05_Screams in the Dark

issue 5

December 2024

Screams in the Dark: Sound and Music in Twin Peaks Season 3

By Ed Howard

I. AND I SOUND LIKE THIS…

The first line after the credits of Twin Peaks’ 2017 third season is, “Agent Cooper. Listen to the sounds.” The Fireman solemnly intones this advice, or warning, to the exiled-from-reality FBI agent Dale Cooper, who tilts his ear towards an ancient phonograph emitting a peculiar clicking noise somewhere between an insect and a mechanical crank. There’s certainly a narrative rationale for starting the season on this note – the distinctive click reappears at a key moment late in the season, as a harbinger of things going drastically wrong – but such plot devices rarely serve only one role in the work of David Lynch. Beginning a new venture into Twin Peaks with this somber instruction hints at the degree to which sound, its absence, and its manipulation, will provide a framework for the season’s oddity and intrigue.

Lynch, who directed and co-wrote (with original co-creator Mark Frost) the entirety of the new Twin Peaks’ 18 hours, was also credited with the sound design for the show, assisted by “sound supervisors” Ron Eng and Dean Hurley. Lynch has always placed sound on an equal plane with images in his cinema. He’s often been the sound designer on his films, and intimately involved in choices regarding sound even without the explicit credit. In a New York Times interview about Twin Peaks, Lynch defined cinema as “sound and picture, flowing together in time.” Sound and music – and especially the amorphous, noisy spaces in between those poles – are as vital to Lynch’s oeuvre as his unpredictable imagery.

For the new Twin Peaks, the sound is a major part of what defines it, what sets it apart from the 25-plus-years-old first two seasons – and from everything else on TV, then and now. Twin Peaks the early 90s ABC TV show was also defined by its sound, and in many respects it has endured through its sound. The lush-but-melancholy romanticism and quirky jazz of Angelo Badalamenti’s score became synonymous with the show itself, and the soundtrack was nearly as inspirational on musicians as the show’s imagery and storytelling were on directors and TV showrunners.

Badalamenti, one of Lynch’s beloved frequent collaborators, of course returned for the new season, reprising some choice nostalgic highlights from the ‘90s show alongside a handful of new pieces. But where the original show was often carpeted with music, propelling along the quirkier moments with a bed of brushed drums and signaling emotional climaxes with painfully gorgeous synth melodies, the Lynch of 2017 seems far more comfortable with silence and near-silence.

As a result of how sparingly Lynch uses that classic Badalamenti sound, the third season has ample room to develop its own eerie soundworld, as memorable and haunting in its way as its predecessor. Badalamenti’s “Falling” is still the theme song, and periodically other familiar cues appear, generally at moments of significance where the music is meant to trigger (and toy with) fans’ nostalgia. Some of Badalamenti’s new tracks mine similar territory, with plaintive, melodic synths reaching for apexes of feeling, but much of the new material he contributed is darker, more minimalist, a set of sparse studies in dread that perfectly suit the season’s tone. The composer clearly understood: this new season would be dark, strange, uncomfortable, even in comparison to the unsettling places Lynch had already gone with this series in the past.

Badalamenti remains an important collaborator for Lynch, and indeed his reduced prominence, far from being a sign of Lynch’s rejection of that music, often seems like a way of spotlighting its power. When Badalamenti’s music does appear, whether it’s the return of “Laura Palmer’s Theme” as Bobby Briggs weeps over his long-dead old girlfriend, or the unbearably beautiful new piece that scores a traffic accident witnessed by the trailer park manager Carl, it always makes an impact.

Nevertheless, Dean Hurley is far closer to being this season’s sonic throughline. Hurley, who runs Lynch’s studio, came up with many of the incidental pieces of music and subtle sounds that hover at the edges of audibility. If the original show was characterized by melancholy melodies and playful jazz, this season is draped in noise, dark drones, and undefinable sounds that linger uncomfortably between music and background ambience. Much of the work Lynch did with Hurley and Eng here is easily missed, mistaken for silence or for naturalistic recordings of the world around the characters. Lynch has always liked digging under the surface of things for the horror and evil beneath, so it makes sense that beneath the seeming simplicity of much of this season’s sound design there would be such darkness.

