In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.
       - Jorge Luis Borges, “Inferno” I, 32

To Aurora Lauzardo and Pete Varsalona, incorrigible “Peak Freaks”

The basic narrative structure of Twin Peaks had started to get as complicated as the question ABC’s Programming Department was facing: should the show be discontinued or not? During its first season, the Thursday-night program had a good chance to carve itself a solid niche in mainstream television and popular culture. But as it had been predicted by fans and detractors alike, the series did not last beyond the second round of episodes in the dooming “Saturday-night graveyard slot” in which it was placed (Altman 47; Corliss 86). Looking back now, those were rocky times for the fans who faithfully parked themselves in front of their sets on Saturdays expecting to follow the show and, instead, kept finding a different program on their screens. As for the concluding two-hour solo episode aired in June, it did not seem to offer a significant sense of an ending for Twin Peaks. In fact, the managerial decision to kill the show was amply parodied by the final scene, which left an unequivocal feeling of “we shall return” in the viewers’ minds. Despite the problematic issues of gender and violence that convinced different audiences to condemn the series, many spectators still could not understand the network’s final verdict against the program.2

The complexity of the stories that composed Twin Peaks, the replication of identities and its arrogant, self-conscious style have been blamed for its disappearance. Perhaps people got tired of self-contained sarcasm, and audiences found what Corliss calls “cliff-hanging teases” a tiring item, an obstacle to following the story line (86). By the end of the first season, however, the stuff that Twin Peaks was made of was not the closure of a simple murder story. By then it was obvious that just reading the plot was not an issue anymore, and that finding out who killed Laura Palmer was not at stake so much as deciphering what it was the owls (and Twin Peaks itself) really were (since they were not, as we know, what they seemed); or why and how was BOB going to destroy whose body next, or maybe which one of the oneiric characters in Dale Bartholomew “Coop” Cooper’s fecund mind was going to give him a clue that would lead him to the assassin’s path. Then, why has this difficulty of following a simple mystery-murder plot been held responsible for the extinction of a once phenomenally popular television series?

It is true that as soon as viewers lost sight of Laura Palmer’s cadaver the story became an implacable search for a murderer, deceitfully like any other “Saturday Night Mysteries.” It is also true that the narrative act of Twin Peaks, in turn, soon started to unveil various hidden agendas that break away from the canon of television detective series. The carefully staged dead body of Laura did not lead to an already familiar figure like the characters played by network favorites such as Jaclyn Smith, Angela Lansbury, Raymond Burr, or Burt Reynolds. Neither did we find, in a matter of one or two hours, a psychotic killer like the legendary Jack the Ripper or the more modern and recalcitrant Freddy, recently disappeared from the big screen. The “plot” in Twin Peaks opened up, before the end of the first season, to the presence of a supernatural entity whose unintelligible name (“BOB,” as the viewers would learn later on) was crucial for the solution of the murder of three women. This entity, whose last name and essence remain unknown even to this day, was gradually unveiled by detective Cooper’s weird attempt to decipher  –  via principles of oriental philosophy and strokes of chance  –  a number of clues: the messages left by an unknown “writer” in a set of scattered letters, the design of a mysterious map that hosted extraterrestrial entities, and the chess game on which the lives of different people depended.3 An agent of that Greatly Respected and Feared Bureau of Intelligence enters the game, narrative and otherwise, in the middle of a dreamlike sequence; in it, places and faces seem to replicate and question the reality of the scene. Laura and Madeleine, Audrey and Donna, Bobby and James, Shelley and Norma, many of the inhabitants of Twin Peaks look a lot alike, in a suspiciously similar manner to the way in which the different logs and thick red fabrics take us   –  consciously or unconsciously  –  from the Great Northern to One-Eyed Jack’s, to the local motel, or to Cooper’s doubled-up dream scenario, among others. Cooper learns at a certain point that the assassin he has been chasing is not just a common outlaw, but the very same man who has taught him the art of clue-solving. What this character really wants, as Cooper will realize in time, is to see him  –  the detective figure  –  die because of a certain woman, very dear to both men, whose death was ultimately Cooper’s doing because of his sin of adultery.

