Swimmin’ in Lynch’n’Pynchon: Mysteries of Meaning
Ricardo McHero has surely met his match now. He’s backed up to the edge of the cliff. All conceivable routes of escape are cut off by the imposing black SUVs of Nas D. Villain’s many henchmen. The flash drive in McHero’s jacket pocket has information that can save the entire civilized world from destruction, but if he can’t figure a way out of this predicament, that flash drive will plummet with him to the bottom of the canyon, or worse yet, end up in the hands of the demented psychopath Villain, currently sighting McHero down the barrel of his fully charged and loaded death ray.
YAWN.
WHAT EXCITES AND ATTRACTS US IS A MYSTERY.
The causes of excitement and attraction are mysterious. Truly there is no accounting for taste. It’s true as regards life in general, and certainly true of the art we consume. The obverse mystery to “what excites us?” is, of course, “what bores us?”.
Sometimes a supposed page-turner, thrill-a-minute blockbuster, or other ostensibly exciting art or entertainment product is just, well, boring to us. Are we just sociopaths who can’t empathize with the heroes and heroines, can’t identify with their dangerous struggles, can’t feel the villain breathing down our own necks? Do we just lack imagination?
For better or for worse, there will always be those who are more interested in what the artist is doing than in what their characters are doing. The interest-level of the two factors can even be inversely related. Many times the case arises where the exploits of characters are as thrilling as can be, at precisely the same moment that the conception and execution of the creators is at its most boring--that is, its most formulaic, conventional, anodyne, or predictable. Genres known for “excitement” can be the most bland when assessed with the criterion of originality. The generic PG-13-rated superhero movie is the ultimate example of this.
No denying, I am here propounding the position of the amateur critic, or just the tiresome pedant, but I can’t help that it’s also the ground I occupy in my own everyday consumption of art and entertainment. And, I know that I’m not the only one. Are you one of us?
WHAT EXCITES AND ATTRACTS US IS A MYSTERY.
Mysteries are attractive and exciting.
Speaking in a broad and pseudoscientific way (not being bothered to go look up the studies I’m thinking of), we know that when a task is left unresolved--for example, when an important answer to a relevant question is as-yet unknown to us--, our brains “leave open” the circuits dedicated to the “completion” of that “task.” I believe neuroscientists call this phenomenon “attentional residue.” (I believe neuroscientists also call art & music bloggers “the most inaccurate and scientifically sloppy fucks on the planet,” and the two terminologies may be related). In the paragraphs that follow I will use the term “open loops” to refer to circuits/tasks/questions that are as-yet unresolved, and I will speak of “closing loops,” meaning to resolve the given tasks.
All narratives are, in fact, mysteries. At the beginning of a narrative, the reader is immediately burdened with a set of unanswered questions--of opened loops—even if those questions are as simple as “what happens next?,” or “how does it end?”. If we didn’t feel we were missing at least SOME information that we wanted to acquire, there would be no reason to keep reading or watching.
In genres like the detective story, of course, the setting up of unanswered questions is more highlighted, more overt; but, even in stories that are not nominally Mysteries, missing information is the essential driver relating the audience to the story. (Of course not all artworks are “stories,” and I will address that in due time).
Mystery is the driving force of narrative as well as one of the most pervasive underpinnings of life in general.
(I have already set up three mysteries in this essay so far, only one of which has been resolved--and that one, not overtly. Come to think of it, there have been four. Can you tell what they were?)
It is possible, however, to expand and enliven the idea of mystery, to intensify its native quality: the burning dissatisfaction, the motivation to resolve, the crackling engagement of the goal unattained or the image as-yet out of focus. (In short, the very phenomenon, including on its neuroelectric and psychological levels, of Potential Energy).
SEMANTIC MYSTERIES, ONTOLOGICAL MYSTERIES, AND META MYSTERIES
“The novel clarifies itself only to create further mysteries.”
-Richard Poirier, writing about Gravity’s Rainbow
In addition to intra-narrative, informational mystery (What will happen? Who is the murderer? Do they get together in the end? Will she survive?...read on to find out...), it is possible to create and cultivate semantic mystery. One can, that is, refuse to specify what is meant, whether in the words or actions of characters, or in the phraseology or gesture of the creator themself. To the reader, this becomes a mystery of meaning. (Semantic mysteries are the basis for double entendres, indeed for much wordplay in general--but these are not the only kinds of semantic mystery).
If it is the semantics of the storyteller themself that are in question, if the narrator is unreliable for example, or if things & events are described only in oblique, hinting, or elliptical ways, one can thereby achieve ontological mystery, that is: it is possible to leave the audience wondering WHAT, IN FACT, TOOK PLACE. The actual sequence of happenings portrayed may, itself, come up for question.
By throwing into doubt the boundaries of an artwork, its status as fiction or nonfiction, its existence in the “real world” (or in the reality of the fiction, or in the reality of a fiction within the fiction), one can achieve meta-mystery. This might be characterized as mystery about what level of reality we are being given at any given point in the narrative.
Even at these increasingly abstract levels, it is possible to “close loops” as easily as to open them. Just as in detective fiction the initial, maddening clue--the nagging clue whose meaning tantalizes us right up to the final chapter--can be finally put into place, thereby solving the entire mystery, so, too, loops opened on the semantic, ontological, and meta levels, can be eventually resolved, if the storyteller so chooses. These “solutions” can often be elegant and deeply intellectually satisfying.
Arriving at solutions of mysteries--on any level--is, in fact, inherently satisfying. This is the essence of what makes consuming detective fiction so pleasurable.
