5 Peaks Paratexts

Adaptation, Remediation, and Transmedia Storytelling

In Part 13 of The Return, Walter, the corporate rep negotiating a franchise of the Double R Diner, tells Norma that her “home” restaurant is not as profitable as the newer ones in the franchise. Norma contends that customers have complained that the pies she is known for aren’t as good at the other diners, to which Walter advises an “artistic compromise,” that Norma revise her recipes in accord with the pies sold at the other Double Rs. Walter’s comment, that there is need for “tweaking the formula to ensure consistency and profitability,” speaks to Frost and Lynch’s ambivalence about the idea of Twin Peaks becoming a franchise, this anxiety reflecting the creators’ desire to maintain artistic control over The Return within the context of corporate hierarchies. The art-of-pies metaphor gains strength when we consider the show’s repeated association of pie with pleasure, and further, survival, as the cherry pie Dougie brings to the Mitchum brothers in the desert in Part 11 of The Return saves his life.

In perhaps a fairly obvious sense, the “evil” associated with doppelgangers in The Return similarly functions as a critique of imitation and copying—assaults on the originality and uniqueness of individual identity. The ethics of uniqueness is most prominently associated with the Log Lady, whose special “kind of knowing” Robert Jacoby (the psychiatrist’s brother) pays tribute to in The Secret History of Twin Peaks (Frost 2016, henceforth The Secret History). “With difference comes misunderstanding” (315), says Jacoby—meaning, in the spirit of Twin Peaks, that embracing what is different or other is a challenging task in which the universe of Twin Peaks is thoroughly invested. So, how different can The Return be from its previous iteration and still attract an audience and compel viewers familiar with the series who desire, like the Odyssean Cooper at the end of The Return, to go back to their “home text” (Grossman, Literature 12)? Frost and Lynch understand the tightrope walk involved in maintaining the same tone and characters that earlier drew viewers to Twin Peaks while at the same time needing to avoid a formulaic “return,” adapting the stories and characters to varied contexts and a different socio-cultural-historical moment.

Certainly, the worlds of Twin Peaks provide comfort in sameness: a joyful frisson in hearing Angelo Badalamenti’s score begin again after it is withheld for the first two minutes of The Return; a pleasurable sense of stability in knowing in 2017 that Andy and Lucy are still wise and sometimes courageous fools and that FBI agent Albert Rosenfield maintains his irony and barbed sense of humor; gratification in learning that although Sheriff Harry Truman is absent (and sick with cancer), his brother, Sheriff Frank Truman, remains, as the Log Lady says, a “true man”; delight in seeing, in Las Vegas, that Cooper’s traits “will out” (“coff-eee”) and relief that, in the end, “Cooper, the one and only” (as Diane calls him in Part 17) will awaken from his catatonic state encased within the life of Dougie Jones. In giving us substantial elements of character and story patterns we remember from the early 1990s, Frost and Lynch do provide the benefits of franchise, the “institutionally-based demands for ‘more’ and ‘further’” that comprise the energy of reboots in popular entertainment properties (Palmer 77).

And yet from the beginning Twin Peaks has resisted ameliorative nostalgia. It is the case that in Seasons 1 and 2, Frost and Lynch have transplanted 1950s styles into a present-day setting. A postmodern interpretation could attribute this decision to a nostalgia for an idealized past that removes it from its historical conditions and specificity (see Ramsay and Lafky), but Frost has explained that a kind of timelessness does exist in many small towns in the US, the reality of which motivated a setting where “time has kind of stood still for a while” (at least for twenty or thirty years) (“Mark Frost”). Many of Lynch’s films take place in similar retro-1950s worlds, but he sees the world of his characters reflecting that of his audience, where recycled postwar culture (oldies stations, television reruns) creates “opportunities to re-live the past” (Rodley 278). What Lynch describes is less a retreat into myth or a longing for a perpetual present than the hyperconsciousness of cultural memory and time’s passing. “There is some kind of present,” he has said, “but the present is the most elusive because it’s going real fast” (Rodley 278).