Syntax gets complicated when one tries to talk about Twin Peaks. It might have to do with the fact that one is not just trying to reveal the name of this particular entity who has put an end to someone else’s life. For Twin Peaks’ basic narrative structure falls under a category of what John Irwin calls “pure analytic detective stories,” a fictional genre that lends itself to endless acts of rereadings, “grows out of an interest in deductions and solutions rather than in love and drama [and] shows little interest in character, managing at best to produce caricatures” (1169). Narratives tailored in this fashion, filmic or literary, put a strong emphasis on the act of reading and its processes, and not on the consummation of a discovery of a mere fact.4 After weaning the spectator off his/her symbiotic relationship with the authority figures in the genre such as Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock and, on a different level, characters such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot, the story that Agent Cooper is trying to tell eventually turns into a seemingly pointless wander in search of the nature of the narrative driving force itself. Within the frame of pure analytic detective fiction, Cooper’s development as a character is not enslaved to the unveiling of the mysterious entity of the murderer. The deductive process is the goal in itself, and not the attainment of partial information (a name or a face, etc.). This wandering viewpoint, according to Wolfgang Iser, is a key element in the “act of reading,” since it “permits the reader to travel through the text, thus unfolding the multiplicity of interconnecting perspectives which are offset whenever there is a switch from one to another” (118). And it is Twin Peaks’ potential for constant substitution of identities that helps the reader create a network of connections that do not depend only on a mechanical, passive, chaining process of isolated data from these different perspectives. In other words, all the units that constitute its thick web of stories can be mixed and matched to multiply and create new stories. This, in turn, also implies a detour from the traditional detective stories: in this particular type of fiction, the author is the one responsible for the story and, hence, he or she is expected to dictate who killed the victim. Differing from this practice, Twin Peaks  –  besides attempting to tell who killed Laura Palmer –  represents a diverse range of social issues (drugs, prostitution, violence, incest) as well as spiritual quests (supernatural and extraterrestrial forces, the damnation of the souls of both Cooper and the beloved he attempts to rescue, belief in the self and others) and team-worked artistic invention (of which Donna-Maddy-James, Cooper-Truman-Andy-Hawk, Norma-Shelley and other recombined groups are obviously an emblem).5 This process of switching narrative foci is, no doubt, partly what grants the act of reading its great relevance in Twin Peaks. The different units of its wandering viewpoint help “establish a relationship of reciprocal observation between stimulant and stimulated perspectives” which, as Iser argues, makes the reader reconsider the path of conventional one-way channels of artistic communication (118). The difficulty and danger of all this reshuffling of elements in the narrative chain is that, although the reader’s network potentially encompasses the whole text, this potential can never be fully realized –  in a kaleidoscopic manner.

What Twin Peaks seems to be attempting, then, is to conform the foundations for the process of reading, an indefinite number of selections that, according to Iser, have to be made during the reading process and which, though intersubjectively not identical –  as is shown by the many different interpretations of a single text –  nevertheless remain intersubjectively comprehensible in so far as they are all attempts to optimize the same structure. (118)6

Again, the potential for optimizing the text, never consummated but amply feasible by achieving as many interpretations or “readings” of it, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this is what precisely confers beauty and richness upon each artistic text, while at the same time it is the very element that can cause, if misused or ignored, the dismissal of a text as “incoherent,” “incomplete,” or, as it was mentioned before, “arrogant” or “inconsistent.” Consistency is, no doubt, the most important clue for the involvement of the reader and even the writer/producer in the artistic process: “the wandering viewpoint divides the text into interacting structures, and these give raise to a grouping activity that is fundamental to the grasping of the text” (Iser 119).

In the case of Twin Peaks, the numerous recombinants have been placed for the reader to select and group, in order to constitute a meaningful message; they have not just been preset in an obvious manner that generates artificial association of ideas and gets tiresome after the readers have mastered the basic techniques. The process of building consistency in the act of reading, then, is not a mere “illusion-making process, but comes about through gestalt grouping, and these contain traces of illusion in so far as their closure  –  since it is based on selection  –  is not a characteristic of the text itself, but only represents a configurative meaning” (Iser 124). For Cooper, the traditionally expected center of signification in the detective story, this means that not BOB and not his former master in the Bureau, not even the weird people of his dreamland, no definite single character, can help him solve the mystery of Twin Peaks. For he is searching for a murderer at a literal level, but he also is seeking an understanding of himself and his own literary traces which do not fit in a clean-cut, straightforward mold of an FBI-faithful serviceman, nor in a parody of the detectivesque archetype. Ultimately, he is neither James Bond nor Max 086 (the Super-Agent); and he is not trying to recover the Pink Panther diamond with the aid of an avant-garde oriental Watson.

Then what is the actual point of Twin Peaks? If its theme is not to unveil who killed Laura Palmer and the other three women, if it is not to reveal who is going to sacrifice Ms. Twin Peaks to the deadly chess game, what is it saying? The bottom line, hard to digest, is that the central theme of Twin Peaks is whatever each one of the viewers wants to name it, because –  like in any other act of reading –  it is “built up by the way of the attentiveness aroused when the knowledge invoked by repertoire becomes problematical… As the theme is not an end in itself, but a sign for something else, it produces an ‘empty’ reference, and the filling-in of this reference is what constitutes the significance” (Iser 147). Cooper’s endless search for an identity, the people of Twin Peaks’ drive to find out who or what BOB is, all the narrative desires of the series seem to lead its readers toward a quest for significance rather than just a mere search for an immediate meaning. This makes the viewing process, usually quick and easy in the television environment, rather heavy and complicated. In fact, the basic element of building images out of Twin Peaks, fundamental to the act of reading (in) it, forces the readers to learn as much information outside of the different plots as possible; otherwise, as Iser says, “... the reader who is not fully conversant with all the elements of the repertoire..., there will obviously be gaps which will then prevent the theme from achieving its full significance” (145). This abyss of not achieving significance, of transcending the gap in communication, is the ultimate danger of the aesthetic response process.7

