“We are like the dreamer who dreams then lives inside the dream”
With the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks Mark Frost and David Lynch left everybody in awe, just like Twin Peaks originally paved the way for many supernatural artistic TV dramas, most prominently Riget (The Kingdom) by Lars von Trier, but The X-files, Lost, Stranger Things, American Horror Story all profited by Twin Peaks’ example.
At one point in the 2017 sequel of Twin Peaks, Gordon Cole is heard telling Albert and Tammie about a dream he had with Monica Bellucci in it. Albert is seen frowning in his typical way, but Gordon ignores him and continues with the recollection of what his mind’s eye saw at night.
In the dream Gordon is in Paris on a case, then is invited by Monica to have a coffee at a certain café. Monica mentions the ancient phrase “We are like the dreamer who dreams, then lives inside the dream”. After a pause she adds: “But who is the dreamer?”
This could be a metaphor. It could refer to us, viewers of Twin Peaks, who have been watching the original TV series, and subsequently dreaming/thinking about what it all meant, especially with the cliffhanger ending of season 2. If you only do a google search, you already find tons of reddits discussing storylines and minuscule details of this iconic TV show. People have been obsessing with Twin Peaks since it first aired in the nineties. In that sense we are like the dreamer (= TV watcher) who dreams and lives inside the dream (=TV series) we are watching. This also fits with the presence of many screens in the 2017 Twin Peaks limited event series. In a lot of scenes people are watching some kind of screen, either a surveillance camera, laptop or TV. Lynch and Frost are commenting on our addiction to TV shows.
We are living in the Netflix era, where tons of shows are only a click away. Ironically Twin Peaks isn’t on netflix. It was for a short time in 2016 (at least in Belgium), but then it got removed, presumably because Showtime wanted exclusivity for the long-awaited third season.
Lynch and Frost are of course not the first to comment on the screenaddiction of our society. Some have predicted it. I’m referring to David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, published in 1996. In this novel he describes the Interlace system, which gives people more control over what they want to watch. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Infinite Jest centers around an entertainment-video that is deadly fascinating in the literal sense.
The work of David Lynch has always been a hommage to the art that is cinema. Films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are driven by surrealism and illusions, just like cinema is at the core the illusion of movement, the fast sequence of still images so our eyes don’t notice it.