II. DRONES AND THE DIEGETIC

If the sound design of Twin Peaks’ third season is most characterized by one thing, it’s the drone. Again and again, both Hurley and, in his newly made music, Badalamenti, tend towards foreboding long tones, deep bassy rumbles, and ethereal machine hum that nearly bleeds into the background noise. Indeed, the drone is omnipresent in this season and yet its presence is often slippery. Lynch’s sound design deliberately blurs the boundaries between different levels of sound, refusing to distinguish between the diegetic sounds that are organic to a scene and the sounds and music inserted into the mix from outside the show’s reality. After all, as Lynch has always emphasized and as his famous Club Silencio sequence from Mulholland Drive delivered as a thesis statement, there actually is no such distinction. What we think of as “diegetic,” sound seemingly originating from onscreen sources, is only yet another illusion of the filmmaking process.

Although it only figures in the season’s first few hours, the mysterious New York City lab centered around a big transparent box perfectly embodies Lynch’s approach to layering background sound, music, and Hurley’s often-amusical subterranean drones. The shot of the NYC skyline that introduces the sequence is stock footage, its glossiness made unnerving by the way Lynch overlays it with a dense carpet of humming, hissing white noise and drones, with just a faint murmur of car noise as the only token nod to urban naturalism. Inside, the room is spacious and antiseptic, most of its space dedicated to electronic equipment, with the large glass box prominent in its center. Lynch fills the space with sinister, throbbing mechanical drones, modem-like whining tones, and buzzing machine noises. It’s not at all clear how much of this dense backdrop of noise is meant to be the actual diegetic noise of all those computers and gadgets. Later, when the security guard goes missing and Sam and Tracey visit the room together, a plodding, richly textured drone piece gets mixed into the room’s undercurrent of sinister sound, its occasional chiming guitar chords the only sign that there’s any distinction to be made here between the sound of the room and the musical soundtrack.

Lynch returns to this type of atmosphere again and again throughout the season. The music Hurley made for the show – and released on the album Anthology Resource Vol. I – is perfectly suited to the way that Lynch seeks to confuse the diegetic or naturalistic with the unnatural, the artificial, the manipulated. Hurley contributed a series of low-register drones, many of them deliberately anonymous and almost unnoticeable. It’s music designed to play quietly in the background of a scene for a few minutes without consciously pricking at the attention. These pieces often subtly color the action, blending seamlessly with whatever other sounds are in the mix.

When the drug dealer Red meets with psychopathic Richard in episode 6, a low background hum, metallic and electronic, approximates the wind howling against the metal walls of the freight container they’re meeting in. It’s quiet and subtle enough to go unnoticed, but just artificial enough to slightly add to the scene’s unsettling vibes. At the scene’s climax, Red flips a coin and it pauses in mid-flight, and the sound of the coin – an unnaturally amplified chiming – gets elongated into a fragile bell-like resonance as the coin hangs in the air. The manipulation of the coin’s sound mirrors Red’s warping of reality: both are pulling and stretching at time, suspending the normal rules.

Similar effects recur in the domestic scenes featuring Sarah Palmer, who turns out to be one of the show’s primary loci for malevolence. At the end of the second episode, she slouches on her couch, drinking and watching violent nature footage on TV, with animals being torn apart by predators. The carnivores’ growls are electronically distorted, slowed and looped. The effect isn’t obvious but the subtle way that these sounds are processed and tinged with harsh distortion makes an already disturbing scene even more so.