As the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges establishes with his works in prose, the acts of writing and reading can actually turn into circular ruins, a never-ending process that confuses and exasperates the reader who does not want (or is simply not able) to see beyond the literal. It is not an artistic capricho that the labyrinth is a crucial narrative axis in Borges’s prose, since it very significantly represents all reading processes. The world of Borges’s fictions is populated by different kinds of people and mazes. It is not a pristine landscape of “normal” or “real-istic” individuals, but a thick texture of very literary characters who inhabit a universe of reading as they always connect previously written data. In this same fashion, Cooper’s relationship both with Western and Oriental traditions unveils a quest much closer to (and, paradoxically enough, distant from) home than the classic detective story. The simple reason behind this: he is, just like Jane and Johnny in any classroom of the world, learning how to read. And precisely the same as Jaromir Hladík or Erik Lönnrot, as the character named “The Man” or as Borges himself, Cooper is entangled in a difficult and painful attempt to figure out what the letters (or narrative units) really mean; not just the letters given in the story, but deeper grounds of meaning and interpretation not spelled out so clearly within the text. Well into the narrative game of Twin Peaks, the FBI agent pronounces BOB’s name, but this literal plot wears out temporarily when the entity responding to the four-letter name flies out from the body of Leland Palmer, who is, significantly enough, Laura’s father. Likewise, the characters in some of Borges’s texts (such as “The Secret Miracle,” “Death and the Compass,” “The Circular Ruins,” and “Borges and I”) find themselves uncovering puzzling sign codes, but the quest is never completed by the “author” figure. In other words, the act of reading cannot just be consummated inside the text as a literal reading would do; instead, it must be performed inside and outside of the text. The true readers of both Borges’s and Twin Peaks’ narratives are not just literal consumers of signs and books. Rather, they are characters actively engaged in a search for meaning and significance.8 This might explain why many of the potential readers for the multiple levels of Borges’s labyrinths get frustrated at the difficulty of reading (in) the textual and conceptual maze, and why they blame it on Borges. Or why many viewers have given up altogether on the “weird style” of the series and have blamed it on Lynch.

Which brings us to another step in the figuration of the act of reading in Twin Peaks. The text is not just an inert artifact, a static object to be approached by the reader. In order to achieve a significant moment in the communication, the text must be clearly perceived as an event, as something that is happening. The moment of contact between the text and the reader “arises out of the manner in which the strategies disrupt consistency-building, and by thus opening the potential range and interaction of gestalten, it enables the reader to dwell in the living world into which he [or she] has transmuted the text” (Iser 128. Emphasis mine). Notice the semantic field of all these verbs: they all converge in the common grounds of action, not just from the part of the text, but of the reader as well. In consequence, while the reader is engaged in the process of reading, he or she will react to what they have produced, that mode of reaction enabling them to experience the text as an actual event (Iser 129).

Reading as a tangible event brings us back to the concept of involvement, which is a condition of experiencing the text. Truly, the reader has to process the data in person, not allowing any other narrative entity to dictate the meaning or its significance. What do the words “Twin Peaks” signify, for example? The name of the town, the title of the series (in italics, please), the name of two mountain tops? Or maybe the pseudo-Siamese glances of the different characters at the stories? (“Are you twin-peaking tonight?” I was asked by other “freaks” on those memorable Saturdays.) The “eyes”/ “I’s” of the readers-viewers when watching the series? Lynch-Frost as trickster auteurs of the project? You name it. The firsthand, intransferable-yet-communicable involvement in the perception and interpretation process is essential to the happening of the series.9 And these “[o]bvious textual ambiguities are like a puzzle which we have to solve ourselves” (Iser 129). This solving process, in turn, stimulates the reader to balance the contradictions emerging in it; contradictions springing out not only from the classic-styled mystery fiction plot, but also from his or her own “habitual experiences, which are now a past orientation. As such [reading] is not a passive process of acceptance, but a productive response” (Iser 133). What, then, is the task of the reader, if it is not just to think concurrently with the detective and help him or her solve the “mystery” /case, not forgetting to admire in the meantime his or her skillful and adventurous spirit? The reader is responsible for making the signs consistent, maintaining alive the possibility that those connections newly established will in turn become signs for further correlations, even if they seem not to be relevant to the traditionally central murder story. This is the actual plot of Twin Peaks, for the plot is “not an end in itself –  it always serves a meaning, for stories are not told for their own sake but for the demonstration of something that extends beyond themselves” (Iser 123). At the risk of getting lost in the maze the true readers of this narrative can actually find new meanings and new significances every time they watch Twin Peaks again.10 Given that, as I mentioned earlier in this article, the final two-hour episode-movie in June left us with a bittersweet and hopeful aftertaste, we can always figure out acts of reading that will offer new significant senses of an ending (other than ABC’s) for Twin Peaks.

