JOHN J. PIERCE
In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton), manager of the Fat Trout trailer park, has just been questioned by FBI agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) about the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) when a mysterious woman (Ingrid Brucato) appears at the door of Teresa’s trailer. Seen from her viewpoint, her approach is accompanied by a snatch of ominous sound effect and music.
The woman, leaning on a cane and holding an ice pack to the right side of her face, doesn’t say a word, even when Desmond asks whether she knew Teresa, and we never learn who she is. But Rodd reacts to her with a look of seeming terror. There follows a brief cut to a utility pole outside, accompanied by a variation of the Indian war whoop of the Man from Another Place (the whoop is also later associated with the One-Armed Man, pursuing Leland in his camper van, the shot of the utility pole at the Fat Trout during Desmond’s second visit, and when Cooper visits and sees “Let’s Rock” scrawled on Desmond’s car); then we are back to Rodd’s reaction. “See, I’ve already gone places,” he says. “I just want to stay where I am.” This line doesn’t appear in the script, notes “Deleted Scenes: Script to Screen” at a fan site called Dugpa.com; maintained by a fan who goes only by the name “Dugpa” (a Tibetan term for a spirit, borrowed by Twin Peaks); instead, there is deleted footage bringing in Deputy Cliff Howard (Rick Aiello) (Lynch and Engels 22–23).
Until that scene, Rodd appears to be just another eccentric character, like those already familiar to fans of the original Twin Peaks TV series (1990–91). There’s even talk about coffee, a running gag in the series; he calls his “Good Morning America” and opines that it’s the “best god-damned coffee you’re going to get anywhere,” after Desmond remarks that it has “the sting of the 48-hour blend.”
The juxtaposition of the utility pole and the war whoop and the look on Rodd’s face suggest that the “places” he’s gone to have to do with the Black Lodge, part of a secondary universe (along with a White Lodge and the Red Room, which seems to be a bridge between them) that was introduced in the TV series but was fully systematized only in the film prequel.
Now that a new Twin Peaks miniseries is in the works, we may see more of it—or perhaps an altered version (indeed, actor Harry Dean Stanton is slated to reprise his role as Carl Rodd in the revival). After 25 years, Lynch can hardly be criticized for second, or even third or fourth thoughts. Chris Carter, for example, retconned the mythology of The X Files (1993–2002) more than once, and did so again in a 2016 TV revival.
Contemporary fiction with supernatural elements is often called “urban fantasy.” The town of Twin Peaks is hardly urban, yet the mythology Lynch has constructed for its denizens parallels those of novels, films and TV series about vampires, zombies and werewolves. Only, Twin Peaks has nothing to do with familiar supernatural beings. Even so, it seems to have rules, just like those for urban fantasy and classic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings.
Lynch’s early experimental films like Eraserhead are more akin to Kafka than to the high fantasy world building of J.R.R. Tolkien—indeed, he once planned a film version of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” according to the “David Lynch Unproduced Films” website. And while he got his big break with the assignment to direct an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 science fiction novel with Dune, he didn’t seem to have a real vocation for science fiction. After Dune proved a critical and commercial failure, Lynch was able to turn to Blue Velvet, a more personal project, thanks to a provision in his contract with De Laurentiis for Dune. Blue Velvet, like Twin Peaks, is set in a small town with small town secrets—but while it has surreal elements, there is nothing explicitly supernatural.
Supernatural elements might never have been introduced into Twin Peaks, either, but for happenstance. The series was conceived by Lynch and Mark Frost as sort of an offbeat soap opera, with the murder of Laura Palmer and the assignment of FBI agent Dale Cooper to investigate it giving viewers a chance to meet and follow the lives of its natives—including such quirky characters as Margaret Lanterman (the Log Lady) and Dr. Lawrence Jacoby as well as the more sober-minded Sheriff Harry S. Truman and his deputies, and the men and women of often troubled local families—the Palmers, Hornes, Martells, Briggses, Haywards and others. There were a number of sub-plots, some grim, others comic—yet none of them amounting to a transgression of the bounds of ordinary reality. So how and when did everything change?