The Return underscores Frost and Lynch’s adaptation of the small-town setting to call attention to the passage of time but also the dangers embedded in tranquility. The town has generated its own “Dweller on the Threshold,” the aspects of character Frost identifies in Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (henceforth The Final Dossier) as “the sum total of all the dark, negative, unresolved qualities that reside in every human being” (11). It isn’t just that within the story tulpas melodramatically disrupt “normal” life in The Return. In some ways more disturbing in the show’s reprise is the menace of a looming stasis and the consequent anxiety that indeed very little has changed. This threat of quietude is anatomized in The Return, where many of the characters remain fixed in their forms from twenty-five years earlier: Lucy is bewildered by cellular phone technology; James is still pining romantically for a woman (Renee)—or the idea of a woman—he can’t have; Shelly is again involved with a wrong guy (and her daughter, Becky, has embarked on the same path with her abusive husband, Steven); and even when Laura is not Laura (Carrie Page), she is still drawn fatally back to being Laura, as her final scream demonstrates.

The traps laid within the story worlds of Twin Peaks are set to capture characters within fixed positions, such immobility becoming one source of women wishing desperately to break out of their received roles, as discussed in Chapter 3. Add to this sense of confinement the presence in 2017 of drugs, young agitated addicts at the Roadhouse reflecting the pervasive severity of the contemporary opioid epidemic. Drug-addled Steven seems to have committed suicide after a painful exchange with a suffering Gersten Hayward (Donna’s sister), who, we are told in The Final Dossier, had struggled with mental-health issues and “turned to stronger street drugs for comfort, concurrent with the nationwide trend in dependence on opioids and designer synthetics” (27).

The inertia and lethal traps in which characters are caught are further reflected in a material corrosion besetting the town. Unexplained instances of decay abound: the decomposing face of a jail dweller; a young, jittery woman scratching the rash under her arm at the Roadhouse; a deathly ill girl vomiting ghastly fluids, who sits in a car beside a hysterical woman trapped in a traffic jam—this follows a shooting incident where a sullen, defiant boy tries to emulate his equally creepy father by shooting a gun at the Double R. These grotesqueries define a rotting town. Frost has made clear, as referenced in Chapters 2 and 3, that the world of 2017 isn’t the same Twin Peaks, whose denizens must confront the atrophy and rottenness associated with trying to hold onto a world that no longer exists, a world yearning to maintain its “Special Agents” as stable and restorative figures—and, of course, that world wasn’t very good in the first place, as the frog-moth creature and horrifying White Sands sequence in Part 8 amply show.

We already knew that darkness was an integral part of Twin Peaks, culminating at the end of Season 2 when Cooper’s doppelganger merges with BOB. How is it possible, Twin Peaks asks, to adapt to change without going “nuclear,” without carrying with you a ferocious violence? In some sense, the stories of Twin Peaks that exist beyond the boundaries of the original series suggest a negotiation between fixity and destructive disruption: it is the imaginative energy of Twin Peaks’s continuations—its paratexts and The Return—that are pitched against the forces of sameness and violation that threaten both the diegetic and the nondiegetic elements of this universe.

A creative rejoinder to fixity, the dynamism that characterizes the permeable fictional contours of the universe of Twin Peaks works to resist categorization. We see this most readily in debates about The Return’s status as cinema or television referenced in Chapter 1. In this vein, the Showtime event’s incorporation of high-art tone and pace—extended silences that pepper the dialogue—and long takes and surrealist visuals destabilize the medium when elements of the show are paradoxically “hypermedial,” making us aware of their artistic intent, and also “realistic” in an effort to capture the awkward and weird small moments of daily life (as Laura Dern said about The Return, “David [Lynch] doesn’t abandon his characters when they’re not doing something big” [Lynch and McKenna 489]).

