Nicholas Birns
TELLING INSIDE FROM OUTSIDE, OR,
WHO REALLY KILLED LAURA PALMER
i
The question of "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" received its determinate
answer on November 10, 1990. But this does not mean that the question
has been fully decided. Indeed, much of the force and interest of the
mystery in the first place proceeded from the inherently undecidable fashion
in which the series posed the question.
There was a primary, very dramatic ambiguity in the way the question
was overtly answered. In the classic style of the romantic doppelgänger,
Laura's killer, although utilizing the form of Leland Palmer, seemed to in fact
have had an entirely separate identity, the psychotic "Bob."ii The show
maintained interest in what is basically a received convention by the rigor
with which it held out the possibility of both a natural and supernatural
solution. As the appropriately initialed Thomas Pynchon put it at the close of
The Crying of Lot 49, "Either you have stumbled indeed . . . onto a secret
richness and density of dream . . . or you are hallucinating it." Twin Peaks
explored the allure of the supernatural without ever privileging or mystifying
it. By focusing on the indecisiveness of the uncanny rather than its
possession of an occulted truth, Twin Peaks explored both levels without
ever firmly adhering to either of them.
This was an aspect of the show's general achievement, which was to
combine high romantic pathos with postmodern pastiche. The emotional
power of the show was not ironized by the pervasive aura of satiric
appropriation and self-reference. Rather, it was vouchsafed by it. We were
moved all the more because the show renounced any restrictive and
manipulative claims to a mimetic meaning that would have an unmediated,
originative import. In fact, the central drama of Twin Peaks is inseparable
from its various modes of self-reference. A key instance of this occurs in
Episode 1007, where, in a way that allegorically tropes the series' reticence
about ultimate questions, we are brought close to but are not shown the
identity of the murderer. This occurs in both formal and thematic registers.
The show's ever-present formal self-awareness had previously been
ramified by the Invitation to Love show, which is watched by the characters
in Twin Peaks much as Twin Peaks is watched by viewers in the outside
world. When Invitation to Love is first introduced in Episode 1002, when it is
watched by Shelly Johnson, we recognize its fictionality by the way in which
the names of the actors are verbally spoken by a voice-over during the
theme song, for example, "Selina Swift as Jade and Emerald, Evan St.
Vincent as Jared Lancaster." Before they are presented as personalities, the
mimetic trope by which they are to be represented is explicitly announced.
There is no possibility we will take the characters in Invitation to Love as
Bradleyan autonomous personalities independent of a fictive frame. Thus, by
implication, we are not to regard those in Twin Peaks in this fashion either.
By its ironic stance toward the internal drama, Twin Peaks undercuts any
claims to an excessive or exclusive veracity or numinosity.
Invitation to Love seems at times to frame and mirror the larger action
outside of it. In Episode 1007, when Leo Johnson is shot by the offhandedly
affectless Hank Jennings, Invitation to Love displays Montana, the young,
angry, archetypical 1960s rogue male who is obviously Leo's surrogate,
being shot by Chet, who is old enough to be Montana's father despite being
married to one of the twins (Jade and Emerald), who are the sisters of
Montana's significant other. The twins earlier have been seen as surrogates
for Laura and her cousin, double, and eventual fellow victim, Madeleine. Leo
is not only likened in role and character to Montana, but he has earlier been
associated with Montana (the state) when he is said to be driving a truck
there in Episode 1006. Thus both Leo and the father-surrogate, as mimed by
Chet and Montana, are linked romantically to Laura. The internal
metaphorics of this episode point to the local mogul Ben Horne, who
subsidizes and sanctions Hank's shooting of Leo.