According to Twin Peaks film editor Duwayne Dunham in the documentary Northwest Passage (2010), it began at a breakfast they shared and a seemingly chance remark by Lynch about the idea of a man cutting his arm off to remove a tattoo. Nothing might have come of that, except that Lynch and Mark Frost sought to hedge their bets by adding an ending to the first episode so that it could be shown separately in the event that Twin Peaks wasn’t picked up for series broadcast in Europe. That was when Lynch came up with the One-Armed Man, BOB, the Man from Another Place and the Red Room. An article in Entertainment Weekly (April 6, 1990) was prescient about the use the series might make of the footage shot for the European version:
When series creators Lynch and Mark Frost sold the Twin Peaks foreign videocassette rights to Warner Home Video, the company put them under a contractual obligation to provide a film with an ending. Lynch fulfilled the requirement with one last scene, a chilling, almost indecipherable epilogue. Flashing 25 years into the future, it involves FBI agent Dale Cooper, a psychic dwarf, and a beautiful woman who’s a dead ringer for Laura Palmer. The sequence, which uses a computer-distorted soundtrack, parts of it played in reverse, rivals Lynch’s eeriest, most alienating work. A spokesman for the show says it’s unlikely to air; indeed, it’s hard to imagine how the series could incorporate it, except possibly as a dream sequence [Mark Harris; italics added].
Indeed, that was how it was incorporated into episode two; for the remainder of the first season, viewers were kept guessing whether it was anything more than a dream. After all, Cooper had a thing about dreams; earlier in the episode, he had explained how a dream three years earlier had gotten him into a Tibetan method of deduction, which he demonstrated by throwing rocks at a bottle to identify the killer (wrongly, as it turned out). But it was the recycled dream sequence which introduced such iconic elements as “fire, walk with me,” the convenience store (mentioned several other times during the series and the film) and, of course, the One-Armed Man and his evil counterpart BOB:
Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chants out between two worlds, “fire, walk with me.” We lived among the people. I think you say, convenience store. We lived above it. I mean it like it is, like it sounds. My name is Mike. His name is BOB … I too have been touched by the devilish one. A tattoo on the left shoulder … oh, but when I saw the face of God, I was changed. I took the entire arm off [episode two].
In episode five, Cooper and Truman find the One-Armed Man, Philip Michael Gerard (Al Strobel)—yet the reason for Gerard’s disability is explained as decidedly banal: he is a traveling salesman who lost his arm in a car accident, and that the only Bob he knows is Bob Lydecker, a veterinarian. Following Cooper’s intuitive detection process, he and the police investigate Lydecker’s clinic, which leads to the discovery of a myna bird that provides a clue to the murder case. Meanwhile, the story lines of the series characters reveal the dark secrets of a seemingly idyllic community—including adultery, drug dealing, prostitution (involving a Canadian casino/brothel called One Eyed Jacks), as well as garden variety business chicanery.
The only hint of something beyond common reality comes when Truman introduces Cooper to the Bookhouse Boys, a local crime-fighting secret society:
TRUMAN: Twin Peaks is different. A long way from the world. You’ve noticed that.
COOPER: Indeed I have.
TRUMAN: And that’s the way we like it. But there’s a back end to that that’s different too. Maybe that’s the price we pay for all the good things.
COOPER: What is it?
TRUMAN (lowering his voice): There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. It takes different forms, but it’s been there for as long as anyone can remember. And we’ve always been here to fight it [episode three].
Back then, however, the “evil out there” seemed at first to be quite worldly, even if Truman knew better: when the sheriff takes Cooper to actually meet the Bookhouse Boys, they are busy interrogating Bernard Renault (Clay Wilcox), brother of Jacques—the prime suspect in the murder of Laura Palmer, who is himself later murdered by her father Leland in an act of seeming revenge.
In a spin-off book, Welcome to Twin Peaks (1991), Lynch and Frost refer to the Bookhouse Boys staging a “passion play” at Glastonbury Grove that has religious overtones—a sword, chalice, crucifix and chrysanthemum all figure in it (68). But that seems to have been an afterthought, rather than an element in the original conception of the series—which might have continued on a worldly track. Leland Palmer could have turned out to be Laura’s murderer even if Cooper’s dream and all that came of it had never happened, but it wouldn’t have been a matter of demonic possession. How things would have played out, we don’t know.
Lynch and Frost had wanted to keep the mystery going as long as the show lasted in any case, and ended it in the second season only under pressure from the network. “They forced us to, you know,” Lynch said afterward. “The progress towards [the solution], but never getting there, was what made us know all the people of Twin Peaks, how they all surrounded Laura and intermingled. All the mysteries…. It would’ve made Twin Peaks live a lot longer.” Resolving the mystery “killed the thing” (Lynch, Lynch on Lynch 180).
There had been the (seemingly hallucinatory) appearance to Cooper of the Giant in the second season opener, inaugurating the supernatural tenor that was to dominate much of the second season—after he was shot at the end of the first season (the Giant eventually turns out to be a doppelgänger of the elderly waiter at the Great Northern). Viewers weren’t supposed to know, at the time, whether that scene, like the dream in episode two, was supposed to be “real.” All they knew was the cryptic references to clues like “The owls are not what they seem.” Yet other supernatural elements, seemingly unrelated, were introduced, such as Pierre Tremond making creamed corn vanish when Donna Hayward called on his grandmother after taking over Laura’s Meals on Wheels route.
