“Twin Peaks” vs. “Severance”: On Mystery, Evil & Dissociation.
The work is mysterious. But is it important?
Spoiler warning for Twin Peaks Season 2! No reference to The Return is made or implied in this post.
I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks. By that, I mean revisiting it for the first time since my primary viewing close to eight years ago — a time that still feels like murky ether in my memory and which hosted some of the darkest ideations my brain has ever known. I couldn’t quite grasp Lynch back then, that being my very first foray into his dream-ruled, reality-defying world. Just as I began to believe I was onto it, the show kept slipping through my fingers and every time my sense of reason attempted to extract concrete meaning out of its events, all effort was thrown out the window with the next twist.
That said, one thing was undeniable to me: I felt Twin Peaks. I felt it deeply, as an encapsulation of the universal horror I was struggling to come to grips with on a personal level, on the heels of turning 18 and disoriented in a whole new city, weighed down by anxiety and a paranoid sense of ever-lurking danger. Laura Palmer, as befuddling as piecing together the night of her murder seemed, became a symbol on my conscience, perhaps similar to her death’s haunting effect on the town of Twin Peaks itself. I sensed something being profoundly revealed to me during the funeral scene where Bobby Briggs erupts into an impassioned speech the sentiment of which has since inspired the core of so much murder mystery TV: “All you good people, you wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did…”
The series, whose legacy remains heavily associated with its primary director despite his sparser than typically taken into account involvement, unmistakably carries the bizarre creative essence of David Lynch, which seems to have served as both a deterrent and an attractor during its 1990 airing. Operating within a “whodunit” framework, Twin Peaks engages in a mystery-solving structure in order to propel its plot forward, yet progressively proves that the mystery aspect is of the least importance to the story being told. Clues are gathered, characters constantly introduced, the case spirals into a tangled web of objects switching hands, vaguely incriminating confessions and dramatic secrets kept behind closed doors. All the while, over the town rests the foggy veil of something much more sinister; something palpable but ethereal, and strange to the point of ineffability.
A shared acknowledgement of this mystical force is poignantly conveyed in the series’ pilot, where the news of the discovery of Laura’s body travels around town without being explicitly articulated. The characters closest to her break down at the sound of her name in a woeful tone, instinctively understanding that the moment has finally come, when Laura is no more, as if the idea had been brewing since long before that day, swirling around their consciousness at the collective witnessing of her sinking deeper into what would eventually bring about her demise. Of course, this inner knowledge is buried far beneath the persona of Laura that corresponds to each of the residents’ superficial liaison to her — employee, colleague, lover, friend — which they invoke when questioned, only to be forced into reckoning with the undisclosed facets of her life now being openly divulged to them.
The latter is a job for Special Agent Dale Cooper, the show’s steady hand played by Kyle MacLachlan who embodies the Lynchian everyman with a strong extra dose of Lynch’s own self-insertion here. A black coffee and cherry pie enthusiast with a sideways approach to murder investigation (involving trusting dreams and visions, as well as employing Tibetan mind-body coordination techniques), Cooper is perhaps the most charming character on MacLachlan’s roster of, as Lynch himself puts it, “innocents [...] interested in the mysteries of life [who] you trust enough to go into a strange world with.” He’s at once our point of view and, maybe surprisingly so, his very own fleshed-out character — a quirky-mannered outlier whose hypostasis feels more authentic by virtue of his peculiar idiosyncrasy.
Cooper’s line of work exists in delightful contrast to his innate childlike whimsy which in Twin Peaks curiously finds room to thrive. Even as he starts to uncover the town’s dark underbelly, he continuously expresses his affinity for its people, food and nature, blending in seamlessly with his surroundings and forging a friendly bond with the local sheriff department — a total anomaly for procedural TV. He leads with intuitive awareness, attuned to energies, signs, and the spiritual realm. Most importantly, his unusual methods and their largely unchallenged implementation suggest the way in which Lynch intends for the show (and practically all of his work) to be consumed: not through pragmatic adherence to compiling puzzle pieces, but with attention to what you know you are feeling even when logically divorced from the specific images displayed on screen.
That is the precise realization being driven home for me this time around. By accident or design, it so happens that this viewing experience is also currently juxtaposed against a very different one, though in quite the complimentary way. Like the majority of the internet, I’ve been tuning into the weekly TV rendez-vous of the moment. Severance, the Apple TV original created by Dan Erickson and executively produced by Ben Stiller, exploded in popularity throughout its recently concluded second season which went down intricate plot pathways, escalating the show’s narrative tension.
