Last Quarter: Death as tragedy & transformation

Hello. It's Friday, and I wrote this post in advance because of how I've taken an extended weekend trip; but when I started writing it was a morning following two days of bitterly strong, cold wind, which followed a heavy snow-and-ice storm. The end of wintertime still feels rather far away, even if solar spring has begun.

What's looming much closer is the time I call Twin Peaks season. The television series' timeline prominently kicks off on the date of February 24th, so this is when I annually rewatch it as one of my few favorite shows. I've written a little about the series before, and conversely since this isn't a very media-focused newsletter I think there's only a little more I feel motivated to write on the series beyond what I already managed. However, its co-creator David Lynch died a month ago, and this will be my first year rewatching Twin Peaks in a world without him. I say "without him" somewhat paradoxically since given what I understood of his personal belief system, I know that he would insist death is no obstacle to his presence remaining in the world; and as I have come to accept that ghosts are real in the sense of memories persisting after death, I would agree that much. Simultaneously, though, whatever existential change this artist has undergone, it is such that he will not personally be putting more art out into the universe.

As someone deeply affected by many qualities of that art, especially where Twin Peaks is concerned, I mourn that loss. The timing and context of Lynch's death also felt alarmingly relevant, even if he probably passed in peace. And I feel driven to process some of those feelings here, even briefly, because of how they intersect with overall death work.

A violent death in a small community

For those curious enough to read on but who are not already acquainted with Twin Peaks, I will summarize it without revealing details that would diminish a first-time viewing experience. The story arrives sequentially in three formats:

First, there is the original television series in two seasons. The episodes depict life in a small town[1] immediately following the violent murder of a high school homecoming queen, Laura Palmer; much of this life is simply mundane interpersonal relationship sagas that sometimes had almost nothing to do with Laura's life or death, but the process of investigating that death uncovers both a human underbelly to the superficially idyllic community and a supernatural weirdness underpinning ordinary life. If this sounds familiar without having seen the show, numerous series have used this mold or portions thereof since the first broadcast in the early 1990s. Tonally, however, Twin Peaks was unique from the start. It both parodies soap opera melodrama and embraces it in earnest; it presents its strange, occult cosmology with very little real explanation; it's equally cynical and hopeful about so-called human nature. And originally, it wasn't meant to reveal Laura's murderer. The question of "who killed Laura Palmer?" was supposed to remain open through the entire story, however many seasons it lasted.

While this proved very popular and turned Twin Peaks rapidly into a cultural touchstone when it aired, the network eventually got cold feet about such an experimental concept and forced David Lynch and Mark Frost, the joint showrunners, to reveal the killer partway through the second season. This was a widely scorned maneuver that to this day many fans and critics consider a huge mistake; as the show pulled the rug out from under itself, it then spent the back half of that season turning into a much less self-aware soap opera as Lynch (perhaps understandably) retreated from the project and various crummy subplots were thrown at a wall to see what stuck. In my and many others' opinion the second season is at least salvaged by how compellingly the killer's reveal is managed in the moment, and then by the last few episodes that worked toward a fantastic, intentional cliffhanger ending directed again by Lynch. But those episodes notwithstanding, the series' legacy seemed destined to become an odd artifact that never achieved what it was really capable of due to corporate meddling.

The followup film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, met a similarly messy critical fate when it was first released in 1992. Unconstrained by FCC standards for television and the kinds of network norms that interfered with the show, David Lynch shot a prequel concerning various events that led up to Laura Palmer's death, especially events in her own life, and the filmmaking became so experimental and abstract that it would invite comparisons to Lynch's seminal work Eraserhead. With Laura's fate inevitable already, with her traumatic life very difficult to watch, and with the Twin Peaks cosmology made ever stranger, many people didn't respond well to this movie at the time. However, I consider it one of the greatest films ever made, and it's been critically reassessed for a while now. It still doesn't make for easy viewing or interpretation, but the story fundamentally engages with the necessary prospect of humanizing and fleshing out Laura, turning her from a relatively voiceless victim to a person who had agency and whose suffering leading up to her death belonged to her, not just to the community trying to make sense of it afterward.

