The Beautiful & The Damned

Those familiar with David Lynch know his fascination with the evil undercurrent--or, as he would name it, the “darkness”--swirling beneath a veneer of the pleasant, pedestrian, pastoral--i.e., the “light.” This fascination (that of the duality shared between light and dark) has become a central theme in his oeuvre, beginning with the decision to film Eraserhead in a highly contrasted black and white (and almost exclusively at night), carrying through to the violence that occurs in the suburban apartment of Dorothy Vallens (played by Isabella Rossellini), visited only at night by Kyle MacLachlan’s character in the film Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont, and finally arriving in the idiosyncratic town of Twin Peaks, which lends its name to the seminal 1990 television series. Twin Peaks is first and foremost a whodunit, following the formulaic construction of narrative to which all detective stories adhere. From a narrative standpoint, the juxtaposition between dark and light is obvious: here is a small town proud of its pleasantries and lack of crime having to face the reality that one of its children has been murdered. But Lynch, who began as a painter/visual artist, explores the theme of that dark, swirling undercurrent in a more visceral and convincing way through the use of visual rhetoric. This is no more evident than in the inclusion of Invitation to Love, a fictive soap opera that exists solely in the realm of Twin Peaks. 

The “nested story” trope has been utilized throughout in works like The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane; but Invitation to Love recalls most readily The Murder of Gonzago, a production put on by the travelling players in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare uses the nested play to bring Hamlet to action, confirming for him (and thus, too, the audience) Claudius as the culprit in his father’s murder. Invitation to Love is used in a similar manner, but its effect is opposite. As Nicholas Birns argues in his essay “Telling Inside from Outside, or, Who ‘Really’ Killed Laura Palmer”, Invitation to Love works to mislead the audience (i.e. us). By pairing characters from Invitation to Love with characters in Twin Peaks, Birns is able to assert that the nested story points to Ben Horne (played by Richard Beymer) as the culprit. Because we know this to be untrue, the purpose of Invitation to Love becomes less transparent. It’s in this lack of clarity that we find Lynch’s intentions.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes introduces the concepts studium and punctum. If the town of Twin Peaks is the studium, i.e. that thing by which we “enter into harmony with” (27) the intentions of the photographer (or, in this case, director’s), then Invitation to Love is Twin Peaks’ punctum. Barthes explains that the punctum is the thing that “breaks (or punctuates) the studium; [it is] the element that rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow, and pierces” (26) the viewer. He states that the studium is “that wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste...it is of the order of liking, not of loving” (27). The argument can be made, then, that the punctum is that thing that leads a viewer to the order of loving. And, if the town of Twin Peaks and all of its citizens are the studium (the thing by which we begin to understand Twin Peaks and decide to like it), then Invitation to Love is one of the show’s punctums. It is notable that the title given to the fictive soap is Invitation to Love, a gesture made to the audience that stings, pricks, bruises even. For it is in analyzing the fictive show that we find Lynch’s truth, a theme at the heart of all his work, most prominently in Twin Peaks. That is that darkness and light, good and evil, the beautiful and the damned exist concomitantly. Taking as truth Birns’ assertion that Invitation to Love misleads the Twin Peaks audience as to who the culprit of Laura Palmer’s murder is, we can see that the character of Ben Horne (who Birns effectively points out is criminal in more ways than one) is innocent of the crime central to the show’s narrative. Furthermore, Birns shows that revealing Leland Palmer (played by Ray Wise), Laura Palmer’s father, as the true culprit results in a more satisfying twist for the show’s audience. This fact alone proves Lynch’s truth by placing in us, the audience, a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment and excitement at the revelation of filicide. And without the visual rhetoric displayed through Invitation to Love (e.g. the argument that bad is invariably bad and good is invariably good), Lynch’s argument that the beautiful and the damned exist in duality would ring false in the Leland revelation. Because the audience has come to expect a mimetic display from television, Lynch gives us a more true to life conclusion than the utopian values preached by (mainstream) television (e.g. Invitation to Love).