It was the Tremonds, Pierre and his unnamed grandmother (Frances Bay), who put Donna (who had a talent for intuitive detective work akin to Cooper’s) on the trail of Harold Smith (Lenny Von Dohlen), who had Laura’s secret diary, and then committed suicide—that seemed more important at the time than the creamed corn. Yet in Fire Walk with Me, the Tremonds (also known as the Chalfonts, although we never learned which if either identity was real, or who they might have been trying to hide from) returned as major players, and so did creamed corn—now called “garmonbozia.” Scattered elements of the Black Lodge mythology came together in the convenience store scene, as seen by Philip Jeffries (David Bowie), an FBI agent who seems to appear out of thin air and just as suddenly and mysteriously vanishes into thin air after telling his story. (A longer version of that scene than what appeared in the film, along with variations on Red Room scenes, can be found as part of the box set Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery and The Missing Pieces, on disc nine.)
Besides the Tremonds, the Man from Another Place and BOB, the scene includes the Jumping Man (self-explanatory, described by Lynch in the documentary Moving Through Time: Fire Walk with Me Memories as a “talisman come to life”) (Carlton Lee Russell) and the Electrician (Calvin Lockhart, the man with a cane). There are also two woodsmen who don’t seem to have anything to do, although one was played by Jürgen Prochnow, a noted German actor who also had a major role as Duke Leto Atreides in Dune. The shooting script includes dialogue that never appeared in the film as released:
FIRST WOODSMAN (subtitled): We have descended from pure air.
MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE (subtitled): Going up and down. Intercourse between the two worlds.
BOB (subtitled): Light of new discoveries.
MRS. TREMOND (subtitled): Why not be composed of materials and combinations of atoms?
MRS. TREMOND’S GRANDSON (subtitled): This is no accident.
MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE (subtitled): This is a formica table. Green is its color.
He touches the table.
FIRST WOODSMAN (subtitled): Our world.
MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE (subtitled): With chrome. And everything will proceed cyclically.
SECOND WOODSMAN (subtitled): Boneless.
MIKE [sic] (subtitled): Yes, find the middle place [Lynch and Engels 36–37].
In the script, the Man from Another Place doesn’t mention “garmonbozia.” Nor is there a close-up of a man, reportedly the Electrician, according to Dugpa—although Michael J. Anderson has asserted it was the Man from Another Place—saying “Ee-lec-tri-city.” In the extended version of the scene, the Electrician says two words: “animal life.” That might refer to Earthly life in general, or black dogs that run at night (later associated with Pierre Tremond in a music video scene), or even a brief glimpse of Pierre wearing a mask and then lifting it to reveal the face of a monkey—the same monkey who whispers “Judy” at the end of the film.
Besides talking about garmonbozia and a formica table, the Man from Another Place invokes the power of the Owl Cave ring that had figured toward the end of the second season (“With this ring, I thee wed”). That ring is first seen (in the chronology of the film/series) by Chester Desmond at the Fat Trout trailer court, where it was apparently left by the Tremonds/Chalfonts. The Man from Another Place later shows it to Laura, in what seems to be a dream, with Cooper warning her not to take it. After she is seemingly visited by Dale Cooper’s love interest (and Black Lodge escapee; abducted by Windom Earle, Annie was led into the Black Lodge in an effort to trap Cooper) Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), she finds herself wearing it. It’s gone when she wakes up, but she later sees Philip Gerard, the One-Armed Man wearing it in the traffic encounter in broad daylight—no dream there! Annie has worn the ring at one point, and Jeffries knows about it. The Twin Peaks Gazette, seeing a parallel to Tolkien, posted an analysis, “One Ring to Rule Them All,” connecting it with the relationship of the Man from Another Place to BOB and the significance of garmonbozia—but couldn’t quite pin it all down.
In another Red Room scene the Man from Another Place tells Cooper, “I am the arm, and I sound like this”—giving the Indian war whoop. (There are deleted scenes in which he says that “someone else” now has the ring, and where a nurse takes it from Annie,). The FAQ entry on Fire Walk with Me at the Internet Movie Data Base addresses a number of conundrums, including the ring, garmonbozia, the monkey, and the identity of Judy (whom Jeffries, in his visit to the Philadelphia FBI office, indicates is a key player). Twin Peaks Online offers an even longer FAQ list.