Horne is indicated because he is at the top of the social pyramid of
Twin Peaks. He is a sort of civic father figure, who could function doubly as
the pillar of the community by day, and by night as the master hand behind
the indefinable evil that circulates around Twin Peaks, just as he is the
guiding force behind the various ordinary crimes of prostitution, fraud, drug
dealing, and arson attempts that characterize the town's quotidian level of
maleficence. In the first year's episodes. Ben Horne is the nodal figure in the
surface plot-action, since much of the action is either orchestrated by him or
(as in Audrey's and Agent Cooper's investigations at One-Eyed Jack's) are
directed at him. A figure who is at once an established, mature adult yet also
an active, erotic agent, capable of wooing a young girl, he clearly operates
as the reflection for Chet in the internal drama. Therefore, if we are to
accept the apparent mandate of that drama, Horne must by this logic be the
killer.
It took a long time for Horne to emerge this clearly. Our suspicion was
initially directed by the narrative to Laura's immediate romantic interests,
Bobby Briggs and James Hurley, and other of Laura's friends and
contemporaries. But after the first few episodes, the viewer was aware that
the extent of the mystery needed a figure of power and complexity to stand
behind it; and that figure, given the nature of American society. would
necessarily have to be a mature male. Even Leo, who is sufficiently violent
and disturbed to have committed the crime, cannot provide a solution that
would truly satisfy the viewer. Leo's viciousness does not automatically
connote power. His abusive rage, which he regards as an unmediated
expression of his own personality, is in fact underwritten by a larger social
mechanism manipulated by Horne, who can choose to put him out of action
on a whim. The charismatic immaturity that made Leo both fascinating and
repellent also made him unable to embody the specter of a larger, more
conceptual question to which the Laura Palmer solution would be a clue
rather than the end in itself.
In the case of Ben Horne, the contours of this larger question are
primarily political ones. As Mark Frost has stated, Horne and his brother
Jerry were intended to be modeled on Jack and Bobby Kennedy (this was
overtly mentioned in Episode 2018). It is not far-fetched to suppose that the
senior Horne brother represents the disillusionment with the Kennedy legend
of the David Lynch who was an Eagle Scout at Kennedy's inauguration in
1961. Horne embodies a superficially charismatic vitality barely concealing a
borderline-criminal subversiveness which lent the surface its constitutive
dynamism, a combination that seems more and more to have been
characteristic of the late 35th President.
The minatory contours of Ben Horne's dark charisma are not only
evident in his various connivings, but in his choice of associates in these
exploits. Horne seems to have a peculiar predilection for cohorts of Northern
European descent. Examples abound: his involvement with the Norwegians
whose departure is prompted by Laura's murder; the carousing Icelanders
who replace them; and, tacitly, his dealings with Josie Packard's all-tooprecipitously dispatched mentor, the South African Thomas Eckhardt. These
various intrigues are indicative of an intuitive proto-Aryan bonding, an
alliance only with those sufficiently lily-white to be part of Horne’s echt
American coalition. (Admittedly, Horne is very ready to accept Japanese
investment in the second season. However, this is after we are reasonably
sure that he is not the murderer, and the Japanese investor is in fact
someone far closer to home.)
Much has been written about Lynch's conservative politics and his admiration
of Ronald Reagan, but there is a political critique to Twin Peaks beyond
simply exposing the dark secrets beneath American middle-class life. At the
party he throws for the prospective Icelandic investors in Episode 1005, Ben
Horne takes the time to mention his admiration of the Nobel-Prize winning
Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun. Hamsun is principally known for his
collaboration with the Nazis late in life; the viewer is thus invited to place
Horne in Hamsun's political company.iii
Horne-as-murderer, that ever-hypothetical construct, would represent
the probity of American society undermined by being taken itself to an
extreme. This would resemble the real-life attempt of the ultra-right
vigilante groups to be found in places near the region where Twin Peaks is
set to subvert the American government by an excess of so-called
Americanism. The murder of Laura Palmer is here a cult sacrifice required by
Horne's political regimen. To satisfy Horne's perverted kernel of Aryan
essence, that which is most beautiful in America would have to be killed
because it somehow marred the impossible and ultimately ugly absolutes
exalted by far-right dogma. If Horne is the murderer, the secrets to be found
in Twin Peaks are not supernatural, but all too natural. Horne's particular
psychosis would connote not the purely mystical, but the pragmatically
mystified. Thus the entire motif of schizophrenia would have been more or
less eliminated. If Ben Horne's physical form had been the "host" for Bob,
the evil spirit would have been less a negation of Ben's everyday persona
than a violent exaggeration of a potential that was already there. Ben Horne
as a criminal would represent a reification of this-worldly power, rather than
an irruption of supernatural evil onto an innocent world.