As against stasis, and sameness, or nefarious imitation (Mr. C) and commercial exploitation (ensuring “consistency” of the brand), the pleasure of a particularly good cherry pie stands alongside characters, stories, and visual images that are distinct, unique, or different. And indeed, the effect of extending the world of Twin Peaks in its paratexts is to resist reification of Twin Peaks, the idea that it is one stable thing. And so we have been introduced to paratexts written by an extended authorial family: Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town (1991); collectible trading cards; Lynch-directed commercials for Georgia Coffee that aired in Japan; Lynch’s prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (henceforth Fire Walk with Me); Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (henceforth The Secret Diary); soundtrack albums; the audiobook (recorded by Kyle MacLaghlan) “Diane . . .”: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper and novel The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes (henceforth The Autobiography), both written by Mark Frost’s brother Scott; an official fan-club magazine called the Twin Peaks Gazette, canceled after three issues in conjunction with the series cancellation in 1991; and Mark Frost’s The Secret History and The Final Dossier.

The intermedial storytelling of “Twin Peaks” blurs boundaries and resists closure, implying an ethics of world building pitched against objectification in all of its forms, in the identities of selves and texts. Twin Peaks argues for “open borders,” whether this be redefining a medium or resisting the categorization of humans, especially women, as things or types, as we saw in Chapter 3. Twin Peaks paratexts continually redraw the contours and “maps” of their fictional places, pushing beyond the story’s initial boundaries. Such movement and vitality are, in the end, the organizing principles of the universe, as indeed electricity becomes an increasingly central trope in The Return.

Twin Peaks exemplifies major “electrical currents” in contemporary intermedial storytelling. These have been theorized with varying points of focus: (1) remediation, where stories appearing in different media paradoxically bring readers closer to the fictional worlds they represent, while at the same time call attention to the act of mediation (see Bolter and Grusin); (2) transmedia, following Henry Jenkins’s groundbreaking studies of storytelling across media platforms, thus creating elements of a fictional world that converge intermedially; (3) remakes, sequels, trilogies, reboots, and franchises, where a text or series will “co-exist” with or reinterpret a known set of characters and stories (see Verevis); and (4) adaptation studies in general, which may incorporate the previous models of textual reprise, emphasizing the multiple ways in which adaptive revisitations provide “repetition with variation” (Hutcheon 4). These ways of conceiving of textual production and reception not only create a path for understanding Twin Peaks’s singular and representative role but also suggest the show’s helpfulness in further clarifying the place of adaptive modes of storytelling in contemporary culture and society. R. Barton Palmer recently observed that “all texts are fragments in the sense that they await gestures of continuation that challenge the mirage of self-containment in which they are mistakenly thought to endure” (76).

There is hardly a better example of this adaptive model of textuality than Twin Peaks’s intimate conversation among its texts and paratexts. Indeed, Twin Peaks demonstrates the work of textual continuation to question where texts begin and end, like the Log Lady’s reflection on death as “just a change, not an end” in Part 15 (or MIKE’s question to Cooper in the Red Room, “is it future or is it past?”). The show interrogates fixed and fluid human and textual identities, offering a generative model of textuality, or “elasTEXTity” (see Grossman, Literature) that posits story worlds as open and unceasing.

If, in 1995, David Lavery called Twin Peaks a “completely furnished world” (“Introduction” 7), the abundance of story and affect associated with this fictional universe is also due to its susceptibility to more furnishings, an expansion of its world by extension and paratext. At first blush there are pleasures aplenty in what Thomas Leitch aptly describes (drawing from Wolfgang Iser) as the gaps that are created and filled by adaptations (see “Mind the Gaps”). Twin Peaks paratexts delight in filling gaps, telling us (in the Twin Peaks guidebook), for example, that visitors no less diverse and luminary than Oscar Wilde (in 1902), Enrico Caruso (in 1918), and The Guess Who (in 1969) have appeared or performed in the town. We learn that Jerry Horne’s favorite restaurant in Twin Peaks is Angelo Wong’s Italian-Thai restaurant. In The Autobiography, we discover that young Dale sent letters not only to J. Edgar Hoover but also to Efrem Zimbalist Jr., star of the television series The F.B.I. (1965–74); we also find out that Dale scored 800 on his English and Math SATs (70). Later, when Cooper first meets Diane on December 17, 1977, he describes her as “an interesting cross between a saint and a cabaret singer” (Scott Frost, Autobiography 147). In The Secret History, we learn that James Hurley’s favorite book is Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Andy’s The World According to Garp (1978). We see the postcard that Norma sent to her parents in the spring of 1969 on her honeymoon with Hank Jennings, brimming with joy at having seen a taping of The Tonight Show with guests Sammy Davis Jr. and Victor Buono. With multitextual and multitextural fervor, The Secret History recounts meticulously the secret history of Doug Milford, journalist ex-military brother of Mayor Duane Milford: Doug had close connections to the mysteries of Roswell and extraterrestrial happenings throughout the postwar US, culminating in meetings with President Nixon and Jackie Gleason (giving new meaning, as Special Agent Tammy Preston notes in the margins of these reports, to the phrase “to the moon, Alice!” [296]).

