1 Behind the Red Curtains

Questions of Authorship

One of the ways Twin Peaks arrived on the television landscape of the early 1990s was under the banner of cocreators and executive producers Mark Frost and David Lynch. Frost was a three-year staff writer for the groundbreaking ensemble police drama Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87) and Lynch was the Academy Award–nominated film director of The Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet (1986). The latter film ignited controversy for its depiction of sadomasochistic sex and violence, but it also ushered Lynch into more mainstream attention and turned a modest profit. Over a decade earlier, his experimental first feature Eraserhead (1977) had endeared him to the Greenwich Village “underground movie” crowd, who gave the film a cult following during the course of its midnight runs at the Cinema Village (from the fall of 1977 to the summer of 1978) and the Waverly Theater, now the IFC Center (from the summer of 1979 to mid-September of 1981) (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 220). This chapter looks at the way inter- and extratextual sources constructed Twin Peaks as a “Lynchian” text notwithstanding the inherently collaborative nature of television authorship. Out of the twenty-nine total, Frost directed one episode and contributed to ten scripts, while Lynch directed five episodes with a hand in three scripts, in addition to the pilot, which he directed and cowrote with Frost (see Appendix).

ABC was able to take advantage of Frost’s reputation in the industry and especially Lynch’s critical acceptance as an auteur. The day the pilot aired, the New York Times ran a publicity story with the ready-made headline “When Blue Velvet Meets Hill Street Blues” (Woodward, “When Blue Velvet” 31). Framed by a discourse on authorship, the reception conditions of Twin Peaks allowed for a reading strategy through which audiences could identify the series as a new television crime drama—both innovative and provocative—with the cultural capital of art house cinema. Entertainment Weekly’s April 6, 1990, cover featured not cast members but Lynch himself, leaning on a canted television set that displayed an extreme close-up of an eyeball, presumably belonging to Laura Palmer. The television set both draws attention to his transmedia authorship and links him to the diegesis of the pilot (recall that when Cooper plays a videotape of Laura and the camcorder zooms in on her face, he sees a clue reflected in an extreme close-up of her eye). At this point, Lynch was more visible than ever, and the headline spoke to the recognizability of his pop surrealist style: “David Lynch Brings His Bizarre Vision to Prime Time: The Year’s Best Show!” The cover story provided a textbook overview of his directorial signatures (see Jerome), while the rest of the issue included four additional articles on the production of the series, along with an “A+” review (see Tucker). Wearing a slightly oversized black suit jacket and white dress shirt, buttoned to the top, with his brown hair coifed into a messy pompadour, Lynch also had a signature look.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, he is a playful illusionist and an audience manipulator associated with “thrilling” sensation, who made use of both cinema and television and worked across both sides of the camera. Not only did he appear in promotional and publicity material such as the Entertainment Weekly cover but he also guest starred on the series as FBI regional bureau chief Gordon Cole (introduced over speaker phone in Episode 4 and in person in Episode 13). Motivated by Gordon’s acute hearing loss, Lynch amplified his voice in his performance of the character such that his manner of speaking—the flat northwestern US accent, halting rhythm, and nasal, almost high-pitched tone—remains as unmistakable as his fashion. Lynch’s image served a similar function to that of Hitchcock, who also donned a particular uniform (white shirt, black suit, and black tie). Creating the “idea” of Hitchcock through his personality and physical appearance, the droll, heavyset host of his named anthology series suggested an overriding authorial presence despite his collaborative involvement in production with inconsistent degrees of authorial control (Kapsis 31–32). If Lynch is an auteur, a title he most certainly deserves, he is also a celebrity-director, and the two roles shaped each other in the production and reception history of Twin Peaks.6

