The Most Popular Surrealist

How David Lynch used Surrealism to craft Twin Peaks

Mild spoilers warning for Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Most of what I reveal in detail is present in the early episodes.

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I can hear this image

My most overplayed vinyl is the Original Twin Peaks Soundtrack. I put it on again and again, and in the few months I’ve owned it the cover is slightly warped for being so loved. Besides my record player is one of my posters for Twin Peaks. On my bookshelf sits the complete series on DVD. What can I say? It’s my favorite favorite favorite.

For those of you not familiar with Twin Peaks or David Lynch in general, I’d say you’re in for a treat, but I think you’re really just in for a super confusing time. I always tell people to start with Twin Peaks and to only watch with someone who also loves it. The show is so bizarre and is a bit old, so it can be beyond confusing the first time around. And, more importantly, it doesn’t get less confusing. The more you watch, the more you find confuses you.

The story of Twin Peaks is quite simple: a small town is rocked by the death of teen queen Laura Palmer. Her murder slowly unravels the town and its many secrets, slowly exposing the people of Twin Peaks to not only the horrors of Laura Palmer’s secret life but also their own horrors.

If that were all Twin Peaks were, however, it wouldn’t be a David Lynch show. The show is a miasma of Lynchian motifs. It’s not just that Laura Palmer was a prostitute and drug dealer addicted to cocaine (that’s not a huge spoiler, by the way, it’s revealed early in), it’s that surrounding her is a vortex into a world unknown and untamed. Giants appear to announce the news on your favorite gum. A strange man appears out of the blue behind the couch. People speak backward in dreams. And you keep hearing the phrase, “Fire walk with me.”

screen cap from the first episode

I could sit here and dictate in detail what this and that means, or point out the duality often present in Twin Peaks through characters, but that would be missing the larger picture. You’re not supposed to understand Twin Peaks because what you discover on your own and determine for yourself reveals the stranger truth. By coming to our own conclusions, we are revealing ourselves in the process. This is the magic of Twin Peaks.

I rewatch Twin Peaks at least twice a year, give or take. I don’t watch a lot of television, and to be honest I struggle to name any new shows from the last few years that I’ve watched. It’s not that I circulate through the same shows, mymemory is incredible when it comes to shows. I can tell you what Fresh Prince episode we’re watching within the first five minutes. No, I just would rather read. The exception, of course, is Twin Peaks.

Every time I watch, I am brought into a new world. Something new is revealed to me, or I am revealing myself more and more each time. It wasn’t that I was surprised that Lynch studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but I was baffled at how often I neglected to see the echoes of Philadelphia in his work.

Laura Palmer

For anyone new, I’m from Philly and talk about my never-ending love for my city time and time again. And you’ll hear it again! David Lynch lived with his first wife in Philadelphia, a world away from his childhood in Montana and Idaho. It was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and though his time there was often in fear, it was this time that most influenced his work.

“We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street. We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen. The house was first broken into only three days after we moved in. The feeling was so close to extreme danger, and the fear was so intense. There was violence and hate and filth. But the biggest influence in my whole life was that city.” - David Lynch

When you read these words, it seems incredibly apparent in his work. Violence in Lynch’s work isn’t excessive. It’s not meant to be shocking but is a natural and unfortunate extension of the characters and the world they occupy. Lynch does not hide away from the dark world we know but confronts it directly without glorifying it.*

David Lynch as a character in Twin Peaks

I explained to my sister that the violence in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is hard to watch. To see the downfall of a teenage girl is never going to be fun, and anyone who has seen the first few episodes has an idea of what is coming. But I promised her that if she watched it, she would come out of it loving Laura Palmer more than ever. The final shot is one ingrained in me.

But it’s also his childhood, one he described as idyllic, that shapes his seminal work, namely Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. While these components are fascinating, particularly to hardcore fans like myself, how does one create a surrealist television show?

Lynch is a believer in the fact that film is the greatest medium of surrealism because the subconscious can be revealedstraight away. A television show, on the other hand, seems harder. There are scripts, showrunners, a network, actors contesting, audience reaction, etc.

While I think added ‘randomness’ to make the argument that Lynch’s work is surrealism is juvenile at best, I do find the introduction of a certain character exemplary in this format.

set photo of Frank Silva

The character of Bob is vital to Twin Peaks, and he’s found in the first episode, well before he’s introduced. This isn’t a sneaky trick brought on by clever writing, but rather an honest mistake. Frank Silva was a worker on the set of Twin Peaks and happened to accidentally appear in the background of a scene. This purely accidental scene appealed to Lynch, who would go on to make Frank Silva one of the most important characters in the series.

