Twin Peaks sea­son 3 decoder: Electricity

This arti­cle con­tains spoil­ers for Twin Peaks sea­son 3 part 6. For max­i­mum enjoy­ment, we rec­om­mend read­ing after you’ve watched the show.

In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, Agent Coop­er exam­ines Lau­ra Palmer’s body. While film­ing the scene, the set was beset by a faulty flo­res­cent light, caus­ing it to flick­er uncon­trol­lably. Instead of get­ting annoyed and call­ing for it to be fixed, David Lynch react­ed by man­ning the switch him­self, lend­ing the whole sequence a quin­tes­sen­tial weird­ness and, giv­en what we now know about the func­tion of elec­tric­i­ty in the show, a cer­tain eeri­ness. Indeed, we can look to this hap­py acci­dent as the rea­son for elec­tric­i­ty becom­ing a key motif through­out the series.

It’s in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, where elec­tric­i­ty began to real­ly make its cryp­tic pres­ence bet­ter known. The open­ing shot, a slow zoom out that reveals a blue-hued tele­vi­sion screen, has always been regard­ed as some­thing of an in-joke, cli­max­ing as it does with Leland Palmer smash­ing the TV set with a piece of wood.

We see amor­phous, blurred shapes shift and dance across the screen. Call it a mood-set­ter, call it an amus­ing­ly vio­lent response to the show’s can­cel­la­tion after sea­son two, but this shot offers up the super­nat­ur­al uni­verse of Twin Peaks as if under a micro­scope; atom­ised, reduced to its barest and most vital com­po­nent, the one that arguably gov­erns all.

Else­where in the 1992 pre­quel film, we see the Man from Anoth­er Place (in sea­son three he’s an elec­tri­cal tree with a lumpy piece of flesh atop it) declar­ing ​“E‑LEC-TRI­CI-TY!” dur­ing the con­ve­nience store flash­back. (Intrigu­ing­ly, the snowy effect momen­tar­i­ly reap­pears over the shot of the Danc­ing Man and the Man from Anoth­er Place, link­ing elec­tric­i­ty direct­ly to the lodge spir­its and explic­it­ly refer­ring to the open­ing shot.)

In Hap’s Din­er, as Agents Chet Desmond and Sam Stan­ley drink their damn fine cof­fee and ques­tion Irene about Tere­sa Banks, there’s a guy in the back­ground fix­ing a lamp; again the wild flick­er­ing lends the scene a sur­re­al and unset­tling qual­i­ty. Then there’s the tele­phone pole out­side Deer Meadow’s Fat Trout trail­er park (seen again in sea­son three, part six), which appears to emit the same noise as the Arm’s Native Amer­i­can war-cry whoop­ing, heav­i­ly sug­gest­ing their destruc­tive influ­ence may spread and trav­el via electricity.

In sea­son three, elec­tric­i­ty allows Coop a reprieve from his Black Lodge prison. Set­ting off via the glass cube and then a met­al box float­ing in time and space, he is returned to the ​‘real world’. Sev­er­al levers had to be pulled first, juic­ing up the mys­ti­cal – but also lit­er­al – cir­cuit­ry as he is squeezed through a plug sock­et, emerg­ing in Las Vegas and assum­ing the iden­ti­ty of Dougie Jones.

Twin Peaks schol­ar Lind­say Hal­lam has sage­ly not­ed elec­tric­i­ty is the show’s pre­dom­i­nant bind­ing force, con­nect­ing or recon­nect­ing every­thing – includ­ing Fire Walk with Me’s open­ing shot. Elec­tric­i­ty also fits in with Lynch’s obses­sion with dual­i­ty: light and dark, good and evil, dop­pel­gängers, hap­pi­ness and sor­row, sur­face appear­ance and the murky under­neath. Elec­tric­i­ty deliv­ers illu­mi­na­tion but equal­ly threat and dan­ger. When elec­tric­i­ty fal­ters, too, dark­ness and strange events com­mence. Twin Peaks fluc­tu­ates like the flo­res­cent light in the morgue between such dual­is­tic ten­sions and realities.

In part six, Lynch again hints at the sub-tex­tu­al mean­ings of elec­tric­i­ty. First with the shot of the Fat Trout trail­er park tele­phone pole and then with the ​‘Spark­wood and 21’ traf­fic light (the most melan­cholic stop-go sign in the world), which for the first time appears to crack­le with elec­tron­ic dis­so­nance. Lynch is telling it to us straight: bad things are afoot again in the moun­tain town of Twin Peaks and near­by Deer Meadow.