This essay contains major, ruinous spoilers for the seventh episode of the second season of Twin Peaks, "Lonely Souls," which was my favorite episode of television for a good decade. I cannot convince you to care about this, other than to say that Twin Peaks is a show worth experiencing, and that this episode is one of the few things worth knowing nothing about beforehand. I am aware that this does not make for a compelling argument.

This essay will also hint at certain aspects of the third season of that show, but hopefully without giving away the game. That said, there will certainly be tremors.

Lastly, it will be revealed that the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me contains at least one shot of a clock. Please steer clear if you would rather not know anything about Fire Walk With Me, or about clocks.

Proceed, or don't, as you wish.

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"I just miss having a life of my own," says Maddy Ferguson to her aunt and uncle, tucked snugly between them, as Louis Armstrong plays in the background. The irony couldn't be more apparent if you underlined it with a photo of her dead cousin, which the shot conveniently does. Laura Palmer (deceased) and Maddy Ferguson (soon-to-be-deceased) are both played by Sheryl Lee; Maddy is just Laura with a brunette wig on. But for the moment, it seems like an innocent wink, just a tongue-in-cheek joke during a wholesome moment. Maddy has recently found closure amidst a disorienting love triangle; more profoundly, Leland and Sarah Palmer have found closure through the doppelgänger of their dead daughter. Maddy is leaving; perhaps this suggests that Leland and Sarah are finally ready to let go.

The shot is composed is composed strangely and serenely. The three family members seem unusually far away, shrunken down in the middle of a scene that's all about them. The camera moves slowly, gently, making the room feel larger the more it travels along. At first, the shot is foregrounded by Laura's photo; it takes a full two minutes of slow movement before it rests, at last, on the record player upon which "What a Wonderful World" is still spinning.

When Maddy is murdered, that same room is lit by a harsh spotlight. The room's spatial dimensions are all but eliminated; that space which seemed so cavernous is now abruptly claustrophobic. No efforts are made to keep the blinding white from dissolving entire portions of each frame; the camera, which still takes pains to observe rules of formal composition half the time, suddenly moves in jagged and uneven ways whenever the spotlight switches on. The framerate slows to a crawl. The room, which is part of an actual house, suddenly feels like a cheap set, while the actor's faces and mouths begin to feel disturbingly, unsettlingly real. The audio of Maddy's screams lowers until it sounds like her murderer's low growl.

All the while, the record keeps skipping. It skips, not missing a single beat, not slowing down along with the slowed-down pace of the spotlight shots. Its low hiss-and-click repeats, maddeningly, until you almost forget you can hear it. Everything feels increasingly trapped in place.

It isn't just the slo-mo shots that give you the sense that things are falling apart. From the moment the spotlight first turns on to the end of the scene, four minutes go by—four long, excruciating minutes. There is almost no discernible dialogue. There is virtually no action, at least not in the sense that plot beats are occurring. We are trapped in the moment of a murder, trapped in a place that feels too small, as individual moments stretch out for an eternity. (Most notably, a far-too-close-up shot of Maddy's killer sucking on her chin that lasts for twenty-one whopping seconds.)

The minute just before the spotlight is superbly-crafted horror, the reveal both of a killer and of a woman still in the house with him. It's supremely tense. Twin Peaks models itself around the twists and turns of soap operas, and here is a moment that, for a moment, feels like it could lead to many places, most (but not quite all) of them bad. You could imagine an unbearable, gripping situation, one in which Maddy's fate is left uncertain until the final shocking moments.

Then the spotlight rips a hole in reality and a part of you goes: Ah, I see. This is not a moment in a longer scene. The thing we were dreading would happen has already happened; what happens next will be anything but uncertain. Maddy Ferguson is already dead. There is no possible escape. We know it, and most excruciatingly of all, we can tell she knows it too. You can see it in her eyes, long before the moment of her actual death. She is sobbing, but she has stopped fighting. All that's left is waiting for it to end.

This is trauma made manifest. Trauma revolves around a literal rupture, a break of some kind. Survivors of trauma struggle, years later, to escape that single moment; it can feel unavoidable, even timeless. There is also, in many cases, a pre-traumatic moment of seeming inevitability: you realize what is about to occur, and you realize on some level that it cannot possibly be diverted, and the part of you that panics and tries to bolt or struggle conflicts with the part of you that wants to start resigning yourself to what's about to happen now, even before the incident has fully begun.