In episode 13, Sarah half-watches boxing, wandering in and out of the frame as she searches for liquor to refill her drink. The manipulation of the boxing audio is far more obvious than the nature footage’s distortion. It’s been noticeably looped, so that there’s roughly 20 seconds of an announcer speaking, vague thuds, and a bell ringing, cut off abruptly so that the loop can restart. Whenever the bell rings, a weird skipping noise, like an electrical discharge, accompanies the choppy cut. The rest of the audio is just the clinking of Sarah’s liquor bottles as she shuffles around pouring drinks for herself; these sounds are perhaps emphasized a bit in the mix but are unquestionably diegetic. The boxing audio, though, is trickier, because it’s unclear if Sarah’s TV somehow got stuck in a loop of the same snippet of a boxing match, or if the repetition indicates a rupture in time, or reality, linked to the supernatural forces of the lodges – as it becomes increasingly clear that one of these entities is living within Sarah.

The manipulation of TV audio and the decision to let Hurley’s noisy soundscapes represent a room full of computers and recording devices in operation both point to Lynch’s interest in technology’s capacity for strangeness, for warping reality rather than documenting it. In episode 4, the FBI’s interview with the imprisoned doppelganger of Dale Cooper is accompanied by a deep rumble and machine buzzes; as in the NYC box room, the sound is technically explained diegetically by the recording machines and computers stacked up around the hi-tech interview chamber, but it adds to the unsettling feel of the conversation. Cooper’s voice sounds unnatural, too. He’s speaking flatly and mechanically, without feeling, unconvincingly parroting the repartee Cooper once had with his old boss Gordon Cole, and the mechanistic feel is enhanced by the slight reverb applied by the microphone that connects him to the interviewers in a different room.

Later in the series, when Cole, Albert, and Tammy install themselves at a South Dakota hotel, they’re again surrounded by walls of equipment, the purpose of which is rather unclear, so that these scenes have an undercurrent of constant sonic motion, of noise and electrical buzz. Technology occupies a special place in this season, but it’s a strange and caricatured type of technology. Phones and computer screens often display big, clearly marked, color-coded boxes, and programming is accomplished with a few brute force commands. Voices heard through technology’s interface are subjected to distortion and uncertainty: even the Cooper doppelganger gets confused by a fuzzy, ambiguous call with someone who’s seemingly pretending to be the former FBI agent Phillip Jeffries.

As in the original series, electricity is also very important, both thematically and sonically. Electricity is a gateway to other levels of reality, and the crackle of electrical wires signals the presence of forces associated with the lodges. Hurley even recorded a small library of noise pieces based on electric sizzling. These sounds crop up again and again: as the Cooper doppelganger struggles to resist the lodge’s call, when Coop’s tulpa Dougie Jones sticks a fork in an electrical outlet to trigger his true persona’s reawakening, when the FBI visit the site where Bill Hastings met the Major, when the woodsmen accost cars in the desert, and in countless smaller moments throughout the season when that electrical buzz signals that something ominous and otherworldly is close. At times, it happens almost subconsciously, as when Richard pulls his truck up to the edge of the woods and a quiet electrical buzz fades in just as the reflection of phone wires overhead appears in the truck’s windshield.

This is an example of Lynch and Frost developing some of the obtuse mythology from the older Twin Peaks material, making explicit the connection between electricity and the supernatural. Sonically, though, it’s Lynch and Hurley taking a mundane sound and, through repetition, transforming it into a signifier of horror and strangeness.

III. AMERICAN WOMAN, I’VE BEEN LOVING YOU TOO LONG

Lynch has always been a director in love with pop music. He revels in its knowing artificiality and performative expressiveness. From Dean Stockwell crooning Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a light in Blue Velvet to an auditioning actress lip-syncing Linda Scott’s “I’ve Told Every Little Star” on a Hollywood soundstage in Mulholland Drive, pop songs and their performance have often provided richly resonant moments to Lynch’s cinema. It’s through pop that he explores and reveals the fake, the artificial – and, nevertheless, the sublime. It’s another Orbison song, “Crying,” sung in Spanish as “Llorando,” that provides the framework for Mulholland Drive’s unveiling of film’s oft-disguised but omnipresent disconnect between image and sound, between appearance and reality.

