I miss those days when there was an old-school TV box with only a few channels to choose from. If you wanted to watch your favourite show, you had to be there on time—like 9 PM on Tuesday, no pausing, no skipping, just you, the show, and the ad breaks giving you just enough time to grab a sandwich or take a piss. You might say Netflix is better, and I won’t even try to convince you otherwise. Sure, you can watch anything, anytime, and never miss an episode. So maybe you’re right. But if you weren’t there in the ’90s, you’ll never quite get it. And if you were, then you know what I’m talking about.
There was a TV show that defined those days for me: Twin Peaks. I must’ve been around five years old when I first saw it—far too young. I watched it with my older brother, and it messed with my head in a way I still can’t shake off. I had dreams about it, where I walked through One-Eyed Jacks and touched those wooden corridors like I’d actually been there. I still do get those dreams, despite many years passed. In a way, I never dreamed about the characters, but the places. It reminds me of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where he wrote about how certain places—whether real or imagined—settle deep in our consciousness. And so, I believe Twin Peaks did to me. As if it wasn’t a story that I watched but a world I entered; a space that—as Bachelard might have said—became part of my inner geography. Whereas for some, Twin Peaks will always just be that weird TV series about a girl who got murdered, for others it became something else entirely. Who killed Laura Palmer? was the question that kept people awake at night—or worse, it became part of their own nightmares. It didn’t just glue you to the screen; it could possess you.
As if David Lynch didn’t just create a TV series—rather, he opened a portal to the strangest, unmapped corners of the mind. He projected a living model of the unconscious and made it a show, with Dale Cooper as the wandering consciousness at its centre. The series feels like a dream analysis, where Cooper isn’t just solving Laura Palmer’s murder but confronting the depths of his own psyche. From Bob’s terrifying appearances to Louise Dombrowski’s mesmerizing dance, Twin Peaks brings to the surface what usually hides beneath our feelings. In a sense it exposes the undercurrents that fundamentally shape who we are.
The hypnotic way the story unfolds blurs the line between dream and reality, revealing the hidden machinery of the mind—a vision of what Freud once called “the uncanny”: the return of the familiar made strange, or the strange made suddenly intimate. The uncanny in Twin Peaks lives in the woods that feel known but aren’t, the homes that seem warm until the lights flicker. The familiar world returns warped—and what we thought we’d buried rises again in eerie disguise. There’s the home video of Laura and Donna dancing at the picnic, caught in a loop of joy that’s already gone. Laura laughs and reaches toward the camera—as if still alive, still here—but we’re watching her from the other side of death. These moments stick not because they’re surreal, but because they feel almost real—like they came from a place inside us we pretend isn’t there. That’s the uncanny: not fantasy, but memory misremembered. Familiarity laced with dread.
The show plays out like an essence of a psychoanalytic session, where repressed returns in symbolic form. Laid out in front of you—almost as if on a silver tray—is a vivid reflection of everything that makes us twisted in a different way. It’s everything psychoanalysis tries to touch—but here, it simply is, no interpretation required. The series, in a poetic way, touches on the death drive, the Oedipus complex, and all those things that make psychoanalysts twist their tongues, outdoing each other in finding ever more bizarre ways to describe the same old stuff: why we are the way we are.
David Lynch poses the ultimate question—which isn’t Who killed Laura? but Who killed you? The question that sent Harold Smith into a breakdown. In other words, the question of who hurt us, shaped us, split us in a way that no matter how far we run, we cycle back—drawn to the primal crime scene that defined our fate. I was five years old, watching something I didn’t understand—but somehow, I knew it understood me.
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