"Is it future," a man will ask twenty-five years later, "or is it past?" The original run of Twin Peaks set several scenes a quarter-century into the future; in 2017, the third season of Twin Peaks recreated sequences that had initially been shot in 1990 and 1991. Where are we, when one scene shows us the future from the past, and another shows us the past from the future? Are we now, or are we then? And did then come before and after?

If it feels pithy to juxtapose film commentary with traumatic events, or real traumas with fictional ones, it's important to note how seriously and carefully David Lynch depicts trauma. While his reputation is sometimes reduced down to his being "bizarre" or "dark," few filmmakers (hell, few artists) have spent as much time exploring traumatic experience, or covered it from as many angles. The so-called strangeness of his filmmaking often reveals itself, in due time, to be a physical reproduction of traumatic moments: an attempt to viscerally and plainly reproduce something which we only ever feel internally, and abstractly, in feelings we barely know how to express.

The pilot episode of Twin Peaks opens with the discovery of Laura Palmer's body. What follows is thirty minutes of the world around her slowly learning about her death: the creeping dread her mother feels as she dials number after number, trying to find where her daughter might have gone; the slow dissolution of her classroom at school, as eyes meet across the chasm of her empty seat; the cop photographing her who can't help but cry. He gets reprimanded, of course, but why wouldn't he cry? It feels both unusual and normal to spend so much time depicting grief: unusual, because few shows ever dwell for so long on such a fixed tone, and normal, because why wouldn't there be grief? Why are those who mourn the dead so often reduced to pithy sadness one-liners, then pushed to the side, so the action can begin? How many crime dramas spend as much time depicting grief across a single season as Twin Peaks spends in its first half hour?

There is an absence. That's a lie: there are two. There is the sudden loss of Laura, experienced across her whole small town. But there is also an absence of Laura from the show, and an absence of her death. Twin Peaks revolves around the murder of a girl who is never seen alive; its entire plot arises from her horrific death, yet her death is never seen. (At least, it wasn't seen before the prequel movie, made after the full run of the initial show.)

The moment exists in the eternal past, left behind for the sake of the present. Only Laura's smiling face, fixed in a photo frame, remains as a reminder, staring at us as the credits roll at the end of every episode. The show is about a tragedy we didn't get to see. Until, all at once, Maddy is murdered, and the moment seems to stretch out further the longer it goes on, and we realize: it is still happening. In this moment, here and now, Laura Palmer is being killed. Just because it's happened doesn't mean it isn't happening now, or couldn't happen again.

"It is happening again," says the Giant to Dale Cooper, before we quite know what he means. He says it twice in a row. "It is happening again."

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Twin Peaks, like many of Lynch's projects, is both a vision and a subversion of 1950s America. It depicts a blissful, almost innocent world. And it shows the truth beneath that seeming world: a truth that, while not wholly dark, is by necessity darker than the wannabe-utopia that the American suburb pretended to be. That world is extreme and highly contradictory; its joys and tendernesses are more potent than the opiatic pleasantness of the ever-smiling 50s, but that's partly because they exist in contrast to grief and loss, to trauma and outright cruelty.

At the center of this imaginary world lay the nuclear family: perfect, indivisible. Two parents and two children. The stable atomic unit of a functioning society, neatly parceled into neighborhoods, house-by-house.

You don't notice unless you're looking, but there are no nuclear families in Twin Peaks. The closest thing would be the Hornes, who serve as a foil to the Palmers in some ways. There is a father, mother, son, and daughter, but there is also an everpresent uncle, who his brother Ben loves far more than he loves his wife. And the son, Johnny, is developmentally disabled, which feels like an offbeat detail until you start to think about how much Ben's relationship with Audrey, the younger child, must have been influenced by the family that existed before she came into the world. We don't know when Ben grew estranged from his wife, but his relationship with his daughter is chilly at best—and that's before he unknowingly tried to fuck her. The closest thing Twin Peaks has to a nuclear family is obviously decaying, to the point that it can barely be called a family at all.

