In an era where TV rarely ventured beyond the dreaded “To be be continued…” ending, Mr. Lynch and Mr. Frost placed a bet that people wanted more, that the mystery was important for the sake of the mystery, that not everything needed to be explained, and that sometimes things are better without an ending.
In the rich history of art and literature, there are moments when a single work seems to conjure into existence an entirely new genre, containing all of the common tropes and underlying themes at once, creating a template other artists would explore, sometimes for centuries. William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, for example, introduced the world to a couple that seemingly hated each other, but was truly in love, only they didn’t know it themselves until their friends tricked them into the realization. J.R.R Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings trilogy set a standard for fantasy that endures to this day, and to a large extent, modern fantasy authors from Robert Jordan to George R.R. Martin are simply continuing to mine his ideas, updating and recycling them without truly altering the underlying foundation. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis set the standard for almost a century of science fiction films, depicting everything from video phones to an exploitative future civilization based on a hidden secret. Similarly, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon birthed a thousand film noirs, complete with the fast talking private eye, the femme fatale, and the nearly impenetrable twists and turns of the plot. To be sure, in all of these cases and others, elements of the new genre were swirling in the collective consciousness. Shakespeare wasn’t the first to introduce the idea of lovers separated by some barrier, either family or themselves, the underlying trope goes back to at least Pyramus and Thisbe from Greek mythology, perhaps the original young lovers forbidden to marry. Tolkien built upon the more mythic, pulp fantasy popular in the 1920s and 1930s, including Fritz Lieber’s Lankhmar and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Lang benefited from the work of genre defining science fiction authors, particularly Jules Verne and H.G. Well’s classic, The Time Machine. The Maltese Falcon was likewise based on a book that had already begun to define the genre in print if not on screen. In all cases, the respective creators wove various threads already in existence, either recently in the case of science fiction or ancient as in some of elements of fantasy literature or even romance, into something new, a tapestry that didn’t exist in this fashion or design before hand, but one that would go on itself to serve as threads for future artists to the point where at times, it might seem like the thread itself is simply being repackaged over and over again for mass consumption, remade time and again.
By this standard, David Lynch’s seminal cult classic, Twin Peaks, particularly the series pilot episode is such a work, perhaps even one that can be credited with birthing at least two genres instead of one. Though many have pointed to the series as the beginning of what has come to be known as prestige television, leading directly to “Peak TV,” it is, in and of itself, a work that has been replicated over and over again, countless times. Twenty five years after its premiere, the idea of a television show as a “puzzle box” or a “mystery box,” essentially a riddle to be solved by the audience, is so well established that it needs no introduction, but the same was not true in 1990. In 2019, Kellie Herson, writing for The Outline, noted, “There’s never been a better time to be an enormous dork who loves puzzles. Late-2010s television has been dominated by the puzzle box, a narrative form that centers on unpacking a central mystery, exemplified in zeitgeist-capturing shows like Westworld, Russian Doll, and The Good Place. With carefully paced episodes that drop leading clues and execute disorienting plot twists, the format is optimized to capture and keep viewers’ curiosity.” While she noted the initial popularity of Twin Peaks as a mystery, Ms. Herson and many others generally cite Lost, which debuted in 2004, as the birth of the genre, “The puzzle box isn’t a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Viewers fixated on the identity of Laura Palmer’s murderer during the initial 1990-91 run of Twin Peaks; ratings tailed off immensely once the secret was revealed. Often held up as the quintessential puzzle box, Lost (2004-2010) inspired endless theorizing about what, exactly, the fuck was going on with that island. Both inspired a handful of knockoffs, but neither gave rise to anything one would describe as a trend — at least, nothing that compares to the current critical mass of mystery-centric television.” Lost was also specifically identified by Sophia Stewart, writing for Film School Rejects on “The Evolution of the Mystery Box.” “When J.J. Abrams was a kid, he loved magic. One day he headed over to the magic store, and he bought the first thing he saw that captured his imagination: Tannen’s Mystery Magic Box. Its purpose is simple – when you open the box, you’ll find some kind of magic waiting inside. Abrams has never opened the box. In his 2007 TED Talk, Abrams considers why. ‘What I love about this box,’ he says, ‘is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is a catalyst for imagination.’ With Lost, Abrams applied the same logic and introduced mystery box storytelling to the small screen. Most mystery box shows can be summed up with the question, What’s the deal with ______? This narrative style – characterized by narration that unfolds as a series of reveals and twists to unearth central mysteries – can be equal parts rewarding and maddening. Fundamentally, mystery boxes raise the narrative stakes. When storytellers introduce a mystery, they take on the responsibility of solving it in a satisfying, meaningful way.”
