The world of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks suggests that there are vast mysteries hiding just behind the mundane. Characters harbor unspeakable secrets; entire universes exist beneath and within our own, suggesting forlorn cosmic forces engaged in eternal combat. In the stunning third season playing out on Showtime right now, Lynch has vastly broadened the scope of that mundanity—we have settings throughout the U.S. now—and the stakes of that four-dimensional mystery. The corpse of Laura Palmer, washed up by a lake in the premiere a quarter-century ago, was just the tip of the iceberg. We now swim in the vast oceans of both the subconscious mind and truths that exist outside of time and space.
So, too, does onetime Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who after his failed 2012 attempt to rile the Tea Party enough for an upset of incumbent Barack Obama, has taken to the commentariat. You will recall, perhaps, the brief moment during which he was considered a front-runner in 2012 for a party that eventually proved itself so morally and intellectually bankrupt that it would default to Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. Cain’s presidential ambitions ended in a plague of sexual misconduct allegations, all of which he denied. Now, like some spectral ghost wandering between the Red Room and our world, passing through electrical outlets to appear on Fox & Friends, he is merely a distributor of opinions, inhabiting our TV sets and computers like Killer Bob appearing in the mirror.
It is only appropriate, then, that he has taken to using images from the third season of Twin Peaks on Twitter, often for reasons that defy conventional logic.
Here he appears to be equating David Lynch himself with beauty:
Now he has placed a trans television character in the role of a real-life trans woman:
Frazzled old hippie takes the place of, um, libertarian ideologue?
This seems pretty straightforward:
Perhaps here Al Gore reminds him of Bobby, whose feelings for the long-deceased Laura Palmer have begun to thaw, much like the ice caps:
Mid-surgery, McCain found himself in the Red Room, where he spoke with the eerie, backward-talking ghost of Gerald Ford:
This episode is the show’s masterpiece thus far, and it inspired Cain:
In his oldest Lynch tweet, Cain goes for a deep cut:
We look forward to Cain’s 2024 presidential campaign slogan: “Gotta light?-er Vision Of Hard-Right Republican Economics,” as well as his rousing, whistle-stop fight song, “Threnody To The Victims of Hiroshima.” Hit it!
Update: Death And Taxes has an interview with the guy who runs Cain’s website, who claims responsibility for all the Peaks images. But perhaps this too is just a Lynchian feint; the social media directors are not what they seem.