Twin Peaks is not a series or a movie. It's a way of being. Twin Peaks, through its visionary creator David Lynch (1946-2025), taught us a new way of looking, thinking, and living.
Twin Peaks taught us to look at a TV show or a film as we would look at ourselves in a mirror. The pilot, which aired on television on April 8, 1990, opened with the image of a mirror. The woman looking into it was applying make-up while humming. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law went fishing and discovered the corpse of a 17-year-old girl: Laura Palmer. Laura, her death and the mystery surrounding her were the show's starting point.
Throughout the first two seasons, mirrors were associated with the image of evil. That of the evil twin, Bob, appeared in the mirror of Laura's incestuous, murderous father. Bob was "the evil that men do," said a character in the middle of the show when FBI agent Dale Cooper arrests the murderer. Cooper was a mystical investigator guided by signs. And then there were these magic words, almost a spell: "Fire walk with me." A phrase we'll hear repeatedly.
Cooper was then stuck in Twin Peaks, and a new adventure began. In this one, Cooper was still guided by signs, but they no longer helped him solve a police case. They took him to the edge of the world: The Black Lodge, a place where spirits and the dead live. Cooper entered the Black Lodge in the second season's final episode, which aired on June 10, 1991. But it's not Cooper who came out of it. It's his doppelgänger, his own body inhabited by Bob, who we saw when he looked at himself in the mirror and broke it.
Mystical investigation
If the parallels between television and mirror weren't clear enough, the film that followed, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, released in French cinemas on June 3, 1992, opened with the image, not of a mirror, but of a broken television. The film continued with a scene in which Cooper's superior, Gordon Cole, played by Lynch himself, showed two other FBI agents a strange scene: A woman making signs at very high speed, which the two agents started interpreting in the very next sequence. Viewers had to become mystical investigators in search of clues. Twin Peaks invented a new way of thinking about us as viewers: It taught us to think of ourselves as active spectators.
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