I’m still processing the end of Twin Peaks: The Return.
When I was a kid I was fixated for a while on the importance of the number two. Two, I reasoned, was the number that was the building block of all other numbers: Any number could be expressed as a combination of twos, of doublings and divisions and so forth. This probably prefigured my destiny as someone who works with computers, and while there was some degree of naivete at play I do think I was onto something, some part of a big idea. Two is the number that represents the concept that there can be more than one of the same thing – Which, while one might assume it to be a property of nature, is a human invention. The conception of a creature or object as a discrete unit, and the idea that there then could be more of them, is the beginning of the mathematical system of abstraction, which eventually leads to such wild concepts of the idea of there being 0 of those units or, nonsensically, absurdly, a negative number of them.
Two, as a number, contains the implicit concept of boundary, of demarcation, of this and that. I’d say division but that means something else in math. I’d say differentiation but that also means something else in math.
All of which, by a long and roundabout path, brings me back to Twin Peaks. This show is many things, but one of them is an extended rumination on this idea of duality – at first through the fairly straightforward lens of places and people that are beautiful and friendly on the outside but troubled with deep darkness within, then refracted through increasingly surreal and abstract versions. Contrasts of light and dark, love and hate, future and past, and how we get locked into these patterns with no way out. The name itself alludes to this idea, that there are two extremes – but that the residents of Twin Peaks, that all of us, spend most of our time somewhere in between.
The symbolism and causality of Twin Peaks are not clear cut, and I’d hardly venture to suggest I have any definitive answers as to what happens or why. All I’d like to do here is explore some of the impressions and ideas imparted by the show. Some spoilers will be discussed from this point on. You should watch the show first if you have any intention of doing so.
There are locations in Twin Peaks that seem to exist outside of the world, but my impression is that these don’t so much represent an opposite extreme, a dark world to our light world, as they do a pivot point, a place in between. This is the place through which change happens, through which human impulses are laundered and warped. It is timeless because it is the meeting of past and future, in the same way that the gravity of two masses cancels out directly in between them, in the same way that the center of a spinning fan is stationary, and because this is the point of equivalence this is where people freely change places with their opposite-but-equal doppelgangers.
What if you woke up tomorrow and were someone else? Someone with all the same memories, but a different perspective on what they meant, what they signified? How would you know the difference? Isn’t that just what happens, by degrees, every time we wake up? What if you became the worst version of yourself, everything you feared you might be? What if you were certain this had already happened? It’s never clear how Bob ‘possesses’ people, inspires them to hurt and kill those they love, but it seems like evil goes where evil’s wanted. There’s always a seed of the hurt he wants to put out into the world before he gets there.
It’s never really clear what Bob gets from it, whether he lives out his desire to kill through his victims or merely foments their own murderous lusts and intents – but perhaps desire is the wrong framework, and he’s more of a force of nature than a malicious entity, more of a personification of desire than a person with desires. But he grants power… in the way that a contract with a demon might – or in the way mere determination and disregard for the lives of others might. As strong as Bob might make those under his thrall, we see others find the same sort of strength through other forms of selfishness. In strange, petty, trivial ways, poor half-blind Nadine finds her way into incredible strength – and then, perhaps, back out of it, when she learns how to see through other people’s eyes.
What struck me most about the season as a whole was how much it knew what viewers wanted to see and steadfastly kept it away from them. We wanted to see Cooper, we wanted to see problems solved, we wanted to know what happened next, we wanted an ending. We wanted more Twin Peaks. There is no more, there can be no more, of what Twin Peaks was though. You cannot, as I said last week, recreate the experience of experiencing something for the first time. We can’t keep ourselves from trying, though. We’re locked in the middle, immobile, between the future and the past, where everything seems stuck in place and where time has no meaning, where we’re not sure if the person who woke up in our bed is the person who went to sleep in it. There’s not going to be an ending, there’s not going to be a wiki with definitive answers. There’s a gap in the center, a hollowness, where gravity can’t reach. The place in-between.
This is the water, and this is the well. Drink full, and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.