Four Quartets and Twin Peaks
However, this apparent fluidity is also undermined, and like the medium of film itself, Twin Peaks ultimately leans more to a perspective emphasizing fixity. The series ends with both the audience and Cooper entirely bewildered, not even knowing ‘What year is this?’, before another charact er screams, and all the lights, both literal and figurative, go out. This ending is the Lynchian punishment for attempting to tamper with the deterministic nature of time (Cooper had attempted to time travel to alter the inciting event of Twin Peaks ). Agent Cooper’s hamartia becomes his inability to accept the fixity of time. He cannot accept that the past has passed, and especially not that awful things have happened in the past which he cannot change. He longs to return to the past, just as the audience longs to return and revive their beloved television series. But in The Return , we are routinely denied any type of comforting fanservice, and its title becomes ludicrously ironic when considering that the vast majority of the third season takes place outside of the titular town itself. The desire to return is never sufficiently fulfilled because, just as we can’t alter the temporal flow of a film, we cannot alter the fixity of time. And we never find out what year it is.
Therefore, Twin Peaks ultimately stresses the ontological status of time over the phenomenological, while not discounting the latter: presenting a reconciliation between the contradiction between flux and fixity, inclined towards the importance of fixity.
IV
There is a way to resolve the contradiction between the fixed (Parmenidean/Einsteinian) and fluid (Heraclitean/Bergsonian) views of time. Time can be understood as both fixed and fluid. Time might be fixed and deterministic when planned out along a timeline or Penrose diagram, but the lived experience of time is one of change and fluidity. And though time phenomenologically is fluid and flows, it is still proceeds in only one fixed, unalterable direction. Einstein, Bergson, Parmenides, and Heraclitus can all be considered correct. Time in reality can exist, just as time in literature and time in film exists, as a contradiction. And though perhaps ‘contradiction exists in the process of development of all things’ , 6 sometimes contradiction finds itself as the end of this process. Perhaps seemingly irreconcilable polarities can find co-exists. Both can be present together, perhaps.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Eliot, T. (1943) Four Quartets . New York Lynch, D. Frost, M. creators. 1990-1. Twin Peaks . ABC TV.
6 Zedong (1937).
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