The convenience store scene also establishes the context for the scene in which the One-Armed Man confronts Leland and Laura Palmer (caught in a traffic jam): “You stole the corn. I had it canned over the store…. Miss, the look on her face when it was opened, there was a stillness, like the formica table top…. The thread will be torn, Mr. Palmer, the thread will be torn…. It’s him, it’s your father!”1 (“Stillness” replaces the shooting draft’s “closeness” [Lynch and Engels 90]. The smell of burned engine oil, also associated with the Lodge, recurs here; likewise the image of a barking black dog.) In the Red Room, where BOB returns after the murder of Laura, the Man From Another Place (the Arm) reunites with the One-Armed Man as they speak in unison: “BOB, I want all my garmonbozia [pain and sorrow].”2
Yet the systemization of the mythology also includes the role of Gordon Cole, the FBI Regional Bureau Chief played by Lynch himself. In the series, he is little more than comic relief with his huge hearing aid and malapropisms. But in Fire Walk with Me, we learn that the murder of Teresa Banks had been one of his “Blue Rose cases”—which means that the Laura Palmer case must also be one. Yet in the series, the only connection Cooper makes between the two is the “irrefutable similarities,” and indeed claims that the only reason the FBI was involved at all was that Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine), who “barely escaped the same fate” (Pilot) as Laura, had crossed a state line.
Why would Cole designate Teresa Banks as one of his Blue Rose cases? He would do so only if he were already involved in the investigation of the paranormal, and recognized the signs. The coded dance presented by Cole to agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) by Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole), which Desmond later explains to a rather befuddled Stanley, has to do with the local authorities in Deer Meadow being belligerent (the sheriff may have an uncle in prison), drugs being involved, that they’re in for a lot of legwork, and so on. No a hint of anything paranormal, and when Stanley notices the blue rose pinned to her dress, Desmond responds only, “Very good, but I can’t tell you about that” (Lynch and Engels 6).
Philip Jeffries later appears at the Philadelphia FBI office out of nowhere (as far as Cole, Cooper and Albert Rosenfield [Miguel Ferrer] know, the scene of him in Buenos Aires a moment before having been deleted, although it later appeared in the “Missing Pieces” section of the Blu-ray edition). After telling them about Judy and the meeting above the convenience store, he vanishes immediately thereafter. It is clearly something paranormal; likewise the duplicate image of Cooper himself on the hall monitor when Jeffries passes by the monitor. Yet it may have all had to do with a dream Cooper told Cole about relating to the date (Feb. 15, 1989, a year since the death of Teresa Banks); moreover, he and Cole accept the reality of the situation, even if they are alarmed by it. Only Albert Rosenfield, the forensics expert portrayed in the series as a hard-headed realist, seems skeptical (“It’s raining Post Toasties” [Lynch and Engels 36]). In the film as released, they don’t know where Jeffries has disappeared to—the shooting draft has him arriving from and returning to Buenos Aires, indicating that there are additional portals between the two worlds. Cole’s and Cooper’s reactions were the same when Rosenfield got a call about Desmond’s disappearance in Deer Meadow—which we but not they know came after he found the ring under the Chalfont trailer.
But there had been nothing in Twin Peaks about Blue Rose cases or portals to other places or times or the Owl Cave ring when the second season was derailed by ABC. As Lynch feared, the premature solution to the Laura Palmer mystery killed its appeal, and certainly threw the storytelling out of gear. There wasn’t any reason for Dale Cooper to remain in Twin Peaks once the case was solved, and so an excuse had to be contrived: an inquiry about his crossing the Canadian border to rescue Audrey Horne from One Eyed Jacks. A romance between Cooper and Audrey was reportedly being contrived to keep him in town after that, yet Kyle MacLachlan balked at that because, according to an interview for the Gold Edition of the DVDs for the series, he didn’t think Cooper should have sex with a teenager. (Durham 36). Sherilyn Fenn, who played Audrey, has claimed that it was really because MacLachlan was dating Lara Flynn Boyle (Donna Hayward) (Will Harris).
Whatever the reason, Annie Blackburn, sister of Norma Jennings (owner of the Double R Diner)—who had never been seen before because she had been living in a convent—was brought in as Cooper’s new romantic interest. Blackburn also inadvertently becomes the target of an old enemy, former FBI agent Windom Earle, with whose wife Caroline (Brenda E. Mathers) (a witness in a federal investigation) Cooper had had an affair while she was supposed to be under his protection as a witness to a murder Earle had committed. Earle murdered Caroline in retaliation for her infidelity, brutally injuring Cooper in the process. Cooper vowed never again to become involved with a woman who was part of a case.
