Let’s Rock: The Dialectic of the Sublime in ‘Twin Peaks’

With 'Twin Peaks', David Lynch leaves us with a greater appreciation for goodness and magic, and a heady understanding of the weight of pain, fear, and horror.

Music is a big part of Twin Peaks’ residents’ lives. This is made most evident in 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of the show which picks up where the second season left off in 1991. Nearly every episode of The Return contains a musical number. This isn’t just a needle-drop synced perfectly with narrative action, nor is it a snatch of a chorus or a song sung or hummed or tapped out by characters by way of arriving at or delivering a moral or lesson. Rather, it’s a veritable performance — a show in its own right, meant to be watched or experienced by other characters. In the way that we might go to a concert in the evening, Twin Peaks’ residents venture out into the night in the direction of The Roadhouse to catch a performance delivered by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Rebekah Del Rio, Julee Cruise, or fellow resident James Hurley (James Marshall).

And while performance and spectatorship are recurring themes throughout Twin Peaks creator and director David Lynch’s work, this series is incredibly poignant for the way it frames and explores audience reaction. In Twin Peaks, characters experience and respond to the shows within the show — the music — in ways much like our own as we watch. We’re on a similar or equal footing for the entire duration of a song’s live performance. At a concert, if you were to look at the crowd watching the performance, you might see some people moving with the music, holding conversations, or becoming impassioned. It’s no different with Twin Peaks’ audiences.

As the series mirrors spectatorship — our own expressions — back at us as we watch, it also depicts a shimmer of magic. Sometimes, we see a person rooted to the spot, weeping or shuddering or smiling or dreaming, with eyes closed or watering, losing themselves. On the face of it, it’s a simple and swift response to music, depicted in a sustained and slow and detailed manner — the usual Lynch style. But look a bit closer, with a more visceral, entangled sensitivity, and you might see it for what it is: a monumental experience of the sublime.

Twin Peaks is a show that lands upon and fleshes out what Isabella Rossellini tells editor of Lynch on Lynch Chris Rodley is the “core” of David Lynch’s artistic endeavors: a definition of the good and the bad. “He’s quite a religious person,” Rossellini says. “Quite spiritual. Any person who is religious is always trying to define these things, which are always so elusive.” Because Twin Peaks is a show that demarcates good and bad in stark terms, and because virtually every character becomes a spectator or listener of music, it’s nigh on impossible to ignore their responses to diegetic music. And once these are considered, it’s nigh on impossible to ignore experiences of the sublime, so beautifully and carefully depicted. Then, it’s only a matter of time before our curiosity has us wondering: what does it mean when characters do and don’t experience this self-wracking moment?

In common terms, that which is sublime is something of great grandeur: a meal can be sublime if it indulges the senses, and a night out is sublime if it answers and exceeds expectations. But in literary terms, the sublime is an incredibly involved and existential, if not religious, experience that, according to philosophers Edmund Burke and Arthur Schopenhauer, is rooted in pure terror. In an article titled “Terror and the Sublime,” writer and scholar Terrence Des Pres explains that, though terror is the bedrock of the sublime, the experience itself can lead to incredibly positive feelings: a sense of existential stability and knowing, an understanding that calms and even empowers.

With reference to Schopenhauer, Des Pres lays bare the dialectic of the sublime: what happens in the mind in the face of something that is viscerally terrifying — that is, what it looks like for the mind to move from terror to a position of power. There are two key aspects to the experience of the sublime: “the dissolution of the human image on the one hand,” and “transcendence and exultation through identification with overwhelming power on the other.” In the face of something terrifying, the mind must not resist or run away from the terror, but rather feel it and be shaken by it, and then move to an understanding of it, which carries with it an internalization of the terrible. Internalization means overcoming fear and carries with it, in a de facto manner, an identification with “terror’s own power.” To understand the terrible is to gain its strength, because one becomes cerebrally big enough to encompass the idea of the terrifying.