By the last episode of the first season, Ben's daughter Audrey is hardly
the only person who tends to suspect that he is the culprit. Too many formal
devices point in this direction, one of which is the similarities of Ben's boon-
companion relationship with his brother Jerry to the fraternal kinship of
"Mike" and "Bob " in Cooper's dream (and as we are to find out in the second
season in "reality" as well).iv Yet the thematic direction to this episode is
quite otherwise, because, in the spree of murder attempts that take place
here, only one person is actually and unqualifiedly killed: the sleazy and
obese Jacques Renault, who is strangled by Laura Palmer's father, Leland. In
diegetic rather than strictly formal terms, Leland is by far a more "satisfying"
solution than Ben Horne. Part of this satisfaction simply comes from its more
shocking content. The thematic import of incestuous, schizophrenic mania
appeals far more to the viewer's sense of already whetted desire for
revelation of a great secret than of what is dramatically powerful. Leland's
double identity filled the metaphysical plenum that we have been urged to
believe is behind the murder.
This satisfaction, ironically, comes from the fact that Leland's
culpability is much harder for the viewer to accept. Twin Peaks, like the
Trauerspiel or German tragic drama described by Walter Benjamin, is a
spectacle of mourning that does not offer its audience any pleasing
consolation in the face of irremediable loss (Origins). As the episodes go on,
the mystery thickens, and no solution is in sight; the outlets for the
audience's vicarious mourning are stifled, leading them to become
necessarily more intense. In this way, Leland, whose response to his loss is
clearly the most agonized and tormented of Laura's mourners, becomes the
surrogate for the audience, just as much as the more formally obvious
surrogate roles assumed by Lucy Moran by her voice-over during
commercials or, of course, by Agent Cooper, who is investigating the solution
to the murder just as we are.
Viewer identification with Leland's frustrated and inameliorable
mourning makes us empathize with Leland so much that he is the last person
we would wish to have committed the crime, even as the external evidence
mounts against him. The revelation of Leland's guilt makes us feel almost
responsible for the crime as well. Leland as murderer satisfies entirely
different emotional demands than Ben as murderer. Ben is the kernel of
malice in our outer world; Leland is a similar kernel grafted by the show onto
our own psyches. We wanted Ben to have done it; Leland's complicity is the
truth that we find we "unconsciously" knew all the time, however much we
were loath to face it.
The Leland solution, in its intensely personal nature and implications,
operates to privatize the entire mystery, stripping it of much of its public
dimension. Leland's role as Ben Horne's attorney does not seem to
contribute to or fortify his violent acts, but rather serves, in a predictable
way, to conceal them under the mantle of propriety. This was one of the
advantages of the Leland solution to the show's continuing rationale; with
the Laura Palmer murder not quite serving to reveal all the buried secrets of
the community, there could be further plot developments and thus more to
the series (an outcome which seems, sadly, to have alienated many of the
show's initial viewers). The Leland solution was not just "appealing" in an
inverse psychological way, but it also seemed more profound because less
overt, because it ran against the grain of many of the show's formal
suggestions and thus seemed to testify to a hidden truth which we at first
could not see. But the Leland solution is not simply a product of consistent
internal dynamics within Twin Peaks. That the Leland solution was convincing
was also enabled by external evidence. not only that brought to bear by the
detectives within the show but by larger resonances between Twin Peaks and
other works of art, what we might call intertextualities.