The effect arrived at through deception is not confined to narrative works. In Andrew Wyeth’s most famous work, Christina’s World, the viewer is given a pastoral scene of what appears to be a woman lounging in a field, looking at a house near the horizon. The deception, however, exists in the painting’s title. Christina, or Anna Christina Olson, was one of Wyeth’s muses and primary models. Olson is believed to have suffered from Charcot-Marie Tooth (CMT) disease, which causes weakness in the feet and lower leg muscles. With this knowledge, the reading of Wyeth’s Christina’s World changes drastically. And with further research into the history of the painting, it is discovered that only the lower half of the figure in the painting was modeled by Olson, leaving the upper half of the figure to be modeled after Wyeth’s 20-year younger, more attractive, and healthier wife Betsy. The visual deceptions at play here result in a much different reading than the initial one. The same is true for Civil War era photographs, namely those taken by Matthew Brady, in which bodies were collected and displayed in such a way to affect the viewer. Or in the cultural and historical revisations of works like Extramadura, photographed by David Seymour (Chim). The concealing and revealing of secrets in visual rhetoric shapes meaning and interpretation, and thus--as in the case of Hamlet--action.

It is finally through the parodic example of Invitation to Love that we can separate our perceptions of life and how these perceptions are shaped through television. Were we to believe, with Sally and Lucy and whomever else, the nested show, then we would fail to recognize our own perceptibility to evil, allowing an open door for the “BOBs” of our realities to enter and take control. I think this skill is necessary to our students as readers. In order to arrive at a true and deeper understanding of whatever text they are studying, they will need to be ready to analyze and understand the multi-layered meaning that exists simultaneously in any work.

A still from Invitation to Love.

A still from Twin Peaks.

Still from Invitation to Love of Emerald and Jade played by Selena Swift

Stills from Twin Peaks of Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson (Laura’s cousin and doppleganger) played by Sheryl Lee

How's Annie?

Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is a phenomenon. I wasn’t old enough to experience its first run while it was on television in the 90s, but when I did encounter it (somewhere between sophomore/junior year of college) I imagine I did what every Twin Peaks viewer did before me: I fell in love.

Television is the great seducer. We’ve seen this played out over history with the introduction of it into homes around the 1950s to its ability to adapt to Internet Culture (with companies like Netflix, Hulu, etc.) in order to create codependencies. Its goal is to enrapture us, to warp our realities, to trick us into believing that the lives we see on screen are the kinds of lives we live. TV makes us feel more interesting. And to a certain extent this is what the first two seasons of Twin Peaks does, at least in a David Lynch kind of way. We fall in love with the lives of Donna Hayward and James Hurley and Audrey Horne and Bobby Briggs and Richard Horne and (especially) Dale Cooper. This eccentric town in north Washington is both foreign and familiar to us in its smallness, campiness, and otherworldliness.

But where Twin Peaks deviates is in the glossy veneer of (un)reality that many shows before/after it are coated in during post-production. Instead, what Twin Peaks does very early in its narrative is a sloughing of that televisional veneer. It begins with characters' reactions to the news of Laura Palmer's death. The melodrama is painstakingly obvious, and yet it isn’t unreal. Who wouldn’t wail hysterically at finding out their daughter has been murdered? Who wouldn’t run out of class when the news of a best friend’s death has been announced over the intercom for the entire student body to hear? These are the kinds of things that speak to Lynch's genius. His ability to subtly shift reality in order to bring an absolute awareness to it. When Sarah Palmer is absolutely losing her shit in episode one, we take notice instead of just accepting her sorrow as we would in a different show where that sorrow isn’t accentuated and overdramatized, where an actor is heralded for her "authentic performance." It’s because of the melodrama that we take notice. This is what drew me to Twin Peaks back in college. And it’s what made me fall in love with show.

Now that the second run (which aired on Showtime) has ended, I want to express my thoughts/fan theories/criticisms here. Beginning with: how the hell is Annie?