Such wild juxtapositions satisfy our curiosity with imaginative blends of popular culture and political history. But they also create an uncanny convergence of the “likely” and the “unlikely” that enhance and direct the fictional world toward something more closely related to our real experiences. After all, as Lynch told Chris Rodley after the initial series ended, “Twin Peaks is still there, it’s just that no one is pointing the camera at it now” (Rodley 181). On the one hand, the Twin Peaks story world invites an exhaustive filling in that produces the illusion of completion; on the other hand, such filling in could be, in theory and perhaps actually, endless.

Resisting closure and objectification of its own stories and characters, these paratexts have a more serious purpose than engaging our delight in their creative energy. They function to challenge our preconceived notions about stories, characters, and their worlds and to prod us to reconsider and reevaluate our interpretations of texts and worlds we think we know. So it is that in The Final Dossier, Frost fills the gaps in Annie Smith Blackburn’s sad story, or weighs in further on Josie as a femme fatale, to return to an idea in Chapter 3. Frost alludes to Body Heat (1981) twice and calls Josie Packard a “dangerous sociopath” (99); he had earlier drawn out the lethal elements of the character in The Secret History, saying that she was “smart as a snake” (13). And yet, the performance by Joan Chen complicates such simple abstraction of Josie into a type. It is worth noting that in 1991, Twin Peaks earned a “Jimmie” award from the Association of Asian/Pacific American Artists (named after celebrated cinematographer James Wong Howe) for casting Joan Chen in a role that wasn’t originally conceived as Asian. Isabella Rossellini was initially supposed to play Giovanna Packard, but when she dropped out of the project, the role was reconceived as “Josie Packard,” with Chen cast in the part, supporting the idea that “talented actors of any color can play almost any role if simply given the opportunity” (Tusher 18). Frost may later refer to Josie as a “sociopath,” but the performance by Chen, as well as Catherine’s surprising empathy toward her nemesis after Josie has died, unsettles easy categorization (Frost himself notes in The Secret History that part of what motivates Catherine’s reclusiveness after the fire that kills Pete Martell is the loss of her rival Josie, for whom she had developed a high regard and with whom she had formed a strong if complicated bond). These revisitations of story and character catalyze viewers’ reception, conceptualization, and experience regarding them, as we toggle among representations to try to reassemble the puzzles of meaning offered to us. As Marie-Laure Ryan has said about transmedia stories, we “return to them over and over again, not to relive the same experience, but to make new discoveries” (539).

In some ways the ever-expanding fiction of Twin Peaks was anticipated by Frost and Lynch in their earliest conversations about the series, since they began their collaboration by drawing a map of the town. Establishing the story immediately as a concrete visual phenomenon, Frost and Lynch set the stage for the show’s paratexts that further delineate the world. In September of 1990, Twin Peaks was just premiering its second season at the same time as David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer published The Secret Diary. The novel sat in fourth place on the New York Times bestseller list, remediating the diary from the show on a different fictional platform and giving voice to the traumatized teenager at the absent center of Twin Peaks. The Secret Diary articulates Laura’s “sad thoughts” (8), as she reveals the truth of her life, that she is a “darker person than the town thinks” (172). We knew this from the series, as bits of Laura’s sorrowful story are revealed. But what is reinforced in this revelatory paratext is Laura’s struggle—her rage (“such an anger” [71]) at BOB for victimizing her; her attempts at altruism, starting Twin Peaks’s “Meals on Wheels” program and tutoring Josie and Johnny Horne; and her efforts to gain power by taking control of her sexuality and performing the role of femme fatale to assert some agency in a brutally difficult psychological and social setting. She says in the middle of the diary that she has no self-determination, asserting poetically that she was “born without a choice” (100). As against this rendering of her as victim, Laura engages in drugs and sex to escape her pain and to try to control her experience. We are not only brought inside Laura’s psychological devastation, empathizing with her vitality and her desolation, readers are given another perspective on the limits of a small and claustrophobic social world, where the “same faces” appear (31). Part of the challenge, that is—again, in particular for the women of Twin Peaks—is to deal with the fact of being “terribly bored.”

