Twin Peaks Theme

Tuesday the 22nd of August 2006

I never saw Twin Peaks back in the day. It was aired in Mildura, but, ah, it was on after my bed time. So now I’m finally catching up with the Season 1 DVD box set.

The first thing I noticed about Twin Peaks was Angelo Badalamenti’s music. There are three main musical themes, introduced right at the start of the Pilot:

  1. The Twin Peaks theme itself, which you can listen to in chapter 1 (the opening credits). You know it, it’s iconic: two plucked notes, with a piano melody following; a pleasant melancholy. But then, beneath it, almost drowned out: a vibration of cymbals, echoing the sawmill; what is that? Finally, the music swells with organs; a rising cheesiness.
  2. The second theme can be heard in chapter 2 (the discovery of Laura Palmer’s body). It’s a rising and falling tone; it’s ominous, but not overbearing. And embedded within it:
  3. the third theme rises out of the second, at 4 minutes 35 seconds into chapter 2 (when the doctor says, “let’s turn her over”). Piano; uplifting, but cold. In this instance, it falls back into the second theme.

The music reminds me a little of Blade Runner and The Curse of Fenric, but its deployment makes it something truly special amongst “incidental music”. Music is usually allied tendentiously with the moving pictures it’s played over. Custom music tells the audience what to think about each scene, whether to be scared or laugh, even if it sometimes does so ironically or abstractly. In Twin Peaks, the three main themes are repeated throughout the series, detaching them from the specific scenes they play over. They comment on each scene indifferently, making the audience ask questions. How is this scene scary? How is this scene joyous? How is this scene like that scene?

The music has a substantiality of its own as an actor in the show. It wakes up tired minds and opens up new understandings of characters’ behaviour. As often as I think, “people are the same everywhere, like animals, or machines,” I also think, “yes, this is a transcendental moment for them, even though they seem shallow and fickle to me.”