As autumn fully settles, and the trees just outside of my window exhale the last of their green, I find myself drifting towards the nostalgic haze of Angelo Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” compositions. It’s akin to a seasonal migration of sound: I wake to a slow, spectral hum, and I can practically feel the Washington fog curling around me, a certain blueness underlying cascades of red and orange.
I turn the volume up on “The Bookhouse Boys,” hoping it might drown out the quiet fear that I’ll never again feel summer’s carefree breeze. It works, even if only for a moment, because there I am, immersed in a jazz-noir dream tiptoeing through a dim morning. Though the show, “Twin Peaks” is set in the early months of spring, its haunting score evokes the feeling of a season where bloom and decay coexist — a fragile harmony where mystery dews the leaves.
That’s the peculiar magic of film scores: They pull us into these worlds that are only half ours.
The music inhabits us, and suddenly our longing makes us lovers, and our grief makes us poets. We exist beside ghosts of ourselves in an achingly familiar world where desire lingers just out of our touch. Through this act of listening, we perform a type of emotional mimicry — not escapism, but a rehearsal of feeling.
We may not consciously notice the rising strings or the minor-key motif, but they prompt us to feel before we can fully understand what we are seeing.
Badalamenti’s score, “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” is filled with melancholy and subtle harmonic shifts that mirror her enigmatic duality. The lingering pauses and shimmering strings suspend time and cast us as mourners of her absence. “Audrey’s Dance” is a mischievous counterpart to Laura’s haunting melody: A playful, jazzy motif that twirls through the air with sly, syncopated energy, perfectly capturing Audrey’s vivacity in contrast to Laura’s haunting stillness.
Listening to these scores, our heartbeats echo the rhythms of their tension and surrender. We trace the emotional arcs of the narrative, feeling Laura’s sorrow and Audrey’s restlessness, and in that tracing we uncover our own hidden contradictions of grief and desire beneath the music’s achingly familiar hum.
In this light, Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” compositions are more than accompaniment. They are mediums through which we project ourselves. Perhaps that is why, as the seasons turn, we return to these scores again and again: They teach us that feeling itself is the place where the fleeting endures.
Cordelia Aguilar is a Weinberg sophomore and author of “Earworm.” She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
