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Twin Peaks RevisitedThe second season is not what it seems.

By Jessica Winter
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 1:56 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Twin Peaks' rapt, patient gaze was extraordinary then and unthinkable now; what was palatable as a one-off proved too much to ask of a mass audience week after week. Those who gave up too soon, however, missed out on That Episode—"Lonely Souls," where all is made clear, the series' pinnacle and one of Lynch's finest hours. A mood of chaotic foreboding is established early as Cooper and his team coordinate an ad-hoc police lineup for a mentally imbalanced witness, known as the One-Armed Man, in the lobby of the Great Northern Hotel, much to the displeasure of slimy proprietor Ben Horne.

Video file.; The rise of the interjection 'Awwa'!; Marlon Brando in a scene from Reflections in a Golden Eye.; Brando; marlon brando; Reflections in a Golden Eye; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid533275934http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=78144477

Off-kilter out of the gate, the episode builds to a stunning pair of scenes: Leland Palmer, in the grip of demon Bob, beats Laura's look-alike cousin Maddy to death in what a typical newspaper recap called "one of the most gruesome displays of violence ever to hit a prime-time series." (The episode's revelation that the clownish sad-sack Leland raped and murdered his own daughter seems at once unthinkable and, in retrospect, a truth hidden in plain sight all along.) At the same time, at the local tavern, a pale chanteuse sings the lover's requiem "The World Spins" as a communal sadness descends over the place like a specter. This is Lynch at the top of his powers: his brutal efficiency as a horror director—one whose scary monsters of choice are the mangled psyches of our families and neighbors—matched with his troubling gift for illuminating voluptuous beauty in abject pain and sorrow. It's still hard to believe that something like this was on American broadcast TV, sharing a network with America's Funniest Home Videos.

It took Cooper two more episodes to solve Laura's murder. He spent much of the rest of the season trying to outmaneuver his deranged ex-partner, who tracks him down to Twin Peaks and appears to have a nasty fate in store for one of the town's many teenage beauties. This new villain couldn't compare to the greasy malevolence of Bob, though, and it's easy to understand why many have written off these later, meandering episodes—though they did generate their fair share of curiosities. Future X-Files fans got their first glimpse of David Duchovny, who starred in three episodes as a transvestite FBI agent, and Cooper found a love interest in the form of Heather Graham, whose doll-like blankness works to haunting effect in the series finale. Lynch returned to direct the creepy send-off episode, wherein Cooper reunites with the aforementioned midget and the vengeful ghost of Laura Palmer for what might be described as an encounter-group session of the damned.

Video file.; The rise of the interjection 'Awwa'!; Marlon Brando in a scene from Reflections in a Golden Eye.; Brando; marlon brando; Reflections in a Golden Eye; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid533275934http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=78144477

Twin Peaks could have ended with Maddy's murder, and maybe it should have. After that, the show lost much of its narrative energy, if not its taste for the avant-garde. Bob became a kind of freelance fiend, but he worked far better as a metaphor for the evil and depravity lurking next door or, perhaps, at your own kitchen table—a theme that Lynch mined in his feature films Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986). And Lynch was unhappy that intense pressure from ABC and antsy viewers had cracked the show's big secret open far sooner than planned—if he'd had his way, the Palmer investigation might have spun out indefinitely. Yet the director has done some of his best work within unwelcome constraints: The extreme financial limitations he faced during the five-year production of Eraserhead, for example, or the practical problem of turning the open-ended TV pilot Mulholland Drive (2001) into a self-enclosed feature film.

The same was true with Twin Peaks. Forced to stop teasing his viewers and deliver a payoff, Lynch administered it like a flawlessly calibrated punishment, proving that he could be a master of plot and pacing. His genius is to pull up the living-room carpet and show us all the muck and pestilence underneath, and in Twin Peaks, the sexual pathology and homicidal tendencies familiar from his films were all the more disturbing for being veiled and muted to meet network standards. Some of Twin Peaks is brilliant; some of it is virtually unwatchable. But at its best, this strange, aborted experiment showed that having to think inside the box didn't pen in Lynch's vision, but only concentrated it.

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Jessica Winter is a writer in New York.
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