In Twin Peaks’ third season, the Roadhouse plays host to a quirkily curated parade of modern bands and performers, occasionally introduced by an announcer who uses a pinecone-festooned microphone nearly as memorable as Stockwell’s lamp. What seems at first like a playful nod to TV artificiality, a way to give most episodes a neat kicker, is soon complicated as the Roadhouse gets dragged into the series’ increasing concern with what’s “real” and what might not be. The more Roadhouse scenes there are, the clearer it becomes that most of the characters who appear here don’t actually appear elsewhere or have connections to anything else happening on the show. Moreover, Audrey, who seems to be living in her own head, does have a clear connection to these Roadhouse characters, and after much dithering does finally manage to visit it in episode 16.

What’s funny is that although most of the rest of the cast doesn’t visit the Roadhouse, enough do (notably James, Freddie, and Shelley) and then interact with other characters beyond its orbit, that it complicates the reality/unreality dichotomy. The Roadhouse’s status as an ethereal other place, nightly showcasing an unlikely variety of musicians, seems to be infectious. Its web of influence stretches out into the rest of the show, threatening to absorb entire other plotlines and characters into its ambiguous unreality.

It’s not just in the Roadhouse concert segments that Lynch embraces his love of (especially American) pop music. Pop is also an important textural element within the body of each episode. What makes Lynch’s use of pop songs here so fascinating is how hands-on he is with the music he selects, both in the obvious care he takes in picking each song but even more so in the way he digs into the songs, tampering with them, stretching them out or slicing them up to make them weird and new. Sometimes such songs are deployed earnestly, as in the way Dougie’s ride out into the desert – seemingly to die at the hands of the Mitchum brothers – is scored by Shawn Colvin’s cover of “Viva Las Vegas,” a chintzy song that can’t help but feel simultaneously parodic and painfully sincere.

A similar effect is achieved by the odd Roadhouse sequence where the announcer cheerfully introduces ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” which chugs away as James and Freddie get into a bar fight. Even such seemingly straightforward sequences are complicated by the layer of artifice. The announcer lends all the pomp of a band entrance to a record being played on a phonograph. It’s a prosaic variation of Mulholland Drive’s famous Club Silencio sequence, which constantly called attention to the artificiality of film sound and the separation between on-screen performances and the sound that only seems to organically accompany them. The music even pauses during the fight whenever Freddie uses his green glove power: the record skips and scratches to a halt briefly, disrupted by the intensity of the electricity that powers both Twin Peaks’ cosmic mythology and the record player.

Lynch signaled his interest in such disruptions early on, setting the first appearance of the Cooper doppelganger to Lynch’s own chopped-and-screwed remix of Muddy Magnolias’ “American Woman” cover. The song is barely recognizable in Lynch’s treatment, slowed down to a halting, stomping menace, its drums hitting like sledgehammers, its guitars slowed into murky ambience. The vocals drawl and stutter, dripping in reverb, so incredibly sinister as Cooper’s car weaves through dark woods, lighting up a narrow path between the trees. When Cooper steps out of the car, the song skips as though it too was playing on a phonograph, the vocals dropping out and leaving just that skeletal slow stomp.

The overall effect is unforgettable, not just because of the sonic qualities of what Lynch has made – which echoes in some ways the similarly menacing ritualistic music created by 'the' Nine Inch Nails for a crucial Roadhouse sequence – but because of the eerie familiarity of it. There’s even sense, beyond ease of access, in Lynch mucking about with a cover of a song that has already been very famously covered. It’s been a hit twice over, and now here’s both an unfamiliar version and a version that’s been warped and reshaped into something entirely new, transforming its pop structures into a harbinger of doom and evil.