The links between Twin Peaks and certain literary themes and
traditions, such as the Gothic and the American “romance,” have been noted
since the very first reviews of the show. The Gothic resemblances were
obvious from the beginning, the “romance” ones emerged concomitantly with
the sense we began to have of the importance of the place of Twin Peaks,
the uncanniness of its natural flora and fauna and the way in which their
human counterparts seemed to mingle or even conflate their identities with
them (for example. the Log Lady), and the much-remarked-upon concealing
of dark secrets beneath a serene pastoral tableau.
The name Agent Dale "Cooper" immediately suggests the author of the
Leatherstocking novels, which portray characters determined to subdue the
very wilderness from which the novels derived their appeal. Similarly, when
Audrey "goes undercover" at One-Eyed Jack's in Episode 1006, she claims to
be named Hester Prynne not just out of a sense of sophomoric transgression
but to fortify the show's intertextual linkage with works in this romance
tradition such as The Scarlet Letter (which one doubts Blackie read in high
school if she was educated on the Canadian side of the border). In the
second year of Twin Peaks, more specific intersexual suggestions abound.
These suggestions themselves comment on an interesting aspect of the way
in which Twin Peaks was initially televised in 1990.
By having the first eight episodes televised in the late spring, ending
the first season without the murderer being revealed, and filling the summer
with anticipation and suspense on the part of viewers of the show, not only
was a great drama set up about the identity of the murderer, but the second
season inevitably became a separate phenomenon from the first. The first
eight shows were closely scrutinized, subjected to much concerted
interpretation. This scrutiny was so great that any attempt to unravel their
enigma inevitably took on the aura of supplementary commentary rather
than primary text. This is obvious in the case of the many wild speculations
on the dream sequence thought up by obsessed amateurs. What is more
paradoxical is the succeeding episodes of the show themselves as also
partaking of this kind of supplementary speculation. The long (in television
terms) temporal separation between the posing of the enigma and its
putative solution made the second season not completely privileged as a
holder of the solution of the first. Lynch and Frost commented on their initial
creation in the second season as much, if necessarily more authoritatively,
as would anyone else.
As commentary as well as continuation, the interpolation of American
romance motifs in the second season is striking. The key staging point in this
interpolation occurs in Episode 2005. Here, Judge Sternwood, on determining
bail for Leland in the murder of Jacques Renault, refers to the prominence of
the Palmer family in the region since the arrival of Leland's grandfather,
Joshua Palmer. Leland's grandfather had previously been in the minds of the
audience because of Leland's revelation that as a boy he had seen Bob on
the vacant lot next to his grandfather's house at Pearl Lake. The name
"Joshua" connotes the Biblical conqueror of Canaan, the pioneer determined
to establish himself in a new land.v This patriarchal theme, of a frontier
founder-figure giving rise to a family that eventually is cursed by misfortune
and insanity, is familiar in American literature from novels such as
Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom! The predecessor novel it most immediately brings to mind, though,
is Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 novel Wieland, said to be a "genuine
precursor" of more famous novels such as The Scarlet Letter (Chase 29).
There are several intriguing similarities between Wieland and Twin Peaks.vi
Wieland is the story of an immigrant family from Germany which establishes
a country residence in a bucolic area outside Philadelphia. The patriarch of
the family is sitting in his summerhouse one day when he suddenly
decomposes, apparently as a result of spontaneous combustion. As his
daughter Clara, who tells the story, says, "It had the brightness of flame, but
was without its upward motion" (Brown 37). This recalls the frequent
imagery of flame in Twin Peaks, most strikingly in Bob's wildly scrawled
slogan, "Fire-walk with me."
The spontaneous combustion also connotes symbolically the idea of the
stable patriarch becoming somehow unhinged, succumbing to disordering
tendencies within himself. The resonances become stronger when we come
to the second generation of Wielands: where the son, Theodore Wieland,
hears voices in his mind commanding him to murder his wife and daughters,
voices whose mandate he dutifully obeys. But this point, the resemblances
become forceful enough that it does not take a linguistic (anti-) genius of the
order of Jacques Derrida to hear the phonic similarity between "Wieland" and
"Leland," who is also taken over by an evil presence and commanded to
perform vile deeds. The correspondence between the two works is not oneto-one. Wieland's daughters, far from being the captivating figure that Laura
is even after her death, are basically faceless ciphers.