Mr. Lynch himself didn’t quite see it that way, of course. He conceived Twin Peaks as a mystery that would never be solved, a Russian doll with an infinity of smaller dolls inside, forget satisfying or meaningful, until the studio executives forced him to identify the killer midway through the second season, but the fundamentals remain. Twin Peaks certainly opens on a mystery, the murder of Laura Palmer, and subsequently unfolds as a series of reveals about her personally, the events preceding her murder, and the town itself. Throughout, we are introduced to a series of characters who are presented, at first, as mysteries of their own, compounding the central question of who killed Laura Palmer, in ways that are both rewarding and maddening. Initially, this process takes the form of a crime drama. Pete Martell discovers a body on a lakeside beach, wrapped in plastic, while on his way to go fishing, summoning the local police department and coroner. Living in a small town, they immediately recognize who she is, a local beauty queen and high school student, seemingly beloved by everyone and touching everyone’s lives in some way. From there, we are introduced to Laura’s family, who are not yet aware of the horrible fate that has befallen their daughter. Her mother, believing Laura is safe in bed, calls up to her to come down or she’ll be late for school, complete with an eerie shot of a fan at the top of the stairs, droning on and casting shadows. She phones her boyfriend, who is supposed to be at football practice. She phones practice itself, only to learn that the boyfriend isn’t there either and hasn’t been for weeks. Laura’s father, meanwhile, is at work, and by the time she phones him, she’s increasingly frantic, convinced that something must be horribly wrong. At first, Leland thinks there must be an innocent explanation, but the audience knows the truth and we can see a police car pull up in the background. Once Leland sees the sheriff enter the building, he too is convinced and breaks down. Next, we meet Bobby, primarily to learn that he’s seeing Shelly in addition to the deceased Laura, and Shelly herself is married to someone else. Beyond advancing the story and the underlying mystery, each scene is also an opportunity to introduce a cast of rather idiosyncratic characters, which is frequently fundamental to the genre. The small town police sheriff, Harry S. Truman, certainly looks the part, but his team doesn’t seem up to the job between the confusion over transferring a phone call in a small office to an officer who throws up at every crime scene. Laura’s mother is distraught for obvious reasons, but there also seems to be something else going on, a mental issue or a general lack of stability. Leland, on the surface, seems like a solid citizen, but his boss is presented as a sort of used car salesman turned businessman, willing to say anything to make a buck, including talking about how good everyone’s “air sacks” feel in the mountain air.
Overall, there’s a sense that everyone’s hiding something, either related to the murder and otherwise, a dark secret or a relatively benign one. By the time we learn that another young woman is missing, Ronette Pulaski, we’re somehow not surprised that Laura wasn’t alone when she was slaughtered, transforming one mystery into two or more, but as the genre demands, this missing woman is almost immediately found, wandering dazed, disheveled, and beaten across a bridge, solving one puzzle while introducing another. The audience can already guess that the mystery is far more sprawling then the fate of a single young woman, and that the reasons for her death are likely not entirely straight forward, imagining that she was caught in some rip current in the town culture that she couldn’t escape from. Because Ronette was found crossing a state line, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is summoned, and he too is perplexing, if in a more entertaining fashion, focused on pie, coffee, and the beautiful trees as much as he is on the murder, establishing several key, more light-hearted themes for the overall story. Rather than swooping in to save the day by the final act as audiences were accustomed to in the procedural dramas of the day, however, the sense of a riddle to be solved only deepens shortly after Cooper arrives, when he asks to inspect Ronette’s finger while she’s still in a coma, clearly looking for something in particular, but not yet finding it. The sequence serves to turn the audience into the equivalent of Sheriff Truman, wondering what’s going on beneath the surface, a refrain that will repeat itself throughout the remainder of the pilot as Mr. Lynch plays with what the audience knows and what the characters know, contrasting the two to increase the underlying drama. The hospital also introduces a bizarre psychiatrist, seemingly obsessed with Laura and a mysterious one-armed man, who might or might not be related to anything at all. At the morgue, Special Agent Cooper ultimately finds what he was looking for under Laura’s fingernail, a tiny piece of paper with the letter “R.” At her house, he finds a diary with a key to the safety deposit box, which once opened, begins to reveal Laura’s second life. By this point, however, the audience, primed to expect ever deeper mysteries, isn’t surprised to learn that the town beauty queen had both a cocaine habit and a predilection to advertising herself in adult magazines. Sheriff Truman is rocked by the revelation, but as if we had changed roles with Special Agent Cooper, the audience somehow isn’t. Likewise, we aren’t particularly surprised to learn that Laura has at least one other secret boyfriend, and he too has another love interest, Laura’s best friend, Donna, the daughter of the coroner and also the town doctor.
