Who Killed Laura Palmer?

I’m in the middle of a big project where I’m reading and watching a lot of material (a lot) in the hopes of being able to sit in a room and say something coherent about it all. As a part of that process, I’ve been rewatching a lot of television I haven’t seen in a while, and am trying to sort through what makes it a worthwhile item of discussion, how it connects to other shows, and say something cogent about why this particular show is a relevant part of my List of Giant Things I Need to Read and Watch. (Note: you may think that should have read “Giant List of Things,” but indeed, no. It is a requirement to be Giant in order to be on this list.)

As a part of all this, I’ve decided to take Fridays and write about a show on that List of Giant Things. I spend a little time every day sitting down with a word processing document. Might as well use some of that time for the LoGT instead of The Real Housewives of New York City, ya know what I mean? (Note the second: this does not necessarily mean that I haven’t watched The Real Housewives of New York City. I find Bethenny’s cheekbones mesmerizing.)

So, up first on the LoGT project – Twin Peaks, 1990-1991. Largely produced and created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, although some disputes during season two caused David Lynch to leave until returning to work on the final episode.

I first saw the pilot of Twin Peaks in my college dorm room a few years ago, and I remember watching the synthesized strains of the hypnotic opening credits and rocking back in my chair. “What on earth is this?” I wondered, as a machine slowly rotated around the points of a giant buzz saw, blowing sparks everywhere. The pilot introduces the community, the main characters, and what seems like the central focus of the show. Local high school student Laura Palmer has been murdered, and Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman are going to find out who did it. That first, extended-length episode does essentially what you’d expect, outlining the relationships between Laura’s friend Donna, her boyfriend Bobby, her lover James, and all the other minor characters at the diner, the Great Northern Hotel, the gas station, the sheriff’s department. It’s also intensely melodramatic and returns constantly to the overwrought main theme, which never slips quietly into the background noise, but rather slaps you upside the head with its straining, electronic violin and keyboard anguish.

Sloooooooow pan down

For the most part, those early episodes don’t do much to subvert your expectations of what Twin Peaks is doing. There are some weird, unnerving slow shots, particularly one where Sarah Palmer calls her husband Leland to ask if he’s seen Laura, and hears a police officer tell Leland that Laura’s been killed. The phone drops, and the camera slowly pans down the spiral cord until it pushes close up to the receiver, through which we can hear Sarah Palmer making horrific grieving animal noises. It’s deeply creepy, but not unreal. Agent Cooper’s idiosyncrasies make up a good portion of the show’s mystery, especially his penchant for talking into his tape-recorder to an unknown woman named Diane, and there are some particularly odd minor characters. In the second episode, while Sarah Palmer sits on the couch, grief-stricken, she has a vision of a scary long-haired man crouching on the floor. The show is weird, and the pieces to the puzzle increasingly create a sense that the puzzle might not look like you think it does, but at first it’s all just signs and portents.

Bob visits Sarah Palmer in a vision

By the third episode, though, Twin Peaks’ relationship with reality begins to slip. At the end of the episode, Agent Cooper falls asleep and slips into a seriously surreal dream, where he sees flashes of two mysterious men named Mike and Bob, he sits in a red-curtained room while a dancing midget who speaks backwards tells him about his cousin who looks exactly like Laura Palmer and is filled with secrets, and the actress who plays Laura Palmer leans over and whispers the name of the killer into Cooper’s ear. From this point on, Twin Peaks is an unpredictable barrel of the uncanny, where any normal moment could take a swerve toward the bizarre and strange meta-fictional playfulness becomes the dominant mode. Very soon thereafter, the actress who plays Laura Palmer reappears in the main body of the show, now playing Laura’s cousin Maddy. This point also acts as the introduction for Invitation to Love, a show-within-the-show where one of the actresses plays two characters, Emerald and Jade. Throughout the remaining twenty-six episodes, Twin Peaks repeatedly frustrates any attempt to follow a straightforward narrative thread. The surreal red-curtained room reappears, a giant comes to visit Agent Cooper and give him clues, Eye Patch Lady wakes up from a coma and believes that she’s a high schooler, Log Lady’s log delivers mysterious hints, and the owls that live in the woods outside Twin Peaks become evil spirits trying to turn Agent Cooper into his own evil doppelganger. (I think. At the end, it gets…confusing).

Dancing midgets in the red room, Sarah Palmer flips out

Twin Peaks isn’t the first television show to tell a story over the period of several episodes, or to have an immense number of characters, or multiple, interwoven plotlines – soap operas had been doing it for decades, and Invitation to Love is a nice little riff on how indebted Twin Peaks is to that type of television. Nevertheless, Twin Peaks became one of the first shows to actively frustrate viewers’ attempts to keep everything straight week-to-week, and took ample advantage of the television medium in a time before technology made it easy to record, re-watch, and analyze what you were seeing. The show is impossible to follow if you sit down and watch it all at once, pausing to think about what’s happening as you go along. I can only imagine how completely strange and compelling it must have been to watch the whole story spread over many months, or to be unable to rewind and watch Cooper’s crazy dancing midget dream again. You would be in a perpetual state of “WHAT ON EARTH WAS THAT?!?,” and the slow, dreamy, meditative quality of the visual style only makes the lightning quick flashes of a one-armed man getting into an elevator more unnerving.

Who killed Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, who killed Lilly Kane in Veronica Mars

The show has also had a long, influential arm in the television that has come since then. The first season of Veronica Mars is heavily reliant on the “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” plot structure, and although it avoids the surrealist bent that Twin Peaks uses so effectively, the resolution of that story bears some familiar resonances with what happens to Laura as well as connects both shows back to an older Gothic archetype of disordered familial relationships. The beginning of Lost is also strongly reminiscent of the opening episodes of Twin Peaks, where a horrible but understandable event quickly shifts into something supernatural. Even The Sopranos, which would seem like a completely different sort of show, plays with unnerving dream sequences and psychological horror in a way that comes straight out of the David Lynch playbook.

And even though Twin Peaks has become such a ubiquitous, influential, cult-classic television show, re-watching over the past week, it is still unlike anything else I’ve seen. It’s too weird and unlikely to be repeated or copied, and it’s far too neglectful of the audience’s needs for closure, explanation, and sympathetic characters to have any success in the mainstream market. If you’ve never seen it, it’s definitely worth a look. But… brace yourself.