David Lynch has died. One of the most unique artists in our lifetime, which he did in all sorts of artforms: film, television, music, painting. And one of, possibly the, deepest influences on myself as a writer of fiction, both consciously and unconsciously. Twin Peaks, in particular, has had a huge effect on my work, and indeed my mind, for decades: the closest thing to dreaming while still being awake, the feeling of being inside the beating heart of a truly scary fairy-tale, I’ve dreamed about it myself many times since first seeing the show in 1990.
Anyway, I want to pay my own modest tribute to the great man by reproducing here a few pieces I’ve written about Lynch down the years. Beginning with this, from 2014, when it was announced that a new series of Twin Peaks was in the works:
It’s well-recognised that we overreact to pretty much everything these days, especially online. Anniversaries of classic albums, movies of much-loved books, such-and-such a sportsman coming out of retirement…whether positive or negative, virtually everything is the most amazing, earth-shattering event in history, apparently.
The news of Twin Peaks’ 2016 return was a rare exception: this genuinely is the real deal. Of course in the broadest sense, it’s a TV show, therefore not that important. But if art and culture matter to you – and you were a wholehearted devotee of the Twin Peaks cult when it first aired – this will have sent you into paroxysms of delighted anticipation.
It’s hard to overstate how brilliant, ground-breaking and singular David Lynch and Mark Frost’s drama was when it first aired in 1990-’91. We had literally never seen anything like this on television (and rarely in any other medium). I don’t care if it sounds pretentious, Twin Peaks was truly great dramatic art: comparable to Fellini, Scorcese, Lynch’s own movies.
It applied to a TV serial the stuff of Lynch’s films, and similar avant-garde works in cinema, theatre, music and visual art. You got the feeling they were “creating”, in the purest sense, not merely filming a script by rote.
So much of the show’s greatness is in the way disparate elements are brought together: dialogue, performance, narratives major and minor, music (Angelo Badalamenti’s exceptionally evocative score), camera angle, even something as seemingly trivial as the choice of colour for drapes in a hotel room.
Quintessentially Lynchian, a lot of it feels intuitive, as though they didn’t quite know what they wanted to do until it was done: creative genius and inspired happenstance together allowing this work to basically give birth to itself.
There was an unprecedented artfulness, strangeness, ambition and beauty in Twin Peaks, an unshakable eeriness. It made the small screen feel “big screen”.
On one level it was a murder-mystery, on another a small-town soap opera. But Twin Peaks, on its deepest level, was a fantasy-horror. In the series’ most terrifying and masterful scenes – directed with cinematic flair, some by Lynch – Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) enters a nightmare world of dancing dwarfs, backwards speech and evil alter-egos.
Even “the owls were not what they seemed” in this surreal realm of reverie and madness. I will never forget first seeing those scenes; I’ve been having dreams and nightmares about them ever since.
Indeed, I was borderline-obsessed with Twin Peaks, and have remained so for over two decades. The DVD has been rewatched several times, and hasn’t aged or degraded a bit (yes, even the oft-derided Season 2). It’s just so weird and unique, it’s timeless.
And it had a profound influence on me professionally. Twin Peaks has inspired, or been mentioned in, several books, one play, two screenplays. And a Young Adult mystery novel I have out next month, Shiver the Whole Night Through, is in large part an attempt to capture the mood and tone – that dreamlike, unsettling feel – of Twin Peaks.
The forest, as in the show, is central to my story, virtually a character in itself. Add supernatural elements, small-town weirdness, creepy goings-on, demonology, possession, a murder-mystery involving the local beauty queen…there are even a few scenes of the hero drinking “damn fine coffee” in a diner.
I’m not the only writer influenced by Twin Peaks, and its effect on TV can’t, like its brilliance, be overstated. People often cite The Sopranos as the birth of this Golden Age of television, but it was Twin Peaks which made possible that sort of complex, demanding, ambiguous storytelling. Its impact has been felt in countless dramas ever since: everything from Mad Men, Lost, 24, The X-Files, Desperate Housewives and The Killing to – more obliquely – True Detective and The Returned.
Ultimately, I think, Twin Peaks has endured and is revered because it offers two profound, almost elemental experiences. First, the show captures the sensation of being caught in a dream: that woozy, unnerving, “tilted” feeling of most dreams, where everything is recognisable but slightly “off”. It’s two percent removed from reality which, counterintuitively, makes it a truer reflection of human consciousness than “straight” realism.
Secondly, Twin Peaks taps into something at the core of our culture, those archetypes of the anima mundi: forests and fairy-tales. The show is a classic fable, creepy and disturbing: a modern-day retelling of all those old middle-European folk-tales/horror stories.
Most of the pivotal action takes place there; Laura repeatedly “going into the forest”, where the black heart of her (and mankind) is revealed; she dies there, while Ronette is almost killed; Major Briggs disappears there; One Eyed Jacks is hidden deep in the folds of the forest; and of course the Black Lodge/White Lodge, that hellish netherworld into which Cooper is drawn.