The series deals in corporate thriller sensibilities with a sci-fi twist, set in a dystopian reality of unspecified timeline and geography where employees at elusive corporation Lumon are able to undergo the titular procedure pioneered by the company in order to cognitively separate their work selves from their home selves. It’s arguably a very strong premise, one that redefines the well-loved body double’s function as a storytelling device and instantly raises questions about work-life balance, nature vs. nurture, as well as the numbing effect of late-stage capitalism on society. Nevertheless, perfectly primed for exploration as the concept might be at face value, Severance certainly doesn’t take the simple route with it — meaning a version which might merely involve inserting the everyman into this already unique and emotionally complex experience.
While Season 1 roughly outlines the procedure’s stakes and practicalities, it becomes increasingly obvious as the series progresses that whatever allegorical sentiment the description alludes to is wrapped up in a much more complicated maze of mystery. The four central characters, with whom we get acquainted in their “innie” (work self) form, are there to not only introduce and contextualize what severance entails, but — as underlined by the fact we don’t get to follow most of them home until the season finale — perhaps most crucially, to unveil the secret objective of the corporation they work for. In their quest, they stumble upon all sorts of uncanny sceneries and presences that beg to be linked together, including but not limited to… baby goats on the Lumon premises.
One of Severance’s charming signatures, much like Twin Peaks, is its meticulously curated atmosphere. Cold-scale color-grading and eerie piano notes accompany shots of snow-blanketed nature and dimly lit, vacant third spaces, while Lumon’s high-tech interior, — perfectly mirroring Apple’s design cues — features minimal decor, trademark labyrinthic white hallways, and bright, sterile office rooms with a retro-futuristic touch that plays along the show’s secrecy regarding time. Those elements, which here counterpart Lynch’s sepia-toned ‘50s American aesthetics, forest locations, old Hollywood beauty looks and sensual jazz crafted by none other than Angelo Badalamenti, constitute the most direct portal to the untethered-to-realism microcosm the show’s experience takes place in, similarly affirming its immersive quality. But while many would agree with the assumption that we wouldn’t be talking about Severance in a Lynch-less world, the two series’ approaches to their main axis, the mystery contained within their respective realms, are diametrically opposed.
It’s difficult to imagine how Erickson and Stiller’s work would fare in Lynch’s era of TV. Severance, starting from its first season, has steadily taken on a template which understandably attracts a type of viewer whose ideal relationship to the series can’t be actualized without the ability to pause an episode and zoom into a corner of the screen. It’s unmistakably a Reddit show. Unfurling its mystery has a technical edge to it; the kind where the recurrence of jargon, physical items and behavioral signs holds material significance in the assembly of the puzzle, and which appears to often rely on non-diegetic references in order to contextualize its next steps. Watching Severance, you can feel the gears of storytelling turning at all times. Withheld information is always sitting right behind the script which caters to your coveted ignorance in a highly calculated manner, sometimes even obstructing organic character interaction.
I’m not sure if there’s a scenario in which Severance’s trajectory doesn’t frustrate the intuitive viewer to some capacity. I’ll be the first to admit I have a negative bias towards art that seems to pride itself upon its exclusivity, as well as art that cares less about being interpreted and more about controlling the strings of its experience. My preference lies not with participating in a game the rules of which are dictated by another party, but with discovering a sense of belonging in the proposed world that can breathe all on its own. Naturally, I’m somebody who would expect to primarily get out of Severance something that the show has been intent on de-prioritizing. I do worry that rendering a vitally humanistic concept in mathematical terms jeopardizes the transparency of the heart of the matter: the discourse and emotionality oozing from the main premise.
The fact this is tricky territory for any sort of evaluative comparison isn’t lost on me. For one, Severance is still far from completing its cycle as a TV series. Its well-established closed-loop M.O., nonetheless, doesn’t promise any future closure or pay-off that could help soften the sting of tedious runtime spent on cryptic exchanges and dramatically ineffective twists during the first two seasons. At its most brilliant (e.g. the two riveting season finales), the show is able to tap into the philosophical fabric of its universe and extrapolate rich intellectual ideas which it elucidates through phenomenal visual language. Yet its overwhelming preoccupation with the “greater case” solicits a refusal to illuminate the building blocks of said universe, in turn reducing its resonance and the impact of many of its emotional beats between inconsistencies and inadequate investment in its characters.
On the other front, it’s equally impossible not to acknowledge the elephant in the room regarding Twin Peaks: the infamous derailment of Season 2 which coincided with Lynch’s increasing professional divestment from the project. Still a topic of friction among fans of the series, the second season’s erratic streak and severe lack of focus has marred its legacy to a reasonable degree. However, while critical of all the structural choices that ended up producing some spiritless, scatterbrained television, the high point of discourse around the season which, of course, pertains to the supernatural “resolution” of the Laura Palmer mystery halfway-through, doesn’t see me on the far con-side of the argument. Rather, it strikes me as a one-way reaction to the misguided application of a technical viewpoint to the show at the time.