On the other hand, Wieland's sister Clara, who represents the
principles of civilization and sanity in the book, has no obvious counterpart in
Twin Peaks. Donna Hayward would perhaps be the closest equivalent, but
she is much too young and is kept at too peripheral a remove from the core
of the mystery. Rather than being simply a transposed Wieland, Twin Peaks
merely takes up appropriate Wielandian themes and images and moves them
three thousand miles west to Washington State in a kind of translation
psychopathii. A prime example of this is the summerhouse in which Wieland
senior spontaneously combusts, which bears a notable architectural similarity
to the gazebo in Easter Park where Laura for a brief time is “resurrected."
This example shows that the appropriation is in no way direct or mechanical.
It is far more a matter of the overlap of images and semiotic fragments that
makes it cognitively enriching to read the later text by light of the earlier.
For instance, there is much discussion in Wieland of extreme
Protestant or proto-Protestant sects, groups like the Camisards or the
Albigensians, whose radical enthusiasm may have generated Wieland's
susceptibility to inner voices. The contemporary equivalents of these are
prominent in Twin Peaks in the many references to Tibetan religion and other
Oriental or pseudo-Oriental vehicles of the occult. The territorial setting is
another bond shared by the two works: not only its prominence in both, but
its nature, a wilderness superficially tamed by civilization but still eligible as
the metaphorical vehicle for human violence and disorder. Material
suggestions fortify this kinship. such as the eventual disclosure that Agent
Cooper was raised in the Philadelphia area where Wieland is set, and thus
has been in both locales.vii On a more conceptual level. the settings of the
two works have a similar sense of the relatively recent dispossession of the
Native American population; the haunting residues left by their memory,
albeit dialectically "displaced" into the psyches of the current occupants of
European descent. Of course, there are many differences as well. The major
one being that the voices which prompt Wieland to murder his family do not
come only from the delusions of his own mind, but from the uncanny and
malevolent ability of the visitor Carwin to throw his own voice. Carwin thus
projects into Wieland's mind commands which were not there at all.
The methods of Bob/Leland in Twin Peaks differ totally. Bob's internal
pathology is palliated by no such auxiliary, external agent. Yet "agent" is a
key word here, which shows that even disjunctions between intertexts can
show new ways of reading them, because there is no one in the book whom
Carwin, if his personality was suitably lightened, would resemble as much as
Agent Cooper. They are both primarily ratiocinative minds who have to
operate within the realm of the intuitive to fully display, in a Poe-esque way,
their intellectual brilliance. We need to remember that Cooper has an
unusual access into Leland's/Bob's mind, as well as the revelation in Episode
2009 that in the dream he shared with Laura the aged version of Cooper
was, in Laura's view, possibly Bob's former ally "Mike."viii In this light,
elements of collaboration between detective and criminal enter the picture
subtending the more prominent and ultimately more important themes of
opposition; and Carwin and Cooper have more in common than their names
both having six letters and beginning with “C.” These sorts of parallels get
gratuitous after a point, and should not be relentlessly executed. Twin Peaks,
if not organically greater than the sum of its parts or sources, is considerably
more elusive than any one of them.
