Appearing at a time when television’s greatest philosophical
questions were “How will MacGuyver save the day with nothing but a wad of gum and an enema bag?” and “Which
toddler will fall on his ass this week on America’s
Funniest Home Videos?”, Twin Peaks seemed
like an intellectual breath of Douglas Fir-scented air. David Lynch and Mark
Frost’s series swam in the murky waters of metaphysics, synchronicity, duality,
and other philosophical concepts, and these were not just set decorations for a
show often dismissed as arbitrarily weird; they were central to its plot and
purpose. So Twin Peaks is an ideal
topic for Open Court Books’ Popular Culture and Philosophy series.
The nineteen different essays that editors Richard Greene
and Rachel Robinson-Greene compiled in Twin
Peaks and Philosophy: That’s Damn Fine Philosophy cover much ground
incorporating the original series, Fire
Walk with Me, and last year’s Return.
The writers chew over how the Black Lodge reveals the true self according to
Hinduism (Felipe Nogueira de Carvalho’s “Know Thyself, Agent Cooper!”), how
Laura Palmer embodies the Madonna/whore complex (Tim Jones’s “Laura
Palmer—Madonna and Whore”), the varying degrees to which characters such as
Albert Rosenfield and Sheriff Truman live up to Immanuel Kant’s moral code
(Jeffrey and Kristopher G.Phillips’s “Albert Among the Chowder-Head Yokels and
Blithering Hayseeds”), the degrees to which the series’ female characters
possess power (Elizabeth Rard’s “The Miss Twin Peaks Award Goes to…”), the ways
The Return reflects the roles of
American women (Leigh Kolb’s “The Mother of All Bombs”—my favorite entry in the
book), etc.
The two latter pieces I referenced are among the few that
deal with the series’ more socio-political point of view, and I would have
liked to see more of those types of pieces considering The Return’s more pointed (see Dr. Amp’s rants or Janey-E Jones’s
diatribe about being a 99 percenter) yet often muddy (see the way women are
often objectified or brutally murdered or the scene in which transgender Denise
Bryson is both lauded and mocked) perspective. However, this is not Twin Peaks and Political Philosophy, so
fair enough.
Occasionally, writers make the mistakes that are too often
made in essays on Twin Peaks, most
notably the failure to acknowledge Mark Frost’s role in its creation and
writing— a considerable oversight since he is far more aware of philosophical
theory than Lynch. Some writers clearly did not read Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, so they
dismiss some things that he clarifies in his book as wacky fan theories, such as the fact that girl
who swallows the frog-moth in Episode 8 is Sarah Palmer. In
“Through Plastic Our Secrets Seen,” Andrew W. Winters makes some comments that
will raise eyebrows among the kinds of obsessive fans who’d read this book
(Shelly Johnson is discontent at the Double R, a job she specifically says that
she loves? Big Ed should be content even though he is married to a woman he never
loved? No one but Leland seems troubled by Laura’s death at her funeral?). However,
S. Evan Kreider’s “But What Does It Mean?” is probably the only essay guilty of
disappearing up its own posterior, which is a very acceptable percentage considering how tempting
it is to do so when writing about something as byzantine as Twin Peaks. For the most part, the
essays are thought provoking, accessibly written, and determinedly entertaining
(see “Special Epistemic Agent Dale Cooper”, which Elizabeth Rard writes in
character as Cooper).
