“See You in My Dreams”: The Oneiric in Twin Peaks
Noemi Walton
Agent Cooper’s “deductive reasoning” scene is an example of Twin Peak‘s dreamlike red herrings, misdirecting the audience.
In his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” André Breton “once and for all” defines the term “surrealism.” To Breton, surrealism is “psychic automatism in its pure state … in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (26). As such, surrealist works often engage with this perceived power of unconscious thought, taking on oneiric aesthetic qualities. Breton rails against the “reign of logic” that he observed in post-enlightenment Europe, asking “Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?” (12). Thus, a significant goal of the surrealist project is to assert the importance and logic of dreams through art. David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, co-created by Mark Frost) possesses this dream logic through direct and indirect references to the oneiric. The show explicitly invokes dreams through a number of notable dream sequences, and the protagonist, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), believes that his dreams are valuable pieces of evidence into his investigation of who murdered the town’s homecoming queen, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), but the world of the show itself is dreamlike even when characters aren’t explicitly dreaming. Through his use of red herrings, non sequiturs, and composite characters and objects, Lynch evokes aspects of Sigmund Freud’s theory of dream analysis, creating a palpable sense of the oneiric within the world of Twin Peaks.
In his 1901 book “On Dreams,” Freud outlines how the latent meaning of a dream is transformed into its manifest content, which is usually difficult to interpret due to the ego’s desire to conceal repressed wishes. According to Freud, “From every element in a dream’s content associative threads branch out in two or more directions; every situation in a dream seems to be put together out of two or more impressions or experiences,” (648), and the process of weaving together these threads and associations is called condensation. Condensation often creates composite figures and objects, both of which are present in the world of Twin Peaks. The demonic figures haunting the residents of Twin Peaks, Mike (Al Strobel) and Bob (Frank Silva), first revealed to Cooper in a dream at the end of Episode Two, curiously share the names of high school students Mike (Gary Hershberger) and Bobby (Dana Ashbrook). Cooper and Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) briefly remark on the fact of these shared names, but the associations — or lack thereof — between these four characters remain ambiguous, contributing to the oneiric atmosphere of the show. Additionally, objects in Twin Peaks often seem to be out of place or to contain strange, mystical powers. In Episode One, titled “Traces to Nowhere” (Dunham, 1990), Pete Martell (Jack Nance) offers Cooper and Truman coffee, before bursting back in to tell them not to drink it because “there was a fish in the percolator.” These displaced objects contribute to the dreamlike atmosphere of the show because they often appear as amalgamations of disparate things. “Why would a fish be in the percolator?” one may ask, but Lynch rarely answers these questions, presenting the strange world of Twin Peaks matter-of-factly. In the world of Twin Peaks, just as in dreams, associations between characters and objects may not be clearly grounded in reality and may in fact be created to trick us.
The show takes part in some of this random association through red herrings, appearing to present the audience with a straightforward whodunnit plot before subverting their expectations with clues that lead nowhere. Lynch’s use of red herrings is evident in a scene in Episode Two, titled “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” (Lynch, 1990) where Cooper demonstrates a “deductive technique” which came to him in a dream. The scene takes place in the woods, a place of immense spiritual and visual significance in the show. As Jeffrey Weinstock explains in “Wondrous and Strange: The Matter of Twin Peaks,” the forest is not only the site of Laura’s disappearance and the entry-point to the Black Lodge, but its trees can be classified as “inspirited objects,” (36) which seem to have thoughts and powers of their own. As such, the staging of Cooper’s deductive reasoning demonstration in the woods contributes another layer of spirituality to a scene already laden with references to dreams and mysticism. On a chalkboard curiously placed in the forest (Weinstock may call this object “displaced”), Cooper has written all of the possible “J’s” in Laura’s life, referring to her diary entry: “Nervous about meeting J tonight.” After each of these names is read out, Cooper throws a stone at a glass bottle, which sits on a log several feet away. When Truman reads out the name of Leo Johnson (Eric DaRe), whose connection to Laura is unknown to the officers and the audience, Cooper breaks the bottle. Johnson’s is the last name read, and a faint, windy sound can be heard over the soundtrack as Cooper prepares to throw the stone, foreshadowing the breaking of the bottle. The music changes from Angelo Badalamenti’s aptly named “Dance of the Dream Man,” an upbeat, noir-esque jazz track, to the somber, eerie “Laura Palmer’s Theme.” The change in music and the haunted expression on Cooper’s face shifts the scene’s tone from light to grave, indicating that both Cooper and Lynch treat the results of the method with complete sincerity. The scene ends on a medium shot of the broken bottle lying on its log, before fading to black. The fade to black at the end of this scene, while likely used to transition into a commercial break, places an increased emphasis on the shot of the broken bottle, encouraging the audience to associate Leo Johnson with Laura and suspect him as her killer. Crucially, Leo Johnson is not the killer, and this scene works to misdirect the audience, obscuring the true killer’s identity.
Agent Cooper is often the “agent of dialogic misdirection in the show” — part of Twin Peak‘s surrealist rejection of logic.
