Ep. No. 24: The 17th Secret or “A Question and Some Answers”

“I have a question for you. Apologies, it’s a bit of a long one, but I think I’m going to need to unpack it a bit.

Okay. So you love Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie. I want to talk a little bit more about the Eerie, because you so often talk about the Weird. Here is a nutshell quote from Fisher ‘the Eerie is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. There is something where there should be nothing or there is nothing where there should be something’. Now season 3 is riven with eerie absences. First and foremost, or at least the most obvious being Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer’s absenteeism. There are more fundamental absences: absences of story progression and structure, absences of narrative and temporal cohesion. Absences of place. We spend very little time in Twin Peaks as a location, and next to no time in a Twin Peaks that is recognizable to us as fans of the original show.

By venerating Laura, part 8 highlights and helps to foster a yearning for something that is fundamentally lacking. Even the music that underscores the scene in the fireman’s Palace reinforces this View. This lack can also be found in the way the season continuously defers, confounds and obscures its meanings, a quality which finds focus in elements that imply a hidden order, such as the recurrent instances of mysterious, seemingly metaphysically significant numbers.

All this absence generates a feeling that there’s a radical outside to this tale. A place where these structuring elements reside just behind a curtain that the fans attempt to glimpse behind through theories and readings. Perhaps if we are to talk about encounters with the weird in season 3, an incursion of something beyond the edges of the known, we need to talk about the way this vast sense of eerie absence bears down on the story and the characters. On us.

Naturally I have ideas about what this absence is. What this outside is. But this isn’t my podcast.

So what do you make of it?”

–Adam from Diane podcast. You can tweet at him (and the other Dianes) at: @DianePodcast and you should, because they are smarter than us.