But it is not gratuitous at all to insist on an intertextual aspect to the
Leland solution. The inseparability of this solution from questions of
authorship is indicated by the on-screen presence of David Lynch himself
shortly before the murder was solved, as if he were providing a kind of
"signature.”ix Lynch's authorial presence reminds us that Twin Peaks is a
fiction, and thus can resonate off other fictions. The Wieland solution is not
the only possible intertextual one, but it is the strongest candidate, just as
the "Leland" solution, six shows into the second season, was not
authoritatively established but nonetheless seemed inevitable.x Thus the
solution itself goes outside the strictly defined perimeters of the show and
solicits readings of the other texts in order to achieve its most ample
ramifications. Twin Peaks is implicated in an order of literary and cultural
history not entirely its own. This allusiveness cannot be simply dismissed as
a postmodern sympathy with the simulacrum or a desire to collapse meaning
into received images. Many negative comments that the series received after
the initial burst of enthusiasm among the intelligentsia had been made on
this basis, that Twin Peaks is nothing but a frivolous encyclopedia of popularculture clichés. The rigorous intertextual focus demanded by the Leland
Palmer solution, the way it demanded knowledge not just of films but of
books, echoed the series' overt claim to profundity as well as to parody, to
resonance as well as enigma.
Orthodox left-wing criticisms of Twin Peaks tended to see the series'
attention to the powers as well as the dangers of imagination, along with its
inability to take itself too seriously, as both evading social necessities and, in
addition, refraining from making the proper obeisance to the oppositional
pieties of high culture, which these perspectives tend to see as threatened in
themselves by the medium of television. This is not to preclude serious
political discussion and critique of Twin Peaks; clearly, its depictions of
women, Native Americans, and other minorities (Canadians, for instance)
share a stereotypical bent with its many television counterparts, and are
rightly liable to criticism. Far from delegitimizing the series as an aesthetic
object, though, these critiques served a worthy purpose by preventing an
enthusiastic over-identification with the show on the part of the academic
critic, a "slumming" celebration of popular culture which would be the equally
bad obverse of a left-Tory rejection of it.
It would be a mistake to say that because the "solution" to the mystery
of Twin Peaks is not a simple and transparent one, that there is no solution
at all, and to thus simply blanket the series under a veil of postmodern
indeterminacy. Nonetheless, to privilege the Wieland solution would be to
neglect to notice the way in which even this solution is problematized. First
of all, it is only available through external evidence, through looking at
sources outside the show. To make the key to the mystery a quantity
external to the object in which the mystery is lodged is to sever almost
automatically the bonds of organic plausibility which make a solution
convincing. The series does not simply continue "Romance tradition" itself,
which, after all, has been sharply questioned by revisionary Americanist
scholarship.xi
Secondly, even the more internally available "Leland solution" did not
immediately leap into the viewer's mind from the evidence at hand, but was
assisted by outside commentary. The release of Jennifer Lynch's Secret Diary
of Laura Palmer shortly before the beginning of the second season in
September 1990 was not just a promotional epiphenomenon of the series,
but a crucial interpretive intervention upon it. (This intervention was not
necessarily Jennifer Lynch's; most likely the co-creators themselves
determined the thrust of the diary. But as far as the reading/viewing public
was concerned, the diary was the primary avatar of this knowledge.) The
diary strongly implied that Leland was the murderer, far more than anything
in the show had previously led us to believe; no other viable suspects
emerge from a close reading of the diary.
Thus the diary already pre-structured our willingness to accept Leland
as the murderer. The intertextuality between the diary and the show
operates in much the same way as that between Wieland and Twin Peaks,
where our reading of the written text indicates our interpretive framing of
the televised one. Notice, though, that not only are the traditional roles of
the verbal and the visual reversed (in that the visual or televisual is not an
illustration of the verbal, but is the illustration of it) but that in both cases
the verbal item is little more than an implement. The diary is not "the truth”
about Twin Peaks, but a promotional tool designed to tie in with the
denouement of the Laura Palmer mystery. Similarly, whatever Wieland is in
itself, in relation to Twin Peaks it is not "the truth," a confirming origin, an
enriching source. Whether the intertexuality was intended by the show's
creators or is only accidental, the book functions only to help us read the
television show, not to discipline it within some sort of American literary
continuum. It is after all hardly the only other literary or cinematic source
alluded to, overtly or covertly, in the show. It is merely one piece, in the
puzzle, not the whole puzzle at all.