While the red herring is a common trope in the mystery genre, which does not necessarily have a relationship to surrealism, its use in this scene becomes oneiric when combined with other curious elements of mise-en-scène and dialogue. Cooper asks Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) to wear oven mitts while holding the bucket of rocks, as if the stones contain so much spiritual power that Hawk could be hurt by them. Weinstock posits that there is an “association of circles and circular movement with violence and the spirit world” (36) in the show. These round stones could fit within this category of inspirited objects, which are graphically associated with the violent death of Laura Palmer and the Black Lodge, the entry point of which is also in the woods. Weinstock also remarks upon the appearance of artfully stacked donuts in the police station, and they appear once again in this scene, now even more out of place because the scene is located outside. When the officers express confusion over the meaning of the phrase “Jack with one eye,” Hawk says it “sounds like Nadine, Big Ed Hurley’s wife.” Nadine (Wendy Robie) has nothing to do with the show’s central mystery, but Lynch creates yet another false thread, connecting the two characters through this line. As Freud argues in “On Dreams,” the ego purposely obscures the latent meaning of the dream through condensation and the conception of random associations. Lynch uses some of this dream logic in this scene by creating false connections between objects and characters, which misdirects the audience’s suspicions away from Laura’s true killer, whose name is not even on the chalkboard.
In “On Dreams,” Freud explains that many dreams “are without sense or intelligibility, [and] seem disconnected, confused and meaningless [sic]” (642). Freud argues that the frequency of nonsense and non sequiturs in the manifest content of dreams is a major reason why dreams are considered “the outcome of a restricted mental activity” (642), making a similar argument to Breton, who argues that the “reign of logic” has led to a de-emphasis of the significance of the dream (Breton, 9). As such, a considerable contributor to the oneiric quality of Twin Peaks is Lynch and Frost’s employment of non sequiturs in the show’s dialogue. Cooper is usually the agent of dialogic misdirection in the show — he often has the affect of an excitable child, distracted by trees and chocolate bunnies — and this quality is on display in the first scene of Episode One. The scene opens with a long take, the camera meandering around Cooper’s room at the Great Northern Hotel. Panning up from his bedside table, over the bed, and eventually to the ceiling, where the detective is hanging from a bar by his legs in a bizarre form of exercise, the camera lingers on the room’s odd mise-en-scène. On the bedside table, a lamp and clock are combined to create a Freudian composite object, and the room is laden with timber and hunting décor. Weinstock quotes the production designer Richard Hoover, who suggests that within Twin Peaks “the concepts of inside and outside [are] conflated” through the use of “dead animals and their parts…and nature drawings that are photographed as if they were theatrical backdrops for the action” (30). By blurring the binary of inside and outside, the show presents a series of surreal, liminal spaces within the town of Twin Peaks. Badalamenti’s “Dance of the Dream Man” can once again be heard beneath Cooper’s disembodied voice as he babbles into his tape recorder, telling “Diane” about his stay at the hotel. The camera pans down from his feet — still within the first shot of the scene — and lingers on his bare legs in a surprising moment of exposure for the often buttoned-up detective. In the scene’s second and final shot, Cooper shoves the tape recorder in his boxers and hops down from the bar, pausing for a moment before turning the recorder back on to tell Diane the “two things that continue to trouble [him]… not only as an agent of the Bureau, but also as a human being.” The music drops out and the camera slowly pushes in on Cooper’s contemplative face, emphasizing the importance of the information he is supposedly about to reveal. In a complete non sequitur, he asks “What really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, and who really pulled the trigger on JFK?” Instances of non sequitur in the show are a significant source of its humor. MacLachlan’s delivery of lines like “Diane, I’m holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies” is also an important factor in the effectiveness of Lynch’s comedy — Cooper almost always appears completely serious despite the absurd nature of the dialogue. These moments of levity contrast the often eerie and disturbing events surrounding Laura’s murder, creating an ambivalent tone that contributes to the show’s overall sense of the oneiric. The show’s humor, like dreams according to Freud, can be bewildering, often owing to moments of dialogic non sequitur.
Breton’s conception of surrealism as a mode that encourages the eschewing of rational thought in place of “psychic automatism” makes way for the dominance of dream logic in surrealist works (26). In Twin Peaks, a combination of various existing television and film genres including the mystery and the soap opera, this dream logic appears in surprising ways. Lynch’s use of composite characters and objects, red herrings, and non sequiturs contribute to the show’s oneiric atmosphere, referring back to Freud’s theories about the structure and functions of the dream. Freud’s concept of condensation and the formation of false associations within dreams seems to inform Lynch’s employment of these elements within Twin Peaks, lulling the viewer into a dream world each episode.
Works Cited
Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 1-48.
Freud, Sigmund. “On Dreams.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952, pp. 633-686
Weinstock, Jeffrey. “Wondrous and Strange: The Matter of Twin Peaks.” Return to Twin Peaks, 2016, pp. 29-46.