But, yet one more level of mystery remains possible (doubtless the levels are actually infinitely varied and infinitesimally gradated, but stick with me here for some semblance of a Manageable Schema of Mysteries). There remains, that is, the possibility of Infinite Mystery. Infinite Mystery is the outcome of opening a loop--on any of the aforementioned levels--and simply refusing to resolve it before the end of the piece. Unresolved loops, unsolved clues, unfired guns over Chekhov’s mantelpiece, can indeed be created on any level. I could, for example, “Create Infinite Mystery” just by tearing out the last 3 chapters of the next Poirot whodunit I buy. The possibility exists, then, that the Creation of Infinite Mystery can be simply the result of terrible craftsmanship or, if it IS done intentionally, can be executed in a way that is quite cheap and facile, or so as to be merely for effect.
But...when loops are opened with particular artfulness...when they sincerely use creative and original means to hook the audience, to oblige the audience to invest in the given mystery...when the unresolved questions are presented via harnessing the artist’s full power to engage the attention and awaken the emotions…and, most especially, when the unresolved mysteries ring true because they mirror the confounding and unanswerable questions in our own lives… Ah, in such a case, this Infinite Mystery can be a most beautiful thing.
“Hey, Justin--aren’t you just using the word mystery as a code-word for that old boring literature-seminar buzzword ‘ambiguity,’ in a bald-faced attempt to render more sexy and palatable what is possibly the most unexciting and unsatisfying description one could possibly give to a piece of writing?” Yes, yes I am. And you fucking love it. Stick with me.
“WHEN TWO SEPARATE EVENTS OCCUR SIMULTANEOUSLY PERTAINING TO THE SAME OBJECT OF INQUIRY WE MUST ALWAYS PAY STRICT ATTENTION”: TOWARDS AN EVENTUAL POINT TO THIS ESSAY
Perhaps the abiding mystery (The Mystery Abides) of this essay so far is best articulated by the character of the Big Lebowski in the Coen Brothers’ eponymous film, when he demands: “What in God’s holy name are you blathering about?”. I’ll tell you what I’m blathering about, man.
In the sections above, I have been quite general with my terminology, referring rather to “storytellers” or “creators” than to authors, to “audience” rather than “viewers” or “readers”. This is because I really want to discuss Infinite Mystery as it occurs in two art works of different media, one a book, the other a television & film franchise. Fanboying out on these two artworks is the real purpose of this essay, and the foregoing Definitive Monograph Pertaining To The Kindes And Types Of Mysteryes, Theyr Cultivation And Illumination is just a long ramp leading up to this particular, imminent, very fucking satisfying moment, coming up any minute now, where I shall reveal the titles of the two works, about which I have written so much, the unresolved curiosity about which question is even now causing your eyes to skim these sentences even more rapidly, looking for capitalized words several lines ahead, just praying that I will shut the fuck up with all this preamble and get to saying what I actually want to say about the two artworks which, though in my verbose way I wouldn’t particularly care to admit as much, by the uncapitalized way, are twin peaks the return and gravity’s rainbow, but whose titles I have left purposefully uncapitalized in the middle of this frustratingly endless sea of an ocean of an expanse of a desert of a run-on sentence in the hopes of punishing people who have skimmed lazily ahead but who, perhaps as a result of their inattentive skimming are by this time in the sentence receiving more of the bittersweet but delicious frustration of unresolved mystery about what the two titles actually are and so are, in that sense, actually the lucky ones for whom the mystery hasn’t yet undergone what I like to call the “deflation of revelation” but will be glad to learn that the train of this sentence is about to undergo the termination-of-embarkation that is arrival at the destination of its final station.
So, to sum up: I’ve recently greatly enjoyed two really fantastic works of art, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and the TV show Twin Peaks (the entire series but particularly its 2017 3rd season, Twin Peaks: The Return, written by David Lynch & Mark Frost and directed by Lynch; I am also here considering as integral parts of The Return the two canonical companion novels by Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks [2016] and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier [2017]). Any Twin Peaks fans reading this post surely noticed that the quote in the title of this section was originally uttered by that show’s main character, Special Agent Dale Cooper.
I loved both artworks, and, after considering both, spending some time with critical examinations and fan commentaries of each, and letting each one sink into my consciousness and rattle around in there with the other one, I could not shake the feeling that the two were somehow kindred works--or that, despite their very appreciable differences, I liked them both for similar reasons. The question of in what way they were linked became an open circuit for me, requiring closure.
It was while wondering what so satisfied me about both pieces that I hit on the idea of Infinite Mystery: of the peculiar pleasure, the vastness and power, the satisfying dissatisfaction, of experiencing Unclosed Loops, especially when it happens on the narrative, semantic, ontological, and meta levels all at the same time. This led me to the realization that Infinite Mystery is actually, when well-achieved, a VERY PLEASURABLE PHENOMENON.
With these two works as examples, I came to the realization that the frequent discussion of the ostensible Postmodern Phenomenon of Ambiguity (and yes, both of these works must undeniably be labeled Postmodern, despite one of them being a popular TV show that was spawned on a major commercial broadcast network) generally leaves out a key factor, namely that ambiguity, manifest in the phenomenon of Infinite Mystery, is a source of pleasure. It is a means of giving delight, at least to those audience members who appreciate it as such.
Conventional wisdom goes that leaving audiences dissatisfied is a Bad Idea: that people prefer their mysteries solved, and that leaving plot holes and unsolved clues in a story is indicative of either being criminally up one’s own ass, or just of plain poor technique. Therefore, when such things are intentionally done by very accomplished artists, they are often assumed to be making a Serious Postmodern Statement, about the irresolution in life, about the meaningless of modern existence, or about the limitations of art.
