That Gum You Like, Is Back in style
How Twin Peaks Rewired America Forever — and Why Walker Awake Still Tunes Into Its Static
There is a scene in Twin Peaks — maybe you remember it, if you were, like us, sat round the TV for this real Gen X “appointment TV” series — where a young woman stands in a red-draped room and screams.
Everything about this was new. Everything about this was not quite right.
I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back…
“I feel like I know her,” she says later of the girl whose murder has ripped a small town apart “But sometimes my arms bend back.”
The girl, of course, is Laura Palmer, and she and the murdered girl are one and the same.
In 1990, Twin Peaks aired on prime-time network television — on ABC, of all places. It arrived dressed in soap opera drag, a goofy sitcom and a detective noir, but very quickly it became clear: this wasn’t just another quirky murder mystery.
For those too young to remember it at the time, it was a seismic event. It’s hard to describe that before streaming, watch-alongs, deep-dive summary shows, fan-theory Substacks (not unlike this one), where cordless land-lines were a novelty, and even Blackberries would seem like sci-fi — Twin Peaks was a social media event.
Beneath the surface of its Pacific Northwest town, it revealed something that has since become one of the defining images of American life: a picket-fenced dream curdling into nightmare.
It was a seed that had already been planted by co-creator David Lynch (RIP the legend). Four years earlier, in Blue Velvet, he’d given us the original American scream: the camera panning from a white-picket fence and blooming red roses to an ear, crawling with insects. It was all there — suburban surface, seething rot. A small town dripping with menace. The banal made mythic. The normal made strange. And most of all, that unmistakable Lynchian flavour: innocence tainted, time distorted, dreams crossing over into waking life like a fevered Freudian Venn diagram, where both exist in the same space.
“It’s a strange world,” says Jeffrey Beaumont. He had no idea just how strange, and he had found his ticket to this new reality, a severed ear, not quite Willy Wonka, something else entirely. And as for Freudian, bursting out of your dangerous lover’s closet to kill your terrifying father figure? Forget about it!
If you don’t look, it’s not happening. If you don’t talk about it, it’ll go away.
But it never does.
America at the Edge
What Twin Peaks did — and this is a key point — wasn’t introduce surrealism to American TV. Surrealism had existed for decades, in paintings and poetry and cinema, and it was sprinkled liberally across everything from The Addams Family to The Twilight Zone on TV. American TV already had some pretty weird shows before Twin Peaks.
No, what Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost did was localise it on each and every doorstep. They took every totem of Regular Joe USA — log cabins, high school football teams, cherry pie, beauty pageantry, you name it. But made everything… ever so slightly… slightly off.
It felt different to other shows. It looked different, the lighting was all wrong, like the noir-iest of noir films, but not in historical black and white, in ‘modern’ TV’s garish NTSC colour. The smiles were too wide. The camera lingers on empty spaces when a scene is over. We knew the tropes of TV inside out, and this is kinda the same thing, so why does it all look so strange? And why is that woman talking to a log?
Suddenly, the United States felt like a haunted country. A place where the dreams of the 1950s never quite died — they just went underground. And what was lurking there? Violence. Secrets. The past, always bleeding into the present. A girl found wrapped in plastic, and a community that can’t admit what it already knows.
This isn’t clean-cut. This is drugs, sex, crime and murder, if you’ll but scratch the surface a little.
That’s the true horror of Twin Peaks. Not just that bad things happen — but that everyone knows, and no one says anything.
If you don’t look, it’s not happening. If you don’t talk about it, it’ll go away.
But it never does.
The Myth of the Picket Fence
The aesthetic of Twin Peaks is famously nostalgic: the hairstyles, the diners, the doo-wop tunes and louche-jazz saxophone. But this isn’t a warm kind of nostalgia. It’s weaponised. It’s what happens when you trap memory in amber and pretend it never changes.
The more wholesome the surface, the deeper the rot.
This is America’s central paradox: the dream of “normalcy” masking a history of violence, denial, and erasure. Twin Peaks didn’t invent this idea, but it was the first to smuggle it into the mainstream through a cup of coffee and a charming FBI agent with a voice recorder. “Hey Diane…” Cooper would say, and of course we never see her. She might not even exist.