There were other hastily-contrived storylines, like Benjamin Horne’s delusional fantasy of being a Civil War general, Nadine Hurley’s attempted suicide, and subsequent amnesia—she imagines she is a teenager again, joins the high school wrestling team, and goes in sexual pursuit of fellow wrestler Mike Nelson (Gary Hershberger). Nadine’s husband Ed (Everett McGill) had already been carrying a torch for Norma, owner of the Double R Diner, whose own husband Hank (Chris Mulkey) is a career criminal; they finally get together only after Nadine’s descent into lunacy. Andrew Packard (Dan O’Herlihy), long believed dead, turns up alive—and involved in another conspiracy.
By February 1991, Twin Peaks’ ratings were in significant decline, dropping from an average of 18 million viewers during its first season to a series low of roughly seven million. As a result, it was put on indefinite hiatus (“‘Twin Peaks’ Cancelled”). Moreover, the airing of the remaining episodes, instigated by a frenetic letter writing campaign by fans (Citizens Opposing the Offing of Peaks, or C.O.O.P.), was delayed by nearly two months. Yet those episodes had been building up to a season-ending cliff-hanger involving a bomb planted at a bank that threatened to kill off several lead characters, and Cooper’s pursuit of Windom Earle, who kidnapped Annie and took her to the Black Lodge. With Lynch having seemingly lost interest in the series after the culmination of the Laura Palmer mystery, the unfolding of the mythology was left to Frost and others.
On the one hand, it was played as a matter of local Native American mythology, as in a conversation between Cooper and Deputy Thomas “Hawk” Hill (Michael Horse), after Major Garland Briggs (Don Davis) is taken (episode 17) to what he believes (after returning in episode 19) is the White Lodge, after disappearing while on a camping trip with Cooper:
COOPER: Have any of you fellows heard of a place called the White Lodge?
HILL: Where did you hear that?
COOPER: Well, it was the last thing Major Briggs said to me before he disappeared. He asked me if I ever heard of a place called the White Lodge. I told him I had not. He wouldn’t say why he asked.
HILL: Cooper, you may be fearless in this world. But there are other worlds.
COOPER: Tell me more.
HILL: My people believe that the White Lodge is a place where the spirits that rule man and nature reside. There is also a legend of a place called the Black Lodge. The shadow self of the White Lodge. Legend says that every spirit must pass through there on the way to perfection. There, you will meet your own shadow self. My people call it The Dweller on the Threshold.
COOPER: The Dweller on the Threshold.
HILL: But it is said that if you confront the Black Lodge with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul [episode 18].
On the other hand, there was a teaser to UFO mythology. In episode nine (second of the second season) Major Briggs—at the behest of the Log Lady, who says her log has advised him to “deliver the message”—approaches Cooper. The Air Force, it seems, is still trying to detect alien transmissions from space as a carryover from Operation Blue Book. But buried in gibberish are two messages. The first is “The owls are not what they seem,” the second Cooper’s name repeated three times. Both messages, Briggs later tells him (episode 19), came from the nearby woods rather than from space.
An element of astrology is introduced when Briggs is kidnapped (episode 26) by Windom Earle, and tells Earle under the truth serum haloperidol that access to the Lodge is granted only “when Jupiter and Saturn meet” in conjunction. Cooper later finds the same reference on a petroglyph at Owl Cave; a cave painting identifies Glastonbury Grove as the point of entrance. It seems to be stretching coincidence, to say the least, that a conjunction is occurring just when it is most convenient for Earle. It had already been coincidence enough for it to turn out that Briggs and the Log Lady both had mysterious tattoos—and that she too once disappeared when she was a child. Until then, there was nothing explicit to connect the Log Lady with the Lodge.
It was only when the fate of Twin Peaks had been sealed that Lynch returned to put his stamp on episode 29, the finale. He made a number of changes to the script drafted by Frost, Harley Peyton and Robert Engels, yet his primary focus was on the Red Room—where he thought they had got things “completely and totally wrong” (Lynch, Lynch on Lynch 182). The original script focused on Windom Earle, as witness when Cooper makes his way to the Lodge—which isn’t the Red Room from his original dream:
4. INT. BLACK CORRIDOR
Cooper struggles with the door, can’t open it.
WINDOM EARLE’S VOICE: You’re going about this all wrong, Dale.
Cooper stops, tries to locate the source of the voice.
WINDOM EARLE’S VOICE: We’ll profit not at all from resisting what there is to experience here. That much I do know. Still, an entire life of research arid contemplation can’t begin to prepare one for the actual experience of being here.
COOPER: Where are we?
WINDOM EARLE’S VOICE: Speaking for myself, I’m up here. No, up here.
Cooper looks up. Earle is floating ten feet off the ground some distance away.
EARLE: Think of us as astronauts. And when you do, think of us fondly. I could hazard a guess at the physics but why spoil the fun?
