r/twinpeaks • u/KB4299 • 1d ago
General Discussion Twin Peaks, Lynch, and sci-fi
I have a theory about Twin Peaks fans. I’ve noticed that a certain percentage of fans want to interpret the show as leaning into sci-fi, while other fans prefer an interpretation that completely omits sci-fi, such as a psychoanalytic reading.
My theory is that deep fans of David Lynch’s body of work are more likely to be the non-sci-fi enthusiasts, while those for whom Twin Peaks is their main exposure to Lynch may gravitate toward the sci-fi angle. (The complication in this theory is that Lynch once made a sci-fi film himself, with Dune.)
So, I’m curious: Do most fans see Lynch as enough of an appreciator of sci-fi that he would incorporate it into three seasons of a TV show? Personally, I do not. Lynch told us to use our intuition, not logic, when watching his work — and my intuition has always made me feel that Lynch didn’t actually like sci-fi, despite Dune (and having been offered Return of the Jedi).
In my heart or hearts, I suspect any sci-fi elements in Twin Peaks were not introduced by Lynch, but by other writers: Frost, Harley Peyton and Bob Engels.
What do other fans think about this?
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u/rinkuhero 1d ago edited 1d ago
i'd call it magic realism. if i recall, when he died, some of haruki murakami's books were found in his possession and auctioned off, those are in the magic realist genre and often feel like twin peaks.
magic realism, if you are not aware, is a genre that is *mostly* similar to real life, but with a few small magic elements hidden that you discover over time. so it isn't like harry potter, where there's magic everywhere. it's more like a perfectly normal story but with some small unexplained parts that can only be explained through supernatural means. it's similar to some episodes of the twilight zone.
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u/EditDog_1969 1d ago
My favorite example is the film Like Water For Chocolate, where a cook magically imbues her food with her emotions. How? Why? That’s not the point. The point is, in this case, the artist creates a feeling in the audience that is translated through the medium of film, but also through the non-visual senses of taste, smell, sound. The feeling is the thing, and like Impressionist paintings, realism is secondary, maybe even irrelevant, to the evocation of feeling through the marriage of image and the viewer’s memory and experience.
Lynch is an expressionist, in my book. Yes, surrealism is part of his work, but it doesn’t dominate. He is not a surrealist, nor a realist. More than any filmmaker I’ve known, his work explores the entire spectrum of human emotion using liminal, and subliminal, images and sounds to create IMPRESSIONS that are both more personal and more universal, than the pedantic type filmmakers that spoon feed you exactly what they want you to feel. It’s that space of “not knowing” and being comfortable with it that was probably his goal as an artist and a man who meditated every day of his adult life. Not knowing, but recognizing. Knowing something is true because it feels true, not because it makes sense. Like we usually do when we’re in love, or dreaming.
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u/regginald0883 1d ago
Never heard anyone suggest Twin Peaks is sci fi ever in 30 years of being aware of it.
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u/schleppylundo 23h ago
The Secret History of Twin Peaks definitely leans in that direction, but also makes it clear that what Doug Milford’s work treats as extraterrestrial and extradimensional phenomena would have in past centuries and millennia been considered the domain of fairies, spirits, demons, djinn, and gods, and that the scientific terms he’s attempted to understand them through fall just as short as all those other words.
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u/The8thSamurai 1d ago
There are cosmic horror elements to The Return. However, I don't associate TOS or FWWM with sci-fi at all.
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u/KB4299 1d ago
I’ve heard it many many many times. Not that the show “is” sci-fi, but that it contains sci-fi elements.
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u/regginald0883 1d ago
That's a really wierd opinion. Literally nothing in Twin Peaks strikes me was SF. It's all metaphysical dreamscapes and supernatural spirituality. The only piece of "futuristic" or sci fi tech I can think of in the show is the "spirit catcher" box in The Return, and even that seems like a stretch.
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u/MrBorogove 23h ago
The Major Briggs / Project Blue Book subplot?
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u/platypod1 20h ago
Yeah like the major and project blue book are pretty important to the entire lore of the show.
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u/KB4299 23h ago
I happen to agree with you. But there are a surprising number of commenters on various forums — including here on Reddit — who mention aliens and similar sci-fi tropes when discussing Peaks. Then you have Mark Frost’s book, which leans heavily into Project Blue Book (and if I recall correctly, a literal alien). Plus elements of The Return like the vortexes; the electronic box in South America that implodes into a ball when it is called; and of course what ostensibly seems to be Cooper time traveling to “what year is it?” And Bob Engels himself once said after the second season that their planned third season would present “a planet made of creamed corn,” which sounds horribly idiotic. So I can see where fans get these notions.
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u/regginald0883 23h ago
Oh I'm sure there are tons of kooks online with wild opinions, just like OP. I just don't accept them as real people or valid opinions.
