As long as there has been TV there has been procedurals. Investigations into crimes that even in early iterations like Dragnet wanted a reason — what drove people to do all that? Who could imagine such a thing?
These are questions that, abstractly, are often asked of the work of David Lynch. His very name has become its own unique descriptor for something viscerally understood as beguiling and containing a distinct type of strangeness. His modes were indelible and singular, and his creations were as uncanny as half remembered dreams clearly felt and grasped, if not as easily explained.
There’s no shortage of work from Lynch’s oeuvre to recommend in the wake of his passing this week. But Twin Peaks, his and co-creator Mark Frost’s seminal television show, feels like the one that best answers the gaping void that we’re left with. It’s there that the intersection of so much of what made him beloved collides into something remarkable and eccentric. Like the bulk of his work, it didn’t just look death in the face but felt around the vacuum of it the way you might rummage around an empty pocket.
The drive of any murder mystery is captured in the name: whodunnit? The mystery of the thing focuses on the who and the how and the why. But the meaning of those mysteries, and the procedural genre built on them, always plumb far deeper. Investigators at the heart of these stories often find more than they bargain for: affairs, betrayals, resentment, unrest. This isn’t just a means of establishing red herrings — the core of these stories are the communities jolted by the murder itself and left to pick up the pieces. At their best, the genre examines the way crime and death could unrepentantly tear a hole in our reality so profound that anything might tumble out of it.
Such was the world of Twin Peaks, where a high school girl’s murder shook a community with such force that the very universe seemed to fall off its axis. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was the ad copy that pulled in both viewers and Special Agent Dale Cooper (and, ultimately, drove the network pressure a little too hard). But that was more setup; around the investigation, Twin Peaks listened as the loss of Laura echoed around the community.
Like most stories of grief, it’s less of a logical line than it is one of ever-changing waves lapping against the shore. Laura’s boyfriend, her friend, her secret lover, her parents, even people who barely knew her — their lives are all devastated in ways both quiet and loud, big and small. The mystery of who among them might be a murderer loomed large, but it was small potatoes compared to the agony of her loss. And in her void, people were left to make choices; decisions that impacted those as far removed from Laura Palmer’s life as you could get.
And yet even when the show tilted into more cosmic proportions, its stakes felt immediate. Look no further than The Return circling back to Laura’s mom, in her living room alone with the TV blaring and cigarettes burning and drinks littered everywhere. For whatever Coop and viewers might take away from Laura’s place as a celestial being or a wronged victim, here too was the reality, a stark and quietly tragic counterbalance to the eccentricities of Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks, like so much of Lynch’s catalog which plumbed the depths of smiling Americana, never seemed to fear death. On a very Lynchian level, this was because of the introduction of the magical and mystic lodges that connected our world and others. But it marked a clear departure from other procedurals, where death wasn’t just the inciting incident but the threat constantly leveraged against those left alive — the fear that this could happen to anyone, at any time. People died unexpectedly in Lynch’s works, but living was sometimes the more perverse option; you never knew when you were just watching rabbits live their life or a strange man was going to slide out from behind a dumpster and put the fear of god into you. By contrast, in Lynch’s hands, death felt bizarrely approachable, revealing to us the strange and profound miracles of life the same way a dream does.
Death never really felt like the end in Lynch’s works. People linger, memories swirl. It doesn’t matter if it’s a stray mention, a loaded line-reading, or an apparition as a homecoming-queen smile — an absence plays just as big a part in the story as the living, and no one ever really feels like they’ve left. Quietly, we are always reminded how hard and vital it is to look something in the face when all we want to do is curl up and cry.
Perhaps that’s why Lynch’s passing has been met with so much “gone too soon” sentiment. There was a wisdom to his approach — to art, to stories, to weather reports, maybe even life itself — that seemed eternal and ever-bursting. As friends and I swapped texts sharing disbelief, it seemed like many of us weren’t just mourning a creator whose work had shaped culture in unfathomable ways, but the possibility that there were more peculiarities, that could seem at once so eerie and so familiar, suddenly lost to us. Rumors of projects that promised to be wonderfully unknowable suddenly really were. For whatever he had taught us about death being just another phase, we were suddenly left behind.
And yet, to turn to Lynch’s work is to be reminded joyfully of the absurdity of being alive, how the end could be near at any moment and our time here is what we make of it. When Glinda the Good Witch tells Sailor not to turn away from love at the end of Wild at Heart, when the camera tilts up to the sky after Dorothy hugs her son in Blue Velvet, when Coop tries to help Laura one last time — all of these are just as much an expression of life as Fire Walk With Me’s agonizing march toward the end, or Maddy’s doomed trip to Twin Peaks. Even on American Dad he urged us to let the fear wash over us, and not turn away from what we couldn’t understand. In a way we’ll never be able to understand what drove him to all that, but in another way it’s all right there, you just have to find the way to look at it. He made living its own weird miracle. May he forever be connected to the moon.
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Zosha + Cate <3twitter:@30FlirtyFilminstagram:@30FlirtyFilm