COOPER: What is this place?
EARLE: Where do you think we are, dummy?
COOPER: The Black Lodge [Frost, Peyton and Engels].
There is no backward-talking. Laura Palmer appears only for an instant and does not speak. The Black Lodge Singer, the Man from Another Place, the Giant, the Elderly Bellhop, Maddy Ferguson, and Leland Palmer never appear. Windom Earle’s fate is less abrupt; he ends up shackled to a dentist’s chair with BOB as the torturer. The final scene back at the Great Northern is more abrupt, ending with Cooper seeing BOB’s face in the bathroom mirror as he is about to brush his teeth. In the filmed episode, Cooper squeezes the toothpaste into the sink, sees BOB’s reflection in the mirror, smashes his head into the mirror, says “How’s Annie?” repeatedly, and laughs uncontrollably.
Lynch seemed eager to have BOB make short work of Earle, after all the build-up he’d been given by Frost and the rest. He might have been an evil genius to his creators in the elaborate backstory they had created for him, but to Lynch he was strictly a bit player:
EARLE: If you give me your soul, I’ll let Annie live.
COOPER: I will.
[Windom Earle stabs Cooper]
BOB: [to Windom] Be quiet! Be quiet!
[to Dale]
BOB: You go. He is wrong. He can’t ask for your soul. I will take his [Frost, Peyton, and Engels].
Lynch couldn’t make wholesale changes to the rest of the episode; as he put it, “A lot of the other parts were things that had been on a certain route, so they had to continue” (Lynch, Lynch on Lynch 182). Because she had already figured in previous episodes, he had no choice but to keep Annie as Cooper’s love, and he worked that into a scene for Fire Walk with Me, in which she is in the hospital wearing the ring (later taken by her nurse) after her ordeal in the Red Room:
[Laura] turns to her right to see who it is, then turning back to her left she discovers ANNIE BLACKBURN lying in bed with her. Annie has blood around her mouth. She tries to raise herself and strains to speak.
ANNIE: My name is Annie. I’ve been with Laura and Dale. The good Dale is in the Lodge and he can’t leave. Write it in your diary [Lynch and Engels 70].
The Tremonds (who have given Laura a picture of a strange room with a door) appear in another dream of hers, leading her to the Red Room, where the “good Dale” warns her not to take the ring. But there’s nothing in the film about Native American lore, UFOs or astrology. Instead, there are references to electricity—a quick cut to an image of power lines when Jeffries disappears from the FBI office, suggesting that they are a means of travel for the entities of the Lodge and those touched by them; the utility pole at the Fat Trout Trailer Park, and the introduction of the Electrician in the convenience store scene.
And what about Judy, of whom Philip Jeffries makes so much in his appearance at the Philadelphia FBI office? In the longer version of the Jeffries scene for the “Missing Pieces” segment of the Blu-ray edition of Fire Walk with Me, Jeffries is seen checking into a hotel in Buenos Aires, whereupon the hotel clerk gives him a letter left for him by Judy. Later, when he appears at FBI headquarters, his line “I found something … and then there they were” is expanded into “I found something, in Seattle, at Judy’s … and then there they were.”
The scene at the FBI office as it appears in the film is intercut with that of the meeting above at the convenience store, indicating the BOB and the other beings are the “they” of whom he is speaking. As for Judy, co-writer Robert Engels, in an interview with John Thorne, co-editor of Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic, suggested that Judy was Josie Packard’s sister, and that she was involved in dealings with Agent Jeffries and former agent Windom Earle in Buenos Aires:
ROBERT ENGELS: He was down there, and that’s where Judy is. I think Joan Chen [Josie] is there, and I think Windom Earle is there. It is this idea that there are these portals around the world, and Phillip Jeffries had one hell of a trip to Buenos Aires and back! He really doesn’t want to talk about Judy because that reminds him of whatever happened to him. It’s really as simple as that. There was a thing that was going to happen with Josie and Windom and Judy. In our original planning of the prequel, there is a whole other section about all this. A whole other set of mythology that was going to be around Judy and Josie and where Windom Earle ended up.
JOHN THORNE: I did read an early draft of the script that has a line about Judy’s sister. Was that supposed to be Josie?
ROBERT ENGELS: Yes. Yes, I think that is true [Miller and Thorne 8].
This plot thread might have apparently been expanded upon had there ever been any subsequent Twin Peaks films. But Thorne, citing the difficulty Lynch faced in keeping the name “Judy” in the film while deleting the context (The Aug. 8 Shooting Draft reference to Judy living in Seattle, and an earlier July 3 script that mentions her having a sister) later argued that Judy became really just a code name for Laura:
So Lynch was stuck with a line about Judy. But because the original and complex identity of Judy (Josie’s sister or first murder victim) was now abandoned, Lynch had to provide a new identity for the mysterious Judy, especially since he was trying to make FWwM a stand-alone film.