At the end of the second season back in 1991 we’re introduced to Annie Blackburn, a character meant to be the love interest for our hero Dale Cooper. It’s peak Twin Peaks romance stuff. You have Gordon Cole expressing what looks a hell of lot like love toward Shelly Johnson (now Shelly Briggs) in what I think is one of the most authentic moments of television: Cole, being hard of hearing and having to use a hearing aid device, exclaims that he doesn’t need the device to hear Shelly’s voice and proceeds to fawn over her. It’s quite beautiful. Anyway, at the same moment Cole is gushing over Shelly, you have Coop falling head over heels for Annie. And over the course of the final six episodes the two become extremely close. In true Lynchian fashion, Annie wins the Miss Twin Peaks Beauty Pageant, which puts her in mortal/spiritual danger. She’s taken to the Black Lodge, where Coop chases after her and becomes trapped for the next 25 years. At the end of the second season we’re left with that haunting image of Coop’s doppelgänger bleeding and laughing and asking, “How’s Annie?”

That question was for me always more than just about Annie. It was really, “How’s Coop?” But still, what Lynch did for us at the end of that second season with Annie Blackburn was to show us a side of Coop we hadn’t yet seen. A side that boyishly loved a woman he barely knew, enough to sacrifice his soul for her. And so, we really want him to be happy, we want him to have saved Annie, to have ended up with her.

In the series’ second run, that question is both answered and not. We never see Annie. She’s never even mentioned. Which, for a show like Twin Peaks and a director/writer like David Lynch,  isn’t completely out of the ordinary. What we do get a long and drawn out display of Cooper navigating his way out of/through the Black Lodge. Cooper finally emerges from the Black Lodge fully himself, not missing a beat, just as kind as ever, seeing the best in everyone. And for one glorious moment, all is right in the world of Twin Peaks. However, the final episode tears this all down. Cooper is back in some alternate reality where he’s known as Richard and he’s trying to get Laura Palmer back home. In all of this, there’s no Annie. Annie, the one who appeared to Laura and told her to write in her diary, “The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can’t leave.” The woman we loved to watch Coop love. The woman whose kidnapping resulted in Cooper’s being locked in the Lodge for 25 years. She’s completely absent in the second run. Why, David?

How the hell is Annie?

I think we can try to answer this in a myriad of different ways. One being that she served her purpose for the overall narrative and when we last see her in the hospital bed, having the ring stolen from her by the nurse, she has completed her own circle within the world of Twin Peaks; that she is now somewhere living her life trying to forget about the experience she had in the Lodge. And that’s fine.

Another way we might answer this question is to think about Janey-E, the wife of Dougie Jones, who we learn is a manufactured being used for the purpose of bringing Cooper back from the Lodge. Janey-E is not Annie in any regard, but she does share a few similar attributes:

1. They both love men that share the same physical body of Dale Cooper.
2. They are both sisters of women who have an established presence in the show (Annie is Norma Jennings sister, Janey-E is Dianne’s).
3. They both serve Cooper (damn fine) desserts and coffee, which is super important in the history of this character.
4. They share a relation to the Black Lodge.

At the end of the series, another Dougie is manufactured and sent home to Janey-E and Sonny Jim, a sort of happily-ever-after ending for the Las Vegas family. Are we to read into that that in some alternate universe, Dale returns to Annie? I’m not so sure. It seems to me that what we are supposed to gather from this third installment of Twin Peaks is that evil spreads, like ink in water, until what was once innocent and pure becomes evil itself. That the once eccentric town of Twin Peaks in northern Washington, a town where evil was beginning to manifest itself in the quiet lives of its inhabitants, can become a place where children are run down in the streets by trucks, where fathers abuse and murder their daughters, where all of the good can be strangled out until there is nothing but the darkness of evil.

This is why we’ll never know the answer to, “How’s Annie?” She’s been blotted out, her memory, her kindness, her innocence. There isn’t a place for her in this new universe. Or at least, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself