2 Reading Maps, Plotting Coordinates

Genre and Intertextuality

Of all the media outlets that publicized David Lynch’s authorship during the first year of Twin Peaks, perhaps one of the most surprising was Soap Opera Weekly, which featured him on the cover of its October 16, 1990, issue. Clearly, both authorship and genre served as organizing systems for the publicity and reception of the series (between 1991 and 1992, it was also nominated for a total of fourteen Soap Opera Digest Awards). The soap-opera genre arouses what Ien Ang calls a “tragic structure of feeling,” which is “made possible by the way in which the soap opera text is formally and ideologically structured,” and therefore can fall under the umbrella category of melodrama, a cultural form “whose main effect is the stirring up of the emotions” (61). Melodrama has long been synonymous with “failed tragedy,” denigrated as a sensationalistic drama for popular audiences that plays on public emotions instead of appealing to the intellect; trades in flat characters, banal stories, and clichés; and stretches narrative credibility to the point of appearing ridiculous (62). The classist associations between and among soap opera, melodrama, and “inferior culture” (62) would seem to render Twin Peaks incompatible with the highbrow reading strategies identified in the previous chapter.

One of the ways critics attempted to mitigate this problem of taste politics was by making claims to a hip, ironic distance—a mocking or “Lynching” of the genre, if you will. When informed that Twin Peaks was being read as a soap opera send-up, Lynch reportedly “bristled” and told TV Guide, “Soap operas to me should not be camp. These are very real characters,” adding that they “feel and do what they do with all their heart” (Carlson 22). He maintained that “putting yourself above something else” and “poking fun” at it is “not creative,” but “a lower kind of humor” (22). Television packaging agent Tony Krantz, who represented Lynch and Mark Frost at Creative Artists Agency, showed them the 1957 Hollywood melodrama Peyton Place, an adaptation of the scandalous bestseller by Grace Metalious published the previous year, as a way to help them shape their ideas before pitching the series to ABC. Although Lynch was not a fan of the film (Lynch and McKenna 247), he used to watch soap operas, and the novel also inspired the first high-profile, star-driven soap opera to air on prime-time network television in the US, which ran on ABC from 1964 to 1969 (Linda Ruth Williams 47). In fact, Lynch saw the soap-opera format as a potentially more accommodating venue than feature films to write an immersive, continuing story with multiple characters that could unfold in a specific location, providing him with opportunities as a director to concentrate on the emotionalism and idiosyncrasies of performance (Rodley 155–56).7

Twin Peaks is not only a soap opera but also qualifies as a police procedural and mystery series that might situate it under the category of noir as much as melodrama, apropos of Lynch’s neo-noir Blue Velvet, commonly invoked as a companion text.8 Academics have theorized its generic hybridity and allusiveness as symptoms of its postmodernism, reading the series as a subversive noir parody (see Richardson), an exercise in empty formal play and politically regressive “fun” (see Ramsay), and an eclectic bricolage that activates both progressive and reactionary readings, ironic distance, and sincere empathy (see Collins).9 However, we are interested in a more precise understanding of its genre conventions and how they function. We argue that by operating in the broad categories of melodrama and noir, Twin Peaks exploits the already multigeneric registers of film and television storytelling that allow for textual variability and intertextual signifying practices. Exhausting the multigeneric qualities of Twin Peaks is beyond the scope of this short volume, but other scholars have analyzed the series in relation to science fiction (see Telotte), horror (see Jowett and Abbott), and the US frontier myth (see Carroll).10 By limiting our focus to melodrama and noir, we are merely privileging its dominant generic identities as a soap opera and murder mystery in accord with the way advertising and the popular press labeled the series for audiences.