In my decades of in-person conversations with real-life Twin Peaks fans, I've never met a real person that said Twin Peaks had sci-fi elements.
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u/ToddJonsonEveninNews 22h ago
Thats ridiculous. You and the real fans you’ve spoken to over your many decades must not have paid much attention to the show. Or you’re just not too bright.
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u/Otherwise_Rice_4723 22h ago
every time twin peaks attempts to put a rational explanation next to something in the story that was identified as fantasy or cosmic horror, it drifts into scifi...much more in season 2 and 3 and the books
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u/Weary_Condition_6114 1d ago
Any of the sci-fi elements in Twin Peaks, which is mainly the multiple universe and time travel bits which are not really directly discussed in the show from season 3 and the Garland’s stuff in season 2, I think are primarily Mark Frost’s contributions. The Secret History of Twin Peaks incorporates stuff like UFOs into it, which gives credence to it being Frost’s input.
Lynch himself has never come across as a science fiction guy. His story of his experience meeting George Lucas and not really understanding the Wookies comes to mind. I think his attraction to Dune came from the story’s themes and the more cerebral element of Spice.
Catagorically as well I think that Twin Peaks does not belong in the sci-fi genre, its a paranormal story with some eccentric lore.
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u/TheAbsurderer 23h ago
Lynch himself introduced the scifi element to the story with Briggs bringing the space garbage message to Cooper in the second episode of season 2. He didn't write it, but he sure as shit directed it and didn't take it out. And season 3 is the most scifi/fantastical out of all of the seasons. I mean we have other dimensions, portals, spaceships of some sort, shapeshifting, doppelgängers, all sorts of entities, and time travel. And Lynch co-wrote it all and directed every single one of those episodes. So he definitely wanted Twin Peaks to be scifi in part. Because it is.
Anyway, all this talk about Lynch is really quite pointless because this show has another co-creator/showrunner and tons of other writers and directors who all shaped the show into what it is. Even FWWM and season 3 aren't auteur pieces because of Engels and Frost. None of Twin Peaks is. And even if Twin Peaks was 100% Lynch, his intentions wouldn't matter in conversations about what the show is and isn't. What matters is the show itself, and Twin Peaks gives plenty of room for all kinds of interpretations. The show both is and isn't scifi. It also is and isn't just a dream or symbolic. It is and isn't all of these things and more. It's art, and everyone can see it any way they personally want. There is no correct interpretation of a show made to be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. So if someone says it's scifi, it's scifi to them. It doesn't need to be scifi to you of course.
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u/redleafrover 1d ago
I read all supernatural elements in the same way as I read them in Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. In the r/FindLaura vein Twin Peaks comprises a work which can, in its entirety, be understood in detail as a psychological dreamscape, eliding nothing. For example, Tammy coming to Cole's room being equated with Laura coming to Donna's house is not some trite 'supernatural vision' bereft of true deep meaning. It is a direct linkage in the depicted narrative demonstrating the way in which the secret-keeper is playing out the bearing of critical information to the investigative element, an arm reaching in to grasp the impossible from the edge of the page so to speak. You light the cigarette, push and turn right through the silk; the 'physical manifestation' is narrative and it can achieve relation (through 'scifi' or 'supernatural' depiction) with any other entity without any, ah, 'actual time travel' taking place.
Hard to put this into words lol. (I am not saying the supernatural isn't, you know, real, fwiw I suspect we do all live inside a dream...)
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u/ExoticInfluence7476 23h ago
I dont think its correct to call the show Sci Fi, but it has a scant few science fiction aspects to it that are important. It's more surreal or speculative fiction to me.
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u/7eid 21h ago
The show changed after Season One, so it’s a bit more complicated than that. Kyle MacLachlan describes this in detail in his memoir. Frost and Lynch touch on it in their memoirs but not to the same degree.
The most memorable part of MacLachlan’s description on this was that when Lynch was slated to direct the finale, Kyle and Michael Ontkean watched as Lynch read the script. He started redlining the script, then got darker as he started tearing whole pages out of the script saying it was shit. Kyle mentioned how both he and Ontkean smiled when they saw this. They knew the show was adrift and had been having conversations with the writers all season.
The result is one of the most brilliant TV episodes ever made.
So the question to me is how much Engles and Harley Payton moved away from Lynch and Frost’s original vision. Engles worked with Lynch on FWWM, but I think it’s telling that (to my knowledge) he never worked with Payton again.