And that’s just what David Lynch did; he found another persona to attach to the name. That persona was Laura Palmer.
Lynch reintroduces “Judy” to the film after Laura Palmer has been killed. He deliberately places a close-up shot of a monkey uttering the word, “Judy,” just before he cuts to another close-up of the dead Laura. This simple edit obviously establishes a connection between the name and the character: “Judy” is said/Laura is shown [Thorne].
Still, if Judy were actually the sister of Josie Packard, she could easily fit into the continuity of Twin Peaks, even if she has never been to Buenos Aires. It was established in the second season that it was Josie who shot Cooper at the Great Northern, after setting fire to the Packard mill, and then skipped town:
Josie high-tails it to Seattle in order to “put some distance between her and the smell of smoke,” but not before plugging Cooper three times in his hotel room. She feared he would unravel her schemes and foil the plot. In the meantime, Catherine escapes the fire and heads to her [brother Andrew’s] hideout at Pearl Lakes. Both presumed dead, they lie in wait, developing a counter plot to regain control of Packard lands and to wreak revenge on [Benjamin] Horne, Josie, and also [Thomas] Eckhardt [David Warner], who they now realize was behind it all, when he comes to collect her [“Packard Mill Conspiracies”].
None of this seems to tie into the mythology of the Lodge, but after her sudden death in episode 23 after shooting Eckhardt and having a terrifying vision of BOB, there are signs that Josie was more—or actually less—than she seemed. At her autopsy, she weighed only 65 pounds. Deputy Hawk speculates that her soul is no longer in the body. Indeed, it seems to be trapped in the drawer knob of a dresser at the hotel, on which Cooper sees her face.
The Twin Peaks Archive has cited an account in 1993 by Frank Silva, who played BOB, that Josie’s body ended up in the Red Room. It also reported that Richard Beymer (Ben Horne) took pictures on the episode 29 set of a Joan Chen double wearing the same dress as Josie was when she was found dead—at which time Cooper too had a vision of BOB. Silva thought at the time that the double might have appeared in the Red Room in the finale, but when she didn’t concluded that Lynch must have changed his mind (Horne). Could Josie have somehow been in two places at once? John Thorne quotes Jeffries in the July 3, 1991, draft of Fire Walk with Me as saying, “Her [Judy’s] sister’s there [in Seattle], too. At least part of her.”
But will Judy figure in the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks? If she indeed turns out to be Josie’s sister, could she be played by Joan Chen or her double? All we know for sure is that Fire Walk with Me makes a point of invoking Judy’s name in both the scene with Jeffries and the teaser at the end. Jeffries has apparently traveled through time, and Judy may have played a part in that, as the August 8 Shooting Draft suggests: “I want to tell you everything, but I don’t have a whole lot to go on, but I will tell you one thing: Judy is positive about this” (Lynch and Engels 35).
This implies that Judy has discovered something relating to either Dale Cooper, or the meeting above the convenience store. Jeffries’ obsession with Judy and what she may or may not know implies that she could play a further part in the mythology revealed in the extended convenience store scene in the Shooting Draft.
On the surface, Twin Peaks seems like an ordinary place in an ordinary world. And yet, as Jeffries puts it, “we live inside a dream.” It is easy to see the lodges and their denizens as metaphors for the mind/body dichotomy, or love versus fear. In the context of the story, however, they are as “real” as the Shire and Mordor and orcs and wizards in Middle Earth. BOB and The Man from Another Place and the rest aren’t supposed to be just in our heads; they’re out there. One of the Log Lady introductions added by Lynch for the Bravo re-runs in 1993 and available on the complete Gold Box 2007 DVD set even suggests that their world is the real world: “There are clues everywhere—all around us. But the puzzle maker is clever. The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow mistaken for something else. And the something else—the wrong interpretation of the clues—we call our world. Our world is a magical smoke screen” (episode 27).
Jay Dyer, in “Inside David Lynch: An Esoteric Look at Twin Peaks,” argues that the secondary world of Twin Peaks evokes older ideas of the occult, such as The Lesser Key of Solomon. One could also invoke P.D. Ouspensky or Charles Edward Hinton and his idea of a Fourth Dimension, albeit Hinton had a purely spatial dimension in mind. Robert B. Durham, uncredited author of Twin Peaks: The Unofficial Companion (2014), speculates that Lynch may have gotten the idea for the Black and White Lodges from William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night (1980) (87).
