Only The Lonely: Meditations on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks
Erin Bradfield
In this essay, I explore the ideas of loneliness and masks presented by Olivia Laing in Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone and apply them to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks. From the moment she is discovered by Pete Martel in the premiere, a spectral figure “wrapped in plastic,” Laura Palmer haunts the show as an agonizing present-absence. While many community members wonder who killed her, few stop to ponder who Laura really was and how she became “a woman in trouble.”* Fewer still tried to help her. I argue that Laura is a profoundly lonely figure who is isolated due to the various traumas she endures and the secrets she keeps about them. Laura masks her pain and presents a much-admired image as homecoming queen; Meals On Wheels volunteer; and tutor to a special needs student. But Laura is dual, like everything in Twin Peaks. Along with this shining public persona, she privately struggles to cope with incest, drug addiction, infidelity, and sex work. I argue that Laura’s inability to open up about her harrowing experiences leads to a bifurcation of her personality. Her trauma generates a corresponding loneliness that proves irresolvable throughout Twin Peaks.
* This is the tagline for Inland Empire, but it is a fitting description for many David Lynch projects.
The Gift of David Lynch’s Dream Logic
Kelly Bulkeley
David Lynch’s works are often said to display a kind of “dream logic.” What does that phrase mean, and why is it so naturally applied to him? This presentation will take a literal approach to the idea of a distinctively Lynchian dream logic by bringing his works into conversation with classic perspectives on dreaming from William Shakespeare and C.G. Jung. This will not be a reductive analysis that turns Lynch’s art into something else. Rather, by exploring his dream logic as a genuine logic of dreaming, we can recognize dimensions of his art as they appear within the unconscious of everyone, which I believe was one of his main aesthetic goals. Lynch wanted us to find these incredible powers of dreaming insight within ourselves, and that is the ultimate and enduring gift of his art.
Clandestine Catalysts: Twin Peaks as a Tale Enabled by Absent Female Bodies
Stella Castelli
As Laura Palmer’s deceased body is found naked, flushed ashore and wrapped in transparent plastic within the opening sequence Twin Peaks, the immediate tonality that is evoked is that of the sublime, combining both awe and horror. Inscribed with tragedy, Laura Palmer’s absence becomes a trigger of narratological productivity as the discovery of her corpse marks the cornerstone of the entire series that subsequently unfolds. Fallen to her untimely demise, the sudden non-existence of Laura Palmer becomes the center around which a grief-stricken community begins to revolve and, by extension, around which the narrative begins to develop. It is her death that allows not only for the story to be told but further, for there to be a story to tell. The teller of the tale we find in FBI Agent Dale Cooper, the voice of law enforcement and jurisdiction, who arrives in Twin Peaks to solve the case and in doing so, obtains a form of authorial agency. By means of an absent Laura Palmer, Cooper is enabled to become the metaphorical biographer and author of the narrative, piecing together the case and recounting the tragedy of Twin Peaks.
This notion of productive authorship by means of absent female bodies is further reinforced if we consider that Cooper is recounting the tale of Twin Peaks by means of disembodied ‘Diane’, his assistant for whom he is recording his findings, only ever present in the form of a voice recorder. As a passive outsider listening exclusively to Cooper’s account of what has happened, Diane remains pure canvas for Cooper’s narrative. In a similar manner as the absent Laura Palmer, Diane thus becomes a clandestine catalyst for Coopers agency through her absence rather than her presence. In the original Twin Peaks, then, agency – on a narratological as well as diegetic level – hinges on the absence of female bodies, which both produce the story and serve as a congruous canvas thereof.
Tell Me This Isn’t Real!: Mulholland Drive’s Haunting Link to Birdman
Katy Coakley
David Lynch often portrays the entertainment industry in surrealist terms as a nightmarish environment that is psychologically damaging to actors. Similar aesthetics and concerns appear in at least one film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. For example, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Iñárritu’s Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) both explore the thin line between passion and delusion, where their protagonists—both failed Hollywood actors—retreat into hallucination to escape real-life worlds filled with broken dreams. These films surrealistically blur the boundary between reality and fantasy, resulting in a narrative perspective that is unreliable and defined by the characters’ egos. In fact, the parallels are striking enough that they could almost be said to occupy a shared cinematic universe in which the Iñárritu film is, in a sense haunted by that of Lynch.
This Is Not the Synopsis You’re Looking For
Phil Ford
In advance of his Blindfold Match with J.F. Martel, Phil has been busy embroidering the hood of his satin boxing robe with the trademark of his most recent athletic sponsor. He says he’ll write his synopsis soon, but “Chickering & Sons Piano Manufacturers” is one hell of a logo to commit to needle and thread.
Phil’s topic may be a secret, but his bio is available to all. Read it here.
What Does the Big Fish Want?
Joel Gunz
David Lynch famously used the metaphor of “Catching the Big Fish” to describe the search for big creative ideas. This talk flips the idea upside-down to consider the process from the fish’s perspective. For example, Lynch’s cinema engages in a profound and complex conversation with that of Alfred Hitchcock. Fans and scholars often point to these affinities as evidence of Hitchcock’s influence on Lynch. Well yes, but that’s just the table stakes. It can be said that both artists were fishing off the same dock; or, conversely, that the Big Fish swam in the same waters in which they dipped their hooks.