Generic Labels and Definitions

Postmodernist readings presume a certain stability of genres in media and popular culture, which have been neither pure and discrete nor static and fixed as systems of classification in the production or reception of a text. As Barry Keith Grant reminds us, “genre movies have always been hybrid, combinative in practice” (23). For example, the canonical Hollywood western Stagecoach (1939) was promoted as a “Grand Hotel [1932] on wheels,” and it also shares a kinship with the road film and the disaster film (Grant 23–24). Moreover, the necessary repetitions and differences in a genre make it possible for change, self-conscious revision and self-parody, and even reaffirmation or transformation over time, “with each new film and cycle adding to the tradition and modifying it” (35). Genres are dynamic, ongoing processes, as generic phases overlap and fall in and out of fashion (34–39). Twin Peaks certainly intensifies the juxtaposition of tones and conventions achieved through its generic heterogeneity, alternating between sadness and humor or humor and horror, for example. Yet, we view the series less as an example of postmodern media and its shifting subject positions than as a self-conscious extension of film and television’s standard business of genre mixing, illustrating just how flexible and porous genres can be (and have been).

Contemporary television may even accelerate a genre’s transformation faster than cinema. Genres structurally regulate repetition and difference among texts, and between text and audience (White 46). Mimi White contends that borrowing popular, existing forms and combining them into new configurations satisfies the demand to fill a large number of programming slots and maintain a wide viewership over a continuous, regular flow of programming (46). This absence of generic unity or consistency suggests that “no single genre can adequately account for the narrative and dramatic practices of the show as a whole” (43), but programs may still retain narrative and dramatic coherence. Blurring the lines between familiar genres has been “the basis for realist textuality,” as in Hill Street Blues, and “shifts in generic register remain identifiable” (43).

Rather than as a product of postmodernism, Twin Peaks might be understood more historically within the aesthetic norms of the prime-time soap opera that began in the 1980s, of which Hill Street Blues was a formative part. Jason Mittell locates Twin Peaks at the vanguard of narrative complexity in 1990s television, but cites programs such as Dallas, Dynasty (ABC, 1981–89), and St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982–88) as important precursors with their “episodic plotlines alongside multi-episode arcs and ongoing relationship dramas” (Mittell 32). Twin Peaks “expanded the role of story arcs across episodes and seasons” (33) that characterized soaps of the previous decade, while new technologies such as the VCR and the Internet supported an even greater degree of narrative complexity. Audiences could now record and rewatch episodes, catch up on what they missed, and discuss the series with fellow fans online (31–32). At the time of its original airing, Twin Peaks was reportedly the most videotaped series on television (Lavery, “Introduction” 11).

Turning to genre does not diminish Frost and Lynch’s contributions as television auteurs. To the contrary, as Grant points out, a genre gives an artist a “flexible tradition within which to work,” and many of the major auteurs in the Hollywood studio system “developed their vision within particular genres, such as Samuel Fuller with the war film, John Ford with the western and Douglas Sirk with the melodrama” (Grant 56). But looking to Frost and Lynch themselves for validation may not yield helpful results. Determining the nature of Lynch’s directorial influences or frameworks seems nearly impossible; he shuns questions of intentionality and never offers ideological or interpretative explanations of his work (Rodley 27–28, 63–64). Whereas Frost has spoken little about his favorite films or television series, Lynch’s taste runs the gamut from studio-era Hollywood films, such as Rear Window (1954), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and The Wizard of Oz (1939) (Rodley 57, 71, 194), to the postwar European art cinemas of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog, and Jacques Tati (62), to an auteur somewhere between those two worlds, Stanley Kubrick (77). Amazingly, Lynch does not consider himself a “film buff” (Murray 142).11 With respect to Twin Peaks, one title does stand out among his moviegoing experiences: the Hollywood melodrama A Summer Place (1959), starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donohue. Lynch once told interviewers, when asked about the films of his youth, “It was fantastic to watch that kind of soap opera with your girlfriend. That made us dream!” (Ciment and Niogret 123).

