Twin Peaks: Dreams, Visions, and Storms
As I’m watching Twin Peaks again and thinking about its characters and tone in prepping another novel, something hit me the other night that I think is important: the show’s use of dreams, visions, and thunderstorms.
Often writer’s advice will tell you to avoid dream sequences, hallucinations, or the weather as some consider these things to be cliched. I think though that sometimes things are cliched because they work. And these things work very well in Twin Peaks.
The reason I think these are used is because they are moments when it seems like the unreal can happen. When you’re dreaming there’s a feeling like something strange could happen and then you’d have to spend time trying to make sense out of it. In most of our dreams it’s probably not a backwards talking dancing dwarf that we have to make sense of, but if we had that dream we probably wouldn’t immediately go looking for a psychiatry referral because it is a dream. Dreams are where the weird happens. Even when we first wake up there’s a feeling like reality hasn’t quite set in yet, it’s more malleable, the weird could still happen.
The same is true when the story is being told from the perspective of someone who is hallucinating. Whether that person is taking drugs, is losing their sanity, or both, we expect them to be susceptible to experiencing weird events. And there’s a tension inherent in it. Our protagonist just smoked their own weight in hash, is that ghost they see real or is it a hallucination? There’s a significant Philip K Dickian theme to the fear of not being able to trust our own senses, memories, or thoughts. And through their warped perspective the audience become ready to accept the weird.
It’s not as overt, but I think the same is true of storms. There’s an eeriness, an otherworldliness to storms, especially thunderstorms. Electricity shoots through the air and pockets of the atmosphere explode in tremendous booms. It’s unnerving to be in a thunderstorm or even in the unsettled air that precedes a thunderstorm. Again there’s the notion that something very different could happen.
Once the weird has occurred in the realm of dreams, storms, or hallucinations it feels like the way is better paved for the storyteller to extrapolate elements of it to the real world of the story. Once the audience has accepted the weird in the guise of the altered state it makes it easier for them to accept it elsewhere. It bolsters their willing suspension of disbelief.
Another related thing I was thinking about with Twin Peaks is how well they use the strange to try and show us something indescribable or unfilmable. I think Legion did this well also. On Legion they once used a dance off to show us a psychic combat. In Twin Peaks the indescribable is sometimes shot in flashes or hallucinatory images. By Twin Peaks The Return they have entire episodes similar to the weirdness of Eraserhead I think to try and show the journey of Agent Cooper’s soul. But how does one show a soul traveling through a nether world? Lynch uses abstract filming to convey abstract concepts brilliantly.
In translating this to prose I do have some advantages. Words can describe things film cannot. And even saying something is indescribable can fuel readers’ imaginations in ways description cannot. That said watching the masterful usage of this in Twin Peaks is proving both inspiring and edifying.
