And there's always music in the air. Rock and stage in "Twin Peaks"

Abstract

This essay offers a new approach to the musical hermeneutics of the Lynchian universe, and in particular of Twin Peaks. The fundamental importance of sound in Lynch's cinema is well known and investigated: here, I propose to identify rock as a non-ornamental but structural, "architectural", element of the author's poetics. Rock - the genre to which also belongs all David Lynch’s autonomous musical production - appears massively in his work and in the three seasons of Twin Peaks. On the one hand in the choice of actors (Bowie, Sting, Manson ...), in the construction of stories and characters (Wild at Heart), in the setting of scenes (the endings of The Return on the Roadhouse stage). On the other hand, in contaminating and strongly marking the imagery of the TV series. The stage, the mask, the double, the hyperbole, the dream - all distinctive and recurring elements - are therefore illuminated by a new light: they belong to the culture and aesthetics of rock.