Melodrama

We cannot know the degree to which Peyton Place and A Summer Place influenced Twin Peaks, but the comparisons are worth observing. Both films belong to the cycle of family melodramas that Hollywood produced in the 1950s and early 1960s, set in small towns or suburban environments, which intersected with two other melodrama cycles during the studio era: the 1950s juvenile delinquency film, such as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955), and the “woman’s film” or romantic “weepie,” such as Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), that began in the 1930s and 1940s. If the popularity of Twin Peaks paved the way for longer-running dramatic series about the goings-on of small towns, such as Northern Exposure (CBS, 1990–95), Picket Fences (CBS, 1992–96), Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004–12), and Pretty Little Liars (Freeform, 2010–17), Hollywood’s midcentury family melodramas opened the door for Twin Peaks. Not unlike how critics positioned the series “above” melodrama as an ironic, auteur-sanctioned soap opera, English-language film critics and academic film theorists of the 1970s and 1980s began taking Hollywood melodrama seriously through auteurist reappraisals of Sirk, Ray, and Vincente Minnelli. Rereading their family melodramas as critical of a capitalist society besieged by psychological, emotional, and sexual repression after World War II, film scholars found melodramatic excess capable of seeding a narrative cinema in opposition to dominant (i.e., bourgeois) norms of classical realism.

Melodrama encompasses a broader range of texts and aesthetic experiences, though, dating back to the eighteenth-century French and British stage when the monarchy administered patents to theaters to perform “legitimate,” spoken-word plays. Without the aid of speech, unlicensed theaters had to rely entirely on music and physical performance to communicate to the audience (the term “melodrama” derives from the Greek word for music, “melos,” and the French word for drama, “drame”). Cinema continues this tradition of embodied spectator address and, according to Linda Williams, “registers effects in the bodies of spectators” (4). “Woman’s film” melodrama both displays “weeping” and “sobs of anguish,” and also provokes “an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (4). Once deemed “unofficial” theater for the middle- and working-class, the word “melodrama” has more recently been used as a pejorative term for “films addressed to women in their traditional status under patriarchy—as wives, mothers, abandoned lovers, or in their traditional status as bodily hysteria or excess, as in the frequent case of the woman ‘afflicted’ with a deadly or debilitating disease” (4). Williams attributes the “low cultural status” of melodrama to the woman’s body as the primary on-screen embodiment of pain and sadness, and the source of the spectator’s “overwhelming pathos” for suffering victimhood (4).

Chapter 4 will provide a close analysis of three melodramatic performances in Twin Peaks, but we must stress the pervasiveness of melodramatic bodies in the series. Younger cast members bring older stars to mind: Sherilyn Fenn’s eighteen-year-old temptress Audrey bears a striking resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, who at the age of seventeen starred in A Place in the Sun (1951), a film Lynch loves (Lynch and McKenna 238); James Marshall’s teenage rebel, also named James, was inspired by Rebel without a Cause star James Dean (Hughes 110). By contrast, older stars return in self-referential roles: Russ Tamblyn, who plays Laura’s psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Peyton Place; Jane Greer, who plays Norma’s mean mother, had a recurring part on the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest (CBS, 1981–90); and Ian Buchanan, who plays Lucy’s ex-boyfriend Dick Tremayne, was a cast member on General Hospital (ABC, 1963-present).12 We should add that Greer is best known as “femme fatale” Kathie Moffat from the noir classic Out of the Past (1947).

More significantly, the crying face became part of a melodramatic iconography in the series, both women’s faces and (contrary to the masculinist conventions of prime-time television) the faces of men. Sheriff’s Deputy Andy Brennan whimpers inconsolably when he discovers Laura’s corpse washed ashore. Laura’s father, Leland, clutches the sheriff and breaks down in tears when he learns of Laura’s death, while her mother, Sarah, moans on the phone. Donna sobs in class when she realizes that Laura’s empty chair means she may have lost her best friend. Even the high-school principal cannot help himself from openly weeping after he delivers the news over the PA system. And these examples are just from the pilot alone. The mournful, romantic keyboard music of “Laura Palmer’s Theme” typically swells on the soundtrack to accompany such moments, underscoring emotional cues similar to the warbling of organs in early television soap operas.13 Crying “cements identification,” Lynch has said, as the experience “transfers over” from one person to another almost uncontrollably (Rodley 167).

