Twin Peaks was born, at least as legend has it, in a small room in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, where two men sat contemplating a malevolent, banal mill town in the Pacific Northwest. The director, David Lynch, and the writer, Mark Frost, had first met in 1986 to plan a film about Marilyn Monroe, based on Anthony Summers’s blockbuster biography, Goddess. Summers, a former BBC reporter, interviewed more than 600 subjects for the book and concluded that not only was Robert Kennedy implicated in Monroe’s death by barbiturates, but that he cleaned up the crime scene, scrubbing any ties to the scions of Camelot. Rather than tearing down this fringe theory, The New York Times’ reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, praised Summers for weaving together such an “extraordinary welter of detail” about the Monroe case that he seemed to summon up the dead. “The ghost of Marilyn Monroe cries out in these pages,” he wrote. “Who will put her spirit to rest?”

It makes sense that Lynch and Frost were both drawn to the same menacing, glamorous source material. Frost came from Hill Street Blues, a cop procedural that relished an intricate mystery. Lynch was fresh from making Blue Velvet, a cryptic art-house thriller that features, early on, a close-up of a rotting human ear. That shot of severed cartilage is what filmheads refer to as an iconic “Lynchian” image—a term that has expanded into an accordion of meanings since the world first listened to a deformed baby crying in Eraserhead in 1977. David Foster Wallace came closest to nailing its essence in 1996: “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Lynch revels in the shudder of creepy proximity that comes over the viewer when the everyday turns sinister.

Lynch revels in the shudder of creepy proximity that comes over the viewer when the everyday turns sinister, when the wallpaper peels back to reveal the insects skittering underneath. Many refer to Lynch’s work as dreamlike—the result of twice-daily Transcendental Meditation sessions that, he claims, break down the barriers between the subconscious and the waking mind. But his dreams can also feel like looping nightmares. Perhaps a woman who should have a complete face only has half a jaw, perhaps a mirror warps and contains a demon, perhaps an old man drooling in the corner can see the future. Pauline Kael called Lynch’s vision “the work of a genius naïf ... you feel that there is very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche.” Lynch’s work passes through the “so bad it’s good” wormhole and out the other side, often obliterating the question of quality altogether. It asks you to wonder what the hell you just watched, and then to wonder whether or not you had the powers of perception to grasp it. And it all begins with the eerie truths that lurk beneath “normal” American life.

The Marilyn fable contains flashes of the ordinary: Norma Jeane Mortenson was, after all, once just a foster child from the skids of Los Angeles. But there was already a lot of mythology baked into her tale, and Lynch and Frost’s collaboration on Goddess fizzled in the script stage. Lynch wasn’t yet ready to splash around in the seedy noir shadows of L.A. (That would come later, in 2001’s Mulholland Drive.) Perhaps he wanted to conjure up another beautiful dead blonde who could serve as a fresher cipher, a Marilyn without the baggage, an undiscovered starlet onto whom an entire village projected their fantasies of goodness and sin. Lynch and Frost’s Marilyn may have withered on the vine, but in her place, they came up with Laura Palmer.

Laura’s story also fit the proportions of television back in 1987, which Lynch saw as “restricted.” After making movies, working in television was, he said, “like going from a mansion to a hut.” Twin Peaks is a town made of dumpy corners: musty honky-tonks, faded Formica diners, drab municipal conference rooms. And yet Lynch mapped a bizarre glamour onto the place by force. It was the discord between the prosaic and the glittering—Audrey Horne’s otherworldly jukebox dance, the alpine grandeur of the Great Northern Hotel, Kyle MacLachlan’s smooth complexion and hyperarticulate monologues—that gave Twin Peaks its carbonation. The surreal Red Room, where Laura Palmer whispered murderous secrets to Agent Cooper in his dreams—and where she promised to see him again in 25 years—felt almost natural amid the carnival of oddities Lynch brought into viewers’ living rooms.