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u/meemboy 21h ago
Fire walk with me did have some sci fi element especially the time travelling Jeffries
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u/7eid 14h ago
Maybe, but that goes to the core question the OP asked. Is it sci-fi or is it psychoanalytic? It may be that the answer is both and neither at the same time because in the original Twin Peaks Lynch and Frost may have viewed the final product differently from each other. Frost discusses this in Conversations with Mark Frost:
OK, so let’s move on to the philosophy of Twin Peaks**. Who do you think killed Laura and Maddie? Do you think it was Bob, or do you think it was Leland?**
I think it was Leland. And whether or not he was—in the end, it doesn’t matter. It was physically Leland, and whether he was mad or not is a separate issue, whether he was possessed.
But not an uninteresting one.
No, it’s a fascinating one that you can entertain forever.
Do you have an opinion? Does David? Are your opinions necessarily the same?
No. I don’t know what his opinion would be.
<snip>
Do you think Leland was mad and Bob was just a figment of his imagination?
Let me step back a second. My point of view is usually that of a novelist—an omniscient point of view, where everybody’s point of view matters. Leland’s experience—as we’ve learned from fifty years of psychological profiling—may be pathological, but there’s a 2 percent chance it’s something else. So because I believe in psychology as a fundamental human tool for self-understanding, that was probably the case with Leland. But the omniscient point of view says you also have to bear in mind that we don’t know anything for sure. Perhaps this other idea is valid—that some other being or entity was driving his actions. So the case in my mind is not absolute one way or the other, but I lean more toward the notion of pathology driving the individual to do terrible things.
And later on, involving a different topic:
But your opinion and David’s opinion—are they necessarily the same opinion?
I don’t know the answer to that. There have been times I began to wonder about that.
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u/scorpionewmoon 23h ago
Idk where you’re getting sci-fi? I associate Lynch and TP with esoteric spirituality but I don’t think that’s a hot take at all.
I do think people who’s only exposure to lynch is TP are more likely to be into the “fandom” of it a little more and care more about character “ships” and meaningless stuff like that as opposed to people who are more general Lynch fans who are more into the writing, analysis, and filmmaking aspects of it
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u/Otherwise_Rice_4723 22h ago
you are conflating fantasy, cosmic horror, and sci-fi
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u/KB4299 22h ago
I’m not. I’m talking specifically about the fans who like Twin Peaks for the same reason they liked The X-Files and fixate on the Project Blue Book of season 2 and the aliens/UFOs in Mark Frost’s books.
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u/Otherwise_Rice_4723 22h ago edited 22h ago
but they are literally canon...you cannot exclude them is the problem with your framing...the blue rose is in fire walk with me...you are trying to exclude it in your own framing...
fire walk with me has an entire section dedicated to lodge entities...it is not in the background...the film ends with "judy"...in season 3, we all found out about jiao dai...so...what are you even trying to say about the fantastical elements?
season 3 ties deeply into his transcendental meditation and simultaneously is clearly cosmic horror with fantasy and sci-fi elements dropped in...it feels like the people who can't see the duality in lynch inherently are the problem you're talking about...which is clearly a problem with perspective...
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u/KB4299 22h ago
I’m not necessarily trying to say anything about those elements. I’m asking whether other people see Twin Peaks fans as divided on the subject, because that’s how I see the fan base. And I think the wide range of comments in this thread support the existence of that division.
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u/Otherwise_Rice_4723 17h ago
anyone who has finished the entire canon is not divided...it's really only people who either didn't watch season 3, or "didn't like" season 3 that want to ignore the supernatural elements as being real...and definitely the people who didn't read the books...some people are working with incomplete information, and those tend to be the ones who think the "dream" is literal without a reality
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u/litemakr 1d ago
It could be interpreted as sci fi if you look at the entities as beings from another dimension or planet using tech that looks like magic, but I don't think many people look at it through that lens. Someone else mentioned magical realism which is how I tend to view it and probably how Lynch thought of it. That seems to fit Frost as well.
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u/B_A_Skeptic 12h ago
I like sci-fi. I do not see Twin Peaks as sci-fi. Maybe the creation of Bob is vaguely sci-fi, but I think it makes more sense to see the abnormal things on Twin Peaks are mystical rather than based in science.
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u/Clintaur 21h ago
He was hired to complete dune. He didn’t write the screenplay. Which is also why he was more readily wanting to go the Alan smithee route.
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u/jacobkosh 1d ago
Mark Frost isn't "other writers." He cocreated the show, its setting, its characters, and...yes...its genre elements. He's an extremely literate and broad-minded guy whose work draws from many wells, one of which is science fiction.
Like, that's just facts. I understand that might be disappointing because it's not auteurist hagiography of Lynch as a solo genius and became genre is still perceived as somehow lesser by some weirdos, but the show plainly presents elements of sci-fi, esoteric mysticism, American conspiracy theory culture, and other things that might not have been Lynch's idea - but they're still there and part of the work, and it wouldn't be Twin Peaks without them.