Twin Peaks isn’t just a television show; it’s a perfume lingering in the cultural consciousness—a complex, otherworldly scent blending the sweetness of cherry pie, the damp wood of Douglas firs, and the acrid smoke of secrets burning in the dark. It is a dream of small-town America, but also a nightmare—a vision so distinct, so singular, that its existence feels miraculous. It is melodrama and transcendence, kitsch and profundity, a soap opera laced with cyanide and magic.
From the moment Angelo Badalamenti’s opening notes wash over you, you know you’ve stepped into another plane of reality. Here, coffee isn’t just coffee; it’s a ritual, a balm, a signifier of life’s simple pleasures. This is a world of immaculate haircuts, flannel shirts, and men like Sheriff Harry S. Truman—stoic, decent, ruggedly handsome—and Agent Dale Cooper, urbane yet childlike, as if he walked out of a Frank Capra film and into a David Lynch fever dream.
Beautiful People, Beautiful Simplicity
Twin Peaks is about beautiful people—literally, yes, but also spiritually. These characters, even at their worst, are imbued with a radiant earnestness, a belief in the sanctity of the ordinary. Truman and Cooper’s relationship is the axis of this fragile, surreal world: two men who meet, instantly accept each other, and step into the unknown together. Their bond is not a clash of opposites but a seamless partnership, a testament to trust and shared purpose.
The plot is deceptively simple: Laura Palmer is dead, and the town mourns. But this simplicity is a mask for something deeper, something primal. Lynch and Frost allow the narrative to breathe, creating space for the warmth of community to seep into every scene. Twin Peaks is a place where coffee and pie are sacred, where a handshake can speak volumes, where even the absurd—logs that talk, ceiling fans that terrify—feels tethered to an ancient truth.
Soap Opera as Art
The soap opera roots of Twin Peaks are not its weakness but its genius. Lynch and Frost took the melodrama of 90s daytime TV—the adultery, the betrayals, the over-the-top intrigue—and transformed it into high art. Catherine Martell’s schemes, the doomed love affairs, the wailing heartbreak—it’s all played with such sincerity that it transcends parody. This is the true beauty of Twin Peaks: it never looks down on its own ridiculousness. It embraces it, luxuriates in it, and elevates it.
The mundane becomes extraordinary, and the extraordinary becomes mundane. A dancing dwarf in a red room feels as natural as a cup of coffee at the Double R Diner. The town is alive with ritual and rhythm, its people and places imbued with a strange, haunting magic.
The Return: Subversion and Revelation
And then came The Return. Lynch didn’t just bring Cooper back to Twin Peaks for a victory lap; he unraveled everything we thought we knew about the story, the characters, and even the very idea of resolution. This was not fan service but a brutal confrontation with time, memory, and failure. Cooper, fractured into pieces—Dougie Jones, Mr. C, the Cooper still lost in the Lodge—is no longer the hero who simply puts things right. Instead, he is a man who struggles, who fails, who reaches for the impossible.
The warmth of the original series is replaced by something colder, more enigmatic. Yet even in this bleakness, there is beauty. Dougie’s naive joy, Laura’s fleeting smile, the bittersweet absurdity of the Mitchum Brothers—it’s all there, glimmers of light in the vast darkness.
And then there’s the ending. Cooper tries to rewrite history, to save Laura, to undo the original sin of Twin Peaks. But this act of hubris only fractures reality further. “What year is this?” Cooper asks, standing outside a house that no longer belongs to Laura. Her scream—primal, world-shattering—is the sound of the dream collapsing. This is not resolution; it is revelation.
Episode 8: The Birth of the Nightmare
To talk about Twin Peaks without discussing Episode 8 of The Return would be heretical. It is not television; it is a cosmic ritual, an art film that burns itself into your psyche. The atomic bomb test at White Sands, 1945—America’s original sin, the birth of a new kind of horror—is rendered with operatic grandeur. The camera plunges into the mushroom cloud, past the fire and destruction, into the heart of the void.
It is here that we see the arrival of BOB, the malevolent spirit, a creature born of humanity’s own darkness. And then, as if in counterpoint, we meet the Fireman, a towering figure of light who creates Laura Palmer, sending her as a golden orb into the world. Is she salvation? Innocence? The eternal victim? The mythology of Twin Peaks is maddeningly opaque, operating on dream logic, but it resonates on a primal level.
Dancing in the Red Room
The image of the Man from Another Place—the dwarf in the red suit, dancing in the Lodge—is Twin Peaks in miniature. His movements are jerky, his words cryptic, his presence both menacing and playful. “Let’s rock,” he declares, and it feels less like a statement and more like a cosmic decree. The Red Room, with its zigzag floors and blood-red curtains, operates outside of time, outside of sense. It is a place of pure symbolism, where the boundaries between self and other dissolve.
The Genius of Lynch
What makes Lynch a genius is his refusal to explain. Twin Peaks doesn’t resolve; it reverberates. It doesn’t give answers; it gives experiences. To engage with Twin Peaks is to surrender to its ambiguity, to let its warmth and terror wash over you like a scent you can’t quite place.
This is not a show to be dissected but to be felt. It is the smell of fresh coffee and burnt engine oil, the sound of wind through the trees, the taste of cherry pie tinged with something bitter. It is the beauty of soap opera sincerity, the horror of cosmic despair, the quiet intimacy of a handshake.
In the end, Twin Peaks is not a show—it is a dream of America, both its light and its shadow. It is the smell of damp wood and fire, the feeling of standing at the edge of an unknowable forest. It is a masterpiece that defies categorization, a work of art that lingers like the most haunting perfume.
And like Cooper and Truman, like the Fireman and Laura, we step into the unknown, hand in hand, ready to face the mystery. Let’s rock.
One of my favorite shows. I rewatch it once a year, like a ritual. Badalamenti's soundtrack often plays while I work.
This is the best review of twin peaks I read until now.