Twin Peaks and the Divine
RIP David Lynch
The American director David Lynch died today, age 78. His work prompted millions of viewers to wrestle with the mysterious and the sublime — among them,
, provoked by Lynch’s Twin Peaks to write a probing essay, re-posted below. RIP David Lynch.— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
A few weeks back, on an episode of the pod that turned very existential,
(rightly) pressed me about what she felt was a cop-out response. I had invoked “art” and “the sublime” as a possible answer to dealing with existing in an immensely cruel and violent world.“That’s how you live? That’s what makes it fine to live — art?” she said in audible disbelief. “But why is there an experience of the sublime at all? Why do you feel a wonder? . . . You experienced transcendence, you've experienced the sublime. Does that not indicate to you that there's something outside of yourself?”
The ancient Greeks had an answer, according to Simone Weil. “Audrey” holds firm that Christianity has an answer too — not just a compelling one, but one that is obviously true. (And
gnomically wouldn’t declare how he felt about absolute truth claims. But that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this essay.)Me, I wasn’t able to fully articulate my answer. And, dear reader, I doubt I’ll be able to do better here in written form either. But I do think I have an outline of something that I’d like to share.
Let’s fast forward a bit: A few days after recording the podcast, I sat down to re-watch David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. “Audrey” took her pseud from the show and said she was a huge fan. I had seen parts of it when it originally aired on television, but had never gone back to it.1
Twin Peaks is iconic for being frighteningly weird. In the show, coincidence frequently points to something else going on — something ghostly, dark and mysterious, subterranean. Did Lynch have answers about the sublime? I definitely didn’t start watching in hopes that he might. But for whatever weird reason, Twin Peaks beckoned to me.
The plot is simple even if the metaphysics aren’t. The core question of the series is “Who killed Laura Palmer,” the innocent high school sweetheart prom queen from this imaginary small town somewhere in the Cascades. The tightly written first season dances around the mystery but never comes close to revealing what happened. Season two, a much messier affair, reveals the answer halfway through. (No spoilers ahead, don’t worry.)
The thing that immediately strikes you about the show is that the story is being told as if it were a soap opera. The music is overwhelmingly sentimental throughout. The dialogue drips with sentiment, too. And a lot of the acting is very over-the-top (which admittedly adds to the weirdness). But as the series goes on, one comes to suspect the sentimentality is not just stylistic. David Lynch is up to something else.
The killer is finally revealed to us in an excruciating murder scene — a scene that goes on and on, with a man furiously beating a female victim into a bloody pulp with his bare hands before sending her careening into a wall skull-first. Throughout the murder, Lynch suggests that a supernatural evil is in fact responsible for the violence. But for all that ghost story overlay, the scene is one of the most brutally physical in the entire series.
The physicality stands in jarring contrast with the sentimentality that preceded it. And as the town comes to grips with the reality of the murder, it’s clear that the sentimentality itself was a coping mechanism. The eerie insistence of every character to do his or her utmost to stick to the town’s happy script is an attempt to not face an immensely cruel and violent world that surrounds them on all sides.
So what’s the sublime on display here? On the one hand, it’s the confrontation with the enormity of the evil being perpetrated. With his sentimental set-up to the extremely jarring murder scene, Lynch gives viewers a terrifying glimpse into the abyss. And the brevity of the glimpse only accentuates the darkness. In fact, the evil presented is so enormous that you immediately feel a desire to run back into the arms of the treacly soap opera that preceded it. You immediately understand why all the denizens of Twin Peaks were so keen to keep from realizing what was actually going on: It’s really too horrible to contemplate.
But at the very same time, we get a glimpse of the impossibility of the human condition. We all inhabit a demonic world, and so we reach for whatever comfort is available. For it’s the only way to accept — to be able to continue. And that comfort is not a delusion! In the Twin Peaks universe, what may at first strike the viewer as almost cloying sweetness ends up being incredibly moving. And more importantly, achingly honest.
“Audrey” (our dear friend and podcast guest, not the wonderful character on Twin Peaks) went on to explain how she experiences her Christian faith in the context of a fallen world. “I feel it in the absurdity of the sacrifice, goodness in the face of despair — and it working and feeling so satisfying on a very deep soul level, right? It shouldn't work, but it does! And that absurdity to me is like proof of the divine.”
I guess I’d offer up that the sublime is precisely satisfying because of its contradictions, its absurdity. I can’t go on I’ll go on, to coin a phrase. I certainly won’t be the last to point out that the core of the Christian drama is the height of the sublime.
I still stumble with “Audrey’s” question about “why”. Why do we feel wonder? And how is it acceptable, or even comforting, to live with only mysterious satisfaction rather than the more definite kind?
I don’t know the answer.
But I guess I’m comforted in the suspicion that an honest secular approach doesn’t land too far away from the comforts of full religious faith.
That will have to be good enough for now.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
The show is a remarkable achievement. Something was clearly in the water in the Pacific Northwest. It captured the country’s attention completely: Twin Peaks on TV, Nirvana on the radio.
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To anyone who’s seen Twin Peaks, I recommend Mark Frost’s book The Secret History of Twin Peaks, written in the run-up to the later series, The Return. It’s a great backstory on how the town’s darkness came about, even if David Lynch didn’t see the town’s background quite the same way. The podcast Tanis is another intriguing story set in the Pacific Northwest - the creator Terry Miles says Twin Peaks influenced him, and it really shows.
RIP David Lynch.
“That’s how you live? That’s what makes it fine to live — art?” she said in audible disbelief. “But why is there an experience of the sublime at all? Why do you feel a wonder? . . . You experienced transcendence, you've experienced the sublime. Does that not indicate to you that there's something outside of yourself?”
Audrey's first question is perfectly reasonable. Yes, that's what makes it fine to live: art, science, philosophy, love, solidarity, the National Parks -- much more, in fact, than any single human can experience. But the rest of her comment, not so much. Why is there an experience of the sublime? This is a question for psychology or physiology or evolutionary biology, but that's not what Audrey's asking. She's asking ... what? What is the metaphysical ground of the sublime? I'd say there isn't one, and Audrey can't prove there is simply by pointing to the sublime and saying "the sublime exists, so it must have a metaphysical ground." That's a wholly circular proof.
Of course there's something outside oneself, namely, art, science, philosophy, etc. It's entirely possible to say yes to transcendence and no to metaphysics.