This interest in wreaking havoc with the meaning and form of pop music continues throughout the season, and resonates with Lynch’s other work as well. He’s fascinated by what’s lurking beneath America’s stereotyped imagery, as in Blue Velvet’s chittering, violent world of insects unseen beneath the grass of suburban lawns festooned with white picket fences. Sometimes here there’s literally something layered underneath, as in the conclusion to episode 7, a quiet interlude at the RR Diner with Santo & Johnny’s 50s rock classic “Sleep Walk” playing on the jukebox. This same episode had earlier featured Booker T. & the M.G.’s even more iconic “Green Onions,” uninterrupted, while a guy sweeps up at the Roadhouse. With “Sleep Walk,” though, the song is corrupted from within: a subtle, discomfiting drone loiters underneath the lilting guitars of the instrumental, gradually rising up. This intrusion is barely noticeable at first, but by the end of the song the drone’s menace has completely changed the character of the tune. The subtlety of the effect is matched by the mystery of Lynch switching between shots of the diner populated with completely different people – a continuity disruption so big it couldn’t just be happenstance.

The richest use of pop music comes in a pair of scenes towards the end of the season, which use similar techniques and ideas to drastically different ends. Episode 15 opens with Nadine telling Big Ed that she’s letting him go, thus finally freeing Ed to pursue his true love Norma in one of the most long-delayed romantic subplots in television history. Ed hurries to the RR, and on the soundtrack Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” starts up, a live version originally from a split LP with Jimi Hendrix documenting their Monterey performances. As Ed enters the RR applause and stage chatter precede the song’s start, lending a celebratory feel to the scene that surely represents the catharsis of so many Twin Peaks fans who loved these characters for so (too?) long and wanted to see them happy.

Lynch is playful with the song, stopping and starting it, not allowing that catharsis to fully flower immediately. He replaces the song’s rhythms with his own. The song fades out with a long held tone, the music dropping away and leaving behind just that tone, a wispy drone gradually disappearing into the diner noise, as Norma gets distracted with business dealings and it seems like she might actually be rejecting Ed. The song bursts back in, Redding’s infectious energy communicating desperate passion and frustrating/frustrated love, and then it fades out again, its ambience reverberating away into the background. Each time it returns its intensity seemingly ratchets up, finally reaching an emotional climax when Norma’s hand gently slides in from offscreen, tenderly touching Ed’s shoulder, breaking the tension and fulfilling 25+ years of delayed gratification. Redding’s voice gets more and more strident, matching the intensity of Ed and Norma jamming their faces into one another, less a kiss than a violent collision.

In his playfulness here, Lynch is teasing his audience, drawing things out just a little longer after waiting so long already. He’s playing with the Redding song sonically, but not really undermining its meaning or structure so much as opening it up, allowing spaces for contemplative emotions not contained within the song, but ultimately delivering, in a big way, on the emotional promise of the song’s lyrics and feeling. Notably, this is one of the only times this season that Lynch straightforwardly and directly closes the loop on his characters from 25 years ago, bringing a close to Ed and Norma’s storyline in a way all but guaranteed to satisfy longtime fans of the show.

This scene is eerily mirrored by the very tonally different sequence in the final episode where Cooper and Diane visit a motel together, after seemingly traveling to a new reality/timeline and coming out the other side as subtly changed people. A deeply disconcerting sex scene between the pair commences, completely without tenderness or passion, and yet on the soundtrack Lynch adopts a very similar style to what he did during Ed and Norma’s reunion, here using the Platters’ version of “My Prayer.” As in the earlier scene, the song fades in and out or abruptly cuts off, with sinister drones filling in the empty spaces. The over-ripe emotionality of the Platters song becomes simply uncomfortable here, its lushness abraded by the stoic, joyless sex that Coop and Diane are having.

