The Tube: The Queen Isn't Dead

According to my Tumblr feed, all the hip kids are raving about David Lynch’s early ‘90s serial drama Twin Peaks. Bloggers such as high school pop culture genius Tavi Gevinson of Style Rookie wrote about not just the “teen bedroom” aesthetic, but the artifacts left behind after the death of a teenage girl, a theme that also occurs in later films such as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and is later parodied in the 1999 film Jawbreaker.

Twenty years later, Twin Peaks–the Kafkaesque small town in the Pacific Northwest shaken by the murder of the local sweetheart, Laura Palmer–is back on the map. This can’t be nostalgia per se. Though the show was set specifically in 1989, like many Lynch works, it is unmoored from the zeitgeist of any particular time. Watching Twin Peaks isn’t like watching I Love Lucy, in which the clothing styles and cultural signifiers bind it tightly to the 1950s. It is more like having a dream and, if you were around for the first run in 1990, it was like having a recurring dream.

Anyone that’s lived in a small town can draw parallels between Lynch’s fictional hamlet and their own. Though far from the misty fir trees of Washington state, I have seen more than my share of Log Ladies lounging on benches in the Iowa City Pedestrian Mall on summer afternoons. Your brilliant creative writing teacher that seems so full of clever idioms? More like Agent Dale Cooper than you’d like to admit. Your post-collegiate, minimum-wage waitress job echoes the Double R diner. I swear, if you’re sitting in Tobacco Bowl and you squint through the smoke and take a sip of coffee, you will easily imagine you’re in the Book House.

Since Twin Peaks can even seem like the mysterious older cousin to our small community (especially with the David Lynch Foundation, a center headed by Lynch to promote transcendental meditation in schools and other organizations, based in nearby Fairfield), the tragedy of Laura Palmer’s death seems all too real, even two decades after the show aired.

From the first episode, we are faced with Palmer’s body, with its tangled blonde hair and blue lips, and Lynch doesn’t give us much time to feel what the rest of Twin Peaks feels: an eerie sense of guilt. At her funeral, Laura’s estranged boyfriend, Bobby Briggs, spells it out for us in a coked-up outburst: You all killed her!

If we’re thinking in terms of archetypes, we probably did. Laura Palmer is the girl you love to hate: perfect grades, pristine and pretty features and a list of volunteer projects to rival Max Fischer’s extracurricular activities in Rushmore. She was the girl who seemed to have it all together while you were squeezing zits and listening to Bright Eyes. Unless we were the prom queen, we’ve all wanted, at least for a second, to kill the prom queen. Take her down a few pegs. Yank the tiara from her crown of blonde curls. Destroy!

What really killed Laura Palmer is the bitterness and angst of our high school years, which seems to follow us into adulthood. Her death becomes something of a feminist cautionary tale. Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill–a pioneer of the Riot Grrrl movement–perhaps explained the reason for Laura’s demise best: “To force some forever identity on people is stupid. Point out inconsistencies in their behavior, explain how they are not ‘truly what they say’ because you saw them ‘do this’ one time…why? Because it’s easier to deal with cardboard cutouts than real people.”

Riot Grrrl–a feminist movement started by the women in bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney and Bratmobile–came about in the Pacific Northwest at around the same time Twin Peaks was being filmed. The ragtag crew formed bands, published zines and renounced their hatred of and alienation from other girls, perhaps in an attempt to prevent horrific events like Laura Palmer’s murder. It seems anomalous that these two unrelated cultural events–a television show created by a man who dreamed up some of the most horrific scenes of female victimization on the one hand, and a bunch of punk girls with glue sticks and access to copy machines on the other–could coexist in the same universe. This was, of course, before the internet.

One of the main themes of Riot Grrrl’s manifesto–Revolution Girl Style Now!, passed around on Xerox pages and stapled into zines–was that cattiness and jealousy of other women are dangerous. They called the phenomenon “Girl Hate,” and demanded that you drop the words “slut,” “whore,” etc. from your lexicon.

Is David Lynch a feminist, and did he plan to incorporate a feminist undercurrent in Twin Peaks or any of his other films? The answer is as complex and murky as the series itself and it is widely discussed among film critics. There is no “yes” or “no” answer as Lynch doesn’t seem to hold any particular reverence or hatred for women.

Yet again, Twin Peaks and Riot Grrrl are surfacing side by side, an odd couple. They lasted only a short time as a televised series and as an active movement, but both are undergoing a cultural revival among children of the ‘90s today. The genius of David Lynch and the passion of Riot Grrrl movers and shakers like Kathleen Hanna exist not only for their aesthetic, but for their contributions to pop culture as a whole. Why are we still so compelled? What is so timeless about the show that it can be brought to life again? Well, David Lynch might have said it perfectly: “The thing is about secrets.”