In my literarily-oriented mind, one reading of Twin Peaks would tell us that the owls are not really what they seem. Birds of the night, voices in the dark, these charming and terrifying characters of the “Ghostwood National Forest” (Lynch et al 113) are an emblematic sign of the readers. Present, yet apparently “away” or “asleep,” they are very much like Cooper when he sleeps, dreams and, by the way, gets the most significant pieces of information for his job. Cooper and the owls open their eyes (the twin peaks?) and see in the dark; in other words, they, just like us, read.

Cooper’s last dream melts with the first one; they both provide crucial information not just for the search of the murderer, but for the insides/insights of Cooper’s mind, which we eventually realize works as a mere reflection of ours. In one of the last scenes with BOB and the Master, Cooper (who, by then, we either know or at least suspect is a representation of ourselves) revisits Goethe’s play Faust by selling his soul to the devil: he chooses to enter the cave in the same way Dante willingly enters the gates of Hell, despite the warning sign. But what does this whole network of pacts and agreements mean? How is the reader represented in Cooper’s heroic gesture of entering the Owl Cave, a realm in the landscape of Cooper’s mental processes that supersedes and violates natural-physical laws? What does it really mean that he is driven by the love of a woman? And was it for Caroline, or for Ms. Twin Peaks? The pact of selling your soul not for your own salvation but for the sake of a loved one, brilliantly explored in Klaus Kinsky’s characterization of “Nosferatu the Vampire” in Werner Herzog’s film of the same title, among others, recurs in this last scene as a way of asking the viewers the ultimate question of the act of reading: are you going to lose yourself in the process of involvement, in the experience of the text, in order to turn it into a truly aesthetic  –  and not just a consumerist  –  event? Are you going to attempt self-realization through this narrative, or are you just going to remain faithful to the tradition of simple glances at the plot, in order to consum(mat)e it and eliminate it?

The moment of realization becomes evident at this point: the chess game (apparently played between Cooper and the Master) was just a trick from BOB, the until-then-ultimate-evil-character, to attract both of them to his ground of action, that hellish dreamland that Cooper dares to visit taking us inside of his mind. From there the only realization that the readers can achieve is the fact that we are all dreamed by somebody else. In turn, is Bob’s only motive to abort the possibility that there is some otherness above him, who is dreaming him? Then again, Borges had already told us in his “Circular Ruins,” where the creator that we know throughout the story ends up being the creation of yet another being superior to him, another “father” or “master.” What Twin Peaks tells us, beyond these circular ruins of fiction in Cooper’s mind, is anybody’s story. Cooper’s body is released, but his soul is taken over by some other presence. In the meantime, we find out that the entity of Ms. Twin Peaks, who during the scenes in the Cave had been blurred by the appearance of the filmic persona of Caroline, seems to have returned as well. Cooper, back in his bed at the Great Northern, wonders about her and he is told that she is resting in a separate room. We would never see her again, though, which makes it impossible for us to reach the conclusion that she was truly saved, and not just spit back from hell like her beloved agent. Once he leaves his bed he realizes (and simultaneously so do we, thanks to the wonders of the mirror) that Cooper’s physique looks like BOB’s, in one last moment of terror. The mirror breaks, apparently by Cooper’s move. And Borges, reading his passage, makes us wonder/wander:

“[...] mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.... Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.” (4)

Indeed, was Cooper the one who just acted out the scene, the one who has broken the looking glass in order to escape the mastery of BOB over his (id)entity? Was it actually BOB’s will taking over Cooper’s soul? Or is it the intensity of the moment, terrifying in its unbearable encounter between the true self of Cooper and the readers’? Or could it be Lynch and Company, breaking their young and wonderfully monstrous relationship with the world of television? Was it any, all or any combination of the above mentioned? Or was it something else?

Inevitably, Cooper’s last dream brings us back to the first –  that exciting and also intense moment of creativity that Twin Peaks offered its true readers during their television honeymoon period. The circular ruins of fiction come to an end. And yet, it is an unreal end. Because, as we know, the labyrinth only has one end: the exit. For as long as we continue reading (in) the maze of Twin Peaks, like in Borges’s fictions, the supposed termination of the series will be as fake as the image of Cooper in the mirror and the dubious identities that inhabit the town.