In many ways, the current TV scene resembles a time warp. From The Muppets to Fargo, it’s a good season for nostalgia. As the first ads for a miniseries revival of The X-Files begin to air, production is well underway on another ’90s cult classic: Twin Peaks. Of course, the sudden spate of remakes, reboots, and revivals is partly an effort to capitalize on the security of an established title, but in the case of Twin Peaks and The X-Files, their longevity requires more explanation.
The two have much in common: memorable characters, dry humor, superior writing, and dark atmosphere centered on investigations into the paranormal. Douglas fir forests, secretive small towns, and an abstruse mythology form the shows’ connective tissue, and despite a dip in quality late in their runs, they maintain a faithful following. Of course, mysteries are perennially popular, but the shows delve into more than mere commonplace crime, seeking to understand the problem of evil on a broader scale. Both Twin Peaks and The X-Files step into the unknown and attempt to grapple with that mystery rather than explain it away.
For Twin Peaks, the mystery is the death of Laura Palmer, the first skirmish in a broader supernatural conflict. When the teenage girl’s body washes up on the beach, the whole community is shocked. Laura seemed to touch everyone in Twin Peaks, Washington: She worked at Horne’s Department Store, delivered food to shut-ins, dated hotshot Bobby Briggs, and was homecoming queen.
Around the central investigation exists an atmosphere of quirky humor that revels in its own weirdness. Discordant music plays as the characters deliver ridiculously overwrought dialogue: “When these frail shadows we inhabit now have quit the stage, we’ll meet and raise a glass again together in Valhalla.” It consciously parodies the excesses of soap operas with melodramatic side plots. A handful of eccentric characters—Sheriff Harry Truman, Big Ed and his unbalanced wife Nadine, grandiloquent Major Briggs, the lady toting a log about (“Who’s the lady with the log?” “We call her the Log Lady”)—occupy the town and act as suspects. Director David Lynch (who had examined the monstrous before in The Elephant Man and Eraserhead) provides a highly stylized visual palette, mixing garish reds with dark shadow.
It’s not long before optimistic, fresh-faced special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) rides into town, ready to set things to rights. He’s the monster slayer, the white knight. Twin Peaks is Eden, an idyllic haven stuck in the 1950s: “a town where a yellow light still means slow down, not go faster.” But the murky pine forests loom over the borders of civilization. It’s said that “There’s a sort of evil out there. . . . A darkness, a presence. . . . [I]t’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember.” As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the darkness has already crept into Twin Peaks.
After Twin Peaks was canceled in 1991, The X-Files (masterminded by Chris Carter) came along to fill the gap. FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate the odd, unusual, and just plain bizarre. When people rise from the dead, or a case is left with suspiciously mystic loose ends, Mulder and Scully are first to the scene.
Passionate, needy, and immature, Mulder is eager to accept any far-fetched story, while the more professional Scully must dissect and quantify, fitting the data into a logical framework. They are exaggerated stereotypes: the Believer and the Reasoner. Scully is an eternally present representative of the Enlightenment, even if The X-Files tends to agree with “spooky” Mulder.
The central plot concerns the abduction of Mulder’s sister as a child, but most of the episodes revolve around a “monster of the week.” From occultist serial killers, to mutated cavemen, to a psychotic mind reader, the monsters of The X-Files frequently bring Mulder and Scully into contact with the most elemental manifestations of evil. Their response is to attempt to explain these events in a more or less scientific fashion—Scully more, Mulder less—but the answers are usually left open to interpretation.
Human beings like simple answers. Sherlock Holmes strides into the drawing room and makes order out of chaos, reason out of superstition, answers out of emptiness: Here is how it was done. Mr. Green in the drawing room with a candlestick. The end. Psychologists squirm out of the simple word “evil” by applying labels and phobias. The monsters of the Middle Ages have all been categorized and named. “People believe in authority,” observes one of the mysterious government officials in The X-Files. “They’ve grown tired of waiting for miracle or mystery. Science is their religion.” And, he might have added, the opiate of the people.
But merely to name a thing is not to understand it. In fact, long scientific words tend to obscure more than they illuminate. They promise power over the unknown but in truth offer only a spurious comfort. They are imprecise and abstract, implying settled answers that seldom reflect the complicated reality. G.K. Chesterton observed that “there is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word ‘damn’ than in the word ‘degeneration.’ ”
This is a truth that Twin Peaks and The X-Files recognize. They eschew comfortable answers and do not provide a neat and tidy solution at the end of each episode. Furthermore, they externalize evil in the form of monsters that are to be not analyzed but slain.
That said, the question of belief is an important one. Twin Peaks is more likely to accept the supernatural at face value. Strait-laced Agent Cooper projects a Boy Scout integrity, but more than half of his professional method consists of heeding obscure messages in dreams, decoding signs from the stars, and learning from the hierarchy of the ancient kingdom of Tibet. When he finally sets the stage to unveil Laura’s killer, he finds himself “in need of something new, which, for lack of a better word, we will call magic.”
As the protagonists of The X-Files and Twin Peaks come face to face with real supernatural powers they are forced to question their assumptions. Scully is a holdout: “I’m afraid. I’m afraid to believe,” she says, but “I’ve seen things that I cannot deny.” Twin Peaks‘s killer rants and raves, a possessing spirit driving him mad. The townspeople stare in horror. Could it be a demon? “Schizophrenic,” diagnoses one character. Another avoids the issue: “An evil that great in this beautiful world. Finally, does it matter what the cause?” Cooper is indignant: “Yes. Because it’s our job to stop it.”
What both shows ultimately offer is a refusal to take refuge in long words. The monsters lurk in the dark places, and the truth is out there in the wild woods. Evil is a reality, whether within or without us, monstrous or prosaic. Either way, it’s still our job to stop it, and while that is the case, we will still turn to heroes like Mulder, Scully, and Cooper to fight our monsters and solve our mysteries.
Hannah Long is a writer in Rural Retreat, Virginia.
