The Greatest Mystery Series Ever Made Was Never About The Mystery
Who killed Laura Palmer?
When you watch Twin Peaks today, you still sense that David Lynch and Mark Frost’s supernatural mystery series was like nothing else on television. In the opening minutes of the pilot — which is available in 4K on the re-released Twin Peaks: From Z to A Blu-ray — prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is discovered dead and wrapped in plastic on the riverbank of the small Washington town. Although we soon learn that darkness has long lived under Twin Peaks’ dreamy, kitschy atmosphere, Laura’s murder is an unignorable breach of cruelty and violence into a picturesque world.
A horrid murder tainting an artificially peaceful small town is not a novel premise, but the enduring power of Twin Peaks isn’t solely because Lynch and Frost turned it into a show about FBI hunting demons hiding among Douglas Firs and cosy family homes. Twin Peaks is fluent in the language of network soaps and procedurals from the ‘80s and ‘90s — episodes are defined by the interweaving of melodrama and feuds vying for our attention against a beautiful but haunted backdrop.
Yes, it’s a show about Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) finding Laura’s sadistic culprit in a sea of depravity and ghosts (at least for half of the 30-episode original run), but at different points, it’s also about waitress Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick) and teen criminal Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) getting revenge on Shelly’s abusive boyfriend. Or, it’s Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) trying to get her in the favor of her crush Cooper by repeatedly putting herself in danger. Or, it’s about the vile greed of the town’s major capitalists, Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) and Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie).
These are clearly B-plots, as there’s no doubt audiences tuned in week after week to find out, first and foremost, who killed Laura Palmer. But these are all storylines you’d be likely to find on programs like Dallas, Dynasty, or The Young and the Restless — and the incremental build-ups of tension and releases of information all designed around commercial breaks are the lifeblood of Twin Peaks as much as the spiritual dreams, the absurd comedy, or ballad interludes. Lynch’s use (or to his critics, dependence) on irony often circulates discussions of his work, but his first television sensation hooked viewers because underneath the warm, arch, surreal style, it operated on established and uniquely televisual structure that Lynch and Frost know is bewitching and cathartic. Twin Peaks is not about the mystery; it’s about how mysteries are told.
The spell of strangeness and disorder cast over Laura’s hometown is difficult to break, even after her killer is found (prematurely, from Lynch and Frost’s point of view — ABC forced the reveal to combat declining ratings). After her death, we see friends and acquaintances crumple in each other’s arms, showcasing behavior that’s unnaturally somber, eccentric, or self-destructive, but always believably human. The gap between a mystery and its solution is like a gulf between sense and disorder, and Twin Peaks is primarily interested in the spectrum of humanity that you can see (through a stylized lens) when you realize the world around you is operating on a different wavelength. Every storyline is driven by feeling — the hope of finding love and peace with others, or a dread that true evil lives among us, under the earth, and in our homes. The hermetically-sealed melodrama of Twin Peaks isn’t trying to undermine popular television language, rather it admires its design: the soap opera is primarily a tool to make you return, again and again, to a world where something craves resolution. This desire defines Twin Peaks more than any killer plot could.
Twin Peaks’ great success was not in its mystery but its people and strange subplots.
In extending the original run of Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost adopted completely different tones and structures to emphasize the loss of innocence at the heart of the project. Fire Walk With Me (also included in the From Z to A boxset) is a prequel focusing on the last days of Laura’s life, and recenters the girl wrapped in plastic in her own story. It’s a shocking, painful, and experimentally empathetic portrait of abuse and agency that recovered from its initial critical panning to be viewed today as one of Lynch’s greatest films. The film returns to the site of her suffering to undermine the procedural pleasure of her murder investigation and attempts to place her somewhere beyond the borders of a digestible television mystery — a place not of restored order, but rather spiritual peace.
In the seven years since Showtime aired The Return (also included on From Z to A), no American media has come close to its ill-fated, melancholy thesis on our morbid interest in returning to incomplete stories. Having moved on from 20th century melodrama, Lynch and Frost ape the style of modern, multi-story prestige crime TV, deconstructing the temptation of nostalgia as a slow, doomed realization dawns on the viewer: looking for answers may very well kill us.
Viewed as a staggering trilogy spanning over 25 years, the complete Twin Peaks is a serialized meditation on the walls that good and evil put up between us. Viewed as a whole, it remains a lasting, collaborative, experimental thesis on humanity as viewed through mystery and melodrama — for better or worse. Trust us: you will get answers, just not the ones you expect.