Journalists who interviewed Lynch seemed to relish in the apparent incongruity between the horrific content they had witnessed in his films and the earnest, mild-mannered person they met: a self-identified Eagle Scout from suburban Idaho who claimed not to watch television (Shales C8) and to get ideas over coffee and milkshakes at Bob’s Big Boy (Weinstein N8; Woodward, “Dark Lens” 21; Zoglin, “Like Nothing” 97). He expressed a fascination with industrial spaces such as factories and machine rooms, an admiration for painters Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon, and an indebtedness to the writing of Franz Kafka, but communicates in youthful 1950s slang (“oh boy,” “pretty cool,” and “Holy smokes!” were among the quoted Lynch-isms) (Shales C8). In short, he personified the very tensions that fascinated critics in Blue Velvet—darkness and light, weird and ordinary, hip and square. The executive producer of The Elephant Man, Stuart Cornfeld, once called him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars,” a quote commonly attributed to Mel Brooks, whose company produced the film (Rodley xii), but regardless of its origin, it may as well have been brand Lynch. And the term “Lynchian” was about to become a household adjective, what author David Foster Wallace famously defined as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” (161).

In the months leading up to the pilot, story after story generated buzz by trying to articulate that ineffable Lynchian sensibility as an authorial context for the series. For the Los Angeles Times, Twin Peaks was “[a] serialized murder mystery that is all mood—one moment the height of campiness, the next disturbingly eerie” (Weinstein N8). The New York Times Magazine put Lynch on the cover and compared him to European surrealists Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau, remarking that his “taste in risky, often grotesque material has made him, perhaps, Hollywood’s most revered eccentric, sort of a psychopathic Norman Rockwell” (Woodward, “Dark Lens” 20). Rolling Stone detailed Lynch’s meticulous preparation and handiwork, such as creating BOB’s unholy alter for the United Kingdom home video version of the pilot by assembling found objects on a mound of dirt with candles he brought personally (Pond 51, 53). On the other hand, the author notes how Lynch improvised on the shoot, intuitively seizing upon accidents or problems, such as allowing a broken light to flicker to achieve a certain atmosphere in another scene (electrical flickers, of course, turned into a visual motif in the series) (120). As the Washington Post affirmed, Lynch had made some “spookily mercurial” films and with Twin Peaks was “reinventing the prime-time soap opera” (Shales C1). The day after the pilot aired, Time echoed this growing consensus by comparing the cliffhanger question-cum-marketing catchphrase of the series—“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”—to the one for Dallas (CBS, 1978–91), the prime-time soap opera par excellence: “At worst, Twin Peaks could turn into an aesthete’s version of ‘Who Shot J. R.?’ At best, it will be mesmerizing” (Zoglin, “Like Nothing” 97). Time’s interview with Lynch reinforced an auteurist rationale for the distinctiveness of Twin Peaks, which, the author proselytized, is “like nothing you’ve ever seen in prime time—or on God’s earth. It may be the most hauntingly original work ever done for TV” (96).

An auteurist reading is hardly unthinkable. Fans of Lynch would have noticed connections between Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet through their story lines (mystery, sex crimes, and drug trade in a deceptively wholesome lumber town), characters (quirky detectives played by Kyle MacLachlan), music (a jazz-inflected score by Angelo Badalamenti and songs by synth pop balladeer Julee Cruise), and retro teenage dream worlds. One journalist pointed out that Blue Velvet ends where the title sequence of Twin Peaks begins, on a shot of a robin in a tree (Woodward, “Dark Lens” 43), although the bird is actually a Bewick’s wren. What makes this auteurist reception atypical for a series in the early 1990s is that television “auteurs” were historically understood as writers and executive producers (“showrunners,” in the parlance of twenty-first-century television discourse), whereas directors vary from episode to episode and therefore a single director may not exert a consistent creative force behind a series as a whole (see Abbott; Hallam, “May the Giant”).

Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, Lynch moved around the northwestern US during the early years of his life. The Lynch family first relocated to Sandpoint, Idaho, when he was two months old, then to Spokane, Washington, in 1949, and finally to Boise, Idaho, in 1955 (they spent 1954 in Durham, North Carolina, where Lynch’s father, a research scientist for the US Department of Agriculture, completed his doctorate in forestry at Duke University). It was in Alexandria, Virginia, riding out his disenchanted high-school years, where he fell in love with painting. After aborted attempts to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston and the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Austria, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Lynch’s time in Philadelphia introduced him to making films, including a stop-motion animated short projected onto a sculpted screen called Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967) and, after he left the academy, a short that combined live action with animation called The Alphabet (1968). Filmmaking helped him to realize his desire to create a “painting that would really be able to move” (Rodley 37). A production grant from the newly established American Film Institute (AFI) funded a short called The Grandmother (1970), which led to Lynch’s decisive move to Los Angeles later that year with his first wife, Peggy Lentz, and their daughter Jennifer. There, he started a fellowship at the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory) and from 1971 to 1976 labored intermittently on Eraserhead. Jennifer Lynch would go on to write The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990) (see Chapter 5).

Seven years his junior, Frost was born in 1953 in New York City, grew up in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, and (coincidentally) also learned his craft in Pennsylvania, where he studied acting, directing, and playwriting at Carnegie Mellon University. After cutting his teeth in Hollywood as a television writer on The Six Million Dollar Man (ABC, 1974–78), he joined the writing staff of Hill Street Blues. Frost’s other writing credits include episodes of The Equalizer (CBS, 1985–89) and the occult horror film The Believers (1987), directed by John Schlesinger, but his work on Hill Street Blues built his reputation in the 1980s, earning a Primetime Emmy Award nomination and Writers Guild of America Award for Episode 14 from Season 4, “Grace Under Pressure” (originally aired on February 2, 1984). Two members of his family left their marks on the Twin Peaks universe. Scott Frost, his brother, wrote Episodes 15 and 21, as well as the tie-in novel The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes (1991) and audiobook “Diane . . .”: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper (see Chapter 5). Actor Warren Frost, their late father, played “Doc” Will Hayward.

In 1989, Lynch and Frost founded Lynch/Frost Productions to produce the series. Gary Levine, the vice president for dramatic series development at ABC, said the network wanted “to attract both Lynch devotees and soap opera fans,” explaining that although Lynch’s deliberate pace as a filmmaker was “unsuitable for most commercial broadcasts,” Frost “understands how to work within an extended story with lots of characters” (Woodward, “When Blue Velvet” 31). The press amply covered Lynch’s biography and background in painting, characterizing him as the visual artist who set the tone of Twin Peaks and Frost as the writer with the television knowhow. According to a Newsweek interview, “Lynch thinks like a painter, not like a writer: he never talks about themes and messages; what interests him are textures, moods, contrasts, silences. ‘When you can talk about it,’ Lynch says, ‘you’re not using cinema’” (Ansen 68). The Village Voice practically offered an introduction to mise-en-scène analysis as a prologue to its interview, illustrating how Twin Peaks differed from traditional television in terms of Lynch’s uniquely cinematic style (see Taubin). Yet, in spite of his almost “pure cinema” approach, he admitted that Frost taught him how to organize visual storytelling around eleven-minute dramatic “acts” to accommodate for commercial breaks (the pilot aired with only five breaks, as opposed to the conventional seven) (Woodward, “When ‘Blue Velvet’” 31; Jerome 38, 40).

