Twin Peaks
What is going on?
Episode seven was the most coherent story-based episode we’ve been treated to in the new season of Twin Peaks. So of course this week was confusing as hell. I’ve tried to analyse the images and work out what it all means, but the best I can offer is guess work. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the abstruse imagery, episode eight is beautiful.
I believe the story here is one of good and evil, destruction and creation. The atomic bomb fire cloud is displayed as a ballet, awe inspiring power unleashed. In it we see the birth of Bob, the demon who, after possessing Leland Palmer, kills Laura and others.
To balance this we have the creation, in the giant’s golden brainwaves, of the idea of good, represented by Laura Palmer. Here my logic falters as the show has portrayed Laura as a victim of evil rather than a force of good – looking back, her potential shone through in the way she touched so many others before her death. Perhaps she would be better described as the death of hope.
The golden sphere, containing Laura, is sent via copper fallopian tube to earth. Is that what materialises as an egg in the desert? From the egg, hatches a disturbing frog-locust (plagues of Egypt to cleanse the evil from the world) that enters the body of a young woman/girl who is sent to sleep when a strange poem is recited again and again over the radio. And after she experiences her first kiss.
Playing live at The Roadhouse this episode is Nine Inch Nails, with “She’s Gone”. It fits perfectly with everything else that happens in this episode, and the haunting poem recited by the char-grilled demon who may or may not just want someone to light his cigarette.
“This is the water
and this is the well.
Drink full,
and descend.
The horse is the white of the eye
and the dark within.”
Is the well the entrance to the Black Lodge? Is the Black Lodge hell? Does the horse refer to the original peoples of America? A white horse inside a room has been used as an image previously.
I’d love to think that the meaning behind this episode will become clearer as the series progresses, but I very much doubt that will be the case. Whatever happens the art house style television and the prevalence of silence in Twin Peaks is brave and fascinating. No one can complain that this is dumbed down for its audience.
Comments