I finished Twin Peaks: The Return yesterday. It’s pretty good, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but it’s good television! I’m about to spoil it, and the entirety of Twin Peaks, as well as David Lynch’s films Mulholland Drive and Wild at Heart.
Throughout The Return, no image is harder to look at, or more moving, than the wrinkles on Sheryl Lee’s face. Lee, the owner of the image that is Twin Peaks (the prom photo of her character Laura Palmer), has been brutalized on screen more than any other actor in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s soap opera slash meditation on the nature of evil. This is partly intentional, as the story opens the day after the rape and murder of Palmer, and partly logistical, as Lee would also portray Palmer’s cousin Maddie, equally brutalized by the entity known as Bob, and would lead Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a prequel about the last week in Palmer’s life, once the show was cancelled as a result of ABC’s meddling and Lynch’s flighty nature. Whatever the reason, fans of Twin Peaks have spent a lot of time looking at Sheryl Lee’s lifeless face and being directly confronted with the idea of a woman struck down before her prime, the best years of her life cruelly ripped away.
I think that’s a big part of why it’s so moving to see Sheryl Lee as something other than the girl wrapped in plastic; the wrinkles, the age, the unpleasantness that all fall over her face at various points break something in our brains: an idea that her face is no longer the face of a woman, but a memory. “Memories are perfect, people are not” is about as succinct of a theme of Twin Peaks‘ early episodes as you can get. So much time is spent deconstructing the persona that Palmer set up for herself, as the perfect volunteering virgin gets revealed to be a drug-addicted, often manipulative, self-destructive cheater. The great thing, though, is that this deconstruction never takes away what a tragedy it was that Laura Palmer was killed in that train car. At the start of the 1990s, in between the still ravaging moral panic around the AIDS crisis and the continued evolution of “what were you wearing” rape culture, a lot of good, well-meaning people were wasting their entire lives writing off victims of tragedy for “putting themselves in that position in the first place.” David Lynch, and Twin Peaks, doesn’t ever really engage with this idea, which is a big part of why it’s aged better than every other show about the tragic snuffing of wayward youth from this time. Even in a show like this that is so often nakedly humanistic, you might expect a cynical character to bring these ideas to the surface so the show can take a heroic stand that tragedy is tragedy regardless of the victim’s behavior, but the show doesn’t do much in the way of acknowledging this idea as a possibility.
The flip-side of this is that when people die, their sins don’t go away. The natural order of birth-life-death is broken by narrative storytelling, and even more so by Lynch himself. The reason I say the natural order is broken by narratives is because we are at a place of observance above the natural order. Even in a story with zero fantastical elements that is just someone living and then dying, you can always return to the parts where they are alive, now informed by the horrible knowledge of what’s to come. This has to be considered a version of the intended experience of art. Rewatching Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, for example, involves knowing that this wide-eyed starlet is a projection(?) of a bruised, dejected murderer who takes her own life, but that knowledge doesn’t make her downward spiral any less uncomfortable, nor does her death make her idealism, that must have come from somewhere true, any less genuine.
Once the original two-season run of Twin Peaks was over, Lynch made Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a 135-minute long movie about knowing the end. The film is a dance with the inevitable, a repeat of a long-sung song that dissolves into dissonant hellfire the further down the path you walk. Laura does awful things in this film. She does good things as well. She cruelly saves Donna, and kindly ruins something within James for the rest of his life. None of those things change the fact that she is dead, and her death does not change the woman she was, she is. Past and present and future are all the same in Fire Walk With Me, a movie where you are living in what has been, with recent experience of what is to come.
In episode 18 of Twin Peaks: The Return, a woman with Laura Palmer’s face, the third time (conservatively) that Sheryl Lee has played a woman in trouble in this world, takes Dale Cooper’s hand and walks out of her life. She has just killed a man; the pattern states that he was probably trying to harm her, but maybe that’s projection. She’s unpleasant and a little rude, watching her companion with incredulity as he insists she is someone she is not. She is, though, even though she is not, to a degree, Laura Palmer. And just like Laura Palmer, Carrie Page is a regular person with good things and bad things about her, none of which cause her to deserve being tossed out in front of what may have once been Sarah Palmer’s house, with her eyes wide, screaming, seeing the long ago death that she is living sometime in the future.
David Lynch doesn’t do angels because angels don’t exist. There are just people and their corpses. He may have the best view of death out of all of us, a culture and a time obsessed with paying respect to the dead in constant priority over the living. Dead people don’t make mistakes: they can be forgiven for everything, and they can’t hurt anyone anymore. If perfection in a person is not hurting anyone ever (a belief that is not true but is no less steadfastly believed), then the best thing a person can be is dead. That is the ideal.
The joke is…David Lynch does do angels. In his 1990 film Wild at Heart, at the end of the picture, Sailor Ripley, on the verge of succumbing to his injuries, is visited by a visage of Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. She is played by Sheryl Lee. The angel looks a hell of a lot like Laura Palmer.
But it’s not. She is salvation, sure, but she is not Laura Palmer, and to get even a semblance of a happy ending, Lynch breaks the world of Wild at Heart, using one of his most trusted tools to do the job. This salvation that comes to Sailor doesn’t make him not a brutal man who has done horrible things and been falsely accused of many more, and it also doesn’t make him not a sweet, loving, man. Salvation in Wild at Heart is a fantasy, just like how death in Twin Peaks isn’t an eraser.
The truth of ALL OF THIS is somewhere in between the two, somewhere on the path that is marked both by impossible, joyful abundance and the cold, somber indifference. Lynch might see himself like The Fireman/The Giant, passively and sadly documenting the cruelty of the world, which makes the left-field rescue of Sailor in Wild at Heart so dizzyingly cathartic. But it’s never fun in the holistic way, in the way that gets the thing out of the back of your head that this isn’t real or right. We let ourselves get close to it, but even on a first viewing, Wild at Heart is still something darker, regardless of the dead prom queen descending upon the film in a bubble.
There are no angels. Doesn’t mean we have to tell them Right Now, we can let them have their fun for a little bit, as long as at the end of it we all acknowledge that life is for the living, and not even the saddest death can ever change that.
Davey Peppers 