It’s here, y’all! The two-year anniversary of So Desensitized, a project started out of equal parts genuine passion for horror and critical writing, and spite over rejection. We’ve come a long way. I’ve given y’all my thoughts, feelings, and analyses on various pieces of horror media twice a month for two years at this point, sometimes more than that for holidays, and eight times a month in October. That’s not too shabby for also being in high school that whole time and having a part-time job for the last six of those months. So today, as voted on by all who participated in the bracket on my Instagram a little while ago, I am finally writing about my favorite thing of all time: David Lynch’s masterpiece Twin Peaks! But that’s not all! I’m writing about Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls as influenced and inspired by Twin Peaks, since the final vote was a tie! So happy reading, stay spooky, go to your local library, and thank you for two great years! 🦉🌲🪵☀️🔪🩸

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear before we get on with this: every single TV show after Twin Peaks has been influenced by Twin Peaks, whether they know it or not. There are  some more obvious influences - The X-Files, Yellowjackets, and Stranger Things, to name a few - but I am not exaggerating when I say that Twin Peaks fundamentally changed the way TV worked forever. It did things no one knew could be done on television, showing everybody around the world the true extent of what TV could do and portray. Every TV show is influenced by Twin Peaks in the same way that every slasher movie is influenced by Psycho, which is to say, simply by nature of being. But some shows are more direct tributes than others. Which brings us to Alex Hirch’s animated children’s masterpiece Gravity Falls.

To list all of the parallels between Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls here would be impossible and also take up the entire post, so I’ll just leave a few here. First, and possibly most obvious, each show is set in a small town in the Pacific Northwest plagued by unexplainable strangeness. Twin Peaks, Washington, and Gravity Falls, Oregon, respectively. Second, the owls. Owls are a sort of running joke in Gravity Falls - seasoned viewers will have fond memories of the Owl Trowel™ advertisement. In Twin Peaks, however, owls are dangerous servants of evil. “The owls are not what they seem” is a phrase first introduced in Season Two, and later owls are shown to be animals that are easily possessed by the evil spirit BOB, making their presence inherently evil. The owls are one of the most iconic images of Twin Peaks, and their pointed inclusion in Gravity Falls is a clear acknowledgement of, essentially, the source material. But beyond surface level homages such as mystical-seeming waterfalls and a defunct hotel (in the form of the Mystery Shack) in Gravity Falls taking the symbolic place of the Great Northern of Twin Peaks, the soul of Twin Peaks in Gravity Falls runs much deeper than the somewhat obvious.

What David Lynch did best, and what Twin Peaks is known for, is doppelgangers. The idea of someone who looks exactly like you but is not you is pervasive throughout the show, from Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson as cousin lookalikes (both played by the inimitable Sheryl Lee), to the actual evil doppelgangers that reside in the Black Lodge and can annihilate the soul of their double to truly devastating effect. The Lynchian blond-brunette doubling is a very well-known theme that is explored in just about all of his work, as well as the idea of identity as tied to appearance and behavior as indicators of self. Alex Hirsch plays into this in Gravity Falls with recurring identical twins. Twins are incredibly important to the canon and lore of Gravity Falls, with the weight that having another person who looks a lot like you but is very different from you in terms of personality featuring heavily throughout the story with Dipper, Mabel, Stan, and Ford. Now, some of this does stem from Alex Hirsch being a twin himself, but also fits very well with the Twin Peaks and doppelganger influence/homage. 

In each pairing, there is a sense of there being a “better” twin - Dipper and Ford, respectively - that overshadows the others life accomplishments by being closer to the subjective ‘ideal’ of personhood. Dipper and Ford are both traditionally smarter and more serious than Mabel and Stan, which means they often leave them to be underestimated and underappreciated in who they are. This leaves all four twins vulnerable in certain ways that greatly impact the story, because believing yourself to be better somehow than somebody else you are very similar to is also very damaging to yourself, as well as the other person. Twin Peaks also plays with the idea of a ‘better’ self, with, more obviously the good and evil selves portrayed by the Black and White Lodges, but also with Laura Palmer as a perfect daughter of the town, and the weight of her lineage being placed on her cousin Maddy Ferguson when she comes to town for the funeral. In both Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls, there are better and worse versions of almost everything. Doppelgangers everywhere, stealing credibility from the real one - whoever that is. And in both cases, this kind of doubling is also reminiscent of small town America.

Both Twin Peaks, Washington, and Gravity Falls, Oregon, and picturesque American towns. They have quaint little diners and beautiful forests and just enough tourist-y places to keep the economy going. But they are both absolutely haunted by evil and strangeness. Gravity Falls is the weirdness center of America. Twin Peaks literally has a portal to Hell in it and is also home to the personification of evil and male violence. They are both so very close to being perfectly nice small towns, except for all the ancient evil. But then, isn’t that how America has always been?

For all decades of American history, there are two Americas. There is the America experienced by rich slaveowners and the America experienced by the slaves. The America that won World War Two and the America that treated its returning Black soldiers like less than dirt. The America that invented the suburb, and the America that lived in poverty mere miles away from the cookie-cutter homes just outside of the floundering inner city. The towns of Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls are exemplary of the two Americas that exist within the American Dream. Twin Peaks is a lovely little logging town with fantastic trees and a sweet little diner, and also incredibly high rates of sexual and domestic violence, drug trafficking, and prostitution. The same men who run that great old hotel also run a brothel just over the border. Gravity Falls is a little tourist trap town on the way to everything else, and used to be so besieged by monsters that a whole society was created to make people forget the unexplainable things they saw and continue living the illusion of a nice, normal town. 