Between May and December of 1990, the Twin Peaks media blitz continued in full force. Cast members rotated in the guest seat on Late Night with David Letterman and graced the covers of entertainment and lifestyle magazines including Entertainment Weekly, US, Esquire, TV Guide, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Playboy. Frost accompanied Peggy Lipton, Piper Laurie, Dana Ashbrook, Mädchen Amick, Eric DaRe, and Sheryl Lee on the Phil Donahue Show (WNBC, 1985–96) to inform audiences that a second season had been renewed, and the night before its premiere, Kyle MacLachlan hosted Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-present) and poked fun at his Cooper character in an affectionate parody skit. Articles in New York, Newsweek, and Time assessed the popularity and possible future of the series (see Leonard; Leerhsen with White; and Zoglin, “A Sleeper”), while TV Guide asked four different authors to solve the Laura Palmer case (see Elm). Magazines as disparate as Rolling Stone and the National Review profiled Lynch (see Breskin; Sobran), but it was the Time cover story on October 1, 1990, that announced the “Czar of Bizarre” as a newsworthy interview subject (see Corliss). To be sure, 1990 was Lynch’s year: the N. No. N. Gallery in Dallas, Texas, and the Tavelli Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, exhibited his art, and his Southern Gothic road film Wild at Heart won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Twin Peaks was not his only foray outside of painting and cinema. As a photographer, he captured industrial images and created “kits,” or arrangements of labeled animal parts. From 1983 to 1992, he wrote and drew the absurdist comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, which circulated in the L. A. Reader and the L. A. Weekly. In 1988, he directed a creepy, anti-littering public service announcement for the New York Department of Sanitation, a commercial for Yves St. Laurent’s women’s perfume Opium, and four commercials for the Calvin Klein men’s perfume Obsession (Twin Peaks cast members James Marshall, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Heather Graham starred in three). With Badalamenti, he coproduced Cruise’s 1989 album Floating into the Night (Lynch wrote the lyrics for all ten songs). Half of the songs are heard in Twin Peaks, including an instrumental version of the lead single “Falling,” the theme song for the series. On November 10, 1989, he directed a performance piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music titled Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted inspired by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern’s romantic outlaw couple from Wild at Heart, which featured music by Badalamenti and Cruise (Michael J. Anderson, the Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks, played a woodsman). Lynch even directed an alternate music video for Chris Isaak’s hit song “Wicked Game” that Wild at Heart popularized.

More than any of these projects, though, Lynch’s relationship to the art world and art cinema gave Twin Peaks a prestige factor and brought a level of experimentation that places it in the category of “art television,” or “a sort of television comparable to art films,” as defined by film historian Kristin Thompson (108). Following the likes of Michael Mann and Steven Spielberg, Lynch was not the first director to move between film and television on a US network, but he was the first art cinema auteur to do so with commercial success. Building from earlier scholarship on this mode of film practice (see Bordwell), Thompson reminds us that art cinema straddles a middle-ground style and market between the mainstream and the avant-garde, the latter of which usually consists of non-narrative films exhibited in museums, campus environments, and filmmaking cooperatives. Whereas classical narrative adheres to causality, closure, and spaciotemporal continuity, art films loosen that storytelling logic and may altogether violate its clarity. Art cinema emphasizes ambiguity and psychological or quotidian realism. The auteur often makes him- or herself known as a formal element in the art film, suggesting that what the film “says” derives from an artist’s personal vision and expression (Kristin Thompson 110–15). Twin Peaks serves as an exemplary case study for art television, an auteur-driven series with geographically indeterminate settings (the White and Black Lodges, the Red Room), dream states that blur with reality, narrative digressions, episodic and open-ended plotlines, obscure symbolism, and stylistic excesses. Cooper was not the classical, goal-oriented protagonist in his pursuit of Laura’s murderer, but a “protagonist pursuing what threatens to be an ever-receding goal” (133).

Television historian Robert J. Thompson posits a similar argument about Twin Peaks as an example of “Quality TV,” but he situates so-called quality programming within larger changes in television itself. The term “Quality TV” gained currency in popular and industrial discourse by the early 1980s with the debut of Hill Street Blues (12). Rather than speaking to an aesthetic judgment, the term refers more to a generic style of prime-time, hour-long network dramas that lasted up to the 1993–94 season. In addition to Lynch’s artistic pedigree, Twin Peaks fits every criterion of “quality” Thompson outlines: an unconventional style; generic hybridity and revisionism (see Chapter 2); complex writing with character development and narrative continuity from episode to episode; a large ensemble cast; realistic or controversial subject matter (in this case, incest, murder, drugs, and prostitution); an urban, upscale, well-educated demographic; critical acclaim and award attention; and extratextual battles with a profit-minded network and nonappreciative audience that suggest a commitment to art over commerce (13–16). ABC, in particular, had made an investment in edgier, more daring programming since the 1980s in an attempt to rebrand its corporate identity and recoup the losses in network television’s dwindling audience (152–53).