The heart of Twin Peaks dwells in the forest, that place where our darkest selves come alive and the deepest melodrama of the human spirit is played out. Lynch once described the woods as being “everything those fairy-tales made you feel” – he could as easily be describing Twin Peaks itself.
This is a 2019 review of his memoir, Room to Dream:
Is any artist’s work as difficult to describe as David Lynch? You could say the filmmaker and painter explores the dark underbelly of life and pays retro homage to certain classic elements of post-War American culture, but those are only a tiny part of it.
You might label his output as abstract, surreal, whimsical, disturbing, dreamlike, even deranged at times. But while all of those adjectives fit, none come close (either together or apart) to fully capturing just what it is that makes people love Lynch.
Personally, I’m a huge David Lynch fan, bordering on obsessive, particularly with regards to Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. The iconic TV show and wildly praised film (a BBC poll declared it the greatest of the century so far) are probably the biggest single inspiration on my fiction-writing career, responsible for at least two novels, a play and a film-script. I’ve even dreamed about Twin Peaks, many times, since first stepping into its spooky world over 25 years ago.
So, as a declared devotee, if I had to winnow the man’s work down to its essence I’d quote that famous line by Francis Bacon (a massive influence, incidentally, on Lynch’s painting): “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
David Lynch deepens the mystery: of life, the human mind, the nature of this and other realities. That strange uncertainty at the heart of everything, how the universe (like us, I suppose) is ambiguous and utterly contradictory and basically incomprehensible: his works explore it, capture it, express it, celebrate it.
Don’t expect linear progression, coherent logic or that dismal Golden Rule of modern-day television, the “narrative arc”. His films are more like music, I think, or poetry, and best approached from that starting-point.
Lynch envisions cinema as “images and sounds, moving together through time”; much of it is symbolic, allegorical. It’s dreamy and fractured, it suggests rather than dictates; it’s about mood and tone, the feeling of something inexpressible that you can’t put into words but know when you see it. It’s that grand mystery.
Bearing all this in mind, I approached Room to Dream in an almost Lynchian state of paradox: excitement commingled with dread. Excitement for obvious reasons: this is the first – and, given that he’s 72, presumably the last – memoir Lynch will write.
(Technically, it’s co-written with author Kristine McKenna. Fittingly, the book travels two paths simultaneously: McKenna interviews family, friends and colleagues for their memories of Lynch, then he comments on those memories in alternate chapters. As he puts it, “What you’re reading here is a person having a conversation with his own biography”.)
The dread was because part of me – and I believe this goes for most fans – doesn’t want to know who the real David Lynch is, where his bizarre inspirations come from, what it all means. In short, we don’t want the veil dropped and the mystery explained.
Thankfully, Room to Dream manages a canny trick of delivering a detailed and informative account of Lynch’s life and career, while retaining the secretive charm of what it produced. We learn the mechanics of how Wild at Heart or INLAND EMPIRE were made, but the veil remains in place.
A lot of this is down to the man himself: essentially, we discover, there is no “what does it all mean” (and thank God for that). Lynch gathers together themes and concepts and desires, often seemingly unrelated, over many years, and eventually braids them into a cohesive whole, through that wonderful alchemy of the artistic process. Your interpretation, he insists, is as “valid” as anyone’s, including his own; what you take from a film or picture or piece of music is deeply meaningful, simply because it’s yours.
He was born in 1946 in Montana – there’s a little Irish heritage on the dad’s side – and had a peripatetic childhood, as his scientist father and teacher mother moved to Washington, Idaho, Virginia, Idaho again. Lynch’s formative years, it’s clear, were his pre-teens in Boise, Idaho.
Here much of his recurring obsessions were implanted in the subconscious: rock ‘n’ roll, rebelliousness, alluring women, smoking, motorbikes, 1950s kitsch, chrome and plastic, small-town life, the nebulous and all-conquering concept of “cool”.
The book then moves briskly through each period of his life: after meeting the painter father of a friend, he studies art in Philadelphia, drifts semi-consciously into filmmaking, spends years in LA producing the avant-garde Eraserhead – one of those movies that’s as uniquely brilliant as it is unwatchable – gets his big break through Mel Brooks (really) on The Elephant Man.
There are the usual ups and downs of any life. Dune flopped badly, Twin Peaks became a global sensation, “nobody went to see” many of his films but Lynch didn’t particularly mind. He stages art exhibitions, produced music for himself and others, made commercials; along the way he became a cultural icon and short-hand descriptor for a certain kind of darkly quirky sensibility.
Lynch has been married four times, a serial monogamist who keeps falling in love; perhaps surprisingly, none of his ex-wives speak badly of him, though Emily (the most recent) admits that he can be selfish. Indeed, hardly anyone has a bad word to say. He seems a genuinely nice fella, and weirdly down-to-earth given how transgressive a lot of his films are; he loves building things, getting his hands dirty, chatting to staff in the local hardware store.
