On doubles, haunted spaces, memory, and grief in Twin Peaks, Possession, and Vertigo
Laura Palmer has shifted in essence from a silent dead girl to the distillation of David Lynch’s most operatic revelation: that to harness beauty, with its absolute visibility, is to tell the fables of our world, the horror and the fairy tale.
As a season, Twin Peaks: The Return contains itself; it answers its own questions and then undoes its entirety.
Lynch is interested not only in story, but in the material aspects of film and their effect on the viewer; in sound, space, and time, and in what happens when these aspects of the cinematic experience assert their materiality rather than subsuming themselves to realism.
You cannot love Twin Peaks unless you love Agent Cooper; the liminal space of the town is the liminal space of Cooper’s own reality.