Des Pres quotes a compelling and illustrative passage from Schopenhauer’s seminal 1818 text, The World as Will and Idea, which effortlessly and immediately lays bare the dialectic (or movement) of the sublime within the mind. Schopenhauer gives an example of being lost at sea to describe the “sublime revelation”: imagine yourself aboard a ship in the midst of a tempest at sea, so loud that you aren’t able to distinguish your own voice from the sound of the piercing rain hitting the mountainous waves, which themselves strike against steep cliffs. “[T]he storm howls, the sea boils, the lightning flashes from black clouds, and the peals of thunder drown the voice of storm and sea.”

In this very moment of being in the center of a “battle of the raging elements,” we are acutely aware of two things at once: first, that we are an individual or distinct and frail human will experiencing these forces of nature, able to die at any moment, a “vanishing nothing in the presence of stupendous might.” Second, we’re aware that it is our thoughts that support this whole world — that our thinking mind holds these great and big and violent impressions of the world. (It’s not so much that the storm needs our thinking mind to exist, but an understanding that our being able to sense it makes it terrifying.) We realize at once that we are a small object within the world, which is the moment when our human image is dissolved, and also that we are a subject who contains the world, which is the moment when we identify with the big world and its power, becoming, in turn, as powerful. “The vastness of the world which disquieted us before, rests now in us,” writes Schopenhauer. We are at once victims of the world, and at “one with the world, and therefore not oppressed, but exalted by its immensity.” This is the detailed image, the dialectic of the swift experience of the sublime. An experience of terror — of a shaken image of the self, of the dissolution of one’s humanity — is required before one can meaningfully and positively and genuinely earn the position of “knowing subject” who sees and thereby contains the self as an object experiencing terror, and before one achieves the sublime.

That music, like so much of art, moves or terrifies is self-evident. It’s the goosebumps we feel when an orchestral piece titters and swells, the tears that roll down our faces when the weight of the lyrics are carried by strings as light as air in a song we love, striking us to our core. The music we love reminds us immediately, at the level of our bodies, of our place as living, animalistic beings — as beings that feel all these great big heavy thoughts, so fragile and yet capable of feeling and creating such beauty.

In the world of Twin Peaks, the sublime is carried most poignantly in Julee Cruise’s “Questions in a World of Blue,” which she performs on stage at The Roadhouse as Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) weeps in Fire Walk With Me (FWWM), the film that lays bare Laura Palmer’s final days. There’s a persistence to the lyrics in spite of a steady and somber knowing, laid within a bed of silken synths. In chronological terms, Laura is the first Twin Peaks character shown experiencing the sublime in intricate detail. About halfway through FWWM, Cruise is on stage in a blue-velvet light blooming as if from her soul, surrounded by her band, who are bathed in the blood-red of the stage curtains hanging behind them. On her way into The Roadhouse, Laura meets the prophetic Margaret Lanterman, or Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson), who delivers words that prime Laura for her experience.

The 16-year-old Laura, herself bathed in the soft flashing red of the neon light above the bar, is mellow, dressed up as an adult and playacting at composure. Margaret comes straight up to her and places a hand on Laura’s forehead, as if measuring her temperature. Laura closes her eyes. “When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out,” says Margaret, words that could tersely capture the pain of the entirety of Laura’s short, traumatic life; it’s not so much prophesy as it is a description of the current state of affairs. Laura is barrelling toward annihilation, like a person lost in space. Having been and continuing to be raped repeatedly by her father Leland (Ray Wise), who is possessed by the demonic Bob (Frank Silva), Laura has given up hope for goodness, and so she veers headlong into a life of promiscuity, drug abuse, and self-destruction. She is gaining speed, and nobody can help her because nobody is choosing to see her pain. “And the angels wouldn’t help you, because they’ve all gone away,” Laura says earlier in the film.

Margaret’s words comfort Laura — it’s as if she’s being seen — but they don’t do much more. They leave the girl on her path toward incineration. Margaret squeezes Laura’s hand and then walks away, leaving Laura, who places her hand to her heart, to stare into her reflection in the window outside of The Roadhouse as Cruise’s voice begins. “Where did you go?” Cruise sings in that ethereal whisper of hers.

