Post #358766 by cgeorgia on Sat, Feb 2, 2008 9:57 PM

So I was thinking about twin peaks today and I was reading about on the web a bit. I haven’t seen the show in a very long time but when I watched it many years ago I always found the image of the stoplight to be one of the most captivating symbols of the series. It seems to have garnered its fair share of attention on the web and I thought I might offer up my interpretation. I’ll begin by noting that before David Lynch ever committed a lone stoplight to celluloid the idea intrigued and unsettled me for reasons I could hardly explain. There was just something about the notion of a stoplight continuing to work when nobody was around that always generated some sort of philosophical pause; perhaps something along the lines of if a tree falls in the forest but no one is around to hear it…. Indeed, I always felt Lynch tapped into that aspect of the lone stoplight quite brilliantly to make his point. Now remember I haven’t seen the show in years, but I remember distinctly that every time someone would talk about how Laura tried to signal for help only to be ignored- they would show the stoplight. That is why the image is so potent in the series- the stoplight was, in a sense, Laura Palmer. It always went a little farther for me though. The stoplight seems to capture the human condition in some essential way. Things- functioning properly- letting off signals into empty night. It’s a lonely and unsettling image- it really served its symbolic role well. Let me know if you agree or disagree w/ this theory….
[email protected]