Similarly, Lynch and Frost do not try to stage fetishistic darkness that
would constrain the definition of American expression by merely showing
Laura's murder as the inevitable harvest of the latent dark side of American
life. As Richard Beymer, the actor who played Ben Horne, has said of Lynch,
"Even if David takes you to a really dark place, he will lead you back to the
light" (Knight). Twin Peaks thus emerges as something very different from
the mainstream of the American romance tradition, defined by its critical
creator (and this is a phenomenon of criticism as much as it is of literature)
Richard Chase, as one of "radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and
disorder" (2). Lynch (and Frost, and the others who work with them) appears
uninterested in alienation and disorder, which if overly emphasized tend to
suggest that whatever predicaments are thematized in these negative states
will be healed by an accommodating social order. Lynch's work suggests
more a formal organization of material which achieves interest by using its
forms interrogatively rather than in a closed, autotelic fashion. The aura of
darkness and evil that emanates from Twin Peaks is one whose terror
achieves its fear and its thrill not through a palpable darkness, but through
an impalpable uncertainty.
Twin Peaks does not simply register some anterior evil lurking in the
American landscape or psyche, but constructs this evil (and its antithesis)
through a fruitful imbalance of its formal operations. Far from simply fitting
into a pre-established "romance" tradition, Twin Peaks challenges the basic
assumption of that tradition: that pessimism is somehow more real or true
than optimism. The show performs this challenge by making the evil catalytic
and maneuverable rather than dogmatic and manipulative, by making the
sinister hooting of "Bob" as much of a received image as the reassuring
presences of people like Dr. Hayward. Twin Peaks is not just a new bottle for
the old wine of American psychological catastrophe, but occupies a
previously unfilled place in the history of American cultural production.
This place is that of a "vestigial" (as Major Briggs might say) hint of a
phase of American literary history that never was, of an American
romanticism that would be neither transcendental in the manner of Emerson,
nature-oriented in the manner of Thoreau, or moralistic and symbolic in the
manner of Hawthorne. Twin Peaks has limned a combination of nature, spirit,
fear, and tropological density more characteristic of British High Romantics
such as Keats and Shelley than anyone in the American tradition.
Yet, just as these appreciative effusions have their limit, so does any
attempt to found an interpretive apparatus for Twin Peaks simply on the
revelations consequent to the discovery of the murderer's identity. It must
be remembered that the show's formal self-awareness, as manifested by
Invitation to Love, does not indicate Leland as the murderer. (The equivalent
of Leland's role in the internal drama, in fact, would be the character of Jared
Lancaster, the forlorn father of the twin girls, who seems desolated by the
aggression of the more virile males involved with his daughters, much as
Leland does when he pretends to believe Ben Horne and/or Jacques Renault
are the killers.) This is indicated by the fact that, when Twin Peaks begins to
overtly suggest the nature of the solution from the beginning of the second
year, Invitation to Love vanishes after appearing faithfully in the last six
episodes of the first year.
This disappearance is partially due to the fact that the solution within
the internal drama has been already played out, and it is at variance with the
one highlighted by the show. This has the benefit of not succumbing to the
banal and fruitless idea of the relationship between the internal and external
dramas being one between macrocosm and microcosm, with Twin Peaks
naively reflecting the closely wrought truths lodged in Invitation to Love. For
all the surface postmodernity of this notion, adhering to it does not produce
a self-fragmenting mise en abyme but a too-orderly Platonic system of
resemblance. The disjunction between Invitation to Love and Twin Peaks
ultimately overshadows the more meretricious conjunctions.
Yet in opting for the more narrationally satisfying and emotionally
ambitious solution (which also has the "advantage" of making the show's
obsession with violence against women as metaphorical as possible), Twin
Peaks does not forget the formal level either. This is shown in Episode 2007.