Melodramatic pathos is tied not only to the spectacle of naked emotion on-screen but also to a particular narrative mode based on empathy and identification. Steve Neale claims that melodramas produce discrepancies in knowledge and point of view between spectator and characters (often the spectator knows more than the characters), and hinge on “chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations, deus ex machina endings” (6). Whatever the outcome, either happy (“just in time”) or sad (“too late”), temporal delay puts the spectator in a position of powerlessness to change the order and motivation of narrative events (11–12). Tears ultimately express the spectator’s feelings of fulfillment, loss, and the fantasy that fulfillment is still possible (21–22). The final melodramatic wish, “if only,” simultaneously asks, “what if?” (22).

Episode 14 puts this convention to effect through cross-cutting when Leland, under BOB’s possession, murders Laura’s twin cousin Maddy. Leland straightens his tie in the mirror and Lynch abruptly cuts to some of the principle characters (Donna, James, Bobby, Cooper, Truman, the Log Lady) listening to Julee Cruise sing in the Bang Bang Bar, nicknamed the “Roadhouse.” The audience anxiously suspects the murder that is about to occur, but the characters remain unaware and therefore (like the audience) powerless to prevent it. When Cooper receives a warning from the Giant (“it is happening again”), Lynch cuts back to Leland/BOB, who restages Laura’s murder by murdering Maddy, compounding the irreversible tragedy of the previous event for both the audience and Leland. Before administering the blow that finally kills her, he holds Maddy and cries “Laura.” Back at the Roadhouse, the lyrics of Cruise’s “The World Spins” achingly convey this “too late”/“if only” realization: “Love/Don’t go away/Come back this way/Come back and stay/Forever and ever.”

Donna’s and Bobby’s excessive reactions to Cruise’s performance are entirely consistent with the melodramatic affect of this sequence. Ostensibly thinking about Harold Smith, the shut-in on her Meals on Wheels route who committed suicide earlier in the episode, Donna begins to cry, but Lara Flynn Boyle’s intensely overwrought performance suggests Donna has “felt” the double murder from her table at the Roadhouse along with the extradiegetic audience. Seated at the bar, Bobby meanwhile appears emotionally startled, but he did not know Harold and could not possibly know what happened to Maddy. Nevertheless, he, too, has somehow felt the loss the audience has experienced, a reaction made all the more poignant when one remembers his “if only”/“too late” diatribe during Laura’s funeral: “You damn hypocrites make me sick! Everybody knew she was in trouble, but we didn’t do anything. All you good people. You want to know who killed Laura? You did! We all did. And pretty words aren’t going to bring her back, man, so save your prayers.” As Robert Engels has said, Twin Peaks “was a TV show about free-floating guilt” (Rodley 156).

Reading Twin Peaks as earnest melodrama is not to deny an element of irony in the series, but this irony rarely serves the distancing effect de rigueur for critical appreciation. For example, characters in the first season watch a fictional daytime soap opera called Invitation to Love, which Frost wrote, directed, and shot on video in the historic Ennis House in Los Angeles. The self-consciously bad writing, acting, music, and costumes gently parody conventions of the soap opera, but never undermine the deployment of those very conventions in Twin Peaks. Rather, Frost’s approach only throws this soap-within-a-soap into (comic) relief, calling attention to the embedded television screen as a mise-en-abyme and distinguishing Invitation to Love from Twin Peaks as a hypermediated and hyperbolic level of fiction within the diegesis.