Cruise’s words in the song gently ask another why they left, right when love reached its peak, right when everything was beautiful. Leland began abusing Laura when she was only 12; innocence was taken from her at the crest of a sweet childhood. Walking into the bar, Laura looks small, framed in the wide doorway. Her loneliness collides with Cruise’s words — it resounds. With her eyes drowned in tears and fixed on Cruise, Laura walks over to a table, sits, and begins weeping silently as Cruise wonders, “How can a heart that’s filled with love start to cry?” As sobs begin to wrack her body, Laura holds her hands crossed at her chest, as if hugging herself; no one else will do it. As mascara streams down her face, she finally lights a cigarette and breathes out shakily. The moment is over.

It’s one of the most heartbreaking scenes in a film that never stops breaking your heart. And it is, at its core, an illustration of the experience of the sublime that Schopenhauer describes. Margaret’s fearsome words at the beginning of the scene shake Laura to her core, and as she stares at her reflection and Cruise begins her equally fearsome and destabilizing set with “Where did you go?,” it’s as if Laura doesn’t know who she is anymore, having lost her sense of self at the small age of 12. In that moment, Laura is all immediacy and finitude contained by time and space; holding the ghost of Margaret’s touch to her and staring at her reflection, she is feeling the shock and pain of utter isolation in the way that a person aboard a ship feels the power of the tempestuous waves. She looks at herself in her humanity, seeing and feeling a person acted upon by a terrible fate, able to be lost and snuffed, on the verge of burning to ash.

But as she walks toward the music, as she is riveted by it, and as she begins to cry (especially when she hugs herself), the sequence becomes one of Laura taking in the music, identifying with it, and becoming the knowing subject. There’s an expression she makes when she sits down, weeping. It’s almost a smile at the self and a nod as tears stream down her face, a sad expression of self-understanding. Moving from feeling the pain of the weight of years of trauma, she sees herself as bearing that weight. Laura becomes a knowing subject who considers herself an object of fate, which is why she is able to hug herself. This ability to hug herself is indicative of her having transcended the moment of immediate terror — it means she sees a person, herself, as needing love and comfort, and ultimately it is indicative of immense knowing. This hug means that Laura becomes as big and grand and as powerful as Cruise’s music; this hug means that she has completed the movement of the sublime. It comes as Cruise’s words ask, from a place of understanding that a relationship ends for all manner of reasons, “Was it me? Was it you? Questions in a world of blue.”

In becoming a knowing subject and hugging herself, Laura becomes exalted — or more powerful and immense — by the terror she has experienced. Her mind, in considering the past, now contains the terror or the idea of it. That she can hug herself means that she can see a need within herself, see herself from a remove and look down upon herself. That she can look down upon herself at all means that she has transcended to a position more powerful than before. This power comes from the fact of self-consideration, self-reckoning, a self-remembrance of the past — a past that, from a distance, she can survey, contain in her mind, and flick through in the same way that Cruise’s words consider a relationship that has dissolved. In being able to contain all the pain we have just witnessed, she is undoubtedly immensely powerful, on the same level as the world that oppresses her, too.

Laura emerges from this moment a bit steadier than before, saddled with more knowledge than she had when she entered the moment. Emboldened and empowered, even if only by a modicum, she bites back at a john who mocks her by grabbing his balls.

This movement from experiencing to knowing — to understanding, to containing in her mind the pain she has suffered — and therefore to becoming as powerful as the pain is the entire movement of the sublime, which Lynch traces with such tremendous force. And it’s a movement, an attaining of knowledge, or a position of seeing the self as an object that is depicted beautifully and dramatically in the season two episode “Lonely Souls” for a handful of other characters.

At The Roadhouse, Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean), and Margaret arrive, awaiting something that Margaret senses needs witnessing and is already underway. Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and James are sitting a ways away in a booth, Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) is at the bar, and Julee Cruise is performing. The “something” that Margaret senses occurs during the second song of Cruise’s set, “The World Spins.” It’s a somber song that comes after the more upbeat “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart,” which Donna sang along with. But during “The World Spins,” with its heavy bass and auric synths, the world stops. Everyone at The Roadhouse freezes in their movement and Cruise and her band disappear. The Giant (Carel Struycken), a positive being who dwells in the mysterious White Lodge (the good, or benign, corollary to the Black Lodge), appears onstage. Cooper and Margaret are cognizant, and The Giant repeatedly says to them, “It is happening again.”