We could argue this is a form of ‘auto-writing'‘** and therefore makes Twin Peaks a surrealist piece. But the series doesn’t need that fun bit of trivia to pass the Surrealism test.

Throughout the series, including the film and the first few episodes I’ve seen of The Return, dreams and dream landscapes play a huge role in the storytelling. The iconic dream of Agent Cooper in the Red Room isn’t just a place for plot devices. It reveals the heart of Twin Peaks: the subconscious ruling the characters and the landscape.

What David Lynch sets out to do isn’t just to blur the lines between the real world and the dream world, but to show how the dream world (the sublime subconscious) is the reigning power over the characters. Taking into account the large cast of characters, this may seem odd until you truly dive in.

Agent Dale Cooper

The two most prominent characters where we find this surrealist element true are that of Laura Palmer and Agent Dale Cooper. Given that Laura Palmer’s aspects are spoilers, I won’t be talking about it. Instead, I will focus on Dale Cooper.

The character of Cooper is a seeming antithesis to the dark drama of Twin Peaks. He’s a Boy Scout, as my sister would say, a genuine good guy with a sort of boyish charm. Sherilyn Fenn, who plays Cooper’s admirer Audrey Horne, once described David Lynch as ‘apple pie’ (it should have been cherry pie but I digress). What she meant was he was incredibly wholesome, childlike, and again, boyish.

Sheriff Truman with Cooper

Agent Cooper’s approaches to solving the murder are unconventional, making him an odd pair with Sheriff Harry S Truman (it won’t be hard to forget that name, eh?). Harry is the more serious and straightforward of the two, at first open-minded to Cooper’s eccentricities. It isn’t until over time that he becomes impatient and insists on doing things head-on, no longer relying on Tibet, dreams, or weird tricks.

Lynch sets these two in opposition to each other for several reasons. First, it centers Agent Cooper, and for another, he often relies on juxtaposition in his writing. You cannot have the darkness of Laura Palmer’s secret life without the romance of Donna and James. You cannot have the severity of Black Jacks without the tender sweetness of Andy and Lucy. The hidden soap opera drama of Catherine Martell (RIP to the incredible actress) must live in direct juxtaposition to Pete with his fish in the percolator.

Dualities are a common theme in all of Lynch’s work, especially Twin Peaks. Again, I can’t get into it without spoiling the plot, and I am never one to deny someone the joy of Twin Peaks. But back to Harry and Cooper.

Our dear Special Agent Cooper awakens from a dream to tell Harry he knows who killed Laura Palmer. Don’t worry, it’s early in the show. The next day he proceeds to detail to Harry a dream of his, which unbeknownst to him set the story truly off in Lynchian directions.

iconic dance scene

In the dream, Cooper appears as an old man in a red room with black and white chevron tiling. He is confronted by a little man who speaks backward and the appearance of Laura Palmer in a black dress. It is in this dream that Laura reveals her killer, but Coop cannot remember. But his belief in this dream, that it is every bit as real as a damn fine cup of coffee, is at the heart of Twin Peaks as a whole.

This isn’t to say that Cooper doesn’t seek evidence, and try to find the truth through more thorough means. His character is multifaceted, gushing over trees one second and then breaking into hero mode to save someone. But leading his work is always the dream in the red room. In the end, there is always the red room.

Of course, it doesn’t end here. Twin Peaks has many many many surrealist elements. It even references art multiple times. There’s literally a scene with a giant Kafka photo in the background (which I desperately need). But it all starts with David Lynch blurring the lines between reality and surreality.

If there’s anything you should take from this, it’s that you should watch Twin Peaks. What better way to celebrate the 100th birthday of Surrealism than to see the way it’s evolved into television? I’m joking, what I want to emphasize is how the elements of surrealism can be translated across mediums which is part of why it’s still so compelling to this day. David Lynch was able to take surrealism and challenge how we view it through his films, short films, art, books, and television. What does this ultimately mean? It means the possibilities are still endless. It means we still have more to say about surrealism.

And yes, you should watch Twin Peaks.

One final thing.

I couldn’t find who made the original edit and I’m a firm believing in crediting artists, so if you know please share. Here’s an edit done of Agent Cooper based on a Magritte painting (arguably my favorite Magritte work) (who is arguably my favorite male surrealist). And the wild thing is it’s incredibly suitable to Twin Peaks. Enjoy

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*This is up for debate. I personally feel it isn’t, but Lynch has been criticized for how he writes women.

**my skepticism here is not a critic of auto-writing, but of this happenstance as an example of auto-writing.