Twin Peaks and Philosophy by Richard Greene

Author:Richard Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699876
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

Naido’s eyes are shut; her voice is garbled as she desperately tries to communicate with people. Andy understands that she’s very important, and she is. So many women in Twin Peaks have the answers and provide essential information and wisdom, but their voices are often obscured until they cannot be anymore.

Consider the revelations and contributions of the following women’s voices: Laura Palmer (via her diary), Audrey Horne, Margaret Lanterman (“The Log Lady”), Diane Evans, Norma Jennings, Tammy Preston (especially in The Secret History of Twin Peaks), Betty Briggs, Ruth Davenport, Maggie Brown, Constance Talbot, and Cynthia Knox.

Many of the wives of Twin Peaks are seen as being “embittered,” as one critic writes. However, this criticism does not take into account the heavy burdens these women are carrying, and the remarkable mental and emotional loads they must bear. When Janey-E snaps at Dougie and says, “What a mess you’ve made of our lives,” she is stating a fact. Without her, their lives would have fallen apart.

You’d Better Hurry. My Mother Is Coming

In The Return, “Part 3,” Dale Cooper is released into a kind of White Lodge waiting area before he is incompletely returned to Earth as Dougie Jones. As he falls, he descends into a purple landscape, an ocean-like world of dark liquidity that brings to mind childbirth. He navigates a canal and a hallway—confused, like an infant experiencing a new world for the first time. Naido “sacrifices” herself for his safety, and American Girl (played by the actress who played Ronette Pulaski) tells him to hurry because “my mother is coming.” Both Naido and American Girl share Diane’s aesthetic—their haircuts and clothing—and we will later learn that Naido is Diane. These women lead the way, and help Cooper navigate himself into the next realm. The theme of women and mothers having knowledge that guides characters persists throughout the Twin Peaks universe.

The “mother” that American Girl warns Cooper of is The Mother, or Judy. This is clear in the revelations of “Part 8,” as we see the same creature who emerged from the glass box (as she was chasing Cooper) vomit a primordial soup of evil—including BOB, in concert with the nuclear bomb.

Arendt says, “To beget and to give birth are no more creative than to die is annihilating; they are but different phases of the same, ever-recurring cycle in which all living things are held as though they were spellbound” (p. 179). Birth and death are intertwined in such a way that the possibility of creation is so often met with the reality of destruction. The realities of childbirth and motherhood and the nuclear bomb and its aftermath both illustrate the monstrous emptiness that modernity and patriarchy offer.

According to Bethany Webster, the concept of the “mother wound” is one that suggests that patriarchy leads to deep divisions between mothers and daughters: “The mother wound is a product of patriarchy . . . it is the mother’s projection of her own unhealed wounds on the daughter and the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that have resulted from generations of female oppression.

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