Lost in the Stars: An Anti-auteurist Approach to the Work of David Lynch
Nick Haeffner
David Lynch was universally acclaimed for his originality. However, to see Lynch’s work as simply the unmediated expression of a uniquely inspired individual would be to be misunderstand it. Like Hitchcock, Lynch was an artist who needed and worked exceptionally well with creative collaborators. In case studies of Twin Peaks (1990-2017) and Blue Velvet (1986), this paper sets out to show that the contributions of Mark Frost, Angelo Badalamenti, Frederick Elmes and his actors are necessary, if not sufficient, elements that make the work ‘original’. Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet also self-consciously echo other work and generic templates, such as film noir (bringing themes of corruption, voyeurism and moral ambiguity), melodrama, horror, mythology, esoteric beliefs and, in the case of Blue Velvet, the so-called ‘yuppie nightmare’ cycle of films (eg. After Hours (1985)) that overdetermine the creative vision, direction and decisions of Lynch himself. Even in the most abstract, avant garde and seemingly genre transcendent parts of Lynch’s work the concept of auteurism is complicated by similarities with the work of other experimental artists.
Episode 8 of The Return may come across as weird for a TV series perhaps but parts of it are familiar fare in a contemporary art gallery. While this paper argues more broadly that auteurism can lead to a distorted understanding of film making it also suggests that Lynch’s work, embodying as it does a modernist claim to shockingly novel artistic originality while repeatedly referencing and incorporating so much material that is obviously not originated by him, is a particularly interesting case study, raising questions about whether an auteurist stance towards a f ilm maker such as Lynch may obscure more than it reveals about the work itself.
The Missing Piece: The Absence of The Straight Story from the Lynch Story
Thomas Leitch
Ever since its first release in 1999, The Straight Story, David Lynch’s film about an Iowa farmer’s journey on a lawnmower to visit the critically ill brother from whom he has long been estranged, has occupied a unique position in Lynch’s oeuvre. On the one hand, it is among the most critically acclaimed of all Lynch’s films, with scores of 95% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, which measures reviewers’ responses, 91% on its Popcornmeter, which measures audiences’ responses, and 8.0 on the Internet Movie Database. On the other, it is the most critically neglected of Lynch’s films, having attracted much less engagement from either fans or scholars than less well-regarded Lynch films from Dune to Inland Empire.
This essay argues that this curious status is rooted in the film’s widely assumed failure to fit into two serial narratives that have been foundational in the reception of Lynch’s films. The film’s story, as its title guilelessly announces, is remarkably straight, involving not a murky descent into an uncanny world but rather a journey with a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end that achieves a heartwarming resolution so rare in Lynch’s work that it marks the film as a radical outlier. For this reason, it has not generated the wealth of interpretations that have greeted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Nor has it fit neatly into any narrative of Lynch’s career. The broad implication of this argument is that no matter how highly regarded or fondly remembered they are, the films most likely to receive continued critical attention are those that provoke serial interpretations even as they promote a single coherent narrative of their filmmakers’ careers. The most important serial narratives are not contained within particular films or their franchises but those that offer the promise of indefinite extension in their reception.
This Headline Left Intentionally Blank
J.F. Martel
To prepare for his Blindfold Match with Phil Ford, J.F. has retreated to a concrete bunker overlooking Cape Chigneto, NS with the only copy of his presentation synopsis. He left his mobile phone behind, and we’ve tried reaching him through a Ouija board and a detuned Realistic Chronomatic-260 AM/FM clock radio, but haven’t been able to get through. Service out there can be spotty this time of year.
In the meantime, tune into J.F.’s wavelength by reading his bio.
AXX°N N. —>
The Longest Running Great Liberation Through Watching in the Bardo
Nathan Seckinger
David Lynch’s Inland Empire can be understood as a distinctly 21st-century expression of a very ancient literary genre: a style of esoteric, mystical textuality which presents reality as a layered metaphysical domain that can only be navigated by means of indirect or hidden routes. To take this premise seriously is to approach the film not merely as an object of symbolic interpretation, but as a constructed, performative system in which identity, agency, and reality are fundamentally reconfigured through a polysemic method and single elements operate simultaneously across cinematic, spatial, psychological, and cosmological registers. What follows from this is a set of questions the film itself appears to pose. What becomes of agency when identity is dispersed across multiple embodiments, when actors, characters, and even entire movies can no longer be cleanly distinguished, and when perception folds back upon itself? And what are we to make of a world in which the breakdown of perceived continuity is not incoherence, but rather the visible trace of a system that can be entered, followed, and—at least in principle—traversed?
The Eagle Scout and the Jumping Man: “It Has Something to Do with Your Heritage”
David Titterington
This talk explores how Native American imagery in David Lynch’s painting and Twin Peaks emerges from his biography as an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow—a secret society built on “playing Indian” while Native children were forced into assimilationist boarding schools. Titterington argues that this history of cultural theft and Hollywood stereotypes profoundly shaped Lynch’s unconscious. But unlike the Order of the Arrow, which used ritual to contain and commodify Indigeneity, Lynch’s art lets those same forms shriek, transgress, and unsettle. The talk will explore how Lynch’s work aligns with decolonizing, animist worldviews, recreating a “magic” reminiscent of Native ceremonials—rejecting linear logic, embracing trickster energy, and acknowledging the violence haunting the American landscape.
Walking Through the Fire: The Return, Episode 8 as Prophecy
Eric Wargo
Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return has been called one of the best hours of television in the history of the medium. It was also uncharacteristically explanatory for a Lynch work, seemingly clarifying the nature of the “fire” that had been alluded to throughout the decades-spanning series: the nuclear fire of the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. But in this presentation, Eric Wargo argues that Episode 8 was also a filmic premonition of Lynch’s emphysema death that was likely hastened by the LA fires of January 2025. Wargo contextualizes this premonition with readings of other artist-prophets, including Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films Stalker and The Sacrifice contained a premonition of the director’s cancer death, and Michael Rolando Richards, whose uncanny sculptures seemingly prophesied his death on 9/11.