A major part of Lynch’s life, since the mid-1970s, has been transcendental meditation. (A few years back he toured 16 countries, including Ireland, to promote the practise.) The book ends with him extolling his late guru and declaring, “May everyone be happy…peace.”
He also writes, “Each life is a mystery until we solve the mystery.” I think by that he means death. Until then, here’s to many more years of deepening the mystery in this realm.
And finally, a review of Mark Frost’s 2016 novel, The Secret History of Twin Peaks:
In the late 1980s Mark Frost co-created, for my money, the greatest television show ever made. If you’re a fellow Twin Peaks obsessive, you’ll know that the other person responsible was David Lynch – and you’ll absolutely agree on that superlative.
Millions of words have been written about their drama, which aired from 1990 to ‘91; it’s inspired countless other TV shows, films, music, books, you name it. Twin Peaks, for us devotees, is less a mere filmed entertainment than a state of mind and an entire universe.
Now Frost expands on that universe with The Secret History of Twin Peaks, a lavishly produced novel (of sorts) that colours in some of the background to that seminal programme – and whets viewer appetites for its very belated return next year. (As if they needed whetting, though. We’re practically chewing the carpet in anticipation.)
True to Frost and Lynch’s determinedly skewed sensibility, the book doesn’t take the form of a traditional novel. There’s no straightforward narrative, relayed by a straightforward narrator. We’d probably be disappointed if there was.
Rather, The Secret History of Twin Peaks begins with Gordon Cole – an FBI chief we met periodically during the TV series – passing on a mysterious dossier, discovered in summer 2016, to an unnamed agent. She is to try and divine the identity of the self-titled Archivist, who assembled it early in 1991 (when Twin Peaks came to its open-ended conclusion on telly).
The dossier comprises a wide variety of document mock-ups (this book’s design is pretty sumptuous): memoranda, interview transcripts, newspaper reports, magazine articles, other books, personal correspondence, diaries, a funeral pamphlet, even the menu of the show’s famous Double-R Diner.
It begins with what is, I suppose, ancient history in American terms: the famous mapping voyage of Lewis and Clark through the then-uncharted West. Long before Twin Peaks existed as a town, there was something profoundly, eerily strange about the area.
The local Nez Perce natives believed so, centuries before Europeans arrived, and as The Archivist’s research shows, so did many others. In this 200-year potted history, we encounter possible alien abductions, rumours of witchcraft and demonology, prosaic murders and surreal ones, political skulduggery, the Masons and Illuminati, escaped Nazis, Pacific Rim gangsters, hallucinations, madness, mania and more…culminating in the death of Laura Palmer and ending, chronologically, precisely when the show ended.
Frost cleverly, often humorously, mixes real-life events and people into this fictional fantasia: everything and everyone from Roswell, the Indian Wars and pulp magazine Amazing Stories, to L Ron Hubbard, Jackie Gleason and even Richard Nixon (he comes out of it surprisingly well, actually).
It’s hard to say too much more without revealing the story’s twists and turns. In fact, it’s hard to review the book at all unless the people you’re writing it for were/are Twin Peaks fans.
I’ve just realised that most of this will make no sense to anyone who missed the show first time out; that can be applied to the novel too. If you were at least aware of Twin Peaks back then, you’ll be able to follow it; if you loved the programme, you’ll probably like or love this book.
I especially enjoyed revisiting old characters, some more fondly remembered than others. Frost makes a wise choice, I think, in mostly avoiding a rehash of the central players: Laura, Cooper, Donna, Leyland, Windom Earle et cetera.
Instead we get a deeper insight into relatively tangential people like Major Briggs, Big Ed, Norma, the Log Lady, Hawk – he delivers the book’s funniest section, by far – Catherine Martell, Josie, and especially, Doug Milford. I barely remembered this guy from the TV show, but here he’s pivotal. Even Hank Jennings, one of the baddest bastards in a town overrun with them, is sort-of redeemed as a fully rounded human being.
The book has one significant failing…that, perhaps annoyingly, I can’t really detail without giving too much away. Let me put it like this: the source of Twin Peaks‘ spooky malevolence seems to have shifted, from what I took to be purely supernatural – i.e. BOB and his ilk – to something still-fantastical but scientifically (just about) possible.
It feels to me as though something is lost in that change. Twin Peaks is still a freaky-deaky place, but this new angle makes it seem slightly – slightly – less unnerving, less dreamlike (or nightmarish), less uncanny, less incomprehensible…in short, less mysterious. And as The Archivist declares in the beginning, “Mystery creates wonder.”
Rest in peace, David Lynch. I hope the coffee is hot, and black as midnight on a moonless night, wherever you are . . .
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 