David Lynch, who has died at the age of 78, was one of the most important film-makers of his generation, but, paradoxically, his greatest achievement may have been his television series Twin Peaks. Haunting, bizarre, frustrating, terrifying – Twin Peaks was all of those, an outwardly quirky murder mystery in the US Pacific Northwest that had at its core the disturbing message that nothing in this world is as strange as everyday life.
It began, as every police drama would for years afterwards, with the body of a young woman (the soon to be iconic Laura Palmer) discovered on a lakeshore. But the cliched premise of a small community shaken by a violent death was revealed to be a sleight of hand. Twin Peaks quickly expanded into a surreal meditation on the eternal nature of evil and how it can exist in our midst without our seeing it for what it is.
It wasn’t perfect: there wasn’t enough plot to sustain its two seasons, which ran from 1990 and 1991, and the quality ebbed when Lynch stepped away from the day-to-day running of the series in its second year (to focus on Wild at Heart, his Nicolas Cage-Laura Dern movie).
But, at its best, Twin Peaks – created with the veteran Hill Street Blues writer Mark Frost – scaled heights unprecedented for mere television. It is Lynch’s masterpiece, arguably one of the first TV dramas to demonstrate that this most disposable of mediums could be elevated to an art form. The “prestige TV” revolution that would gather pace through the late 1990s and beyond, with shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men, owes everything to Twin Peaks.
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As does Lynch, for whom Twin Peaks would come to be seen as a defining moment. Granted, he had already gained critical acclaim with The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet (and would do so again with Mulholland Drive). Blue Velvet, in particular, was a sort of trial run for Twin Peaks, in that it blended a noirish plot (and a commanding Kyle MacLachlan performance) to a sequence of nightmarish images: the ear on the lawn, a monstrous Dennis Hopper sucking on a gas mask.
Twin Peaks went further yet. It gave us Angelo Badalamenti’s mournful theme, Lynch’s famous “dancing dwarf”, the petrifying scene in which the demonic “Bob” (the set dresser Frank Silva) emerges from behind a bed – a simple sequence that Lynch amped up into sheer existential dread.
Then, having resurfaced to rescue the series, Lynch dragged us to hell and back with the finale. In the purgatorial Red Room, MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper was confronted by the screaming ghost of Sheryl Lee’s Laura Palmer and finally possessed by Bob (who had killed Palmer when inhabiting her father’s body).
It ended with Cooper-Bob, eyes black, banging his head against a mirror, screaming, “How’s Annie? How’s Annie?” – a reference to the diner waitress Annie Blackburn (a young Heather Graham). I watched it once and was struck down with dread. I don’t think I could bear to sit through it again.
Twin Peaks was fuelled by Lynch’s signature dream logic, and he never much cared to unpack its themes. “When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime,” he said. “A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language, and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”
[ David Lynch, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive director, dies aged 78Opens in new window ]
Lynch revisited the world of Twin Peaks on two further occasions – with the unsettling 1992 prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and then, in 2017, with the masterfully unhinged Twin Peaks: The Return, in which the real Agent Cooper finally escapes the Red Room and sets off in pursuit of Doppelgänger Bob. It would be Lynch’s final project – the last time he would drill into our subconscious and force us to look at the world in horrifying new ways.
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