After the film flopped, it seemed as if that was still the end of Twin Peaks, but in 2017 Showtime premiered a limited-run series developed again by Lynch and Frost. Twin Peaks: The Return was an actual sequel to the events in the original series, building on the cliffhanger ending and turning to a meta-examination of the narrative choices made in earlier installments. Arguably it's one of the only "nostalgia sequel" projects in television or cinema that I've ever found to fully justify itself, because it's a masterfully crafted series that still leaves many mysteries beautifully unexplained while also exploring dozens of interesting nooks and crannies that the original seasons never addressed. And it seems this time the critics and other fans agreed right away.

With such ups and downs, with a few genuinely awkward sections, and with such an embedded weirdness that I truly cannot overemphasize, despite considering anything to do with Twin Peaks to be among my favorite pieces of media I am slow to automatically recommend it to just anyone. However, when it comes to depicting supernatural events and engaging with topics like death and trauma, I could not recommend it more for those curious.

Loss & closure, grief & relief

The original series premiere, its pilot episode, is a feat of storytelling that immediately introduces strange dialogue, idiosyncratic characters, and a deep self-awareness of melodramatic tropes that might be used for humorous, campy effect. However, the emotions veer from camp to sincerity at a moment's notice, and if this would normally result in whiplash for other media, that doesn't happen here. What's given over to irony and parody is that which is genuinely absurd in modern human society; what's treated sincerely are matters of trauma, fear, and enduring love. And in this latter category also falls the nature of Laura Palmer's death, and the communal response to losing her.

These moments in the premiere, and in episodes that follow, often affect me rather powerfully. So many of the actors summon a grief that isn't afraid to enter the realm of the "hysterical," which is honest here. And the writing thoroughly, continuously probes the significance of this one character's absence from so many other characters' lives. Laura formed only one node in a much wider network, but she often seems analogous to a keystone species in an ecosystem, having effects in unexpected places and representing the health of her community. Unsettling discoveries about her "secret" life suggest that this community was not so healthy after all, and once she's removed from it many things fall apart. There is no closure at all for some people, and in other cases there is closure but only in the sense of a redirected life course.

In watching the film prequel, I also have a strong emotional response, but it's different, a necessary counterpart. We have viewed the systemic tragedy, and now we witness the individual, specific tragedy of what Laura endures before her murder. By the time she dies, the film doesn't provide easy answers about whether this should be interpreted as a release from her suffering or as simply an injustice to conclude years of other injustices. My own opinion is that both interpretations would make sense. Plenty of indications are given that Laura truly wants to die and would rather die than be poisoned by the source of her agony and turn from traumatized to traumatizer; nonetheless, her death is still a murder, not a suicide, and said source of agony doesn't come from something innate to Laura's own person, being instead a decidedly external force of evil and horror incarnate. Unsurprisingly, the film is very triggering at points for my experience of abuse, though in a cathartic and authentic way. I can relate to feeling the yearning for death as an escape — an escape from something that should absolutely not be happening.

When I reach The Return, that third season, I find that the themes from both its previous television and cinematic formats swirl together. The narrative implications of Laura's death stand in contrast against the idea that revealing her killer could have "solved" anything; a young woman who should still be alive is still dead. The evolution of the evil that destroyed her is also hinted to not really be so old, perhaps being a product of modernity — not that David Lynch and Mark Frost seem inclined to regard all new things as bad[2], but rather that the human[3] attempt to master nature on even a subatomic level will be our undoing. And if this development isn't wholly modern, either, there is still an embedded critique of the rational empiricist desire to strip all mystery, wonder, and dream from the world. Indeed, by The Return's conclusion, the lesson I often walk away with is that tragedy is woven into the fabric of reality — a phrase I've recently used when processing all that is wrong with my life and the wider world this winter — but an even greater tragedy arises when trying to change the past or control the future. Pure joy and love are real and may even be our salvation, but they would mean nothing on their own.

Every year, when I sit through each of these connected narratives, I am thus reminded that death impacts more than just the dead, and that there is a line to draw between a good death and a bad one. And that nevertheless, we will never eliminate the pain of any death from our lives; death itself cannot be conquered, and in the end we must make our peace with it regardless of how fairly or unfairly it's visited us.

