Twin Peaks Bombs the American Dream

Or, Time for something arguably not as different as it seems

One of my first published pieces to discuss Star Trek at any length was an n+1 article on prequels. Informed by my history as an apologist for Enterprise—and anticipating my even greater defense of Discovery season 1 (and only season 1!)—the essay explores the question of why fans tend to hate prequels so much and why studios keep doing them even so. Since that time, it seems that tempers have cooled on the prequel question. On the one hand, we may have simply been beaten into submission by the glut of franchise material and given up on complaining about particular strains of franchise storytelling. On the other hand, it’s indisputable that prequels have increased markedly in quality. Better Call Saul has been praised as better than its parent show and even as the last true “prestige” series. Closer to home, Andor is actually a second-degree prequel to the prequel film Rogue One, and it’s obviously the best thing Star Wars has ever done.

And then there’s Twin Peaks, which was early to the game with its 1992 prequel film Fire Walk With Me. At first coldly received, it has since been acknowledged as one of director David Lynch’s top-tier masterpieces. And even in the context of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), which finally moved the story forward to great acclaim, the best episode—indeed, arguably the best TV episode of all time—is largely taken up with a prequel story about the origin of the entire cast of evil supernatural characters from the first successful nuclear test in 1945. (Can we therefore say that Oppenheimer is a second-degree prequel to Twin Peaks: The Return?) What makes the episode so effective, aside from its sheer unexpectedness, is how thoroughly it embraces the gesture of the prequel retcon. It provides an origin story behind the “franchise” mythology surrounding supernatural characters like Killer BOB, the mysterious JUDY, etc., and it does so in a way that increases the stakes of the death of Laura Palmer. More than that, though, it helps to clarify what Lynch is actually after thematically—namely, a critique of the entire postwar American dream.

The viewer of the original series could be forgiven for thinking that Twin Peaks was a fundamentally nostalgic narrative about a lost small-town idyll that is being destroyed by the forces of neoliberalism. The short first season ends with the destruction of the town’s saw mill, which in any case was up for sale to investors who wanted to convert the working-class community into a tourist destination. A Japanese interloper—played by Joan Chen, a good sport who nonetheless always appears confused as to why she’s part of the series at all—already threatened the ownership of this crucial source of all-American jobs, an echo of the late-80s/early-90s scare about Japan buying up iconic American properties and destroying jobs through their superior auto industry. The town is awash in drugs and prominent citizens are involved in sex trafficking—both involving trips across the U.S.-Canadian border that appear narratively gratuitous but help to tap into anxieties about globalization.

Even the apparent counter-evidence to this nostalgic narrative can be squared with it. For instance, we learn that the town has been afflicted by supernatural forces for generations, but those forces are located in precisely the territory (Ghostwood) that the short-sighted investors have targetted for their resort. Even if there are deeper forces at work, then, they were kept in check (by generations of brave Bookhouse Boys) prior to the investors’ arrival. Indeed, it now occurs to me that Laura Palmer’s death occurs on the very day that the real estate deal (with foreign investors, no less) was supposed to go through! More difficult to reconcile is the fact that the evil that caused Laura’s death literally came from “inside the house,” in the form of her father, Leland Palmer. But he, too, is aligned with the forces of neoliberalism, since he is the lawyer behind the Ghostwood deal and insists on returning to work as quickly as possible.

So far, so Trumpian—foreigners are flooding our communities with drugs, trafficking our women, destroying our manly jobs…. Even in the original series, I don’t think this is the last word by far, but that narrative is what most immediately leaps to mind on a first viewing. Already in Fire Walk With Me, we can perhaps see a course correction, as the emphasis shifts to the nightmare of the Palmers’ abusive household and (aside from Jacques Renault, whose presence is necessary to maintain plot continuity) there are no trips to Canada, much less any discussion of real estate deals with foreigners (even though Leland presumably would have been working on them at the time, hence creating a potential plot hook). The evil that destroys Laura is all-American. And I think we can say the same of the the transformation of Dale Cooper—the very embodiment of American wholesomeness and cultural authority—into Evil Cooper in the original series finale. At that point, the villain is a rogue FBI agent, Joan Chen’s character has been transformed into a screaming doorknob, and any cross-border plots have fallen by the wayside.