The pauses, though, are worse, filled with Diane’s mechanical panting, that eerie drone, and otherwise no sound at all. Cooper lays back passively, staring coldly at his partner as she grinds against him. The song staggers back in and the singer climaxes with a passionate, elongated “toniiiiiiight” as Lynch switches to a shot of Diane’s upturned face, screwed up with intense, conflicting emotions. It could almost read as orgasmic, especially paired with the music’s soaring grandiosity, but instead she seems desperate, in agony, both ferociously clinging to her pain and longing to be out of this moment, to be done with it already. She covers Cooper’s face with her hands, not even wanting to look at him – the subtext is the memory of a past rape, when Cooper was a different man with the same face, although here he seems closer to that man, the brutal doppelganger, than to the “real” Cooper she cared for. Soon the drone fades back in as Diane is practically sobbing. As the singing again reaches its peak intensity at the end of the song, the drone soars with the voice, and the discordance buried within the music threatens to swallow it up in its ominous river of sound.

IV. SILENCE

As sonically varied as Twin Peaks season 3 is, much of it is built on feelings of stasis and emptiness. At the core of the season is silence, or near-silence, or the seeming silence that Lynch actually populates with various rich textures hidden deep in the background. Long stretches of time play out without any music, and moreover without any obvious sonic intrusions whatsoever beyond the naturalistic sounds of a conversation.
Sometimes, Lynch is deliberately sparing with the sound design to prepare for an eventual explosion. Episode 4 opens with sonic overload in a casino, where Dougie’s winning spree has triggered layers of clarions, cavalry charge horns, and clattering coins, but then there’s no music or non-diegetic sound at all for the remaining first half of the episode, as Dougie gathers his winnings and returns home.

The spartan soundtrack lasts until Bobby Briggs walks into the conference room at the sheriff’s station and sees Laura Palmer’s photograph, at which point Badalamenti’s “Laura Palmer’s Theme” swells. All the silence preceding this moment makes the sudden burst of melodrama seem even sloppier and more intense. Bobby breaks down, his face spasming, at this reminder of the past. This is the first real nostalgic indulgence in the show’s otherwise rather unsentimental first four hours, but it can’t be read as simple nostalgia. The sentimentality is tempered by its surroundings, by the coldness and eerie quiet all around it, by how tonally distinct it is from the rest of the material here. On the original show such moments happened continually, and the show built its atmosphere by ratcheting that melodrama to greater and greater heights until it seemed absurd and harrowing, emotionally raw and yet totally unreal. Here such moments are rare and erupt completely unexpectedly, an intrusion of that heightened melodrama into material that is no less concerned with tonal complexities but mostly in very different ways.

At the other end of the season, Lynch achieves a similar effect when Dougie finally wakes up from his coma and Dale Cooper’s personality re-emerges from the shell of his tulpa. The early scenes in episode 16 are mostly quiet and sparse. Even when the Coop doppelganger’s goons, Hutch and Chantal, get into a gunfight with an angry accountant outside Dougie’s house, the neighborhood seems unnaturally still and quiet other than the gunfire. No one screams or yells, no one looks outside to see what’s going on. In the spaces between gunshots, eerie suburban calm sets in. Nearby, the Mitchum brothers whisper, in hushed awe, at both the violence of the suburbs and the nonchalance with which it’s received.

The relative lack of music or showy sound design in the early scenes of this episode pays off in Dougie's hospital room, where Coop finally wakes up accompanied by a beautiful minimalist Badalamenti drone. As Coop springs into action and begins dispensing orders and gathering his allies, the Twin Peaks theme kicks in, cresting as Coop delivers the crisply assured line, “I am the FBI.” There’s something so knowing, so over the top, about the way Lynch instantly starts glorifying his protagonist once he’s fully returned, using that familiar music as a moving accompaniment to Cooper’s long-awaited awakening. It’s more than earned, of course, both by Lynch’s sonic restraint elsewhere and by the way he kept this iconic incarnation of Cooper offscreen for the 15 hours previous – and retroactively by the chilling comedown of the final hour-and-a-half.