"There is fire where you are going"

Having said all the above, I suppose there is the question of whether David Lynch's own death is good or bad, fair or unfair. For some clarity, I've long had mixed feelings about his actual person and beliefs, namely concerning his advocacy for Transcendental Meditation (which is basically harmless and probably helpful but also tends to carry a whiff of cultishness and extraordinary, unsupportable claims). I would also say that his filmmaking's common focus on Americana is filtered through a very white lens, including with mixed messages on how much to trust entities like the state and police. But these sorts of concerns do not make his life or work irredeemable; they only complicate my appreciation.

For my part, I can enjoy the visionary qualities of his art and judge plenty of other artists far more harshly. To his credit, unless some new information comes to light it seems that in contrast to many male "visionaries" of his type he was kind-hearted and non-exploitative for the most part. And similarly, he was one of the few male filmmakers I've yet encountered with an ability to depict women's suffering and struggles in language I recognize as authentic. There's often palpable collaboration between the auteur[4] and the actors, instead of this sense that what I'm watching is an exclusive project of the male gaze. So Lynch's work in general, and Twin Peaks in particular, is certainly not for everyone but seems to create a space that I and plenty of other women I've known have willingly entered for processing many things about what it is like to be a woman, or in my case to be perceived as one.

Thus it feels like a loss to me that Lynch is no longer making art. And that would make his death unfair if my feelings were somehow what mattered the most. Of course, whether or not he himself persists in some way after death, it's also the case that he was 78 years old and had developed emphysema from a near-lifelong smoking habit that he chose to maintain; I hardly believe someone deserves to die from an addiction, but in terms of pure cause and effect there can at least be no surprise that he died at this age, if not earlier.

I can consider all of these things, however, and still feel like something in his passing was both wildly amiss and wildly apt. The man centered so much of his art on the poison heart of the United States, exemplified in particular by his engagement (in non-Twin Peaks material) with celebrity culture and nostalgia for a golden age in Los Angeles, a city synonymous with Hollywood and central to this nation-state's visual mythmaking. Time and again, he depicted a culture that eats itself, and he sifted through image after image of the American Century only to turn it on its head.

Much of his work, including Twin Peaks, concerns a kind of capitalist apocalypse, even if that isn't the language he would use to describe it and even if his own analysis might be lacking. But I feel comfortable saying as much since there was never a greater proponent than David Lynch for "the death of the author." And then as for his own literal death, it took place in the real capitalist apocalypse: evacuated from his Los Angeles home while his city burned in catastrophic wildfires brought about by the capitalism-created ecological crisis. The smoke of those wildfires in all likelihood exacerbated his emphysema.

How strange and terrible in particular that in much of his work, fire is a symbol of entropy and destruction. In The Return, one character potently warns another, "There is fire where you are going."

It is both a good death, and a bad one — both fair and unfair — and it is painfully fitting. And in his own absence, I feel myself once again learning the lesson that it's all right to have a multitude of reactions to death. To mourn and rejoice simultaneously. As the collapse that we are in accelerates, I will try to answer the invitation for openness: openness to grief for the good things being lost, and openness to release from the abusive system that's breaking. Everything dies. But there is always something else after it, even if it's different. In that sense, nothing dies, and I could agree with Lynch's stance on the matter after all.

The Elephant Man is not my favorite film that Lynch directed; I would rank it somewhere in the middle. But the final words, adapted from Tennyson, have lingered in my head ever since I rewatched it last month.

"Oh, never. Nothing will die. The stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats. Nothing will die."

[1] I say "small" because the writing and shots of the town repeatedly emphasize its tiny, cozy, remote nature near the Canadian border, yet according to a shot in the opening credits Twin Peaks holds more than 50,000 people. Therefore it's not small at all. But I still tend to believe that the living population is more like 5,000 people, and a couple of friends and I joke that 50,000 is a cumulative population tally including ghosts.

[2] It is not, if I may draw on an unfortunate conservative meme, "The Retvrn."

[3] I would personally say white-Western, not human, but I'll be the first to agree that decolonial logic is not itself one of Twin Peaks' strong suits.

[4] It's misguided to act as if movies and television are products of individual genius instead of the work of many, many hands on deck. Regardless, I have to at least use the term facetiously here.

I know that for those of you who aren't versed or interested in the material at play this week, this may not have been as meaningful a read as some others, but thank you if you did finish. Next week I will be writing a review of alchemical symbols (not all of them, but the ones I find the most relevant to my practice), and the following week there will be a post for paid subscribers on the hedgecraft of morels and ferns.