Ah, Agent Cooper, Kyle MacLachlan’s unforgettable everyman FBI-guy, all goofy smiles and ‘damn fine’ — was a stand-in for us. The normal person we really hope can get to the bottom of it all and make it go away. It’s just a murder in a small town. Sad, but it happens.
Happens all the time, right? Not like this. I’ve never eaten cherry pie in quite the same way since.
Walker Awake Turns the Dial to the Same Static
Like we said, a Social Media event. Made even more so by the way Season Three revisited it all (a sequel like 25 years later, who even does that?).
So finally, we get to the point of this Substack (hurrah!), for there are thousands upon thousands of obsessive fan writing on this subject…still, after all these years. Probably a lot better than this one too.
Our echo is a little different, because like in our Dracula call-back piece, some books, shows, movies hit hard and after you tire yourself out trying to outrun them, well, you just gotta go all in.
So in Walker Awake, the echoes of Twin Peaks are deliberate — and unavoidable. The novel doesn’t mimic, but it does listen. It too is set in a world that feels “familiar but not quite.” A dreamlike America of diners and donuts, trains and telegrams, small-town rituals and national mythologies. But like Twin Peaks, that world is cracked.
Walker’s journey, like Cooper’s, is as much inward as outward. Both are drawn into mysteries that have no tidy solution. Both are trying to remember something they’ve forgotten. Both exist in a reality where the rules don’t fully apply — but the consequences do.
Hauntology and the Lynchian Legacy
To understand the deeper cultural impact of Twin Peaks, we have to talk about hauntology — a term philosopher Jacques Derrida coined, and that the late Mark Fisher turned into a lens for understanding modern culture. If we can dumb it down (because we need to): the idea of ‘everything will be OK’ never materialised.
Check out this pretty cool article on the subject.
Hauntology describes the feeling of being haunted by lost futures. Twin Peaks doesn’t just exist in the past — it exists in a ghost version of the past, looping endlessly. Characters repeat actions with slight differences. Time resets. Laura Palmer dies and dies again. No one can stop it. No one, apart from Cooper it seems, is willing to try. The present is a rerun.
This looping logic is everywhere now — in literature, in art, in the fractured logic of algorithmic feeds and false nostalgia. Lynch was one of the first to show us what it looked like, felt like.
And he did it in flannel shirts and bobby sox.
We Live Inside A Dream
The reason Twin Peaks hit so hard is because it told the truth, wrapped in dream logic. The truth is this: America was never whole. The dream of the 50s was a performance. Beneath it: colonisation, violence, trauma, desire.
It promised peace, love and understanding and in the end, looking at the modern US, it wasn’t just a broken promise, it was a malignant joke.
Lynch didn’t make documentaries to warn us of this, because he knew even then, that people tend to ignore facts. He whispered it through owls, flickering lights, and red rooms.
And we totally got it — even then. We just chose not to do anything about it, and now look where we are.
In Fact, We’re Not Gonna Talk About Judy At All
If Twin Peaks opened the door, Walker Awake walks through it. It doesn’t ask: “Who killed Laura Palmer?”
It asks: “What killed Mrs Meek’s family?” Because, well…it can’t have been her, the loving wife and doting mother who’s ninety pounds wet-through?
Agents Cooper and Walker have a shared conundrum then, what happens when we realise the case is not just about a town, or a family, or even the crime itself — but about a whole country’s relationship with denial?
“I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ When after all, it was you and me.”
So yes — the owls are not what they seem.
But then, what is?
The quotes are not what they seem
“I feel like I know her... but sometimes my arms bend back.”
“I'd rather be his whore than your wife.”
“Through the darkness of future past / The magician longs to see / One chants out between two worlds / Fire walk with me”
“One day my log will have something to say about this.”
“In the grand design, women were drawn from a different set of blueprints.”
“Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song... and there's always music in the air.”
Wake up people! the first three chapters of Walker Awake are here for you for free!
Do you still wake up in the night wondering what the hell that was all about?
Drop a line or leave a comment. I’ll share a few of your answers in the next Pressebande dispatch.
Subscribe to Pressebande, our monthly dispatch, and you’ll be the first to read new excerpts, see behind-the-scenes, and join us as we build the Datura library from the ground up.