This way of construing the ambiguity in Postmodern works has some merit. First of all, the premise that people don’t like irresolution is surely borne out by the comparative market share of properties like Twin Peaks and Gravity’s Rainbow, when compared to loop-closing, expectation-fulfilling, mystery-resolving properties like Law and Order (a very different sort of crime procedural from Twin Peaks, and who knows how many times as popular) or a bestselling Tom Clancy novel (and let’s all admit that Gravity’s Rainbow’s market share is artificially inflated by many who have bought but never read the volume). So yeah, the statistically-likely-person on the street doesn’t like too much ambiguity.
And, there is no denying that Twin Peaks, Gravity’s Rainbow, and other works like them certainly do aim to make Serious Postmodern Statements on subjects INCLUDING the irresolution in life, the meaningless of modern existence, and the limitations of art.
But that is not the ONLY value or purpose of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not just a thorny, drab-grey, or melancholic device used to teach us some kind of existential lesson by Artists With Large Concepts. It is a device of great aesthetic beauty, and it can engender an experience of delight. The brain grinding on overdrive to solve something gives off sparks that light and warm the soul. I think that unresolved loops can help make the whole experience of a story more expansive, overrunning itself from the confines of the medium to occupy our minds at other times of day, affording us the opportunity to indulge every nerd and baseball-stats-fan’s favorite wholesome pleasure, the simple pleasure of obsession. Really good unclosed loops run themselves day and night, burrowing by means of their restless gyration into all levels of our consciousness, running in the background even as we sleep; I have visited dream-vistas occasioned by the unanswered questions in Pynchon and Lynch; I’ve known haunting mysteries from these two works to conjure a whole mood, one which hangs around everything else going on in my life. Ok, maybe having obsessive Lynch- and Pynchon-inspired dreams doesn’t actually sound like that good of a time to everyone. But for those to whom it IS a sort of delight (and here’s my ultimate point): oh WHAT a delight that can be. It’s the strangest and most subtle sort of virtual reality imaginable!
And that is the real thing I think is so often overlooked: Infinite Mystery is a site of great beauty and joy, even if only to a minority. After all, not all pleasures have to appeal to everybody. Maybe, arguably, this can be reduced to a strange case of S&M. After all, we know that there are those who do fully and consentingly enjoy the experience of pain in certain contexts. Do I just exemplify a certain brain-peculiarity that causes me to take pleasure in the torture wrought by unresolved mysteries? It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I don’t for example consider myself a masochist in any other arena. (But, even if that were the explanation, it wouldn’t really invalidate my point...the masochist’s pleasure is, after all, still pleasure).
Maybe it’s not masochism, but just the delectation of certain “palates” attuned to appreciate this. I’ve never gotten into wine and don’t really understand all the hype--but I do sincerely believe that wine connoisseurs can get deep, sincere, and highly refined enjoyment from the finest wines, which goes beyond the simple pleasure-centers tapped by the sugar content in a Coca-Cola. I mean, if we don’t agree on at least that possibility, then we may as well shut this whole argument down right now. But if we do accept the possibility, then I believe my premise is sound. Infinite Mystery is as much a way of imparting aesthetic pleasure as it is a means of conveying Deep Statements.
THE LEAP FROM LYNCH TO PYNCHON
A good dyed-in-the-wool David Lynch follower may recognize in the essay up to this point a lengthy paraphrase, overcomplicated gloss, or plagiaristic restatement of sentiments Lynch himself has elucidated much more succinctly in many of his interviews and writings.
How many times have we heard him say:
“Mysteries are beautiful” …?
And statements to the effect:
“a mystery becomes more beautiful as it becomes more abstract.”
I absolutely admit that it was Lynch’s own words that set me thinking along these lines. My concern, though, has been to elucidate what the two dicta just quoted actually mean--how I can understand and square them with my own experience of art. In other words, in what sense are they true? My other concern has been to extend these truths to include my enjoyment of Gravity’s Rainbow as well, because I do believe they are enjoyable for similar reasons.
Twin Peaks is by its nature a mystery. It was, after all, originally marketed as essentially a crime procedural (albeit a very quirky one). It has further mystery pedigree by being associated with the auteur who made such neo-noir head scratchers as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. But how do I make the leap to putting G.R. in the same boat?
Gravity’s Rainbow is not generally discussed as belonging to the mystery genre, nor is its creator constantly giving interviews in which he talks about the beauty of Mystery (or any interviews at all, for that matter--who the heck is Thomas Pynchon? Another beautiful mystery, I’d say…). Nevertheless, G.R.’s overarching plot structure is very fundamentally that of a mystery novel. A couple basic puzzlers are rolled out toward the beginning of the book: Why do the V-2 rockets fall in the pattern they do, matching exactly the distribution of a particular man’s sexual conquests? And, what is the significance of a much-storied custom-built V-2, bearing the serial number 00000? These two unknowns are essentially “investigated” by Tyrone Slothrop, not all that differently from the large-scale structure of a standard detective novel, except here told in the most hallucinatory way possible. Clues are slowly revealed, leads are successively followed by our detective. The second mystery is, insofar as any such thing is possible in a book like this, essentially solved; the salient details of the 00000 rocket launch are eventually made known to the reader. (As for the first mystery? Well…)
To put all this another way: by stating simply that “mysteries are beautiful” (and proving as much in his work), David Lynch kinda sorta taught me how to read Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ll also say that hearing Christian Sager and Charlie Bennett, on their Supercontext podcast episode about G.R., name Twin Peaks: The Return as a cultural moment of comparable scope, impact, and reach as the initial publication of Gravity’s Rainbow reinforced my intuition that these two artworks were somehow linked.