Here, Ben Horne, the formal culprit, is arrested as a result of a deductive
evidentiary process on Cooper's part, even as the narrative reveals Leland to
be the "actual" culprit, an actuality revealed to Cooper only on an intuitional
or “magical" level. To privilege narration over form is perhaps an inevitable
move on the part of both show and viewer. But it is not an unproblematic
one. In fact, the division between form and narration is not in itself
unproblematic, because the figure formally designated to be the murderer
incarnates the more thematically congenial political theme.
Conversely, in order to fully realize the resonance of the narrational solution
one has to go, as we have seen, outside the "story" itself. The question of
“Who Killed Laura Palmer" has not only two aspects to one answer, as the
Leland-Bob answer would propose. Rather, it has two different answers
entirely. Each of these is in turn riven by its own division into mutually
irreconcilable aspects. With regard to the goings-on in Twin Peaks, bridging
the gap between form and narrative may be as difficult a dilemma as telling
the inside from the outside of a doughnut.
Notes
i
This essay originally appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly 21.4 (1993): 277-86.
ii
The doppelgänger motif is, of course, stated explicitly by the revenant dwarf in
Agent Cooper's climactic and personality-transforming visit to the "Black Lodge'' in Episode
2022.
iii
Given that Twin Peaks is as much a pastiche in terms of composition as it is in
terms of content and is not merely the product of a towering individual genius, the Hamsun
allusion would possess maximum impact if it appeared in an episode written by someone
close to the ultimate intentions of the show. This is fortunately true, as Episode 1005 was
written by Mark Frost, the show's co-creator. The Hamsun reference seems to definitely fit
into a political pattern deliberately established for Horne and augmented by his other
associations.
iv
This is not to say that there are no formal clues to Leland as the culprit. The chief
of these, of course, would be the fact that he is the last person pictured (in Episode 1002)
before the onset of Cooper’s crucial dream.
v
Lynch, Frost and Wurman has many references to familial patriarchs, among them
those of the Martell. Renault. and Packard families. Strangely enough, though, Joshua
Palmer, who actually is mentioned in the show, is not cited. The Palmer family is said to be
Lutheran in religious orientation (100), which is presumably what the ancestral Wielands,
coming from North Germany, would have been as well.
Wieland is not Twin Peaks' only American precursor. Several similarities to Poe's
vi
“The Mystery of Marie Roget” are sure to receive notice. such as Marie's and Laura's bodies
being both discovered by a body of water, and Marie, like Laura, working in a perfumery
("perfume counter"). The show's main debt to Poe, through, lies in the personality of
Cooper.
vii
Copper’s territorial origins are revealed in Frost, especially 3-4.
viii
I have to see Beelzebub (Bob) and his angelic archenemy Michael in this pair,
which would introduce a Biblical Miltonic layer of allusion that perhaps should not be taken
as seriously as some of the other levels.
ix
Leland/Bob explaining in Episode 2007 that he is going to send the brutalized
Maddy back to “Missoula, Montana” is another fingering of author as culprit, since Missoula
is Lynch's birthplace.
x
Among the many intertextualities that inhabit Twin Peaks one of the most amusing
is the connection with the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known works of
literature in the history of the world. Gilgamesh and his sidekick Enkidu (who in some ways
is “Truman” to his “Cooper”) were exploring through the forests and mountains on their way
to their ultimate confrontation with the hounds of life and death when they “came to the
mountains whose name is Mashu/approached the twin peaks/which guard each day the
coming and going of Shamash, the vault of heaven:/below, their feet touch the
underworld./Scorpion people guard the gate/whose terror is awesome and whose glance is
death.” Had Bob been sighted in Mesopotamia four millennia ego? See Gilgamesh 198.
xi
Some of the many examples of this scholarship are Carton, Budick, and Levine.
The thrust of the criticism of the original romance paradigm has to do with its repression of
the varied local referents to be found in American life, then and now, and its tendency to
take itself too seriously in its postulation of the Romance as the invariable term of American
imagination. Lynch and Frost are no doubt susceptible to some of these criticisms, but their
self-referential tactics often operate to break down any sense of excessive pretensions to
either imaginative or cultural truths.