The Palmers, on the other hand, are only a nuclear family if you count both Maddy and Laura as members. To achieve that idyllic vision of Americana, Laura must be literally split in two.

Lynch has a thing for splitting women in half. In Blue Velvet, innocent young Sandy is contrasted with the anything-but-innocent Dorothy. After Twin Peaks, the divide turned increasingly literal. Lost Highway casts Patricia Arquette in brunette as a man's wife, and in platinum blonde as a gangster's moll who gets lusted after by that man's teenage alter ego. Mulholland Drive, too, revolves around a blonde and a brunette, whose identities are confused in ways both accidental and intentional. In every case, the split is triggered by a rupture: occasionally an overt tragedy, but far more often a trauma which occurs without us realizing it, or a trauma which has occurred, warping the logic of the narrative in ways that we can't understand until, all at once, we discover what must have shattered the world.

Maddy Ferguson isn't literally Laura Palmer... is she? Well, no: she's not. She just seduces the same man that Laura does, dresses like Laura (in a hilariously bad blonde wig) to manipulate Laura's former therapist, and is eventually murdered in the same manner that Laura is, by the same man: her uncle Leland, Laura's father. Everywhere she goes, people see Laura, and respond to her the way they used to. That's true up to her last moments, where rather than bidding her a wistful farewell, Leland recreates the night of his daughter's death, in conveniently plain sight, so the cameras can finally capture what happened. Look! There's even a spotlight!

(And that's to say nothing of the red curtains that fall immediately after.)

Across "Lonely Souls," which starts by depicting Leland as the perfect image of a loving father and ends by revealing that he's anything but, Benjamin Horne suffers a Greek tragedy in reverse order. Cause and effect are mirrored: he has committed two cardinal sins, and he is punished for both in this episode, but neither he nor the audience realizes it until much later.

When Audrey confronts him for owning the local whorehouse and reveals that she was the masked woman he nearly tried to fuck, we are still unsure whether or not Ben is Laura's killer. Ben confesses that he slept with Laura; he sleeps with an awful lot of 18-year-old girls, and while they're all "consenting" prostitutes on one level, he grooms each and every one of them, plucking them from retail jobs at his department store by offering them quicker, easier money. It's unclear whether he's also the one who's molested Laura since she was young; we only find out later that it wasn't him, and that there's every chance he "only" ever slept with the most technical possible definition of "adults." In retrospect, his confession at Audrey's hands feels like a retribution: he was unaware of the near-incest he committed, or of how close he came to what would have been the unpardonable climax of his hedonistic, family-shattering lust.

In the moments where she confronts him, we see something new in Ben's eyes: genuine shame. If Leland's path leads him from bereaved parent to literal demon, Ben's path takes him in the opposite direction: if not redemption, then at least a sincere desire to be redeemed.

Ben's other punishment is similarly only clear in retrospect. We see him sign a contract with Mr. Tojamura, the mysterious (and extremely racist depiction of a) man who offers him $5 million in exchange for Ghostwood, the MacGuffin of a land deal that Ben is perpetually chasing. Immediately after signing, Ben is arrested on suspicion of Laura's murder. But it's not until later that we learn "Tojamura" is secretly Catherine Martell, Ben's former lover and would-be victim, in disguise. Ben conspired with and double-crossed her as part of her Ghostwood schemes; he later left her for dead. We don't realize in the moment that his "dead" ex-partner just stole his project back from him when it happens. It's only looking back that "Lonely Souls" reveals itself to be a divine retribution for Horne, his past crimes avenging themselves upon him through a mirror.

Ben and his lawyer Leland aren't as obvious foils as Maddy and Laura, just as Audrey is a slightly-more-obscure foil for Laura than her literal doppelgänger Maddy is. (Though Audrey and Laura are the two women who steal Dale Cooper's heart, in slightly different ways.) Nonetheless, the parallels between Leland and Ben reach their pinnacle here, albeit in oblique, tangential ways. They both are fathers and adulterers; they have both torn their own families apart. But on the night that Leland re-murders his daughter, Ben confesses himself to his. There can be no undoing the past, and Ben has traumatized his daughter clearly enough that you can see her skin crawl when he so much as looks at her. But here, there is a future, whatever the past may have held.

