Twin Peaks, David Lynch, and Cosmic Horror

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the first episode of the new season, though I think I got a fair way into it.

Twin Peaks means a lot of things to different people, but the core aspect of it that I always tended to focus on was that particularly Lynchian weirdness. In a lot of ways, I think Lynch's style of horror is an evolution of Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft's horror was all about the mysterious vast and unknowable cosmos, taking the form of hideous monsters that were far weirder than the kind of standard monsters of mythology and gothic horror.

While Cthulhu is the most famous of Lovecraft's creations, the one that I think is the most interesting conceptually is Nyarlathotep. Most of Lovecraft's mythos concerns creatures that look far removed from our own evolutionary path. But Nyarlathotep, at least in one of its forms, appears as a human being - sometimes with inhuman features like midnight-black skin (which, considering Lovecraft's racism, has unfortunate implications,) but ultimately in a humanoid form far closer to our own than even Cthulhu (who, for a Lovecraftian monster, is way closer to human-shaped than most.)

In a sense, Nyarlathotep is a way to have a creature more akin to the Devil or Antichrist in Christianity without abandoning the alien-ness of the overall mythos. Stephen King's Randall Flagg is a similar concept - a creature that walks the earth looking fully like a human, but who spreads death and chaos like a ball of pure evil. In fact, Randall Flagg is even referred to as Nyarlathotep in the Stand, though in the Dark Tower series we eventually find out he's ultimately just a very evil human being (or more likely former human being.)

Anyway, David Lynch's work, and specifically Twin Peaks, has beings that take this mundane appearance and alien nature very seriously. BOB, the evil spirit that possesses Leland Palmer and forces him to rape and murder his own daughter (uh... spoilers I guess?) looks like a normal human being in his "true" form (actually a set dresser named Frank Silva.) But BOB seems to exist purely to inflict suffering in the world - and in fact, even the "good" spirits of the Lodges are implied to also subsist on this suffering (if you watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.)

In the first episode of this revived season, we find that Dale Cooper is still in the Black Lodge (or maybe the White Lodge? Or they're the same thing?) but that his doppelgänger from the end of the original season has been living as some sort of powerful criminal with various people at his command, several of whom he kills (I imagine there's an article to be written about how the only two young women we see at least up to the point I've gotten in the pilot wind up getting violently killed while naked or scantily clad, but I'm not going to unpack that here.)

Interestingly, the Fake Cooper actually looks and dresses almost exactly as Stephen King describes Randall Flagg (at least in The Stand - in the Dark Tower series, at least at the beginning, he is described looking just about as he does in the upcoming movie.)

Now, Fake Cooper isn't exactly BOB - he's referred to as Cooper's doppelgänger, and there's another evil doppelgänger in the Lodge of the Arm (who I believe is the Man from Another Place, which could explain why the Man was looking for "garmonbozia" in Fire Walk With Me when previously he seemed like a benevolent figure.)

Fake Cooper clarifies in a conversation with some of his minions that he does not "need" anything. He merely "wants" things. This does emphasize his alien nature, though one could also interpret this as some kind of denial. Either way, he's terrifying.

Where King and even, to an extent, Lovecraft, generally use inscrutability as an element to their plots, the plot itself tends to be relatively straightforward, and in King, there's often some sort of victory against evil (while considered one of the greats of the horror genre, I'd actually describe King as more of a Dark Fantasy writer - and I mean this as a high compliment, to be clear.)

But with David Lynch, even what truly happened often remains a mystery in his stories. For example, you could interpret Mulholland Drive's first half to be the dying dream of the protagonist of the second half (which really bummed me out when I watched it,) but you could read it a lot weirder than that.

In Lovecraft, exposure to this enormous cosmos of strange godlike beings, characters often fall into a depressive madness. But in a way, Lynch creates narratives that flit along on dream logic in a way we imagine an insane mind would see things.

And in doing so, Lynch imbues mundane objects and figures with the same kind of existential dread that can come from a being like Yog-Sothoth.

And frankly, looking at my own writing, I can kind of see his influence on my works, even if a lot of it was more through cultural osmosis and perhaps the collective unconscious, as I didn't see any Lynch until I was a sophomore in college and a lot of the Lynchian imagery I use I came up with before then.