Both Kristin Thompson’s and Robert J. Thompson’s accounts provide important contexts for the historical significance of Twin Peaks. Lynch collaborated with Frost to create a television drama consistent with his signature style and personal vision as an art cinema auteur; they even launched it with a four-million-dollar, two-hour pilot, conceived as a film and shot on location, which the network aired on the ABC Sunday Night Movie (Jerome 40; Lynch and McKenna 273). The subsequent Lynch-directed episodes were crucial anchors for the series: Episode 2 (the introduction of the Red Room); Episode 8 (the two-hour Season 2 premiere, another ABC Sunday Night Movie); Episode 9 (the development of BOB’s role in Laura’s murder); Episode 14 (Leland’s identification as BOB’s human host); and Episode 29 (the Season 2 finale, aired back-to-back with Episode 28 on the ABC Monday Night Movie). Rising television and independent film directors, editors, and cinematographers came on board to direct other episodes, and although they were able to bring their own sensibilities to the series, they were held responsible for maintaining a general fidelity to the blueprint Lynch and Frost established in the pilot (Abbott 179–82). The series was shot on 35mm and edited on film, each episode averaging one million dollars in production cost, but at the time Lynch disapproved of television’s aspect ratio and sound-image quality as compared to cinema (Rodley 175–76). Few censorship regulations hemmed in the writers and directors, and Lynch essentially retained final cut on the pilot (Jerome 42; Rodley 177–78).

Lynch’s film sensibility, however, did not by itself reinvent network television and revolutionize the quality of the medium. Rather, as Robert J. Thompson recounts, he found an initial (if unlikely) compatibility with new directions in the industry that had been in development over the previous decade. What is more, the attribution Lynch received as the auteur behind Twin Peaks served to enhance the cultural value of the series and of television more broadly (see Abbott; Hallam, “May the Giant”). Television of the twenty-first century has seen a generation of film directors working in similar capacities, with a greater public and critical appreciation of television authorship and aesthetics.

The collaborative relationship between Lynch and Frost was not without friction during the first two seasons. After the pilot wrapped and as ABC deliberated about picking up the series, Lynch moved on to shoot Wild at Heart in the summer of 1989, leaving Frost at the helm of the first season once the network ordered the next seven episodes. Frost reportedly grew frustrated with the assumption that Twin Peaks was primarily Lynch’s series, having cowritten the pilot and the first two episodes with him, then assembling a writing staff that included Harley Peyton and Robert Engels (Hughes 107; Lynch and McKenna 256, 260). While Lynch adamantly wanted to defer solving the murder mystery, allowing it to recede to the background as other related story lines came into focus (Rodley 180), Frost preferred more clarity and closure (Hughes 107). Nobody in the cast knew the identity of Laura’s murderer. Cast members started receiving the script with their scenes alone to ensure secrecy around the story (“Secrets”).

ABC finally pressured them to identify who killed Laura Palmer and they complied in Episode 14, just before the series lost authorial coherence (Hughes 107). Initially, when other writers contributed to the series, Frost and Lynch gave them ground rules and story lines to follow, and even recorded their meetings for the writers’ reference to ensure consistency with the narrative and tone they envisioned (Lynch and McKenna 256; Rodley 174–75). By the second season, Lynch was not in agreement with all of the new story lines, some of which he had not preapproved (Lynch and McKenna 260), and after Episode 14 he more or less removed himself from any substantive authorial role until directing Episode 29, which he largely reconceived from its original script (Hughes 107; Rodley 182). After Episode 16, when Leland dies and BOB escapes, Frost did not directly contribute to the writing of any scripts until Episode 26. “There were certainly some weaknesses in the second season,” reflected Frost, who felt he and Lynch were “stretched too thin” with other commitments, including Frost’s first feature film as a director, Storyville (1992), which he cowrote with Lee Reynolds (Lynch and McKenna 259). From Lynch’s perspective, there were too many other writers and directors whose vision of Twin Peaks he did not recognize as his and Frost’s own (Lynch and McKenna 277; Rodley 182).