And it is. In the Palmer household, what happened to Laura is happening again to Laura’s cousin Maddy (Sheryl Lee). Leland, possessed by Bob, is brutally murdering Maddy. This moment of revelation by The Giant is a literalization of the movement of the sublime. Cooper goes from a moment of immediacy to a moment of knowing, and so too, at the end of the revelation, do Donna and Bobby. Donna begins weeping as she did when she first sensed that Laura was dead, though earlier she had been bobbing her head along to the music. Bobby is stunned, sensing a change in the air. All are moved out of their humanity and into a state of knowing subjects, perceiving their world from above and seeing things in the context of space and time, as opposed to experiencing time move through them. It’s as if all of these characters are carried above themselves by the music to see the wheels of some cosmic or fatalistic system in the process of turning, things shifting on a grand scale. They emerge from the experience with the knowledge that something has changed irrevocably, because it has.

In the Palmer home, meanwhile, no such experience of the sublime takes place. As the record player loops a vinyl that reached its end long ago, Leland/Bob obsessively preens himself in front of the mirror, considering his reflection like a hellish Narcissus, and then goes on to murder Maddy in one of the most haunting manners ever cast across television screens. It’s strange, because, despite Leland/Bob’s obsession with music and his compulsive dancing, he does not once experience the sublime in the way that Laura does.

In The Return, we learn that Bob was unleashed on the planet in 1945 during the Trinity nuclear test. In response, The Giant (also known as The Fireman) sends down an orb bearing Laura’s visage as a being meant to eventually balance the badness of Bob through her goodness. Bob is categorically evil and Laura is categorically good. It is revealed that Bob possessed Leland’s grandfather, abusing Leland through him, and then went on to possess Leland at a very young age. Leland is evil by his association with Bob, but also through his position as patriarch of the Palmer family. The show leaves it up to the viewer whether they want to believe that Leland is evil because of a supernatural reason (through possession), or because of his position as bearer and representation of traditional, toxic, and violent masculinity.

The Palmer household, and indeed much of the series, revels in the friction between appearance and reality, between beauty and its festering underbelly. On the face of it, the Palmers are a perfect family: Leland is a successful attorney, Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) the perfect housewife, and Laura the homecoming queen. But take a more incisive, lingering look at them and you’ll see all the ways in which Laura is destroying herself (through her cocaine addiction) or telling on her father (through her avoidant behaviors and loud emotional breakdowns). You’ll see how Sarah is chain-smoking herself to death because, on some psychic level, she comprehends what Leland is doing to Laura. And you’ll see how Leland is the controlling, violent, unforgiving father — the man espousing toxic masculinity, especially its mid-century iteration, to perfection.

Because of his position as a marker of all that is wrong with the atomic family — its obsession with maintaining pristine appearances at the cost of existential deterioration, which it ignores or brushes under the rug — Leland is not capable of experiencing the sublime, despite his obsession with music. Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) is Leland’s best friend and also client, himself a patriarch of an atomic yet broken family and also a quasi-patriarch of the town via the money his businesses bring in. Ben also serves as a psychological map of and eventual foil to Leland, who we don’t see as much of throughout the series. Ben begins the show as evil — as exploitative and abusive toward women in the way that Leland is — but he goes on to redeem himself through an understanding of his own deleterious power and a resultant desire to be good.

In “Lonely Souls,” Cooper and Truman arrive at Ben’s office because they believe him to be Laura’s murderer. Ben is in the middle of a business deal and is greatly offended that law enforcement would have the gall to burst into his room without having made an appointment first. When Truman tells Ben that he is wanted for questioning in relation to Laura’s murder, Ben is in disbelief. “This is insane,” he says. Truman tells him they have the power to drag him out in handcuffs. “Cooper, is this some sort of sick joke?” Ben asks, turning to the FBI agent. “Because if it is, I know people in high places.” Cooper shakes his head, telling Ben to do what Truman says. Ben straightens, makes himself taller, and waves his hand, like a magician waving his wand.