Invitation to Love unites the people of Twin Peaks and mirrors the events of their lives, providing a cathartic way of negotiating the social conflicts of their everyday experiences and, paradoxically, an escape from those same conflicts. Perhaps, as the announcer opens each episode, one day will bring these characters “a new beginning” and hold “the promise of an invitation to love.” Racked with grief over Laura’s murder, Leland watches a father write a suicide note to his twin daughters (played by the same actress) when Maddy shows up to visit (Sheryl Lee played both Laura and Maddy). Shelly watches tough-guy Montana assault nerdy Chet, reflecting on her abusive husband Leo, who later sees Chet shoot Montana after he takes a bullet himself. Dr. Jacoby hears Montana toast to “old times,” saying, “should old acquaintance be forgot,” right before Maddy calls him, pretending to be his “old acquaintance” Laura. In Episode 4, when Sheriff Harry Truman asks Lucy “what’s going on?” she excitedly briefs him on the most recent episode of Invitation to Love (“what’s going on here?” he clarifies, referring to the “real” world of the Sheriff’s Department). For these characters, Invitation to Love is as “real” as Twin Peaks is to its fans, even as fans see the mechanisms of melodrama exposed.

To encourage ABC to order a second season, Frost said he deliberately incorporated every conceivable cliffhanger from “the history of the nighttime soap” in Episode 7, the finale of the first season, which he both wrote and directed (“Secrets”). Frost intended to reach a level of absurdity with the sheer accretion of genre conventions, but at the same time he sought to achieve “as much edge-of-the-seat tension” as possible (“Secrets”). As Lucy recaps in Episode 8, this time summarizing the events of Twin Peaks, “Leo Johnson was shot, Jacques Renault was strangled, the mill burned, Shelly and Pete got smoke inhalation, Catherine and Josie are missing, Nadine is in a coma from taking sleeping pills.” Lucy also discovers she is pregnant and uncertain of the father’s identity. The finale of the first season ultimately (if only temporarily) shifted the central question of the series from “Who killed Laura Palmer?” to “Who shot Agent Cooper?” Protected by his bullet-proof vest, Cooper is rescued “just in time” when Harry, Andy, and Hawk find him bleeding and barely conscious on the floor of his hotel room at the beginning of Episode 8.

Noir

Cooper, the straight-arrow, big-city investigator assigned to the Laura Palmer case, links Twin Peaks with two approximate cycles of Hollywood film noir in the 1940s: the private-eye or “lone wolf” phase during World War II and the more realistic police procedurals of the postwar period (Schrader 58–59). Entering Twin Peaks in the pilot, a town that seems frozen in the 1940s or 1950s, he “retreats to the past” (58), and with his tape-recorded messages to his secretary Diane, he bespeaks “a love of romantic narration” (57). After manipulating time in Parts 17 and 18, he triggers “a complex chronological order” in Twin Peaks that “reinforce[s] the feelings of hopelessness and lost time,” leaving characters temporally disoriented and literally in the dark (58).

Frost, Lynch, and the various directors of the series occasionally lend a stylized noir “look,” as well. The exterior shots of Snoqualmie Falls give the series an “an almost Freudian attachment to water,” surging under the Great Northern Hotel and into the river that carried Laura’s body, reminiscent of the docks, piers, and rain-swept streets of classic noir. Low-key, high-contrast lighting and interior scenes lit for night establish a fatalistic atmosphere, with actors “standing in the shadow,” such as when characters pass through the convenience store to visit Phillip Jeffries or emerge from blackness in the subterranean basement of the Great Northern. Lighting cuts through windows in oblique lines and “odd shapes” to “splinter a screen,” such as the chiaroscuro effect inside the Horne’s Department Store closet, where Audrey hides to spy on the manager in Episode 6. Canted camera angles create an oblique frame and make the screen appear “restless and unstable,” such as when Josie answers a threatening phone call from Hank at the end of Episode 4 (Schrader 57). Encoded in Twin Peaks are well-known noir intertexts that critics have enjoyed spotting, including namesakes from Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944). Twin Peaks is also the name of a real site in San Francisco and the primary setting of Experiment in Terror (1962), an FBI procedural about a killer—named Garland Lynch—stalking a young female bank teller, whom he wants to coerce into stealing $100,000 for him. In case one forgets that Gordon Cole was a minor character in Sunset Boulevard who worked in the Paramount Pictures prop department, Cooper/Dougie catches the film on television in Part 15. (Recognizing the name “Gordon Cole,” Dougie electrocutes himself and awakens Cooper.)