As a remediated object of revelation, the diary brings to life a new perspective on Laura Palmer. It is worth noting that Sheryl Lee has helped to remediate further and give voice to Laura’s story by narrating the diary in an audiobook. Such adaptations merge actors and texts via performance in a way that further realizes the idea put forth in Chapter 4 that performance exceeds the boundaries of diegetic character. In suggesting that story worlds are open and unceasing, the transmedial stories that constitute the Twin Peaks universe posit authorship, adaptation, and performance as mutually enhancing processes. In some sense, the paratexts themselves perform new roles for Twin Peaks.19 Imagining Twin Peaks paratexts as “free agents,” performing new iterations of the story world, conforms with Lynch’s own remarks about the vitality of Twin Peaks (Lynch having said that he has, over time, wondered what the Twin Peaks folks were up to). He has thus cast himself and Frost as “receivers” who document what’s happening in Twin Peaks, validating its presence, blurring the line between what’s real and fictional, and transferring agency away from writer and director and toward the text itself. In this way, the paratexts may be seen as organically grown story-catalysts, reminding us of the energy and potential of source texts to shift and change, intermedially and temporally, into new forms, media, stories. After all, “the noun adaptation,” writes Leitch, “is subordinate to the verb adapt” (“To Adapt or To Adapt To” 101).

Part of this agency of the text as it adapts and evolves (see Hutcheon and Bortolotti on a Darwinian view of adaptation) is the extent to which its paratexts shape our viewing of the entire experience of the story world. So it is with Fire Walk with Me that the absence of Laura Palmer in the series is remediated as powerful presence. Fire Walk with Me works in conversation with The Secret Diary to explore the subjective experience of Laura Palmer. Lee’s performance poignantly demonstrates this character’s traumas in the days before her death, Lynch commenting on his motive for making the film, “I wanted to go back and see what she was going through during those days before she died” (Lynch and McKenna 324). The film mystified and frustrated initial audiences, illustrating the sometimes neuralgic experience for audiences of seeing their known texts reimagined and re-presented by paratexts or adaptations. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby, for example, declared, “It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be” (11). As Michel Chion reports, “Lynch was accused of playing the spoiled auteur who thinks he can get away with anything, even showing contempt for the public” (143). Quentin Tarantino famously weighed in at Cannes, saying that the director has “disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie” (Lynch and McKenna 310). There was a visceral reaction to Fire Walk with Me, sending Lynch the message, according to the director, that he had “killed Twin Peaks with this picture” (Rodley 189).

This phenomenon might be explained in part by the process by which adaptations can be perceived as “hideous progeny” (see Grossman, Literature). Viewers often turn away from adaptations in disgust because a changed source text disturbs viewers’ stable sense of a story or text that has been internalized. The metaphor is drawn from Mary Shelley’s description of her dream of Frankenstein’s creature and the novel itself as “hideous progeny”; as anyone who has read the novel knows, however, the “monster” is more “human” than the creator. The significance of this for understanding adaptations and continuing stories is that they may have something more valuable and meaningful to say about their sources and contexts than viewers are initially ready to absorb. In this sense, television itself might be seen as monstrous in the way it has feverishly produced programming that creatively rewrites prior texts and genres (as in The Bates Motel [A&E, 2013–17], Hannibal [NBC, 2013–15], Riverdale [the CW, 2017-present], and Penny Dreadful [Showtime, 2014–16]), an idea that resonates with Sarah Cardwell’s appreciation of TV as a “mongrel muse” (119). There is a way in which openness to new formulations of old stories challenges viewers to abandon control, perhaps analogously to the way both Cooper and the Log Lady associate death with “some fear in letting go.” Requiring an openness on the part of viewers to appreciate major shifts in perspective on familiar and internalized stories and “home texts,” Fire Walk with Me has been revalued in the years after its release, the Village Voice in 2013 calling it “David Lynch’s masterpiece” (Marsh).