“Go away,” he says. “Get out of here, go on. Go on. I’m going to go out for a sandwich.” He, in other words, does what he is so used to doing, what society has taught him he can do: wave his hand and try to make the things he wants happen. It’s as if he is running from the terror by slipping into familiar habits. He can make people do what he wants, he can make them come to him, and he can make them disappear if they displease him. This is what the patriarch, the traditional man, does: he moves and manipulates people as though they were pawns or dolls. Ben genuinely believes that Truman and Cooper will leave him alone — that he is above the law, that he is that powerful. And this is the belief that Leland, a patriarch like Ben, holds, too. Leland and Ben could never see or would be unwilling to see themselves at the mercy of a more powerful world, because their identity — and those of most men raised on traditional masculinity — is so grounded in being an acting subject.

This is all to say that Ben and Leland, being nefarious patriarchs, are unable to experience the dissolution of their human image and see themselves as objects acted upon by the world. They are always and only aware of themselves as all-knowing subjects, as little gods above all of humanity, unable to see themselves in their fallibility. They are unable to experience the terror that is the bedrock of the sublime. In the case of the experience of the sublime, knowing subjectivity is earned through terror, but for patriarchs like Leland and Ben, an inhuman knowing subjectivity is finagled and snatched, stolen like in a siege. Their power is incomprehensibly big, unjust, and unearned, held onto with a clawing and suffocating grip.

Leland, and Bob through him, refuses to see himself as being acted upon, always working to manipulate and control Laura, Sarah, Cooper, and Truman. Recall the family dinner scene in FWWM when Leland inspects Laura’s hands, decides that they are dirty, and terrorizes the girl until she runs to the bathroom and cries as she washes her hands. Leland/Bob does not see himself as oppressed by the world. The patriarch never sees himself as a victim but as the oppressor, and this inability is what keeps him from the magic of the sublime in Lynch’s world. To be denied an experience of the sublime in Lynch’s universe is to be denied entry into a spiritual awakening, and to be viscerally unable to experience it is a deplorably sad state of affairs. That they cannot experience the sublime means they will never become as big as the terror they cause, because they cannot identify with it and thereby internalize it. They don’t reach any kind of enlightenment or become as immense as the world they occupy; their world is just the small vicinity of their horrible little minds, which believe but do not understand that it is actually disempowering that their power is greater than all conception.

I believe it’s immensely beautiful and merciful that Laura is allowed a moment of magic in a life rotten with abuse and violence and sadness. It is one of the series’ and Lynch’s greatest gifts. The ability to attain power and beauty, and experience a moment of kindness toward the self through something as treasured as music, is allowed with such grace and care in FWWM. Despite all the tears and pain, Laura is still granted a modicum of power in experiencing the magical transcendence attendant to enlightenment that her tormentors are never capable of accessing.

This is certainly not to romanticize her pain, but to explicate the imbalanced structures of power within which her abuse takes place and to delineate how she is able to experience a glimmer of immensity and beauty and attain the heights of terror that her tormentors reached, if even for a moment. That Leland/Bob are denied entry into the realm of the sublime is a victory for Laura. Once Bob leaves him, Leland is only able to weep over his actions, take in the scope of his harm, and see himself in his fallibility, at which point he asks for forgiveness. At that point, it all feels too late. Near death, we watch Leland rail against and wail over his actions. It is a heartbreaking moment: he sees himself as abuser and abused, as a fragile being. And it is only at this moment of fragility that Laura allows him forgiveness. As he nears the glimmer of a potential for the sublime, he dies.

The dialectic of the sublime in Twin Peaks beautifully illustrates Lynch’s preoccupation with goodness and evil. Not only does the dialectic help us to better understand that those with evil souls have no place in the land of the sublime — it also adds further meaning to the tale by allowing spiritual power to one of Lynch’s most disempowered characters. It reveals those in the vaunted halls of traditional power to be actually powerless in the only sense that matters: the spiritual. With Twin Peaks, Lynch leaves us with a greater appreciation for goodness and magic, and a heady understanding of the weight of pain, fear, and horror. Fix your hearts or die indeed.