But the deeper linkage is not merely that both works take the outward form (however twisted) of mystery fiction. Rather it is in the depth of their mysteries, which take place not only on the narrative level but also on the semantic, ontological and meta levels. Furthermore, they are united in both opting not to close all the loops they open on these levels, thus engendering Infinite Mystery.
SO WITNESS THE FANDOMS
So. Witness the fandoms:
As I said in an earlier section, I AIN’T THE ONLY ONE THAT’S TICKLED BY THIS SHIT.
NOW, is it not true that there is no area of the humanities where a non-academic-specialist does not benefit from a dive into the Podcast-o-Sphere? (Parse my triple negatives if you dare, although here -1x-1x-1 =/= -1, which is a mystery in itself).
I’ll tell you what I’m blathering about. What I’m blathering about is: I listened to a lot of podcasts.
The relative proliferation of podcasts on the two properties is instructive in terms of their reach and popularity. About Twin Peaks, one can find many, many podcasts. I don’t mean episodes of podcasts, I mean entire casts. Just off the top of my head, I can think of six podcasts whose structure is that of an episode-by-episode watchalong, meaning that, for each such podcast, there are: at least 30 episodes comprising the traverse of Seasons 1 & 2; 18 in the case of those casts whose watchalong only covered the 2017 Return; or 48 for those who covered both. I can even think of one Twin Peaks podcast that did an episode-per-episode run of Seasons 1 & 2 and then TWO COMPLETE VIEWINGS of The Return. My citing six such podcasts is, in fact, an extreme lowball figure compared to the actual number of Twin Peaks podcasts with this format, since I (a) limited myself to content that can be found on Spotify, and (b) didn’t actually go look it up but only counted the ones whose existence I could effortlessly and easily remember from my time diving into the fandom.
About Gravity’s Rainbow, I found only three podcast episodes devoted to the book itself (it turned up a few additional results in the form of episodes where it was merely mentioned, or used as an example to illustrate another topic) on Apple Podcasts (none were to be found on Spotify). I did find a bit more activity/ content around G.R. on YouTube, including one very good series by TheBookchemist, which was a weekly readalong, equivalent to the watchalong formats of the Twin Peaks episodes. (Here again, though, if one were to compare relative volumes of YouTube content regarding T.P. vs. G.R., one would undoubtedly find T.P. to dominate by every metric).
So both things are not equally popular, but then, too, neither thing is irredeemably obscure. As one would expect, the television program full of extraordinarily good-looking people vastly outstrips the 800-page novel as far as its popularity is concerned.
But both fandoms, in my estimation, exhibit similar types of enjoyment and take a similar path to enjoyment of the material, and I think a big part of that path, of that enjoyment, is enjoyment of Infinite Mystery. It’s enjoyment of the unanswered questions with which both works leave their consumers, questions unanswered at the narrative, semantic, ontological, and meta levels (I will list specific examples of each type of mystery, at least one from each of the 2 works, in a later section).
Among Twin Peaks podcasts, the act of ruminating (with all the leisurely pleasure of a sultan enjoying a hit from a particularly delectable hookah) over all the unanswered mysteries, the inconsistencies, the POSSIBILITIES inherent in the text of Twin Peaks, is each week’s bread and butter. In other words, the enjoyment--not the passive but the active, engaged enjoyment--of Infinite Mystery is, for some fans, the main point of watching the show (certainly the main point of EXAMINING the show).
For Gravity’s Rainbow fans, doubtless the same is a huge part of the enjoyment. I realized that it certainly was for me. The YouTuber TheBookchemist put it well when he said,
“It’s strange how a book that feels like it should be evasive can be so compulsively readable.”
I did find the same tendency to parse & postulate to be on open display in the limited number of podcasts about G.R., and, of course, the questions of “what happens in Gravity’s Rainbow?,” “what does Gravity’s Rainbow mean?” and “how much of Gravity’s Rainbow is historically accurate?” are also much-discussed in another venue, that is to say, in academic papers and in literary criticism. And who are these academics writing dissertations and journal articles about Gravity’s Rainbow, but a less-exuberant manifestation of its fandom? (I jest--the two kinds of engagement, fan and scholar, are indeed very different; yet, the substance of engagement is still driven by the extent to which the text necessitates parsing--the mysteries it creates and those it leaves unsolved).
In his essay “The Semiotics of Cobbler: Twin Peaks’ Interpretive Community,” which appears in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, David Lavery deems the Twin Peaks fan community a “culture of instinctive semioticians.” The appellation is a quote from Umberto Eco, who names such a “culture” as the basis for any work achieving “cult” status. The need to parse, to examine and explain, thus constitutes a fundamental pleasure of a cult artwork, and by that definition, Twin Peaks and Gravity’s Rainbow fit the category quite nicely.
Thus do I assert, and so witness the fandoms!
WHY YOU LIKE AMBIGUITY MORE THAN YOU THINK (other examples of pleasurable ambiguity)
In case you need a little more convincing that unsolved mysteries give pleasure, I propose to briefly list a few examples of unresolved ambiguities that I’m guessing you too, dear reader, take pleasure in.
Take, for example, the blue note in music. A blue note is a pitch in a scale that is “bent” above or below its usual frequency, sometimes arriving in the no-man’s-land between two notes of the scale. The blue note is the lifeblood of blues guitar, blues harmonica, and thence of much rock music as well. So, if you like those things, trust me, you like the blue note. The most common manifestation of the blue note is the ambiguous third. The third scale degree is the distinguishing characteristic between major and minor modes, and between major and minor chords. If the third is natural, we get a major sound, if the third is flat, we get a minor sound. The typical blue note is a bend or oscillation between a major third and minor third. A very common sound in jazz is a solo line with a minor third in it being played over a chord progression that has a major third above the same root. The blue note (which I’ve just mistyped resulting in the fantastic autocorrect result of “lube note”--which may be just as apt, this kind of note slipping & sliding frictionlessly between its two identities) is never “solved” (or in musical terms, “resolved”) into one identity or the other. Rather it is the constant oscillation which gives pleasure. Interestingly, this “lubricated third,” gliding in and out of major and minor, is also one of the great pleasures of many mediterranean musics, such as much of the folk music of Spain, and is also an identifying trait of the Indian raga known as Rag Jog.
