Serial detection and serial killers in Twin Peaks

Abstract

During its first season, Twin Peaks invited us to watch as if we were reading a detective novel. The narrative began with-or at-a dead body, as all proper detective stories do, then unfolded into a series of investigative responses to the murder of a young woman: the arrival of a heroic detective, the evaluation of physical and forensic evidence, the interrogation of suspects and witnesses. But as many people have observed, the series seemed, in the second season-if not even earlier-to become something quite other than a televised detective novel. Twin Peaks asks us to compare it with the literary detective novel in both its parody of the genre and its celebration of detective conventions, but, at the same time, the series slyly disassembles the narrative structure that undergirds detective fiction. This subversion is precisely what makes the show so simultaneously like and unlike a detective novel. The parody and celebration begin with the arrival of the FBI agent, Dale Cooper. Cooper is a "Special Agent" in many senses; all the qualities that immediately mark him as special or extraordinary-his perceptions of what is unusual about Twin Peaks; his attention to correct FBI procedures and protocol; his ability and willingness to look with cool suspicion past social standing and social performances-arc those of the hero-detective of both the British classic style and the American hard-boiled school. Cooper quickly establishes his investigative authority-not only directly (telling Truman, "the Bureau gets called in, Bureau's in charge; you're going to be working for me"), but also by deed, proving his genius when he points out that the picnic videotape captures the reflection of James Hurley's motorcycle in the iris of Laura Palmer's eye ("holy smoke," we chorus with Truman and Lucy). Cooper's virtuosity suggests that the game being laid out is an evidentiary one, one in which we can participate by close attention and reasoned speculation based on the facts gathered by the sheriff's deputies and by Albert Rosenfeld's examination of the body. Even when the investigative methodologies get weird-interpretation of dreams and mind-body coordination-the guiding principle Cooper declares allegiance to is "break the code, solve the crime" (episode four). This cryptological tenet is one that has been fundamental to detective Fiction since Poe, whose tales of ratiocination celebrate the "mind that disentangles" and whose "The Gold-Bug" makes explicit an analogy between the search for the truth and the deciphering of codes.1 Like all heroic detectives, Cooper is an indefatigable truth seeker. In an impulse shared by the Op of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest who continues investigating the goings-on in Poisonville even after his client fires him, Cooper keeps working (as a sheriff's deputy) toward the truth after he is relieved of his duties by the Bureau. Detectives, as detective fiction has created them, are not innocent men and women: they are cynical, they understand the methods and thought processes of criminals, and some-especially in the hard-boiled school-cross the line into extralegal behavior in more or less serious ways (as when Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone picks the locks of suspects' apartments or Cooper crosses the border into Canada). But, while the detective-hero is not innocent or without moral weakness, he or she is, in the ways that really matter, an incorruptible agent of truth and justice. Cooper establishes his particular brand of morality early in the first season when he cuts off Albert's necrophagous zeal and allows the Palmer family to bury Laura's body, and when he refuses to help Albert file a complaint against Sheriff Truman, citing the "decency, honor and dignity" of the "good people" of Twin Peaks, where "life has meaning . . . every life" (episode four). Especially important is the question of Cooper's sexual morality. We know that Cooper is attracted to Audrey, but he refuses to take advantage of her youthful infatuation. …