| Summary: | In choosing to make of Twin Peaks — an imaginary small town perfectly representative of rural America — the theater of extraordinary events, Lynch inscribes his series in the lineage of the fable: a genre that makes the everyday into a place where the marvelous appears. Otherwise, the analysis quickly reveals that the TV series simultaneously borrows its formal structures, its aesthetic, and its themes from the fairy tale genre. As such, the vocation of Twin Peaks is to say something about the real world, by the very means of its fantastic elements. By transposing its characters into a modern diegetic universe — in an unidentifiable temporality — Lynch gives the series the chance to work on representations of contemporary America, to participate in an American mythology. Like the traditional forms of the fable, Twin Peaks should incarnate a collective unconscious. However, it seems that after the political philosophy of Marx and the psychoanalytical science of Freud, the fabulous story — too conscious of its processes and its structures — is no longer able to perform its function: all attempts to establish symbolic relations between it and the world seem doomed to fail, because they are aware of their processes. The meanings revealed under too-harsh light exhaust themselves and become, necessarily, parodic. The modern fable disenchants itself. Why, then, does Lynch still prefer the fabulous story, even if it fails to reveal something about the world? In the lineage of the critics of stories — who denounce their incapacity to account for the complexity of the real — Lynch does not seek to bring readability to the real. But far from disqualifying the story, he disqualifies the world, and offers the viewer, through the series, a purely poetic experience, separate from reality.
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