I was wondering, as I watched the fifth episode, why I'm so content to just let Twin Peaks wash over me and not try too hard to pull it apart to figure out what's going on, or how all of the various Coopers will come together, or just how all of these plots will converge on Twin Peaks. (Was this the episode with the most time spent in the little town? I think it might have been.)
And then the episode dropped Amanda Seyfried — an actress whose ethereal qualities make her feel like a perfect fit for Lynch — into the middle of the action as Becky, who seems to be the daughter of original series character Shelly, and I realized why I'm just fine letting Twin Peaks do its thing.
Becky, having gotten some money from Shelly ($72, to be exact), heads back out to a car driven by her drug-using boyfriend. After the two argue for a bit, he wins her over with some awful jokes, then drives off, putting some romantic music on the car radio. Becky tilts her head back to look up at the sky, and Lynch holds on her face for what feels like five minutes (it's closer to just one). It's just an overhead shot of a girl in a car, looking up at the sky, possibly high. But it feels like it's the most beautiful, most significant thing you've ever seen.
This is Lynch's greatest strength. He'll imbue an otherwise mundane scene of, say, police officers trudging through evidence with a weird, cool menace. Or he'll introduce crazy comedic beats into the middle of a supernatural horror story. Or he'll take a simple moment like this — two young lovers drive away in a car — and make it feel like one of the most significant things that has ever happened to either. The world might as well stop to let Becky have her moment. That's how meaningful this scene feels.
A lot of TV — even really good TV — is predicated on a sort of emotional hand-holding, on making sure that you know how you're supposed to feel about the scene you've just watched, even if it's filled with enormously complicated emotions that must be processed. For an example of how this can be done terrifically, think of the final stretch of episodes of Breaking Bad, which constantly made sure you knew Walter White had lost his soul, but there were just enough shreds of it left for him to make a stand. Whatever questions the show raised were strictly binary: has Walter lost his soul?
On Twin Peaks, every emotion seems to be happening all at once, which is closer to the way most of us experience life. If you have a fight with your partner, then get a big promotion at work you've been hoping for, the latter doesn't wipe out the former, and vice versa. You're constantly living in the muddle, every day of your life, and that's something TV struggles to depict, because TV likes clean, sharp edges to keep you coming back to it.
Clean, sharp edges are the antithesis of what Twin Peaks is about, though, which means it can get away with some truly unusual stuff. I suspect that, say, the beeping machine that shrinks down into a tiny version of itself (or compresses into a crumpled up version of itself) will have something to do with something. But maybe it won't.
You don't always know which moments of your life will be the important ones, and even if you did, you might struggle to really give them their full weight. So it is on Twin Peaks, and even if the show goes about it in an odd fashion, it captures the way it feels to live in the midst of vast oceans of uncertainty.