Both Gravity Falls and Twin Peaks have secret societies that deal with this. In Gravity Falls it’s the Society of the Blind Eye, and in Twin Peaks, it’s the Bookhouse Boys. These organizations were each created with the intent of taking care of things such that people never notice them. There’s danger in these old woods, and it would sort of be better for the town if people just…didn’t have to know. It’s not really for them to know. Never Mind All That, as Mayor Tyler Cutebiker of Gravity Falls would say. This, again, is distinctly exemplary of America.

Small towns have always been good metaphors for America as a whole (would you believe me if I told you Twin Peaks invented that, too?), because it is very easy to see them as nice and quaint, when, in reality, they are hiding some kind of secret. America covers itself up, just like the Society of the Blind Eye makes people forget what kind of town they live in. The same way the Bookhouse Boys take care of it before you even notice it’s there. As twins and doppelgangers run amok in Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls, they create worlds where no one knows who is who and what is what. A doppelganger is a dangerous thing, and America is its own doppelganger. There is no good America and bad America, just like there is no good Twin Peaks or bad Gravity Falls. There are just Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls. There is just America, in all its dichotomy. Sheriff Truman doesn’t know quite what to do with the evil in his town, just like America doesn’t know what to do with the evil in itself. The good and the bad exist within and next to each other. The Black Lodge and the White Lodge are the same place, and to ignore one for the other is possibly the most dangerous thing one can do.

At this point, I feel it necessary, as it always is when discussing Twin Peaks in any capacity, to bring up Laura Palmer. She is the most important character, far and away. She is who Twin Peaks is about, on just about every level. She, too, is America, a perfect smiling Homecoming Queen hiding a life of pain, violence, and suffering at the hands of her father and the other men around her. While it would be easy to say that there is no Laura Palmer in Gravity Falls, as it is a show for children, and a character even remotely like Laura Palmer would be nearly impossible to get past strict Disney guidelines, I am here to argue that Laura Palmer exists within Stan Pines. Walk with me here.

Laura Palmer makes the ultimate sacrifice. She believes that if she lets herself die by BOB’s hands (more on him later), she will prevent him from ever hurting anyone else again. Stan sacrifices his own memory, his whole mind, his whole life, to prevent Bill Cipher from taking over Gravity Falls, and, eventually, the world. Stan believes, because of his upbringing, that he can only look out for himself, and in the end, sacrifices himself to save others. Laura, on the other hand, has been made for other people since she was very little, and uses her final piece of self-sacrifice as an act of self-preservation, making sure, in her final moments, that she gets to the White Lodge, and to the peace life never afforded her. While their traumas are, of course, very different, and I do not mean at all to compare Stan’s experiences to Laura’s suffering, their ultimate ends are each very similar, and borne of similar attitudes towards the world and the people around them. Their demons are also similar, each coming from family connection. BOB comes to Laura from Leland, and Bill comes to Stan from Ford. They are societal damage personified, and foisted onto those their original vessel cares about the most, forcing Leland and Ford each to lose a member of their family to what can only be called their own fault.

Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls are, in essence, different versions of the same place, with the same people. It would be a gross oversimplification to call Gravity Falls Twin Peaks for kids, but it was clearly made by a man who knew the beauty and humanity in Lynch’s strangeness and used it to heavily inspire his own beautifully strange and human story of two kids going away for the summer. Gravity Falls summer is a time of fun turned dangerous, a nice and boring town becoming something much weirder and more beautiful than ever expected. Twin Peaks spring is a time of rebirth, of the realization that the town is not what it seems. From owls and Douglas Firs to twins and doppelgangers, from secret societies to a secret President, Twin Peaks and Gravity Falls are forever intertwined. Once you know where to look, Twin Peaks is everywhere in Gravity Falls. The ceiling fans, the owls, the sheriff, the loggers, the diner…I could go on. Gravity Falls serves as a beautiful tribute to the greatest TV show ever made, while still carrying more than its own weight. It is a perfect example of what inspiration should be: a show that is its own thing while paying ample respect to what came before. So while Laura Palmer smiles into eternity, and Dipper and Mabel Pines run around a forest solving supernatural mysteries (shame they’re not in the same state because I do believe they’d get on very well with Dale Cooper), think a little bit about the TV shows you like. I’m willing to bet they’re all, at least a little teeny tiny bit, inspired by Twin Peaks. And think about America, too. The good and the bad. Because it’s all there. And it’s all both wonderful and strange.

Thanks for reading, all, and thanks for sticking with me, whether you’ve been here since day one, or just subscribed recently. I’m glad you’re here. I love both of these shows so much, and I will definitely be revisiting both of them on their own later. Also thank you to my Mom, the wonderful Erin Conwell, for being the last vote and causing this tie because I fear I needed guidelines, since just Twin Peaks or just Gravity Falls would have given me too many options. Thank you all for reading, I hope you enjoyed, and happy reading, stay spooky, and happy two years of So Desensitized! 🦉🌲🪵☀️🔪🩸