream, and American life itself. To avoid the American nightmare, it seems as though Lynch’s work stresses the need to see through, between and beyond these doubles and to refrain from relying on any single identity. It is when the characters (and critics) abide by these doubles that reality collapses, when the understanding of humanity and form falls into stringent (and supposedly opposing) categories of good and evil, right and wrong, that the nightmare occurs.
This is seen in many scenes in Lynch’s work. In Twin Peaks, at Laura’s funeral, Bobby Briggs criticizes the town and himself for failing Laura: “You want to know who killed Laura? You did! We all did.” Of this scene, blogger Jake Hinkson argues, “‘Who Killed Laura Palmer?’ is just the hook. The deeper mystery, it is becoming clear to me, is really ‘Who Was Laura Palmer?’” (2014). Both Donna and James feel regret for not having helped Laura when they had the chance, while Donna wonders whether she knew her best friend well enough. Others, such as Josie Packard, also realize too late that they could have helped Laura; for instance, Josie could have done so after Laura confided in her. When she is interrogated by Cooper and Truman, Josie recounts her last encounter with Laura: “Something was bothering her but we did not have a heart-to-heart on it. She said one thing, though, which stuck to my mind. She said, ‘I think now I know how you feel about your husband’s death.’” Truman, as well, is unable to reconcile Laura’s secret life with her seemingly perfect one. When Cooper discovers cocaine among Laura’s belongings, Harry refuses to believe it; his assertion “Mr. Cooper, you didn’t know Laura Palmer” shows that Truman’s conception of Laura cannot possibly include anything such as drug use (let alone sexual promiscuity). In effect, nobody knows Laura, not because they didn’t have the chance, but, perhaps, because they did not want to know.
In the gaps between the two Lauras, in those moments when Laura does, in fact, emerge as a real individual, nobody responds sufficiently, and so she retreats into herself, allowing her double life to continue unresolved, until she is discovered dead, and the collective dream that the town attached to Laura is shattered, and the nightmare begins. The important point of Laura’s presence in Twin Peaks is that while there must be a sincere sense of self in Laura, we never see it. The series begins with Laura’s death, and so viewers never gain access to Laura’s self. We know Laura only through others, and see only fragments of her identity, through flashbacks, diary entries, and descriptions of her by others, all of which serve to construct only part of Laura’s identity, but not a conclusive whole. The town’s inability to see or accept the other sides of Laura threatens their very relationship with her and their sense of ease and happiness. Their rejection of and/or disbelief in Laura’s darker self is not only a rejection of the bleak nature of reality but also symptomatic of an almost pathological attachment to the American Dream.
Laura embodies all that is ideal and hopeful, possessing no concrete character of her own outside of what others see. To the townspeople Laura is only an idealistic image of goodness, and when this image fails, the town descends into chaos and nightmare, and their image of Laura is shattered, becoming a catalyst for descent. Because the American Dream is so ideally constructed, it cannot be realized since it has no basis within reality. As the embodiment of the American Dream, Laura is denied a chance to have her own sense of self that is separate from everyone’s ideals of her.
Thus the American nightmare is not merely the failure or destruction of the American Dream; rather, the American nightmare is the realization that the American Dream is, in fact, illusory, a dream that could never be made real, a myth culturally propagated that disappears in the grim face of reality. Lynch’s American nightmare—like Kubrick’s—emphasizes that the American Dream does not exist, and can never exist, since reality and humanity cannot be based on doubles of right and wrong alone, but are, in fact, a very complex fusion of such characteristics. The American Dream thus only produces disillusionment and depression for those who invested too heavily in the absurdity of the dream. Within all of his works, David Lynch works tirelessly to demystify these dreams that define America in a similar manner to Kubrick, whose narrative of a young girl’s destruction at the hands of patriarchal perversion symbolizes the American nightmare. Both Lynch and Kubrick, in their use of creative doubling and thematic focus on beauty and innocence, illustrate the disastrous consequences of continuing to circulate the myth of the American Dream.
1. Though the murder as depicted in Fire Walk with Me might be seen to render this question of guilt ambiguous, within the television series, BOB is assigned blame for the murder.
Appel, Alfred. The Annotated Lolita: Annotated Edition. London: Penguin Classics. 2000.
Atkinson, Michael. Blue Velvet (BFI Modern Classics). London: British Film Institute, 1997.
Ayers, Sheli. “Twin Peaks, Weak Language and the Resurrection of Affect.” In The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. 93–107.
Brown, Willa. “Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents.” Dec. 10, 2014. Accessed May 13, 2015 http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/lumbersexuality-and-its-discontents/383563.
Donlon, Helen. According to ... David Lynch: A Selection of His Finest Quotes. London: A Jot, 2007.
Dyer, Richard. “Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda.” In Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 91–100.
Ebert, Roger. “Blue Velvet.” RogerEbert.com, Sept. 19, 1986. Accessed May 13, 2015, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/blue-velvet-1986.
Hinkson, Jake. “Twin Peaks Rewatch: Episode 4: Rest in Pain.”’ CriminalElement.com, March 14, 2014. Accessed April 30, 2015 http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2014/03/twin-peaks-rewatch-episode-4-rest-in-peace-jake-hinkson.
Hoberman, James Lewis. Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media. Culture and the Moving Image Series. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Hughes, David. ‘halloffame david lynch, weird on top…’ Empire, Nov. 2001. Accessed May 31, 2015. http://www.davidlynch.de/empire2001.html.
Mazierska, Ewa. Nabokov’s Cinematic Afterlife. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.
McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. Film and Culture Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Meyer, Priscilla. “Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist?” Division III Faculty Publications. Paper 305. Accessed July 15, 2016.http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1304&context=div3facpubs.
Mir, Shaun “Twin Peaks.” Art of the Title, Sept. 11, 2012. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/twin-peaks/.
Murray, S. “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me: The Press Conference at Cannes 1992.” David Lynch: Interviews. Ed. Richard Barney. Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. 134–45.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufman. Toronto: Random House, 1967.
Olson, Greg. David Lynch: Beautiful Dark. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2008.
Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Weishaar, Schuy R. Masters of the Grotesque: The Cinema of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2000.