A strange, counterintuitive silence is created whenever Gordon Cole turns up his hearing aid to its maximum volume. At several points during the series, he calls for absolute quiet – “no sharp sounds!” – and makes himself vulnerable to any stray sudden movement, as when Albert’s shoe scraping on concrete causes him unbearable pain. Cole, delightfully, turns up the volume in order to get quieter, to speak in utmost secrecy. It’s only when his hearing aid is turned up that Cole can whisper, indeed when whispering is called for. Whenever Cole turns his hearing aid up it lends an aura of ritual to the conversation. This intense preparation places emphasis on every sound, demanding attentiveness to every nuance of the speaker’s voice.

The hushed, intimate quality of these conversations, usually between Cole and Albert (though Tammy gets formally inducted into their trust, and into the whisper circle, late in the season) makes them incredibly potent. It’s worth noting too how artificial this silence is: turning up the hearing aid volume actually shuts out much of the background sound rather than amplifying it, so that these conversations take place in a vacuum. It’s as though Lynch, as Cole, turning knobs, is actually standing there right onscreen tweaking the sound, shutting out everything but the voices in a narrow circle with the two men standing so close.

The most memorable silence of the season is the pall that gradually descends as the final episode winds down to its bleak, harrowing conclusion. The episode pares down in many respects, ruthlessly shedding characters, leaving countless plotlines dangling unresolved, stripping away Cooper’s freshly-returned original personality, and honing in on just two relationships: Cooper and his partner (and sometimes love interest) Diane, and Cooper and Laura, the girl whose murder he once investigated. The final episode is pared down sonically as well. Dialogue is sparse. There’s very little music. Much of the episode is just two people in a car, barely talking to one another as they drive through the night.

This stillness settles in once Cooper returns from his second trip to the Red Room, early in the episode. That sequence, reprising some scenes from the beginning of the season with shuffled events and new context, had been quite maximalist sonically, with bursts of screaming and the signature backwards-recorded language of the Red Room. Cooper reunites with Diane, and they drive towards an obviously prearranged site where they’ll be able to cross over into… somewhere else. The sound becomes minimalist and naturalistic. Before they cross over, Diane pleads with Cooper not to do it, while the wind buffets the car around them, but after the transition – a burst of electrical fuzz, of course, and briefly sped-up wind noises that soon cycle back down to their proper sound – there’s just quiet. It’s suddenly night. They don’t speak at all, staring straight ahead in stony silence. On the soundtrack: the wind, the motor, the sound of the wheels on the road.

This mood lasts throughout the remainder of the episode. With the exception of the terrifying sex scene between Cooper and Diane, there’s basically no music, and most scenes don’t even have the by-now-expected undercurrent of Hurley’s subterranean ambience. It’s uncomfortable how sparse the final stretch becomes, pared down to wind, chittering insects, and traffic hum. Cooper’s night drive with Carrie Page – the final episode’s alternate version of Laura Palmer – is underscored by rumbling noise and a high whine, muffled and muddy, creating unbearable tension as the two characters barely speak.

The final sequence is even more unadorned. No music, no dark drone in the background. The nighttime suburban neighborhood is calm and quiet, the Palmer house looming white and large in the darkness. This new Twin Peaks has a real vision of modern American suburbia as being profoundly empty: this neighborhood, like Dougie Jones’ Las Vegas suburb or the similar failed housing development nearby, seems eerily bereft of people. The ride to get there, too, was characterized by its absences. Lynch stripped down Twin Peaks the town to just a single recognizable landmark, the RR Diner, closed for the night, and otherwise shot only dark roads and impenetrable woods. A ride through emptiness, in near-silence, to get to an empty and quiet place – and then to break that silence with a final scream of frustration and despair.

About the Author

Ed Howard has sporadically written about film, music, and comics for publications including Slant, Stylus, Grooves, and his own blogs. He currently writes long-form reviews of avant-garde music at Reddy Brown Objects.