Doubles



The motif of the doppelganger runs through the series and reflects David Lynch’s Manichean view of a world as divided between good and evil. There’s the good man Leland Palmer who is corrupted by the evil side of his personality, Bob, who may really be a demonic spirit. And there’s the ‘good guy’ biker and the ‘bad guy’ athlete, the good FBI agent in Dale Cooper and his evil double in Windom Earle. Laura Palmer even had her own doppelganger in her near-identical cousin Maddy (both played by Sheryl Lee). And almost every character in Twin Peaks is leading a ‘double life’.

Dreams

In the first episode of Twin Peaks, when Laura Palmer’s body is found, another girl is discovered wandering along railroad tracks in a fugue state. From that moment on, the characters are never entirely lucid, dipping in and out of reveries involving giants, dwarves or one-armed men. The unconscious is constantly bubbling over in Lynch’s films, from Mulholland Drive’s shifting realities to the fractured identities of Lost Highway – he has described Blue Velvet as "a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story". The American dream too, takes a nightmarish turn with the discovery of a severed ear amid Blue Velvet’s suburban picket fences, or the cocaine addict prom queen of Twin Peaks. Only the diner offers escape. As Lynch told The Guardian: “I used to go to well-lit diners, because in a well-lit diner I could sit and think and daydream and I could go to dark places knowing that I could surface in a well-lit, safe place.”