Last week, David Lynch and Mark Frost announced the return of "Twin Peaks", the cult TV show they co-created in 1990. The show, which ran for two seasons before ending on a cliffhanger, would pick up where it left off. Fans wept; takes were written; listicles about the best sweaters and characters were steadily produced. It was a ravenous response for a television show that’s been off the air for 23 years, and was originally cancelled due to a perilous decline in ratings.
But in the meantime, its influence grew. Shows like “The Killing” and “Lost” borrowed liberally from its format; it was referenced by “The Simpsons” (where millennials like myself probably saw it for the first time) and saw its cast reunited for an episode of “Psych”. In music, artists—some of whom were too young to remember the show as it aired—began positioning themselves as fans, hoping to capture a bit of its attendant mystique. Sky Ferreira’s 2013 album, Night Time, My Time, took its title from a quote spoken by one of the show’s main characters, Laura Palmer. (The lyrics of the title track mimic her dialogue, too.) Artists such as El-P, DJ Shadow, and Mount Eerie interpolated bits of dialogue and soundtrack into their own songs. The British rock band Bastille wrote a song called “Laura Palmer”, while Surfer Blood wrote a song called “Twin Peaks”. Then, there is literally the band called Twin Peaks.
A couple of minutes on Google will produce dozens of other artists who cite "Twin Peaks" as an influence, whether explicitly or figuratively. Sure, you can spot plenty of television references in other shows: Pusha T cribbed his album title from “The Wire”, Titus Andronicus wrote “Theme From Cheers”, Wale had his Mixtape About Nothing, and there is a band called Fall Out Boy. But it certainly seems like no other single television show has inspired as much popular music as "Twin Peaks".
Why "Twin Peaks", though? If you haven’t seen it, the show is about a small town called Twin Peaks where a girl named Laura Palmer is found dead under mysterious circumstances. The local investigation is joined by FBI agent Dale Cooper, who’s been working on a similar case. From there, it turns out pretty much everything in this town happens under mysterious circumstances—which, rendered with Lynch’s characteristically peculiar sensibility, elevated what could’ve been a procedural cop show into something unprecedentedly abstract for network television.
“Twin Peaks” put a lot of things together like no show before it. It was a sexy show, cast with sharp-eyed beauties eager to brush up against danger—often at their own peril—and sharp-jawed boys too handsomely stupid to know what they were getting themselves into. It was a terrifying show, filled with jump scares, demonic possessions, and enough unsettling imagery to make anyone fumble for the light switch. It was a funny show, employing non sequiturs, sight gags and a loose, improvisatory quality that made the frequently tangential digressions easier to bear. (The second season was criticized for flying off the rails, but myself and other fans retain a begrudged fondness for its bizarreness.) It was an ambiguous show, exploring Lynch’s favorite theme of evil under the surface—an immaculate place revealed as secretly seedy, the authority figures complicit in moral decay as an unnamed malevolence grew in the shadows.
Put all of this together and you have a very cool piece of art, tangible enough to resist criticisms of banality and yet too ephemeral to be easily summed up. (One shudders to think how uninteresting the weekly television recaps would’ve been.) Television is filled with so many by-the-numbers shows that it makes sense everyone would gravitate toward one that broke the mold. Even if “Twin Peaks” became so underrated it eventually seemed a little overrated, any nagging doubts about its worth could be dispelled by cuing up any episode and hearing the first few notes of that iconic theme song.
All the show’s formal contradictions are best represented by the “main” character, Laura Palmer, who we rarely see alive but whose absence haunts everyone. Laura contained multitudes. She was the beaming, tiara-bedecked girl in her parents’ photo albums, the cocaine-abusing hell raiser who slept around and denigrated her friends behind their backs, and everything in between. She resisted categorization, just as the show does. And it’s no surprise that some of the artists I mentioned ended up referencing Laura, specifically, of all the show’s alluring characters.
Ferreira, for example, casts her lot with Laura’s complicated, obscured personality, and her refusal to be pinned down. The calculated glossiness of Bastille’s song makes their similar attempt at evocation a little ineffective, but hey, they tried. El-P’s “Tasmanian Pain Coaster” samples the same dialogue as Ferreira, setting an enigmatic tone executed through spacey instrumentals and bleary-eyed punchlines. Mount Eerie’s quoting of “Love Theme From Twin Peaks”—which is otherwise known as “Laura Palmer’s Theme”—summons a romance both nostalgic and strange. The more we learn about Laura on the show, the more we’re confused by her dualities—until, inevitably, we realize she was playing a part that couldn’t be changed. And is there anything more romantic to a creative type than the idea one’s self-destruction might be predestined?
Apart from the quoting of the show, "Twin Peaks" also endures as an ideal expression of creativity. Plenty of artists struggle to filter their influences into something that feels new and exciting, rather than rehashed—and the further struggle is how to avoid being pigeonholed once they’ve done that. (Just ask any chillwave artist about being a “chillwave artist.”) Pointing to “Twin Peaks” as an influence doesn’t have to mean you want to write songs about dead girls in small towns, but simply, that identify with something so unknowable and yet fully formed.
Look at the artists who point toward “Twin Peaks” in more oblique, metatextual ways. Surfer Blood is recalling the literal experience of watching “Twin Peaks”, conflating the strangeness of the show with the strangeness of a new relationship. And Twin Peaks, the band, might be the most appropriate tribute of all: According to them, their name has nothing to do with the show, but was randomly picked because they thought it sounded cool. Is that real? A farce? Like Lynch’s creation, who could say?