As the pilot comes to a close, Donna overhears a secret of her own, that the FBI and police believe the killer might be linked to a necklace Laura wore, a heart shaped locket, that can be split in two to give to your significant other. The other half was, perhaps needless to say, given to James, who subsequently hides it at Donna’s insistence when they meet serendipitously in the woods. The FBI also believes that Laura’s murder and the attack on Ronette is linked to another killing a year earlier, where a similar small slip of paper was found under the fingernail of Theresa Banks, leaving us with another big mystery and finally, in the last scene, a small one when an unknown person finds the buried half of the heart shape locket hidden by Donna and James before the credits roll, a classic cliffhanger, enticing the viewer to watch the next episode. If this isn’t a classic puzzle box, the first of its kind, what is it? After the pilot alone, before more secrets and a supernatural threat emerge, it might be tempting to simply call it a murder mystery, but at the time, murder mysteries weren’t constructed anything like this, leading to the second genre Twin Peaks defined to this day. Night time soap operas had recurring plotlines, and clearly with all of the sleeping around and backstabbing, Mr. Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, were inspired by the form, but it would be another five years before Murder One introduced the idea of one, single killing occupying an entire season of screentime. While Murder One had little in common with Twin Peaks, subsequent takes on the genre have pulled much, much more directly. The Killing, for instance, debuted in 2011, though it was based on a Danish series that came out in 2007. The show spends two seasons unraveling the murder of a high school student in Seattle, Washington found drowned in the trunk of a car belonging to a candidate for mayor, a young woman who much, like Laura Palmer before her, also had a secret life, multiple boyfriends, wild predilections, and was surrounded by family and friends who had the same double or triple identities. While more gritty and dramatic, less whimsical and idiosyncratic, it’s not much of an exaggeration to view the set up as essentially a remake of Twin Peaks, especially when the show goes on to reveal a dark underworld of corruption, relationships that were hidden at first, and the necessary twists and turns as we try to figure out who killed Rosie Larsen. The same could be said of much of British author turned US resident and mystery phenomenon Harlen Coben, who has made someone going missing to start a story something of a cottage industry. His Netflix series, Safe, opens with a missing high school student, a dead body in a pool, and a gated community that holds dark secrets. Like Twin Peaks, both use a combination of an investigator asking questions and the occasional flashback to peel back the various layers. Neither, however, delves into the supernatural, making them straight detective stories.
For that matter, HBO’s True Detective (2014) also fits into the same mold, albeit with a hint of the supernatural when the discovery of a female corpse “sends two homicide detectives on a surreal hunt for a mad man” to quote Rolling Stone. There are many, many others, especially if you consider the supernatural infused and the non supernatural infused variety two separate genres, hence the topic of this blog post. Rolling Stone itself lists at least twenty including True Detective. These include The Killing and Lost, already mentioned here, but exclude Westworld, Russian, Doll, and The Good Place. The list runs the gamut and stretches across the ocean to foreign TV: Bates Motel, Broadchurch, Carnivale, Desperate Housewives, Fringe, Hannibal, The Killing, Legion, Lost, Northern Exposure, The OA, Picket Fences, Riverdale, The Sopranos, Top of the Lake, True Detective, Veronica Mars, Wayward Pines, Wild Palms, and The X-Files, prompting the question, has anyone tried to determine how many times Twin Peaks has been essentially remade? The achievement would be remarkable on its own even if the pilot had debuted years later, but at the time, it’s almost hard to believe that audiences embraced something so radically different than anything that had come before. In an era where plots were expected to be resolved in an episode, and other than night time soaps, TV rarely ventured beyond the dreaded “To be be continued…” ending (remember how much that sucked?), Mr. Lynch and Mr. Frost placed a bet that people wanted more, that the mystery was important simply for the sake of the mystery, that moving forward didn’t necessarily require resolving conflict, that not everything needed to be explained, and that sometimes things are better without an ending at all. They placed the bet, and they delivered on the promise. By modern standards, the pacing might be a little sedate, the revelations a little more expected than they were twenty five years ago, and the characters a little more hokey, but like any classic it remains addictively watchable and likely will as long as television is television even if it isn’t really television anymore.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 