That can't be said for Leland and Laura, let alone for Leland and Maddy. There is no future; there is no longer any past. There is only a present moment, horrific and unending. The moment when the nuclear family forever split.

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David Lynch's art is infamously elusive. Symbols abound, but their meaning is rarely obvious. The ones do that stand for something blatant often seem to waver between sincere and insincere, earnest recreations or cheesy parodies or savage deconstructions.

Nonetheless, Lynch has an uncanny knack for convincing you that something meaningful is taking place. You may not understand it—you may be confronted by a reality that is flat-out ludicrous—but on some level, it is apparent that everything somehow makes sense. Even if it's a sense with which you are wholly unacquainted.

Shortly before Maddy is murdered in the Palmer living room, Laura's mother Sarah has a vision of a white horse. I will not pretend to understand what that horse means. I've seen many theories; none of them feel halfway convincing to me. The horse may have simply been a horse.

It is hard to argue that Twin Peaks isn't an intentional deconstruction of an American pastiche. It's not particularly subtle in its portrayal of seemingly-happy households that conceal various kinds of secrets. Some husbands are abusive. Some wives escape the lovelessness in their marriages by striving to invent the perfectly silent drape. Every teen but one, at Twin Peaks' onset, is cheating on every other teen.

You can say that Twin Peaks isn't about the myth of the patriarch, but a whole lot of Twin Peaks sure does seem to revolve around husbands and dads. The emotional denouement of its first episode is a conversation between Laura's best friend Donna and her dad, at the end of the very long day in which Donna learned that Laura was dead. Doc Hayward, amidst an evening of cacophony and violence and fear, is loving and understanding, protective but trusting, tender with her even amidst impossibly difficult circumstances. We won't learn for a long time just how different the moment they share is from, say, moments Laura shared with her father, but it's telling that this was the emotional catharsis that closes the show's first outing: perhaps the purest moment of a father doing what fathers are generally supposed to do. (And even this moment will be subverted in due time.)

Meanwhile, conversely, Dale Cooper becomes a father figure to nearly everyone in Twin Peaks, despite being virtually celibate. He subverts Audrey's lust for him, and puts his own admitted lust aside, to offer her what she's never received from Ben. (This happens shortly before her real father unwittingly tries to... you know.) And his grief for Laura is pure in a way that Leland's clearly can't be. He becomes, not just a father, but an inverse father: a mirror to all the real fathers of this world. Perhaps that's why he simply never finds time for Donna: to be the opposite of her father is to be absent.

You can argue that Twin Peaks isn't "about" trauma, for all that Maddy's murder is so traumatic that it literally shatters the reality of the show. You could argue that Maddy doesn't spring into existence because Laura's death is such a rupture that it splits her in half: the Laura that exists before the murder, inaccessible because we never knew her "before," and the Laura that exists after the murder, the future counterpart who seems to have no existence of her own until she absorbs Laura's personality through osmosis, and dies the moment she decides to leave. You can argue that, when Maddy sits between her parents—sorry, her aunt and uncle—she isn't literally taking Laura's place, framed in-shot by a photo of Laura that is itself framed. Nothing in any of Lynch's films will insist that the strange division of women into separate halves, combined invariably with a confusion of past and present, is his disturbingly effective way of portraying what trauma does to the mind that suffers it, not even when the murderer in that one movie of his suffers a splitting headache that somehow transforms him into a completely different man. My interpretation is just that: interpretation.

You can argue that my "nuclear family" analogy is a bit of a stretch. Sure, it's strange that the detonation of the atomic bomb is referenced just before Maddy gets killed, as if to place that image squarely in our heads: "My family was at Nagasaki," claims Tojamura, who I will remind you is an extremely racist caricature of a Japanese man played by a white woman. But it's not like Lynch literally detonates an atomic bomb the moment that Laura or Maddy dies; he never goes overly nerdy and describes what happens with Laura and Maddy as a sort of quantum superposition, or tries to connect trauma's scattering of time and memory with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He's got a little arthouse in him, sure, but he's not the sort to draw an overly obvious metaphor and eagerly wait for you to pat him on the back; he's not constructing the symbols in Twin Peaks as mysteries waiting to be solved, as if the point is to connect the dots just the right way and reveal the "real" story lying just underneath.