Despite the commercial motives for franchise storytelling, transmedia adaptations shift the agency of meaning from a single source (say, the 1990–91 television series Twin Peaks) to what emerges from a conversation among multiple paratexts, where the initial text recedes hierarchically in a new relay of textual relations. Watching The Return, for example, one wonders about Mr. C’s insistence in Part 2 to Ray Monroe at the diner that he doesn’t need anything: “Want, not need. I don’t need anything, Ray. If there’s one thing you should know about me, Ray, it’s that I don’t need anything. I want.” Fueled by depraved appetite, or “want,” the comment echoes The Secret Diary, in which Laura transcribes an exchange with BOB, who says, “I DON’T NEED ANYTHING [ . . . ] I WANT THINGS” (127).

As part of a continuing echoic dynamic, conversations among paratexts that build meaning are also constructed by viewers. It is, after all, not only the characters’ “return” in the 2017 Showtime event but ours as well. Like the paratexts extending the world of Twin Peaks, our return to the show reshapes and recasts it with what is presumably a different affective bearing on the characters and stories, given our own and the performers’ aging. Exceeding its fictionality, The Return keys actors’ mortality and aging to our own, since it is the real bodies of performers previously playing familiar roles. Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Miguel Ferrer, Richard Beymer, Peggy Lipton, and others reappear twenty-five years after the original show to remind us that selves and texts are always moving in time. Perhaps this is why one of the most powerful scenes in The Return is Norma and Big Ed Hurley’s final reunion in Part 15. Peggy Lipton recalls in Room to Dream that David Lynch stood on the side of the set “crying like a little baby” (Lynch and McKenna 481), as Otis Redding’s song “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” rang out. Aging Ed (with his usually bad “Hurley Luck” [Frost, Final Dossier 89, 90]) and stable, able, usually normal Norma resist the norm and strike a different path, claiming a happy ending. Conditioning us to rethink our ideas about fiction and realities that shift (and age) across time, Twin Peaks embodies an art that reminds us, as Mark Frost has said (in the voice of retiring journalist-editor Robert Jacoby in The Final Dossier), that “storytellers don’t run out of stories; they just run out of time” (319).

The Return demonstrates the permeable contours of texts, since, as the 2017 “Twin Peaks” demonstrates, stories can never be fully told because elements refuse to be put to rest; they keep resurfacing in changed form, shifting like a cultural whack-a-mole. Even within the DVD and Blu-ray packaging of Fire Walk with Me, a kind of doubling of the film in its extras performs more “accretive extension” (Palmer 83) of the story. The discs include deleted and extended scenes and alternate takes from Fire Walk with Me, which Lynch edited in the order they might appear according to the film’s narrative. Lynch thus provides an uncanny “twin film” in the home video extras, echoing the film and extending its textual borders.

This brief study of Twin Peaks has aimed to function similarly as paratextual prodding, giving us and hopefully our readers the opportunity to revisit, rethink, and reimagine a blended universe that continually reshapes our affective and critical responses to and interpretations of what we have watched. Twin Peaks compels its audiences to become part of a viewing experience nicely captured by Sarah Cardwell when she discusses the dynamism of “visual culture,” which “implies something pervasive and encompassing—a context in which we live and participate rather than observe” (134). Twin Peaks is thoroughly committed to a world-building aesthetics that emphasizes the singularity of a fictional universe but also its openness to expansion and its belief in the values of blurred textual boundaries and fluid notions of identity. In active dialogue with its literary, filmic, and televisual continuations, “returns,” and paratexts, Twin Peaks not only demonstrates the practice of remediation and transmedia storytelling but also contributes to advancing broad definitions of adaptation and its pleasures (like coffee and pie) and enduring significance in cultural production.