A few other Unresolved Ambiguities I Believe You Probably Like: optical illusions in which two pictures are present depending on which way you look at it, shows about unsolved mysteries (admit it, you like them; and let’s group under this heading all manner of unsolved real-world mysteries that we may enjoy, from Who is the Zodiac killer? to What was in the money pit on Oak Island?), Yanny/Laurel, the ending of Inception, agnosticism to you agnostics or the sacred mysteries of your faith for the faithful, pondering the meaning of life if you’re the type that enjoys that, and all kinds of double entendres (which are, by definition, unresolved ambiguities).
WHERE THE KICKASS AMBIGUITIES LIE IN THESE TWO WORKS
I’ve held back so long from actually enumerating the Mysteries that these two pieces achieve so well, because this is the furthest along my essay I can reasonably claim to be spoiler-free. From this point on, I will be dropping spoilers. I considered trying to phrase each of these examples in a generic way that doesn’t give anything away, but...YEAH that doesn’t really work. There will also be spoilers of other Lynch works. You’ve been warned. I’m talking, indiscriminate spoilers, including endings. Read on only if you have completed both Twin Peaks and Gravity’s Rainbow, or if you know you never will. You can scroll down to the next section heading, though, and be safe from spoilers after that.
OK. At last, the part where I really get to gush. Some paragraphs back, I opened a loop by promising to name some of the pleasurable unclosed loops in these two works. How are the Infinite Mysteries of Twin Peaks and Gravity’s Rainbow achieved?
This can, of course, only be a partial list. Both of these works are teeming with mysteries too numerous to identify, sometimes cropping up at a rate of many-per-page, or many-per-minute. Sometimes 5 or 6 are crammed in one spoken or written sentence.
A classic example of a spectacularly-executed, multi-level Infinite Mystery comes in Twin Peaks, The Return: Part 11, in a scene in the Double-R Diner where Shelly and Bobby are comforting their daughter, Becky, after a painful incident. In the middle of a heavy conversation between two parents and their shaken kid, Shelly sees her new boyfriend, Red, outside the window. (Until this moment we’ve been uncertain whether Shelly & Bobby are in fact still “together,” or, as is now confirmed, are by now just Becky’s divorced parents). Shelly reacts to Red’s appearance in a totally unexpected way: she instantly abandons the gravity of the family moment, jumps up in an overexcited way (right in front of her poor ex and wounded daughter) and runs outside to kiss him, which they do right outside the glass diner door for all to see. We’ve formerly seen that this Red is a Scary Bad Guy—although we can’t be sure whether Shelly knows this.
A few seconds later, a shot rings out in the diner. The occupants dim the lights and take cover. Policeman Bobby goes outside to investigate. He finds the shot was accidentally fired by a kid outside, riding in the back seat of his parents’ van, with a gun he found under the seat. But to question the van’s occupants, Bobby has had to stop traffic. There is incessant honking of horns; it goes on far too long, until the audience is as rattled by it as Bobby must be. Bobby proceeds down the line of cars to find the main honking culprit, and is met with a middle-aged woman in a sedan, raving and honking incessantly. She is evidently impossibly affronted by having had to stop. She is being kept from something terribly important but, as she shouts and shouts about it, we we actually find it impossible to pin down what, in fact, she was late for. It’s either a family dinner or the emergency room, for her…Oh, God, there’s a puke-crusted zombie child in the passenger seat! Is the way that kid is moving...natural? “WHAT IS HAPPENING”?
In the opening minutes of this sequence, we have semantic confusion, although not of the verbal kind: what we don’t understand is the set of signals exchanged between Shelly and Red. According to our character understanding of Shelly, she wouldn’t behave like this. Thus, are we seeing...mind-control by Red (who we know to be a dark magician and a drug dealer)?, or...Bobby’s subjective hyperbolization of the energy between Shelly and her new beau, i.e., we are shown this interaction from “Bobby’s-heart’s-eye-view”?, or…that this whole scene is imagined or dreamed by the show’s main protagonist Dale Cooper (who we are elsewhere given cause to believe is “the Dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the Dream”) and this is a playing-out in his mind of a daydream, distorted version of what might be going on in Twin Peaks?, or...
…Or, are we indeed so sure that Shelly wouldn’t behave like this?...her behavior is unreal and authentic at the same time...we do know she has a Thing for Bad Boys, but...she was never this indiscreet...or, supposing it is early in their courtship and she doesn’t know what a bad human Red is, then maybe this reaction shows a rather healthy disregard for her former boyfriend’s “claim” on her (although not, perhaps, her child’s)...
This semantic confusion, obviously, bleeds over rapidly into ontological confusion. If the set of signals don’t make sense to our behavior-parsers, then all of the aforementioned explanations become possible. Each explanation holds a resultant “reality claim” inside the fiction. That is to say, each explanation listed above carries connotations of plot occurrences that the audience simply has not seen. The question becomes, “what happened in the hours [and also years] we weren’t looking at these characters?”; we the audience are not told: rather, we are asked.
