The Twin Peaks Loop

In my recent Twin Peaks rewatch, I came to episode 14 a few days ago, the one in which Laura Palmer's killer is revealed. It's been said since that Lynch never intended to reveal the killer's identity and that he wanted it to be a perpetual mystery in the background. I can see the appeal of that. When I watch the show with someone who hasn't seen it, I'm made freshly aware of how much of the show's excitement lived in the uncertainty surrounding most of the characters. Almost anyone could be Laura Palmer's killer. But it's hard to wish for a world in which the perfectly constructed episode 14 doesn't exist.

I love the sense of overlapping realities and perspectives. There's the murder scene which continually switches between the two actors who represent the killer in the dream world and the waking world, there's the shift between the performance by Julee Cruise at the roadhouse and the Giant in that other reality, communicating to Agent Cooper.

I suppose this is the real pivot point, this is where the show stops being a murder mystery and becomes a fantasy series as the driving narrative arc slowly becomes exploring the mystery of the Black Lodge. Before it was the supernatural serving the murder mystery, from here it's the murder plots serving the supernatural. It could be argued that this is what lost the public as much as David Lynch's absence. It's hard to separate the two, I guess, if Lynch truly didn't want the killer to be revealed. Yet it's a very influential aspect of the show, most obviously on The X-Files. In returning to direct the final episode, Lynch manages to make it viscerally as well as conceptually interesting, something he does more fully in the third season.

The other direction could have been something like Fire Walk with Me, using the supernatural as a means of exploring the emotional state of someone involved in otherwise earthly concerns, following in the vein of Laura Palmer's Secret Diary. I'm not sure if that could've been sustained successfully for a full season. The domestic problems haunt the supernatural problems in season three like soil on which strange plants grow. There's Diane's recollection of assault and what it means considering what her character ends up being. There's the contemplation of the relationship between Cooper's moral nature and the fracturing of his identity across multiple characters whose motives and actions vary in purity. One things for sure, none of it would be even half as interesting without Lynch.