The aforementioned narrative and stylistic conventions, as articulated by Paul Schrader writing in 1972, have become part of the conventional wisdom about film noir. However, revisionist scholarly interventions have contextualized noir in a less linear or coherent history, pointing out that its body of films is more narratively and thematically diverse and their expressionistic visual style is not as uniform as previously assumed (see Naremore, More than Night). Vivian Sobchack argues that aesthetic histories have not sufficiently accounted for the phenomenology of particular, materially grounded places in the US after World War II that comprise the mise-en-scène of noir set in both urban and small-town locations: boardinghouses and cheap roadside motels, diners and dive bars, nightclubs and cocktail lounges, gas and transit stations, and the lonely roads in between. At a time when President Truman’s administration promoted postwar stability and a consolidation of international power, domestic anxieties simmered over the shortage of housing and the increase of rent, the rising costs of food and clothing, the spread of communism, and the possibilities of a renewed Depression (Sobchack 132). Note that Harry S. Truman, the baby boomer–era sheriff who presides over law and order in Twin Peaks, shares the same name as the first president of the United States after World War II.

The universe of Twin Peaks exists in the noir-esque shadow of the atomic bomb, the origin of modern trauma, according to Part 8’s black-and-white “creation story” that begins, paradoxically, with the apocalyptic image of the 1945 “Trinity” nuclear test in White Sands, New Mexico. Characters desire to go home and continually seek a “mythological construction,” “the idyllic wartime home front” that “stands as this country’s lost object of desire” (Sobchack 133). Quoting from The Wizard of Oz, Sobchack’s double entendre, “‘there is no place like home’” (137), highlights the “dislocation, isolation, and existential alienation” of these “no places” that characters inhabit (155). It is not incidental that when evil hatches in New Mexico eleven years after “Trinity” (in the form of a froglike insect), it invades young Sarah Palmer’s house, and that at the beginning of The Return, the Fireman/Giant tells Cooper, “It is in our house now.”

In Twin Peaks, nocturnal postwar trauma sends shock waves that ripple up to the present in the light of day—“the past dictates the future,” as Cooper explains—and the inky places that mark the geography of this history turn leisure into “idle restlessness” (Sobchack 158). Diners such as Hap’s and Eat at Judy’s are inhospitable at best, and Pop’s Diner in New Mexico is immediately affected by the Woodsman’s anesthetizing broadcast. Gas stations are earth-based versions of the red-curtained “waiting room”; at Big Ed’s Gas Farm, Ed nurses a cup of soup in the back office, pining after Norma late into the night. Bored young people wile away their time listening to nightly bands at the Roadhouse, where fights break out, bartenders enable prostitution, and corrupt cops pocket bribe money. A chance encounter at a rustic tavern called Wallies lures James into a mariticide plot à la Double Indemnity. Diane regularly drinks alone at Max Von’s Bar, while Sarah tears into the jugular of a sexist trucker at the Elk’s Point #9 Bar who won’t leave her alone. Brothel and casino One Eyed Jack’s facilitates drug smuggling and kidnapping, to say nothing of the exploitation of the women it employs.

