David Lynch and the Fallacy of Answering

I was just listening to an episode of the reliably interesting radio show This American Life called “Quiz Show.” The second of the episode’s three segments was about the MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual event where teams of intimidatingly brainy puzzle geeks race each other to the solution of a puzzle concocted by the previous year’s winning team. The following passage about what the reporter calls “‘A-ha!’ moments” traveled the boomerang path of irony to cause me an “A-ha!” moment of my own:

[audio:TALclip_lynchandpuzzles.mp3]

Are absolute Answers a human construct, while the underlying Truth in nature is not knowable in such terms? I was immediately reminded of the works of filmmaker David Lynch, in particular his briefly brilliant TV series Twin Peaks, which aired in the early 1990’s.

A typically atypical Twin Peaks scene.

As many will recall, the plot of the show concerned the question of who killed Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen in an obscure northwestern logging town. The ABC network promoted Peaks by following the “Who Shot J.R.?” paradigm, and did so quite effectively – at the outset. Lynch was in no great hurry to resolve the Laura Palmer case, sticking instead to his own general style: the seemingly straightforward narrative meandered through a landscape of imagery as strange and disturbing as it was visually striking. Perhaps inevitably, the series soon proved to be as daunting a challenge for network publicists as it was for viewers (apart from a small number of die-hard fans, of which I was one).

One could look at Twin Peaks as a continuous series of “whys,” and indeed, many have. Why the dancing midget, and why was his dialogue recorded backward and played back forward? Why didn’t Agent Cooper’s susceptibility to bizarre visions of midgets and giants disqualify him from becoming an FBI agent? Why does the log lady carry a log around, and is it always the same log or does she have, like, a collection of them? As much fun as these “whys” are, they are incidental to the overall purpose: the series as a whole represents one big Why.

The following paragraph contains a SPOILER. If you are planning to watch the Twin Peaks DVD set and don’t want to know who killed Laura Palmer, consider yourself alerted.

When the murder’s resolution confirms the presence of supernatural elements, the Sheriff comments, “I’ve lived in these old woods most of my life. I’ve seen some strange things, but this is way off the map. I’m having a hard time believing,” the mystical Agent Cooper responds, “Is it easier to believe a man could rape and murder his own daughter?” Satisfying though these lines were, they were also uncommonly pedantic for David Lynch. They were not at all uncommonly pedantic for prime time network television; in fact, I’d lay odds that pressure from ABC forced Lynch to plainly spell out something that his best work would only imply. Finding out WHO killed Laura Palmer is incidental to the essential mystery of why she was killed.

When puzzles like the ones in the MIT Mystery Hunt are solved, that’s it. Done. It’s solved. Completion feels good, which is why there are puzzle junkies, why the spongy psychological term closure has become popular, and why TV networks don’t like unresolved murders. I’m no different in this sense: I like having all the loose ends tied up as much as the next guy. Ultimately, puzzles and TV shows provide frameworks for delivering little completion fixes. We seek them out because out in the day-to-day world they just don’t happen too often. You will almost surely never know why you didn’t get into grad school ten years ago, or why the thieves picked your car. But when you solve the Sunday crossword, it helps. It reminds you that answers exist, and you do sometimes get them. However, when a TV show cops out and spoon-feeds you an answer it helps less, because the answers most often seem unsatisfying. Good dramatists of any medium know that questions are more compelling than answers, and that the only worthy answers are ones that lead straight to more questions.