A bit later in the scene, statements once again become indecipherable, as the yelling woman in the car spouts differing, mutable reasons for her angst. It’s easy to miss in the sheer energy of her shouting, but if you pay attention, the things this woman is shouting actually make no coherent sense. The ontological mystery raised here doesn’t captivate the mind as actively--we don’t really care about this character’s motivations because we don’t know her at all. It is more important THAT she is impatient than what she is impatient about. That question is raised but left unanswered, or indeed given impossible & contradictory answers, and that contributes to the frantic mood of the scene. Mystery is used here as an intensifying spice, heightening our empathy with Bobby’s shaken state of mind.
And when we finally see the puking zombie child, we are presented with another impossibility: is Twin Peaks itself shifting genres into a monster tale? Is this child afflicted with a supernatural ailment? Is Bobby seeing this accurately? What happened, somewhere in the town, which caused the child to be in this state? Is this child about to be sucked back into the Black Lodge like Mr. C and Tulpa Dougie (a condition which we know to cause vomiting)? Did this whole intense situation somehow spiral out from Bobby’s interior, from his intense emotional reaction to Shelly kissing Red? We are not told, we are asked.
But, (and here’s where well-achieved Infinite Mystery differs from cheap & facile “infinite mystery” made by, say the Dada action of “writing” a new Poirot novel by tearing out the last 3 chapters of Death on the Nile), the question-asking is not so one-way that the audience’s brains give up and don’t try. We are given lots to go on. We are given big juicy semantic plums, meaningful things to see & hear...we are confident they are meaningful because the writing leads us so well, because the shooting & acting force us to invest, and so our inner “instinctive semiotician” gets to go wild. To achieve this, and to bring in the skill of “plausible implausibilities,” things that almost just-might-or-might-not-really-happen but don’t break the mood, takes a masterful hand.
Meta mysteries, too, are being opened alongside the semantic & ontological mysteries. Because of the implausibilities, the disjointedness of the storytelling, or simply because it would be a good explanation for the events we witness, we infer that we may be seeing a dream, or an imagining--we know, for example, that in Lynch’s work, unrealistic emotions are often a signal of a fantasy world (think of the narrative in which Diane lies to herself in Mulholland Dr). We can’t be sure one way or the other, because stylistically this scene keeps playing the line between realism and the fantastic. If we’re fairly satisfied that this scene is an imagining, then whose? Could it be structured as Bobby’s imagining within Cooper’s imagining (which itself is inside Frost & Lynch’s imagining)? Thus, we are given mysteries about what level of reality we are on, which is my working definition of the meta-mystery. After all, the “mystery playing out across multiple levels of reality/ imagination/ dream/ paranoid fantasy” is also a pretty decent model for understanding Lynch’s Inland Empire, and a structure that he favors.
It was most satisfying to listen to Jubel and Karl on the Counter Esperanto podcast engagingly trot out three equally-plausible explanations for the events of this scene, one after the other, when discussing Episode 11. How one interpreted other ambiguous scenes earlier affects what reading one gives to this scene—for example, Karl can’t parse this scene without giving a couple different readings to the earlier inscrutable scene between drug-wizard Red and another character, the psychopathic delinquent Richard. Someone who has read the canonical companion novels by co-creator Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks and The Final Dossier, has even more interpretive “keys” on their semiotician’s keyring—but still no more definitive answers about which keys go in which narrative door.
That it bears multiple cogent readings is one of the great benefits to a text of engaging Infinite Mystery. Despite its sometimes sparseness and slow expository space, we are actually getting more story-per-minute in Twin Peaks: The Return than in a typical fast-paced show, because we are getting multiple layers of possibility at once.
This overcomplex delving into a single scene has been meant to elucidate a microcosm of the larger structure of Twin Peaks: The Return (whose structure really begins in the final episode of S2 from 1991). Astounding, confusing, captivating loops keep being opened on every level of abstraction at once. For example, throughout The Return we have lots of subtle evidence that we are not being shown scenes in chronological order. Piecing them back into their proper narrative order is a mystery the show leaves us to solve, a mystery that touches the semantic, ontological, and meta levels all at once. There is a kind of dazzlement of the mind at how much it is asked to keep track of and speculate upon, how many discontinuities it is meant to fit into a coherent theory. Twin Peaks is a text bubbling with all these questions at the same time as it keeps giving nourishing breadcrumbs of plot exposition, of development based on what we knew before. It’s like a motherfucking frothing cauldron of mystery.
Gravity’s Rainbow partakes of the actual mood of mystery only when it cares to. Stylistically, it is less coherent (even though Twin Peaks: The Return has a kind of fascinating stylistic incoherency as well, but within a smaller range); Gravity’s Rainbow is too busy hopping from being adventure story to Busby Berkeley musical to intense hardcore pornography to spy thriller to physics textbook. Nevertheless, the same effervescent flow of mysteries on all levels, many of which are left open for the reader to consider or fill in, and which is underwritten by the same payout of just enough plot continuity, just enough character development (quite a damn lot of these, come to think of it), to engender that same delightful dazzlement as the mind apprehends the many-faceted discoball of mystery being spun before it.
Semantic gaps are opened, time and again, when Pynchon doesn’t specify what the subject pronoun of a sentence refers to. He does this frequently--sometimes the reader gets this answer later (or has to remember it from earlier), and sometimes not. Sometimes there are multiple candidates for the “she” or “it” at the head of a certain sentence. Different readings, different ontologies within the text, may then coalesce as a result.
Many important elements of the book are named but never shown. What, for example, is the Kirghiz Light, that mystical strange attractor at the end of Tchitcherene’s Central Asian flashback? The readers are, in fact, asked rather than told.
Ontological mysteries abound as we are often left wondering, sincerely inquiring, “did that really just happen?”, when events take a turn for the fantastical, or the impossibly disgusting.
