Bernie Sanders and Twin Peaks

It's all on them

PART ONE: ABOUT THE GUY WRITING THIS

Three things about me: I loved Twin Peaks so much on my first watch that I quit Law School and started to study Film. For years I was bullied in school for being “kinda effeminate”. Bernie Sanders got me into US politics. Oh, and I’m Brazilian. So, four things.

I live here. It’s actually very nice.

The year was 2015 and Bernie Sanders had just announced his presidential run. Before that, my interactions with American politics ocurred primarily through Michael Moore documentaries, plus Inside Job (2010) and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). I knew next to nothing about the United States besides the stereotypes (gun violence, obesity, people can’t correctly point countries on a map, etc.) and what I could understand after watching the movies listed above. But something about Bernie’s announcement changed things. I was 20 years old and starting my leftist journey, so to speak, and what started as a spark of excitement in watching a self-proclaimed democratic socialist starting a presidential campaign in the US slowly developed to following the 2016 Democratic primaries, getting utterly frustrated by the process and the results, ignoring the presidential election and inevitably consuming news about what dumbass evil shit Trump was up to at any given moment.

I honestly don’t know why, today, my sporadic interest in American elections, socioeconomic problems and political actors grew in such a manner that it’s like I am two people now. I have my multifaceted life happening around me and in my mind as usual. A job, a routine, loved ones, hobbies, ambitions, plans. And a whole other part of my sense of self exists in English, discussing about US politics online and reading about it. It’s an interest that I don’t share with anyone I’m close to, and the most amazing discovery I’ve had in that department was recently finding the Ettingermentum substack and chat, where I could simultaneously learn, laugh and express myself in regards to my political views specifically about US matters. Sometimes I think I’m too invested in this subject for my own good, and my girlfriend tells me "You’ve been caught by the cultural colonization power of the United States”. I disagree but sometimes the facts are against me.

PART TWO: THE FIGHT AGAINST THE SHADOWS

While I was writing the article I realized that people have to know both Bernie Sanders and Twin Peaks in order to understand some of this, and since I literally don’t have an audience, this is very niche from the get go. I don’t think I’m writing just for myself, so this is the briefest summary possible:

Twin Peaks is a TV show aired by ABC in 1990-91 and by Showtime in 2017, centered about the murder of a teenage girl named Laura Palmer and the subsequent FBI investigation. The show was created by movie director David Lynch and television writer Mark Frost, and it was a mix of procedural drama, surrealist horror and quirky comedy. The show was wildly different than what TV at the time would air, both in structure and cinematography. The result was a cultural phenomenon that changed TV forever.

Much like Twin Peaks, I consider Bernie way ahead of his time, revolutionary, influential and depressingly hampered in the second season by the suits in charge. In the first season (1990 for Twin Peaks, 2016 for Bernie), things happened in a rather smooth fashion at first. People loved it, word-of-mouth carried the ratings and an unstoppable phenomenon both scaried and excited the executives. The show, and Bernie, had some sort of magnetism that I attribute to two things: Their focus on human values and a lingering sense of fight against unfairness, the evils in the world and forces that work in the shadow. Both Bernie and Twin Peaks resonated by challenging the status quo and engaging their audience in unique ways.

In the TV Show, you’d frequently get emotional by the purity of heart displayed by Agent Cooper while trying to uncover hidden truths about the murder of Laura Palmer and the town of Twin Peaks. He’s quirky, honest, intelligent, and, most importantly, flawed. And in politics, from my experience in Brazil at least, and following US elections since 2015, the more squeaky-clean and vague you are, the more people actually hate you. And I emphasize the word hate. You don’t actually need to be an asshole or anything like that, but in this late-capitalist fucked up reality in which people have either 2-3 jobs or 0 job, have limited access to public resources and can’t take the temperature increases anymore, no one wants to listen to a ‘status quo is just fine, we just need to do some adjustments’ type of person. People are frustrated but being frustrated isn’t a character trait or something inherent to human existence. They want to believe that in their lifetime things will get better, and they know that life is beautiful. Agent Cooper knows that, and Bernie’s whole platform is about what we need to do to combat the evils of the world and achieve actual improvements.