Conversely, though, Lynch has a genius for doing obvious things in exceptionally non-obvious ways. It's shocking to learn that Leland was the killer, until on rewatch it feels like there could be no other answer, just as it feels impossible in retrospect to imagine Maddy ending anywhere but dead. Playing Louis Armstrong over a heartwarming family moment is a bit on the nose, isn't it? It's not like Twin Peaks has, I don't know, one major emotional melody that it plays every time something remotely emotional takes place, sometimes swelling it up from out of nowhere at the drop of a hat, other times revealing that it was a song on the jukebox or a radio when somebody abruptly decides to change the tune.

Maybe it's too obvious to reference the splitting of the atom, a literal rupture that sends out shockwaves of energy, when describing the death of Laura Palmer, a figurative rupture whose energy propels the entire show. Maybe the nuclear family I think I see is just a charming American family, minus the incest and the murder. Maybe the fact that Leland and Sarah kind of have two daughters, just like those two daughters are kind of one and the same, is a bit of a stretch. And maybe the way that the show continually returns to Laura's death, emphasizing how it split not just her family but the whole damn town, isn't a way of depicting trauma and rupture and abjection after all: it was just a clever device to introduce its broad cast of characters by suspending them, at the very start of the show, in a seemingly unending grief, just as it was an artistic flourish to spend four minutes at the moment of Maddy's death, a single horrific moment suspended in time.

After all, it's not like scattered time and trauma and quantum superposition are ever explicitly linked. It's not like Laura Palmer ever looks at a clock and—

ah

well carry on then

Ahem. We can argue the significance of the spotlight, or we can try to figure out the horse, although I will leave you to figure out that one on your own. But I'd rather return to one last thing, one incontrovertibly meaningful symbol—though like all of Lynch's symbols, its exact meaning is open to interpretation.

We first see the Palmer family room in that long, steady shot, ending on their record player. When the killing starts, we return to that living room by way of the record player, which has just begun to skip.

"It's a Wonderful World" has been replaced by a jarring, uncanny noise. That part's visceral and obvious. The record player keeps skipping, across the long, gradual reveal of Leland as Laura's killer, through his prolonged murder of Maddie. Even as time distorts around her death, the skipping of the record player remains constant, unaltered in any way.

We are reliving the night of Laura's murder. It doesn't matter whether that reliving is literal or figurative. We are told: it is happening again. It is happening again. What we thought was behind us is now in front of us. Then has simultaneously become now and soon. Anticipation is replaced with a sad, disturbing resignation. Prolonged dramatic suspense increasingly has us catching our breath as we await the release of the near future; profound lack of suspense, on the other hand, just makes the present moment increasingly agitating, increasingly upsetting. You can't wonder what will happen next once you know there won't be any "next" to wonder about.

Trauma experienced in one direction is a perpetual return to the past, an abrupt shattering of the boundary between past and present. Trauma experienced in the other direction is an abandonment to a horrific future, a relinquishing of any hope that anything is coming but you already know will come. It is a cleave and a collapse, both a rupture of what felt whole and a violation of the space between things which appeared to be separate. Maddie is being murdered, or she is about to be murdered, or she has been murdered already. Or perhaps it's Laura, Laura still dead, Laura dying all over again, Laura miserably dreading her own death. It is hard to make sense of, and it is the most obvious thing in the world, painfully obvious, too obvious to ignore, so obvious you stop seeing it. You see it even when you think you don't; you know what it is even as you tell yourself it makes no sense. You blink, and all at once you're there again, remembering how, even as it happened, a part of you wondered whether you had dreamt this all before. Prophesy and memory begin to blur. Past and future stop mattering when there's no such thing as time, just as you can travel anywhere in the world and close your eyes and realize that you're still right back in that place. It is inevitable; it is irreversible; there is no longer anything to reverse. It is excruciating; you are sick of it; it is impossible to get used to. It's not even new. You know it all the instant it begins. It's just another story you've already heard, another endless moment to endure. Another broken fucking record.