The Return’s prequel episode follows the trajectory of the original finale and Fire Walk With Me back to the very origin point of America’s postwar global hegemony—the detonation of the atomic bomb. This burst of evil energy creates chaos in the spirit world, releasing avatars for BOB as well as Laura (now revealed to be the incarnation of a spirit entity) and the mysterious JUDY, who infects the teenage Sarah Palmer. Once again the action is all-American, and the threat of Japanese dominance is replaced by the hideously deformed Asian woman who turns out to be serving as a hiding place for the real Diane—and whose eyes are completely obliterated, perhaps a reference to the Japanese people who witnessed the nuclear bombing up close.

This is not to say that neoliberal themes are absent in The Return. Evil Cooper has of course become a billionaire protected by multiple layers of shell companies, buying up precious New York real estate that will mostly sit idle (i.e., the warehouse where he has set a trap for Regular Cooper), while the good half of Cooper, embodied in the hapless Dougie, lands in the most emphatically and tackily American setting of all—namely, the ruins of the overextended suburban sprawl outside Las Vegas. And for a brief moment, it could appear that the forces of nostalgia win out when Good Cooper defeats Evil Cooper and finally returns to full strength with all his effortless authority.

Yet, as David Auerbach’s masterful fan theory shows us, that is not the end of the story. I won’t go too far into detail on his interpretation, which is very much worth reading for any Twin Peaks fan, but in short, Auerbach proposes that in the final episodes of The Return, we learn that Cooper does not destroy his evil side so much as reunite with it—giving him the strength and ruthlessness he needs to finally destroy the evil JUDY, who feeds off human suffering. When Cooper mysteriously goes back in time to the events of Fire Walk With Me and rescues Laura prior to her murder, he isn’t trying to prevent her suffering, but preserve it, so that he can use her to lure JUDY into a kind of pocket dimension. There, Auerbach argues, Cooper hoped to use Laura as a kind of bomb whose incredible suffering—remember that, in the film, she has just learned unequivocally that she has been habitually raped by her own father—can serve as a kind of bomb that will overwhelm and destroy JUDY.

Let’s translate this into political terms. BOB is a stand-in for what it is about America that emerges most forcefully in the neoliberal era—the embodiment of BOB does, after all, become a billionaire. JUDY, embodied in the distinctively American figure of a housewife, represents what it is about America that came to the fore in the immediate postwar era. And in order to defeat and destroy them both, our heroes must simultaneously destroy the seed of good represented by Laura, after filling her to the brim with suffering.

It’s not about saving some nostalgic vision of America, not about retrieving some lost past, but about blowing up the whole project, which—for all its undisputed charm and appeal, for all the moments of real human value it enabled—is founded on an unspeakable evil. I think we can see this shift of valance in one of the most upsetting scenes from The Return, namely the hit-and-run in which Richard Horne (later revealed to be the offspring of BOB/Evil Cooper and Audrey) kills a young boy. We have seen this intersection before in Fire Walk With Me, in a scene where MIKE (the one-armed man) pulls up alongside Leland and Laura’s car and screams at them. The site where some very very specific plotlines and characters intersected has become the site of the most quotidian horror of the American way of life, a car accident. That anonymous suffering—the boy is never named—is absorbed seamlessly into the power grid that JUDY feeds on. No character is there to notice this crucial “clue.” It’s just another day in America. The boy’s death is produced by the most basic infrastructure of our life, the automobile and the power line.

Or at least that’s how I see it now, after a recent rewatch inspired by David Lynch’s death. In any case, thanks for your patience with a post only very tendentiously related to this blog’s theme. I promise I will return to regularly scheduled Star Trek programming—though I would be interested to learn whether subscribers would be open to more excursions to other fields of pop culture studies.