David Lynch Captured the Appeal of the Unknown

David Lynch famously abhorred explaining himself. “Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film,” the director once said of his esoteric debut feature, during a 2007 interview. When asked to elaborate, he replied, smiling: “No, I won’t.” The clip, which tends to make the rounds on the internet every few months, demonstrates—without actually stating—everything that anyone ought to know about the late auteur’s oblique body of work: The viewing experience itself matters much more than where the story is going, let alone what it’s “about.”

Twin Peaks was perhaps Lynch’s most robust example of this general philosophy—and revisiting the series after the director’s death last week reinforces just how effective his approach continues to be. The show, which premiered in 1990 and has since grown a cult audience, embraced many of linear television’s conventions while simultaneously defying them as often as possible. Part murder mystery, part soap opera with an urban-legend flair, Twin Peaks begins with a resident of the titular fictional Washington town discovering the dead body of a local high-school student, Laura Palmer. From there, it deliberately layers on the kitsch while gradually revealing the cosmic nightmare lurking at the small town’s center.

But Twin Peaks’ many aficionados know that this synopsis belies its true genius. Lynch and his co-creator, Mark Frost, drew on the director’s affection for both the eldritch and the ordinary to conceive this singular affair, making great use of Lynch’s ability to balance these two discordant modes. Over the course of his career, it could sometimes seem easy to take his knack for stylistic cacophony for granted—but even now, Twin Peaks’ unknowability feels appealingly distinct.

The show’s arc follows an otherworldly battle between good and evil, ostensibly a familiar setup. But every character involved has a charmingly eccentric quirk—an eye patch, an obsession with drapes, an ever-present log, an affinity for doughnuts and cherry pie. The town sheriff shares a name with a former U.S. president. The local psychiatrist displays his collection of cocktail umbrellas. The FBI agent assigned to the Laura Palmer case, Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan), is as eager to solve the puzzle of her death as he is to learn what kind of lovely trees mark the entrance to the town. (They’re Douglas firs.) These characters contribute to the overall peculiar tone, emphasizing that viewers shouldn’t expect anything to be straightforward or easy to predict.

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Audiences flocked to the show in its first season, attracted to its central premise. They were captivated by what they assumed were promised answers to the question that became Twin Peaks’ unofficial catchphrase: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” But that reveal came less than halfway into the second season—much earlier than intended, because of network pressure, according to Frost. What should have been a climactic moment instead felt, to many fans, disappointingly abrupt, as if Lynch and Frost had tossed out the truth about the teenager’s murder as an afterthought. The ratings started to decline, and viewers considered whether to keep watching Twin Peaks: Now that the show had wrapped up its biggest subplot, what was the point in watching the rest of its strange, seemingly disjointed storylines unfold over the remainder of the season?

The answer to that—and what actually made Twin Peaks so compelling, beyond its core mystery—lay in Lynch’s rejection of cut-and-dried solutions. Like all of the director’s most memorable settings, the show’s world abided by something closer to dream logic than any earthly science, obfuscating even the most integral developments. Viewers learned that what happened to Laura was a brutal act of violence, one that lacked an easy explanation; the series instead offered both a mundane and a supernatural reason for her murder. Yet after Agent Cooper named Laura’s killer and illuminated the dark forces converging on the town, viewers unfamiliar with the director’s work may have found it hard to imagine where else the show could go. What followed the presumed conclusion of Laura’s thread were 15 more episodes that tracked the affairs and schemes of everyone else in the town—instead of investigating, more linearly, the remaining secrets surrounding the murder. Mainstream audiences may not have always been ready for the task of keeping up with him, but Lynch’s desire to make these swerves is essential to the continued potency of his art.

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Twin Peaks expresses the key duality to Lynch’s work many times over. The director enjoyed having it both ways when it came to narrative comprehension: He would break down some secrets while keeping others, giving his viewers just enough to make sense of what was happening while still leaving room to ponder the deeper meanings. Lynch was a transcendentalist who saw the innate power in the goodness of people, and a surrealist who endeavored to depict both the horror of violence and the electrifying fear of the unfamiliar. In Twin Peaks, he’d play up the Pacific Northwest community’s folksy allure in one instant, then transfix viewers by showing a demonic serial killer inching toward the camera in the next. The director refused to commit to any one truth or mood, allowing for—and encouraging—myriad understandings. He knew that within ambiguity often lay excitement.

After ending on a startlingly inconclusive note in 1991, Twin Peaks returned in 2017 to extend the story for one more season. Yet audiences who’d hoped for a traditional ending were again denied one. Again, Lynch seemed to be imploring them to stop seeking clarity and embrace the moments whose overarching connections are far less obvious. What mattered to him, it appears, was the experience itself: the feelings they evoked, the uncanny images whose significance were difficult to parse yet impossible to forget. David Lynch didn’t want to leave his viewers with an interpretation, but with something more visceral—like the taste of cherry pie and a cup of hot coffee, black as midnight on a moonless night.