It must be no surprise at all that my aversion to convoluted mystery goes hand-in-hand with an affinity towards non-definitive answers, or at the very least a willingness to embrace them. Especially in scenarios of extreme spiraling when it comes to fandom theorizing which can take on its own shape outside of its source, it seems like no final concrete answer ever has the power to live up to bloated expectations set by the screened material, let alone satiate a by-then rabid audience. In the unique case of Twin Peaks, understandably from a present standpoint, I find the pressure for a namedrop driven by live viewers to have been altogether unwarranted: a false, tactile approach towards a mystery that, at its core, revolves around the fundamentally abstract, collective perception of evil.
What really resonates with me about Twin Peaks’ divisive, big mid-Season 2 reveal of Laura’s killer is that, in a funny way, it’s tinged with some passive aggressiveness towards its own actualization. In Episode 16, titled “Arbitrary Law,” Lynch and writer Mark Frost respond to the longstanding question only by raising another. Laura’s father, Leland Palmer, is his daughter’s rapist and murderer, as well as a literal vessel for Bob, a personified demon who feeds on human pain and suffering and whose true form can only be seen by “the gifted and the damned.” Bob has been a steady presence in Laura’s life since her early teens, according to her confession, apparently having inhabited Leland since his childhood. His existence, of course, is unfamiliar to neither us viewers, nor the residents of Twin Peaks. His terrifying apparitions have haunted the series since the very beginning: the manifestation of an otherworldly, palpable force of evil lurking around town, occasionally assuming the appearance of a man.
There is a moment of reckoning among Cooper’s team at the end of the episode — after Leland is captured and killed by Bob as he exits his body to search for a next victim to possess — that, despite feeling quite on-the-nose, articulates, maybe even metatextually, what Lynch and Frost have tried to grapple with across Twin Peaks. As a dumbfounded Sheriff Harry Truman expresses disbelief in the paranormal turn of events they’d just witnessed, Cooper interjects: “Is it easier to believe that a man would rape and murder his own daughter?”
That’s perhaps a testament to the understated empathy and earnestness of Lynch’s work. Twin Peaks, as well as 1992’s prequel film Fire Walk with Me which poignantly elaborates upon those themes, while criticized for their brutal depiction of female suffering and death, evidently understood something about violence conducted against women which overshadows a sole perpetrator. What happened to Laura Palmer illustrates a type of evil so unspeakable it may only be rationalized when by nature irrational — out of this world, metaphysical. Evil that can only be conceived in abstraction and deep dives into the darkest corners of the psyche: the red curtain-concealed lairs where the uncanny resides.
To the question of “how is this evil humanly possible?” Lynch and Frost reply with bewilderment and a sort of doubt. Against much of the audience’s orthodox approach — without being careless as to entirely dismiss accountability — they juxtapose a fundamental interpretation of evil as bordering on possession. Possession, nevertheless, not occurring solely from an outside force, but equally motivated by a specific environment and its accumulated trauma, as Twin Peaks’ title and so many of its timeless visual cues so lyrically suggest.
Dissociation (willful to varying degrees) is key to how Twin Peaks wishes to speak about evil, and a pillar of the “we all [killed her]” ethos permeating the series. Whether it’s Sarah Palmer’s conscious ignorance of what was going on in her home, the figure of Bob’s ex-accomplice Mike whose (personified, even) amputated arm represents a projection of his evil, or Leland’s psychotic compartmentalizing of his darkness which facilitates plausible deniability in his daily life, the idea of a separate “other” is Twin Peaks’ beating heart. Its culmination, of course, arrives with the emergence of Cooper’s evil double at the end of Season 2.
You may be noticing I’m circling back to Severance territory again, though there actually isn’t much to analyze in terms of that particular common thread between the two shows. Twin Peaks’ running theme of the diabolical counterpart doesn’t quite overlap with Severance’s use of the body double as a means to explore concerns about bodily autonomy and the concept of a life unlived — at least up until the moment innies start intentionally murdering people.
Possibly, the bottom line here simply has to do with what drives this dissociation in each scenario. While Twin Peaks acknowledges the prominent existence of calculated, banal capitalistic depravity in a character like unscrupulous businessman Ben Horne, in true Lynchian fashion, it chooses to engage in a much more ambitious conversation about disarmingly strange, universal evil, relying on the audience’s emotional attunement to its setting rather than their puzzle-solving skills. For Severance, the “big bad” has hitherto appeared to be a distinctly unsettling capitalistic entity, the history and complexity of which the audience is unquestionably called to try and unveil.
The first looks at its compartmentalized evil as an extension of the human consciousness — almost like an untapped second nature — whereas the latter’s dissociation-inducing evil preys on conflicted ideas; sometimes grief and loneliness, sometimes religious belief, and sometimes the desire to solve Lumon itself. I guess I’m wondering if Severance’s unrelenting technicality, beyond aesthetically tying into the high-tech environment that frames the show, ultimately has something truly substantial to say in regards to evil and its impact. Is Severance’s evil merely… solvable?