Image unrelated to the article.

By the end of season one, ABC executives wanted the central mystery of Twin Peaks to be solved. They had enough and wanted to move on to other things, and Bernie’s 2016 campaign had a similar obstacle. As much as people loved it and were very engaged by his message, the establishment had enough of him. For a while they entertained his audience with a resemblance of support and respect but the overall feeling was that he overstayed his welcome. ABC wanted to return to the safe soap operas and procedural dramas, and the DNC wanted Hillary Clinton.

In season two, everything was so much more depressing. ABC executives straight up gave David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks creators, no other choice than to end the mystery and the magic of the show. And in 2020, 19 years after Twin Peaks’ heartbreaking cancellation, James Clyburn ended the dream of a Bernie Sanders presidency by making sure the soap operas and procedural dramas ended up being the main show again.

Yeah, it sucked.

PART THREE: THE 2024 ELECTION AND THE NEXT BERNIE

In 2017, Showtime comissioned another season of Twin Peaks giving full control to David Lynch and Mark Frost. The network knew about the cult classic status of the show throughout the decades and realized that the best way to conduct the new series was by making sure its core fundamentals remained intact: sincereness and inventiveness. The original Twin Peaks was about the dichotomy between the purity of Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper versus the evils that exist in the world. The new Twin Peaks, although amazing, was rather pessimistic, but that’s the way things seem to naturally evolve. Bernie can’t run for president again, but it is imperative that his message remains intact and, given the results of the 2024 election, that the messenger is sincere about it.

Trump won mainly because Biden is awful, because voters saw the former as a lesser evil, as something they’ve already experienced and they thought that in hindsight it wasn’t that bad, and because he has a ‘he tells it like it is’ vibe while Kamala reeked of centrist weak sauce. Bluntness and apparent sincereness goes a lot of ways and nostalgia glasses are a bitch, making whatever diabolical shit Trump and the Republicans were doing like the Muslim ban, saying the the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were ‘very nice people’, nominating three right-wing religious weirdos to the Supreme Court (and the SCOTUS decisions that followed) are now just flimsy memories of a supposedly more prosperous time. But like in Twin Peaks, and as cliché as it sounds, the thrust of the story is the inevitable realization that even with pure evil in front of you there is still room for a win. And victory is achieved by being honest about what the evil is, how to combat it and why change would improve the lives of everyone. Dialectical materialism is maybe the only thing that matters. It’s what wins elections and, in one way or another, is embedded in people’s brains. That’s why progressive ideas and pieces of legislation have high approval but sometimes people get scared by conservative rhethoric, hence the important of a honest and trustworthy messenger. Do America have one right now?

Twin Peaks is over, Bernie won’t run for president again. You guys have AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, and some other center-left politicians. Television isn’t nowhere near what it was in 1991 when Twin Peaks’ original run ended, but the ideas remained strong. And the show paved the way for honest, blunt, unrestrained and unapologetic TV, breaking the shackles of rigid formats that came before. Bernie paved the way for the democratic socialist platform and now some of his ideas aren’t fringe anymore, people are angry at the establishment and there’s plenty of room for someone to capitalize on the congruence between so-called “leftist views” and what people are frustrated about.

Both Twin Peaks and Bernie Sanders made me an ‘radical empathetic’ in realizing that there’s more to life than my little problems. There’s plenty of suffering in the world, there’s people with less opportunities and my energy should be directed to simultaneously live my life in the smoothest and fulfilling way possible, learning about all the fucked up shit that is happening in the world and thinking about how can I do just a little something to improve things. Both Bernie and Agent Cooper would agree with me, I think.