Meta mysteries are opened too. When am I hearing the speculations of the author? When is Pynchon writing about writing the book? How many narrators or points of view are there? Whose dream am I inside of now? Whose fantasy is Pirate Prentice experiencing in this paragraph, or is this “really happening”? I will quote the YouTuber TheBookchemist, who summarizes this aspect of G.R. very well:
“Sometimes it gets a bit difficult to understand what’s going on because maybe you are reading a section about a dream a character is having on behalf of another character, and that can be very confusing, and sometimes you are reading a scene with two characters and you get a flashback on how these characters met for the first time, and at a certain point it becomes difficult to understand if you are in the world of the novel’s present or the past. And I occasionally had to reread a section or paragraph 4-5 times, just to understand who was thinking or saying a certain thing. But that’s part of the fun of the novel: the challenging nature of it is, if you find these types of small investigations--understanding who’s saying something and who’s thinking another--if you find that fun, if you can put your investigator’s cap on, you are going to have a hell of a great time.”
My favorite Infinite Mystery in Gravity’s Rainbow is the mystery of What Happens to Tyrone Slothrop. Our hero, in whom we’ve invested so much, whom we’ve followed up and down the levels from external adventures to paranoid speculations to haunted rememberings to hallucinatory experiences to sexual fantasies, this hero eventually just...dissipates. His fate is not told to us, his very continued existence is left up for debate, as if he just scattered bodily among the pages of the book, his ashes blown by narrative winds stronger than his being.
Slothrop’s ending is, in fact, oddly analogous to the 1991 cliffhanger ending of Twin Peaks Season 2 (which, let’s not forget, was, along with Fire Walk With Me, the “finished” text of Twin Peaks for some 25 years)--there, too, we are left with the abiding question, what has happened to our hero? His being may well have disintegrated; we don’t know.
The disintegration of Slothrop leaves behind an eddy in the mind of the reader. A current is set up that keeps flowing on after Slothrop is out of sight, and after the book is set down. It is ontological mystery bordering on meta mystery, as we wonder whether Slothrop perhaps stepped off the page into our own level of reality.
This latter question is raised explicitly in the finale of Twin Peaks: The Return. Those with fan trivia knowledge know that the actress playing the owner of the Palmer house in Part 18 is, in real life, the owner of the Palmer house location and actually lives there. Given the other mysterious discontinuities we’ve witnessed in that Part, is it possible our protagonist Agent Cooper (or is it Richard?) has woken up one level closer to the viewers’ layer of reality?
Without going into any more specifics, suffice it to say that the endings of both works leave the audience wondering WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Not only “what happened?” as in, there was a resolution we were not shown, but also “what happened?” as in, what took place even in the episodes I WAS shown? This is the beautiful achievement of Infinite Mystery.
THE PART WHERE WE DO GO AHEAD AND MAKE THE CORNY POINT THAT ART IMITATES LIFE
I will not deny that these deliberate dissatisfactions are explicitly set up by the authors to mirror, and comment upon, the dissatisfaction and irresolution in our own lives. The postmodern work no doubt references the postmodern experience. The so-called “technological age,” which of course has only intensified but was already in full swing in the 1970s when Gravity’s Rainbow came out, is an age of fragmentation, meaninglessness, and solipsism, despite its ostensible connectivity. We all feel this in our souls. It’s a truth.
But, let me suggest that the relationship of these fictions’ irresolutions to our own real-world emptinesses is neither one of Dour Judgmental Comment nor of mere clever identification. Rather, it is one of satisfying resonance. It gives pleasure, not to say relief, to see the subjective experience of the fragmented modern life well-rendered in fiction. This rendering is best, is subtlest, when it works on multiple levels at once, just as we too feel our own fragmented life-narratives are open-ended on many levels of meaning at once as well.
Thus, the argument for even cynical postmodern comment as, in fact, an especially abstract aesthetic tool toward that same old, perhaps oldest, goal of artistic endeavor: to give enjoyment to the audience.
“Hey Justin, wait a minute, isn’t this just yet another route to the old ‘Beauty is Truth, and Truth, Beauty’ argument?”
Well, yes, I suppose it is, but you’ll have to forgive me as I’ve only just realized that myself. But hopefully we all enjoyed the ride to get there.
PERPENDICULAR AND ORTHOGONAL FANBOYING: THE MERITS OF MAXIMALISM IN GENERAL, AND THE JOYS OF PARANOID FICTION
Some of the merits of these two fantastic pieces do not link neatly with the concept of Infinite Mystery. While I’m on the record, I just want to take the opportunity to mention two more things I love, which apply to both of these pieces.
The first is the virtue of maximalism. Both of these works take place on, and require, a grand scale. The Return comprises 18 spacious, sometimes even slow and leisurely, hours of storytelling. Gravity’s Rainbow clocks in between 700 and 900 pages depending on the edition. I think that the merits of the grand canvas are often overlooked. Some ideas take a long time to say, sure. But not just that. Some atmospheres take a long time to cultivate. Some concepts take a long time, not just to state, but to instantiate. Some feelings only manifest when many combinatory layers have been put together, and assembling these layers takes TIME AND SPACE. The heady combination of exhaustion, perplexity, and paranoia that plagues the reader by the end of Gravity’s Rainbow is a result of the amount of time we have spent “swimming” in Pynchon’s headspace by the end—the effect could hardly be achieved in a 300-page novel, even if the story could be told in that frame.
