Death in Twin Peaks

The Organist

[Explicit language]

In 2017, David Lynch’s metaphysical detective soap opera Twin Peaks returned to cable television screens 26 years after its network cancellation. Most of the original characters resurfaced, but in several cases, either those characters or the actors playing them—or both—were dying. Over its 18 new episodes, this specter of commingled on- and off-screen mortality became as much the substance of the show as the narrative of mysteries, disappearances, violence, slapstick, romances, and resurrections that played out in the foreground.

In the original series, Kyle MacLachlan, as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, investigated the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the all-American high school student with a double life. From there, the show spiraled into a web of secrets, conspiracies, red herrings, in-jokes, and epiphanies. Twin Peaks: The Return jettisoned much of the original series’ plot-based baggage. Instead, it explored the abstract possibilities of the form, tracing mystical and mundane contingencies that ran along a live wire from Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead directly into the circuitry of present-day Twin Peaks.

It is here critic Howard Hampton locates his own kinship with the world of Twin Peaks, together with the true source of the show’s screwball gravitas: the late Catherine Coulson as “the Log Lady,” Margaret Lanterman. Coulson had been with Lynch since his Eraserhead days. A beacon, a cipher, a beloved emblem of Lynch’s universe on the verge of death herself, she delivers a benediction disguised as an oracle’s warning.