Desire and the Twin Peaks Spectator-Subject | 1, 2, 3

Dear Laura

More than any other signifier, however, Laura Palmer embodies and reflects lack. First, she is an absent object of desire, able to offer only partial sexual satisfaction through her voice and her image, most Oedipal in her father's dancing desperately with her photo but also apparent in Dr. Jacoby listening to her describe her “big, bad dreams” on tape. James initially has an object petit a reaction to her death, caressing her necklace, but then he finds a livelier substitute in Donna. “Like cream in coffee, sex beclouds Twin Peaks. We never see it — plain old fornication, that is — but we know it's there, everywhere, lurking” (Zehme, 68). Alive, Laura was Desire unbound, sexually precocious and promiscuous; at One-Eyed Jacks and through secret affairs — Harry/Josie, Bobby/Shelley, Ben/Catherine, Hank/Norma — the other characters too try to fill their Real lack.

Laura is also symbolically fragmented, a subject who occupies numerous, almost irreconcilable signifying positions. She was a cheerleader, Josie's tutor, Joey's therapist, in meals on wheels, a clerk at Horne's department store, a prostitute at One-Eyed Jacks, Bobby's girlfriend, James' and Leo's lover, a nude model, a diarist, Donna's best friend, a high school student, a prom queen, a psychiatric patient, a cocaine addict... Who was this girl? Who knew her? Absent from the start, she is the focus of the search for coherence and understanding. Through Cooper and Truman, the Law seeks to solve the crime, to restore order and “bind desire,” as it were. Maddie, James, and Donna want to understand Laura's life so that they might go on with their own; she haunts their unconscious. Audrey investigates the murder to win the love of Agent Cooper and have him take her away from the confinement of Twin Peaks and her overbearing father. Her shock at being threatened with having to sleep with “Daddy” underscores their Oedipal tension.

For various reasons, these characters are all trying to reenact the original trauma, investigate Laura, demystify her mystery, and show her punishment to be deserved — the second means Laura Mulvey described of suturing over feminine lack (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 13). Laura Palmer's incoherent actions can be psychoanalytically explained, making them less frightening. Her therapy tapes reveal she tried to be good but was overwhelmed at times by her drives. Freud argued such behviour was evidence of a death instinct (The Language of Psychoanalysis, 260); seems the guilty object got her wish.

We, the people

So the spoken subjects can at least identify with the subjects of speech's attempts to solve the mystery of Laura's life and death; the Speaking Subject alone seeks to delay resolution. This Subject is never in the text but is suggested by its nature (Fine, 5). Twin Peaks meandering narrative belies the Law of Broadcast Television that produced it, the Symbolic Father who wishes to maximize suspense so the series' “demographically desirable” (Nielsen) viewers keep returning. While some refuse continued submission —

I draw the line at soap operas that coyly make you guess when they are going to reveal a major plot turn. Specifically I refer to ABC's Twin Peaks... Now they're not sure when the killer's going to be unmasked... Meanwhile, I'll be watching Carole & Company. (Carter, 7)

— many others keep watching, denying the castrating effects:

Who killed Laura Palmer? Many viewers, tired of the hype, are saying, Who cares? I say it too, but as praise. Plot is irrelevant; moments are everything. Lynch and Frost have mastered a way to make a weekly series endlessly interesting (Tucker, 7).

For despite its narrative absences, many of Twin Peaks manifest signifiers are libidinally appealing. First, it offers the general voyeuristic pleasure of overlooking these Lilliputian “people” from a privileged vantage point (Stam, “Television News and its Spectator,” 27). Nor is the text devoid of fetishist female images; in fact, the first character viewers see is the beautiful Josie, close-up, looking at herself in the mirror. Audrey, Shelley, and the girls at One-Eyed Jacks are also coded for erotic appeal. The program's setting is unusually beautiful for a television series, full of phallic trees. Sonic pleasures (pulsion invocante to Lacan) are offered in the quirky dialogue, the best-selling music, and Lucy's voice.

But the strongest appeal, perhaps, is that, in separating viewers into those who watch and those who do not,Twin Peaks offers adherents the always-sought-after sense of connection to other people, as evidenced by Twin Peaks parties (Schindehette, 23). Media attention also assures them they are not alone in this.

So some plenitude lies between the gaps, making desire supportable -- for some — as the pieces slowly fill in.

Postscript

This was an analysis of the first season of Twin Peaks, which emphasized the metaphoric and metonymic nature it shares with all narratives instead of suturing in its gaps. It inspired an obsessive need to return by promising to demystify its absences and make them full. Certain phallic signifiers and a sense of community compensated for the lengthy disclosure time demanded by Law. Now in its second season, the big gaps have been filled in: who killed Laura Palmer, what Cooper's dram meant, even how Laura became what she was. Still under the aegis of the Law of Broadcast TV, however, Twin Peaks continues, even though it "more and more resembles a freak-show version of Dynasty" (Martel, 28). Its editing has become much more conventional, its characters familiar and so no longer startling. It still has unresolved subplots, pretty scenery, and eerie music, but without its central absent lure, it has become an entirely different subject