I’m praising here not just a maximalism of the scale/length of the work, but also the maximalism of throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the work, the sense that the work is overflowing with more content than it can handle. Other favorite maximalist artists, whose work otherwise bears no resemblance to that of Lynch or Pynchon, would include the likes of French composer Olivier Messiaen, who not only wrote at times works of massive duration and for huge forces, but who seemingly always crammed as many colors, effects, and forms into a single piece as he could. Other favorite maxed-out, overflowing works would include Moby-Dick and Song of Myself, both of which delight me to no end.
Aside from their maximalism, these two works both partake of what one might identify as a paranoid style. In Twin Peaks, paranoia as a structuring element is pitched more to the fore in the two conspiracy-laden novels of Mark Frost, The Secret History of Twin Peaks and The Final Dossier, than in the TV series. The idea of people caught in systems they can’t control, and also people unsure whether to impute meaning to seeming coincidences, the question whether disparate events puzzle together into an illicit history of the world, link Frost’s two books very strongly with Gravity’s Rainbow, and I for one find it a goddamn delight.
Paranoid & conspiracy fiction is easy enough to come by, but too often it simply advances its own chosen conspiracy (see The Da Vinci Code). The work which, instead, conjures a dimly-perceived conspiratorial web, suggests shadowy entities without identifying them, gives ample cause for fear and paranoia without ever definitively affirming it as correct--such a work is much more congruent with our actual experience of the world-systems in which we find ourselves embedded, which are complicated and which stretch out beyond our knowledge and comprehension. Here again, that satisfying resonance relationship is set up between our life-experience and the fiction.
When a character can talk themself into a paranoid conspiracy theory, but we as the reader know that their suspicion is at least plausible without being sure that it’s correct, that is the sweet spot of paranoid fiction. The mood of paranoia (as distinguished from the device of paranoia) certainly benefits from the aforementioned grand canvas, in the case of Gravity’s Rainbow. Slothrop’s paranoia eventually becomes contagious to the reader by virtue of length of exposure to it (forgive me for using infectious disease metaphors in the age of COVID). For another example of paranoid fiction, of vastly different style but which I greatly enjoy (with some caveats), see Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
ADDENDUM 9/10/2022: A couple years after publishing this essay, I have come across the fantastic YouTube video review "Gravity's Rainbow: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Rocket" by the channel Mountains of Books. This creator finds in GR a theme I had perceived only dimly, namely that the executors of the conspiracy in GR, Pynchon’s “They,” are not merely mundane human conspirators but are presented as supernatural entities making an incursion into our dimension, with designs of engineering human history and maximizing human misery. This interpretation certainly opens a whole new layer of relation to the Twin Peaks mythos, wherein the tragic events of Laura Palmer’s life are portrayed as the exploits of supernatural/transdimensional entities who feed on human “garmonbozia” (an in-universe term translated as “Pain and Sorrow.”) Whereas I attributed the “paranoid” style in Twin Peaks more to the contributions of co-creator Mark Frost, in fact the garmonbozia element is equally attributable to the Lynch side of the project. In both GR and TP, one is inclined to view the supernatural entities that vampirize human suffering as being rather more symbolic-allegorical than merely high concept fictional conceits. If Pynchon’s “They” are homologous to the malign entities of TP, this opens other credible resonances and crossovers. For example, for Pynchon’s “Them,” the V-2 rocket is portrayed as a talisman of control, a sort of strange attractor in human history that draws humans toward death and annihilation. The atomic bomb, that other technological white whale of magnificent destruction, is glimpsed only briefly in GR and not understood by the characters who read about it, yet the reader is given to understand that these are twin outcomes of Their control of the currents of history. The atom bomb is also a key symbol in Twin Peaks: The Return and it is also portrayed there (in the astounding Part 8) as a major site of incursion into our world by the garmonbozia-eating entities. Nevertheless, within TP these entities are primarily shown operating at the level of the human individual and family, rather than at the societal-historical scale. It could be argued that GR and TP examine these spirits of pain and sorrow on two different levels of operation: GR their vast effects on the currents of history, and TP the penetration of those historical tendrils of controlling evil into the lives of the unremarkable peacetime middle class. I recommend two pieces of media to readers interested in these threads of thought, first, the aforementioned Gravity's Rainbow: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Rocket by Mountains of Books, and, second, the excellent episode of the podcast Weird Studies by Phil Ford and J.F. Martel, Garmonbozia, which considers Lynch’s substantiated human Pain and Sorrow (which, in-universe, has the appearance of creamed corn!) as a force in history and as a resonance with the works of other artists such as Philip K. Dick. [End of 2022 addendum]
YOU THINK ABOUT THAT, TAMMY.
Earlier, I said not all artworks are narratives. Indeed not. Unanswered mysteries are still available as an aesthetic “flavor” to artists working in non-narrative forms and media. It is possible, as with an abstract or surreal painting, to raise a set of unanswerables instantaneously. The aesthetic beauty given thereby is the same, at least in kind, to that ascribed here to narrative mysteries. I again advocate that these unanswerables be viewed as a source of aesthetic beauty in themselves, rather than as merely (that favorite word of academics) Problems.
Finally, one might ask about a hovering meta-mystery plaguing this essay: why has this been posted on a blog which is ostensibly about classical music and academia? My answer is that, in my mind, the topics talked about here have deep connections to themes I’ve touched elsewhere in this blog, and that, although the connections may not be overt, the ideas here have generated as much in the hours I’ve spent studying & discussing & making music as they have in the leisure hours spent watching shows and reading novels. To put it another way: when you spend a substantial portion of your week compulsorily considering Theories of Art, those same considerations also end up bearing on novels and TV shows you consume.
I have attempted here a taxonomy of possible mysteries, while arguing for their beauty, and elucidating their presence in two major artworks of the last 50 years. I had to write this because these ideas were obsessing me. If you read the entire 8000-word puff piece, I salute & thank you.