Motels are places of sordid rendezvous, savage violence, and unexplained happenings. Ben and Catherine carry on their affair at the Timber Falls Motel, where they conspire to burn down the Packard Saw Mill. Leland makes secret appointments with prostitute Teresa Banks at the Red Diamond City Motel, and Mr. C brutally kills his criminal partner Darya at an unnamed motel in South Dakota. Phillip Jeffries hides in an old gangster hangout that no longer occupies physical space, a motel called The Dutchman’s Lodge, accessible through the darkest postwar “no place” of Twin Peaks, a convenience store next to an abandoned gas station guarded by Woodsmen. Spirits are said to hold meetings in a room above the store. Most unsettling of all is the midcentury motel where Cooper and Diane stay in Part 18. After a night of passionless sex, Cooper awakens in a different motel with Diane gone, and finds a letter from “Linda” (formerly Diane) that refers to him as “Richard.” Indeed, as Albert informs Tammy, the first Blue Rose Case involved an occurrence involving doubles in a motel.

Places of residence do not offer the safety, stability, and nurturing environment of a home. Dead Dog Farm houses only drug deals. Harold Smith’s house is more of a prison, next door to the suspicious Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, who may be spirits named Chalfont. The psychotic Richard Horne disrupts domestic space, viciously attacking a witness to a hit-and-run and, later, his own grandmother, in Part 10. Whereas Donna’s idyllic house is violated (first by BOB in Episode 9, then by Windom Earle in Episode 24), Shelly lives with an abusive husband in a house under permanent renovation. Grim ironies seep from the Fat Trout Trailer Park; one resident complains that the government has barely been able to provide his wife (a disabled veteran) with an adequate wheelchair, while another sells his blood in order to afford food. The warm, comforting Double R Diner is the closest place Twin Peaks has to a home, but as a roadside diner, it is only a transient place, a stop-off point on the way somewhere else, and its nourishments are therefore temporary. Down in Odessa, Texas, Carrie Page cannot wait to leave home—a man’s dead body sits on her couch, never commented upon, with a bullet hole in the middle of his head.

Frost has explained that he wanted the 2008–9 economic recession to frame Cooper’s Odyssean journey in The Return (all the way to Odessa), requiring a more expansive national landscape beyond the town of Twin Peaks. The Rancho Rosa Estates in Las Vegas are a fictional example of the “vast tracked housing developments that had been built in the anticipation of this endless boom and were then abandoned” (O’Falt). If the series is a belated postwar noir, these “three-year-old-ghost towns” also give The Return purchase in cultural crisis of the early twenty-first century (O’Falt). Not without affection for their characters or belief in human potential, Frost and Lynch draw hopeful closure around the Jones family story line at the beginning of Part 18, albeit away from Twin Peaks in suburban Las Vegas. This touching resolution is short-lived and somewhat misleading, coming at the beginning of Part 18 rather than the end, with Cooper’s tulpa back at the elusive “red door” in Lancelot Court to stay permanently with Janey-E and her son, Sonny Jim.

All the narrative roads lead to the Palmers’ 1930s Dutch colonial revival house, but the return at the end of Part 18 is not the homecoming audiences saw in the Jones household, belying Cooper’s confident assurance to Laura at the end of Part 17, “we’re going home.” Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017) states that Cooper’s one character flaw is his “irresistible urge to rescue every damsel in distress he came across,” and the Arthurian place names hint at this “white knight syndrome” (57). Prior to the events of Season 1, Cooper failed to protect a woman named Caroline, a material witness in a federal crime, and he blamed himself for his lack of preparation because he fell in love with her. Season 2 ends with him unable to save the new woman he loves, Annie, from his deranged former partner, Windom Earle, Caroline’s murderer and husband. The hubris Cooper displays in tempting fate (O’Falt), hoping to save Laura, rewrite her story, and bring her home to her mother, does not grant him absolution of his mistakes but instead dredges them up from out of the past. The new owner of the house, Alice Tremond, does not know Sarah or recognize Laura and confirms that no one by the name “Palmer” has owned the house in recent years.14 Noir fatalism collides with the melodramatic “if only” in the last spoken line of the series. “What year is this?” Cooper asks. Faced with the site of her own trauma, Laura must relive the experience of her murder through her new identity as Carrie Page. Laura may be dead, but she lives, here but not here, and in “no place.”