"Call it what you want. A mood, a feeling." -David Lynch on Twin Peaks
"Call it what you want. A darkness. A presence." - Harry Truman, Twin Peaks
It's like a drugged mist fell over this town making everyone deaf to this little girl who is screaming.
Twin Peaks is the culimination of a long tradition American Gothic, translated to the tv medium.
I'm from Sleepy Hollow country, near the Catskill Mountains of upstate NY, so I understand DL and Kyle M.'s fascination with the small, somnabulistic towns in the woods they come from. They feel safe and spooky at the same time, and can exist in a time warp. The anxieties there, and in these stories, speak to us about our greater fears as a culture-- of industry, of outsider "Others," of innocence lost, the breakdown of the family structure etc.
"A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land and pervade the very atmosphere. Some say the place was bewitched... that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, used it for his pow-wows... Certain it is the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continuous reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols."
-Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow