‘Twin Peaks feels like cracking a code’: David Lynch through an autistic lens
In this edited extract from Splinter Journal, author and critic Jo Case reflects on how the work of David Lynch became her pop culture ‘happy place’, before and after discovering she was autistic.
I fell into Twin Peaks fandom in my late teens, renting the videos over and over again. Lots of people like to rewatch favourite films and series. But for autistic people like me, this can be especially intense. It can be a compulsion: a comfort, escape, and a way of understanding the world through a beloved universe.
When I discovered Twin Peaks (1990) in my late teens, after high school, I was in a new stage of dawning realisation. I was discovering a world where it was okay to be weird. Where it was easier — if not quite easy — to be myself. The set of social and cultural codes in this world didn’t require being like everyone else. On the contrary, difference was relished. I was spending my Saturday nights at an indie gothic nightclub off Hindley Street, the Proscenium. I immersed myself in music from bands like The Cure, The Smiths, and Sonic Youth. I watched films like Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), and Lost Highway (1997). And I kept on renting Twin Peaks from the video store, racking up late fees because I didn’t want to let it go.
Rewatching is integral to Twin Peaks fandom. It’s not just about loving the world and the characters: it’s about deeply knowing them. A fellow Twin Peaks fan was quoted in a recent Vanity Fair article celebrating 35 years since the first episode aired in 1990: “Can you imagine Twin Peaks coming out before VCRs or without the net? It would have been Hell!” For autistic fans like me, rewatching Twin Peaks feels like cracking a code that might help us better understand not just the world of the show, but ourselves — and how the world really works.
Revealing the layers
In Twin Peaks — and all David Lynch’s work — the surface world co-exists with another dimension, which makes sense of our myriad contradictions and warring impulses. Lynch doesn’t just show complexity: he reveals the individual layers that make up the world and how they combine.
Autistic people who mask, like me, experience the world this way: in layers. We see the gap between who we are and who we are expected to be, and actively work to mask the former and be the latter, often at great psychological and physical cost. Perhaps this is why Twin Peaks’ complex heroine Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), who lived a double life, feels deeply familiar.
I have never been either an idealised high-school beauty queen, or a risk-taking sex worker and addict — Laura’s two sides. But I’ve ignored the awkward nerd I am and deliberately failed my high school subjects, trying to be the cool girl I wanted to be. I can perform at work or parties as if I have no social obstacles, though I then need quiet time in bed with my books or comfort shows to recover.
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As autism expert Dr Devon Price writes in Unmasking Autism, autistic people who are told they are annoying, weird, disruptive, or overly sensitive, “have no choice but to develop a neurotypical façade”, which feels deeply inauthentic and is extremely exhausting to maintain.
“As I grew up, I learned to be less intense, less embarrassing — less me. I studied other people’s mannerisms. I spent a lot of time dissecting conversations in my head, and I read up on psychology so I could understand people better,” Price writes. Me too.
The world of Twin Peaks, and David Lynch’s cinema, is inhabited by characters who feel awkward and ill-fitting in our world, and who sometimes split their personae to cope with that feeling, to adapt — or because they’ve lost control. It celebrates oddness. It depicts the world as deeply coded, and necessary to decode in order to understand it. It feels like home.
A happy place
I didn’t discover I was autistic until I was 34, long after I’d fallen in love with Lynch’s work. But when I did, my love made sense to me in that context — and I’m not alone. Today, online forums like Reddit are thick with fan comments like: “As a diagnosed autist: I would bet money Lynch is on the spectrum.”
My own Twin Peaks fandom is more an avenue of comfortable retreat than connection — except with the two people closest to me, my son and my husband, who have followed me into the Twin Peaks universe and are similarly engrossed in it. Autistic people are generally good at pattern recognition: in fact, the brain regions associated with recognising patterns (temporal and occipital areas) light up more in autistic people. I like nothing better than to lean into this by burrowing into a pile of Twin Peaks articles, books, or podcasts, making connections and forming theories. It is my happy place.
On TikTok, multiple fan videos identify autistic traits in Twin Peaks characters — particularly FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by MacLachlan. In his first appearance in the Twin Peaks pilot, he is literally marvelling at the individual trees in the forest, as he records the date, time, weather, his car’s mileage, and what he ate for lunch. He is strictly rule-abiding (except when he follows his fatal flaw — white knight syndrome), passionate about his favourite foods (coffee, pie, donuts), and deeply analytical, consistently decoding the world through symbols and clues.
This way of intellectually processing the world, rather than relying on instinct, is deeply autistic (it’s why we’re so often exhausted: there is no autopilot). Perhaps this is why so many detective characters are portrayed as autistic or autistic-coded, like Sherlock Holmes, or The Bridge’s Saga Noren. A branch of the UK’s intelligence services, the Government Communications Headquarters, actively recruits autistic people for “their attention to detail, sustained focus, pattern recognition, and innovative thinking”, according to one report.
Lynch’s screen work is richly seeded with detectives who act as avatars for the viewer. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, bright-eyed innocent amateur sleuths Jeffrey and Betty (Naomi Watts, in one of two roles) are actively decoding the world. The latter is an aspiring actor who encounters a mysterious injured woman (Rita, played by Laura Elena Harring) on arrival in Los Angeles and decides to help her discover her identity.
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Other detectives embody surveillance: the idea we’re always being watched and either adapt our behaviour accordingly or risk being censured — something that deeply resonates with the everyday of autistic masking. While Betty helps Rita look for her true self, surveilling detectives shadow them. In Lost Highway, similarly, detectives shadow young mechanic Pete (Balthazar Getty), who had to be released from a prison cell after he bafflingly appeared there in place of Fred (Bill Pullman), a middle-aged man who killed his wife. Both these films double down on being watched through other central motifs: performance and cameras.
Control and chaos
Lynch told interviewer David Breskin: “Your horror of horrors is that all of us are so much out of control, and if you start thinking about it you can worry about that for a long time.” His films and Twin Peaks share a fascination with the gap between cultivated, respectable surfaces and the chaos underneath — and what happens when we lose control of ourselves.
Most of us feel a version of this. But for anyone who feels the gap between their cultivated surface and dormant, chaotic self is a deep one, this is especially horrifying. An autistic friend told me this week about a meltdown at work they found deeply mortifying: a rupture of their professional surface. I felt their anecdote in my body.
While, like my friend, I am “out” as autistic in my workplace and professional circles, people usually only see the positives of this identity. My useful hyperfocus that enables me to churn through work, the attention to detail that is an editing boon. But at a work conference where for days in a row I was around people I rarely share real-life space with, expected to socialise in a casual way between structured events, I found myself spontaneously crying. A cycle that repeated throughout the conference, as I panicked at everyone seeing my true, ugly self, exacerbating my anxiety over not knowing what to say or how to present myself as a person. I kept thinking: ‘they have found me out. I have ruined things.’
This deep fear — losing control of a carefully managed, seething emotional core — is often heightened and dramatised in Lynch’s work. Blue Velvet’s clean-cut Jeffrey is tempted into trouble by his curiosity and desires. Eraserhead’s protagonist Henry (Jack Nance), sensorily assaulted by the world and its demands, trapped in a marriage that happened to him and with a terrifying baby, is tipped into violence. And of course, Laura Palmer, Twin Peaks’ homecoming queen and community volunteer, is revealed to have been an addict and sex worker, self-medicating the trauma of incestual sexual abuse. Depending on your interpretation, Laura’s distracting dive into darkness and dissociation leads to her death.
Performing inauthenticity
I believe Vertigo — a film deeply concerned with duality, performance, unmasking, and control — holds a key to understanding Lynch. According to fan site 25 Years Later, it was a film Lynch often cited as a favourite. In an essay on Lynch and autism, it feels right to return to what seems like one of his special interests.
In Vertigo, Kim Novak plays brunette Judy, a woman hired to play a role as blonde Madeleine, who becomes the object of obsession for a traumatised detective assigned to follow her, who sees her “die”. Halfway through the film, detective Ferguson (James Stewart) meets her again as Judy, but doesn’t discover her dual identity until the film’s final sequences. Like Lynch’s work, it has a dreamy, disturbing, often surreal feel. It’s deeply unsettling, taking its time to unfold, and Bernard Hermann’s haunting soundtrack is as integral as Badalamenti’s for Twin Peaks.
“I want to know your name … and who you are,” Ferguson says when he first encounters Judy. When Cooper finds Carrie Page (Sheryl Lee) in the final episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, while searching for Laura Palmer, he is similarly obsessed with her identity, and with returning her to who he thinks she is — or wants her to be. Both Ferguson and Cooper force the woman they find back to who she was. In Vertigo, this means an inauthentic self: a performance. (In Twin Peaks: The Return, it’s a traumatised one.)
This dilemma is deeply familiar to me, as an autistic woman who masks. Should I succumb to pressure to become the person others want me to be: the most polished version of myself? Should I mould myself to the version other people would respond to? Or can I remain the authentic, messy, overemotional person I am? To function in the world, the answer is somewhere in between.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking: that’s true, to some extent, for all of us. You’ll just have to believe me when I say it’s especially intense for autistic people like me. That at, say, a work conference, I need more operating battery than most to be a person who makes conversation between sessions, while filtering out background noise and figuring out which questions are rhetorical and when I need to speak and can reasonably not speak. That I feel more comfortable at my desk in my home office, editing, than doing most other things.
And when I want to relax, I’ll sink into a rewatch or listen to a podcast, finding new things to notice in the world of my favourite shows, like Twin Peaks.
This essay first appeared in its original form in Issue 2 of Splinter Journal, published by Writers SA
Jo Case is a writer and editor who lives on Kaurna Yarta. She is co-editor, with Clem Bastow, of Someone Like Me: an anthology of non- fiction by Autistic writers (UQP). She was a monthly books columnist for InReview for five years. Jo is a deputy editor of Books & Ideas at The Conversation.