Twin Peaks and the Sound of Grief
Who killed Laura Palmer? The iconic tagline of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult-hit television series, Twin Peaks, lands a blow in the gut of viewers to this day. The show’s 1990 premiere on ABC gave the world the image of a fallen angel — Laura Palmer, a pale blue specter. The high school saint found floating in the waters of Twin Peaks, Washington. “She’s dead,” remarked Pete Martell in his warm drawl. “Wrapped in plastic.” Who could have done such a thing? This would be the mystery that would appear to drive the plot of the series going forward.
But Twin Peaks was not a straightforward mystery series — nor was it simply just a parody the cheesy soap operas of its day. It was a terrifying glimpse into a small town wracked with grief. Lynch and Frost captivated viewers for two seasons with their vision. Special Agent Dale Cooper would eventually unearth the truth about Laura’s killer — that Laura’s father, Leland, had been possessed by a demon spirit known as BOB, and was driven to rape and brutally murder not only Laura but her sweet look-a-like cousin, Maddie.
For David Lynch, sound is just as important — if not more so — than images. He has almost always acted as the sole sound designer for his work. The soundtrack of Twin Peaks is equally iconic for its haunting quality. It has stayed with fans of the show for years. Scored by composer and frequent Lynch-collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, the music of Twin Peaks evokes its most essential qualities — at once the breezy quirkiness of a daydream and the mournful wails of the wise forest trees. A now widely-memed behind-the-scenes interview with Badalamenti illustrates the raw emotion with which the composer imbued his score. He sits behind an old Fender Rhodes keyboard, softly plucking the keys. He is playing “Laura Palmer’s Theme.” The opening notes, sturdy and sinister, like Laura’s nighttime march to the train car where she would later perish. Badalamenti recounts out loud the process through which this song was written. David Lynch was sitting next to him at the time, feeding him his vision while Badalamenti played.
“What do you see, David? Just talk to me. And David would say, ‘Okay, Angelo. We’re in a dark woods now. And there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees. And there’s a moon out and some animal sounds in the background. And you hear the hoot of an owl in the dark woods. […] From behind the tree in the back of the woods, there’s this very lonely girl. Her name is Laura Palmer. Get something that matches her.’ And I segued into this…”
Badalamenti slides his hands up the keys, the notes getting more fragile and high-pitched, swelling with emotion. “Oh, that’s very beautiful…I can see her. And she’s walking toward the camera and she’s coming closer. Just keep building it! She’s getting close! Reach some kind of climax,” Badalamenti (as Lynch) remembers. He presses down on the keys, leaking out the theme’s climactic notes. “Oh, that’s it! It’s so beautiful!” Badalamenti cries out, his voice getting broken up with emotion. As the theme dies down: “Keep falling…falling…falling…now go back into the dark woods.”
This theme, paired with a framed photograph of Laura Palmer’s face, would often end each episode of the original series. A quiet reminder of a girl who, God willing, rests at peace after immeasurable trauma, the blunt chaotic nonsense of abuse at the hands of her father. This year saw the return of Twin Peaks, in a new season aptly titled Twin Peaks: The Return. Over the course of eighteen hour-long installments, David Lynch and Mark Frost once again returned to “a place both wonderful and strange.” A cold-open in Part One brings us back to Laura’s high school. Footage repurposed from the original series shows a girl running out of the building, screaming mournfully. The camera whooshes through the halls, bringing us to a case filled with trophies and plaques. There, in the center, is that framed photograph. Laura Palmer’s eerie smile haunts us once more.
The new series begins with the literal image of a memorial to Laura Palmer. The last episode of the original run ends with her chilling backwards-spoken message to Dale Cooper: “I’ll see you again in twenty-five years.” And she does. Sitting in the dark, otherworldly realm known as “The Black Lodge,” where Cooper has been stuck for this amount of time, is Laura Palmer. She has aged with grace, as has Cooper. They sit across from each other. “I am dead, yet I live.” She says.
Whereas the original run of Twin Peaks couched avant-garde artistry within the conventions of soap-opera, serial television, The Return makes no attempt to soften its breathtaking strangeness. This is made no more evident than in Part Eight, perhaps the most strikingly avant-garde, unconventional hour of television ever broadcast. Ten or twenty minutes into the episode, we are taken out of the familiar unfamiliar of Twin Peaks in 2017 and placed into the black-and-white desert of White Sands, New Mexico. July 16th, 1945. A muffled countdown. A flash of godlike light. We do not hear the soulful orchestration of Angelo Badalamenti. No, instead, the shrill opening strings of “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” by Krzystof Penderecki. It is a sobering, defiant artistic move on the part of David Lynch. But what follows is even more striking. We push forward, swimming into the black shroud of the atomic mushroom cloud. A dizzying and near-seizure inducing avant-garde light-show greets us. Like something by Stan Brakhage. No discernable objects or images. Simply showers of fire and metal shavings, all bouncing around — propelled, almost, by Penderecki’s entropic screaming.
This continues for a lengthy amount of time. Somewhere, in this vast formless nightmare of death, a figure floats toward us. It is gray and featureless. It opens its mouth and spews a stream of chunky liquid matter, in which we can see an orb. Within this orb is the face of BOB. Pure evil. Lynch is using Penderecki’s masterwork as a threnody indeed. A lament for the world. A furious critique of mankind. It is at this moment, Lynch is suggesting, that we unleashed absolute evil unto life. As a response — and yes, this too is bewildering, but if you have made it this far I hope you can perhaps paint a comprehensive image of what follows — a giant, recognizable from the original series, who has been residing in a seaside castle, views this taking place on a cinema screen. He floats upward, horizontally, spewing his own matter from his mouth. This secretion is gold. It too holds an orb. Not with the face of BOB, but that of Laura Palmer. She has been manufactured as a response to evil.
And yet she must die. Her father, overcome by the power of a gruesome, unknowable darkness, must destroy her. The town of Twin Peaks must mourn her loss. For all its wacky charm, the “damn fine coffee” and cherry pie, Twin Peaks is truly a show about grief. As Mark Zoller-Seitz put it in Vulture:
“Twin Peaks is often described as a mystery or a soap opera, and it was definitely both of those things. But it was also the story of a small town reeling in shock after a random act of violence, acting out in strange and terrifying ways […] The deeper FBI agent Dale Cooper and his fellow investigators dug into the soil beneath those magnificent Douglas firs, the more ugliness they unearthed. There was incest, sexual exploitation, drug abuse, drug trafficking, domestic violence, smuggling, murder, and corporate crime happening in those cottages and hotel rooms and in the gloom of the woods. […] Twin Peaks wore the comedy mask and the tragedy mask with equal confidence, and sometimes it put them both away and put on a mask that had live worms in it and might have been made of human flesh.”
In viewing and in listening to Twin Peaks we are commanded by Lynch. “Now go back into those dark woods.” We are asked to stand at the forefront of grief and shock. Of death and the joy of life after. What do these dark woods sound like? The hooting of watchful owls. The hysterical cries of the grieving Palmer family. An atomic bomb going off. A man at his keyboard, shining light through sound on the specter of nighttime fog, illuminating the face of a girl, lost and alone.