Lynch/Frost Productions struggled with other television ventures in the early 1990s. In the midst of Twin Peaks, Frost created American Chronicles (Fox, 1990), a documentary anthology series about unusual social customs in the US, but it was canceled after three months. Following the cancellation of Twin Peaks, he and Lynch cocreated On the Air (ABC, 1992), a slapstick sitcom about a dysfunctional 1950s variety show. On the Air was canceled in the US after the broadcast of only three episodes (a total of seven were shot and shown in Europe).

When the time came to revisit Twin Peaks twenty-five years later, Lynch’s reputation as a film auteur had survived a lost television audience and a scathing reception of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (see Chapter 5). His quintessentially Lynchian film Mulholland Drive (2001) earned him a Best Director Award at Cannes, an Academy Award nomination, and critical acclaim that has only grown over the years; at one point, he allegedly considered making the film as a pilot for a Twin Peaks spin-off about Audrey Horne in Hollywood (Lynch and McKenna 363, 383). Now, he was excited by what cable television could offer him as a director—the possibilities for a “continuing story”—and he heralded cable as “the new art-house” (Smith).

To that end, he approached The Return as a long-form film for which premium cable television was the only possible exhibition venue, unencumbered by commercial interruptions and censorship restrictions. Reuniting with Frost, he cofounded a production company called Rancho Rosa Partnership, named after the Las Vegas housing development depicted in The Return, and cowrote a complete script of over four hundred pages, with no episode divisions. MacLachlan was allowed exclusive access to read the entire script, while the rest of the cast members received only their individual lines (Lynch and McKenna 479). Putting to rest concerns from fans and critics over the authenticity of The Return, Lynch would direct the entire project for Showtime, whose parent company owns the Twin Peaks distribution rights and where old ally Gary Levine was president of programming (Jensen 29; Ryan, “Peak Performance” 44). The series was shot with a feature film crew on digital cameras in multiple cities over a span of 142 days (Jensen 29; Lynch and McKenna 476). Showtime aired The Return in hour-long “parts,” eighteen in all, as Lynch insisted they should not be viewed as discrete episodes within a series (Jensen 29). In fact, it was never officially referred to in television lexicon as a third “season.”

Once again, Twin Peaks was back in the media spotlight and, with his greater authorial freedom and control, Lynch took center stage. Cover stories ran in the premier European cinephile magazines Cahiers du Cinéma (the origin of la politique des auteurs) and Sight & Sound, as well as in more familiar places such as TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, the latter of which published three variant covers for a special Twin Peaks preview issue. The flagship trade journal Variety published a cover story that featured photos of and interviews with Lynch, MacLachlan, and Laura Dern, MacLachlan’s Blue Velvet costar who joined the cast of The Return (see Ryan, “Peak Performance”). After all, Lynch was as much a star as either of them or any of the 217 actors, for that matter, reprising both his role as director and his character Gordon Cole, now deputy director of the FBI. MacLachlan and Lynch were among 27 actors who reprised their roles from the first two seasons.

Following Lynch’s reading strategy, some critics included The Return on their lists of the ten best “films” of 2017, and it even ranked in first and second place for Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, respectively. A spirited and ultimately fruitless debate raged—mostly between film and television buffs over online social networks—as to the rightful media jurisdiction of The Return. Of course, like the original Twin Peaks, The Return is a television program, but at the risk of deterministic or overly literal thinking, its exhibition origin should not preclude it from also being appreciated as a film, like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Parts 1 and 2 screened at Cannes, where a five-minute standing ovation ensued, and all eighteen parts played over three nights at the Museum of Modern Art). What is exciting about The Return is not that it represents postmillennial television at its best or redeems the medium through cinematic auteurism but that it shows how the Twin Peaks universe continues to exist at the threshold of multiple, mutable worlds (diegetic, generic, textual, temporal, and technological). The mixed-media art of Twin Peaks need not be defined according to where or how one views it. Instead, it defies the very viewing conventions one expects from it, be they televisual, cinematic, or otherwise.