All we know for certain is that it is the home of BOB and the Man from Another Place and other spirits, and that they can visit us, and we them, voluntarily or otherwise, traveling to the future or the past through portals, or by electricity, or even through use of the ring. Yet the good Dale and Annie Blackburn appear in the dreams of Laura. Jeffries somehow knew about the bad Dale (“Who do you think that is there?”) before the bad Dale appeared in terms of the timeline for the series and its prequel.
The secondary universe of Twin Peaks, whatever its nature, is a unique creation, and Lynch isn’t impressed by later series it has been compared to, such as The X-Files, American Gothic and, especially, Wild Palms. Comments Lynch, “People said Wild Palms had something to do with Twin Peaks. To me, it had zip to do with Twin Peaks. ZZZIP! And all these rip-off things that came after didn’t catch one little whiff of what Twin Peaks was, to me” (Lynch on Lynch 183).
Lynch had expected to continue his story after Fire Walk with Me, but the film was, at first at least, a critical and commercial failure. Chris Rodley, in Lynch on Lynch, called the film “brilliant but excoriating,” commenting that “by the time Lynch unveiled Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992, critical reaction had become hostile…. It is, undoubtedly, one of Lynch’s cruellest, bleakest neighborhood visions, and even managed to displease die-hard fans of the series…. In exposing the very heart of the TV series, Lynch was forced to accept that he was unlikely to return to the town of Twin Peaks again” (Lynch 185).
For Lynch himself, it was just that “the parade had gone by” (Lynch on Lynch 184). But it certainly hadn’t helped that he’d made a prequel centering on his obsession with Laura Palmer, while leaving Dale Cooper trapped in the Lodge while his evil doppelgänger had replaced him in Twin Peaks. “Why was Cooper possessed by BOB at the end?” Rodley asked. “It looks like he’s lost it.” But Lynch thought that was missing the point. Speaking with Rodley, Lynch observed, “Well, the thing is, he hasn’t. It’s the doppelgänger thing—the idea of two sides to everyone. He’s really up against himself. People were really upset that it ended with an evil Cooper who’d been taken over by BOB. But that’s not the ending. That’s the ending people were stuck with. That’s just the ending of the second season. If it had continued…” (Lynch 182).
Only it was Lynch who decided not to continue it with an immediate sequel. Oddly, however, Sherilyn Fenn has asserted there had been talk at some point of a spin-off in which Audrey Horne and John Justice Wheeler would head for Hollywood. As Fenn told it:
Um … the Audrey spin-off that would’ve come about, it really ended up being the original idea for Mulholland Drive. That was either in between the first and second season or after the second season, but they were like, “What if we did a movie, and it’s Audrey in California?” And they talked about an opening scene of her driving along Mulholland Drive, and how she’s a little bit older. Whatever it was going to be, it never ended up happening for me. But I was young, and I thought it sounded weird, because no one ever really did that [Will Harris].
That would have to have been during or after the second season, since Audrey and Wheeler didn’t become an item in Twin Peaks until nearly the end of the series; but if such a spin-off was contemplated, why not a direct sequel?
Talk of a spin-off would also mean that Audrey hadn’t been slated to be killed off when she chained herself to a bank vault door in an environmental protest—just as Andrew Packard was about to accidentally set off the bomb left by Eckhardt. Fenn has confirmed that she will appear in the revival, as have a number of other veterans of the series—in addition, of course, to MacLachlan as Cooper (“Twin Peaks Season Three”).
“I’ll see you again in 25 years,” Laura Palmer had told Cooper in the Red Room in the final episode of the original Twin Peaks, and it was a bizarre twist that plans for the new series were announced as that year approached. But in the real world of television, there’s a lot of ground to cover, a lot of catching up to do; to help fans catch up, Frost announced in late 2014 (a week after word of the revival) that he was coming out with a novel, The Secret Lives of Twin Peaks, which will (among other things) catch fans up with what has been happening over those 25 years.
While the series has long had a strong fan base, the revival can’t fly if it appeals only to those who put on the annual Twin Peaks Fan Festival in North Bend, Washington, and discuss the series endlessly on the Internet as well as in fan publications. It will have to appeal to a new generation of viewers, through story lines that engage them as strongly as the original series engaged its generation—and it will have to avoid the kind of mistakes that put off too many of the original viewers after only a year and a half. That includes integrating the mythology with the story, rather than using it a gimmick.
Online accounts of the revival have centered on the returning characters—Cooper himself, of course, but reportedly (in the absence of official confirmation) the Hornes (Ben, Jerry and Audrey), Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick), James Hurley and other Peaks natives. Cole and Rosenfield also appear; veterans lead the list at a typical website, Flickering Myth, but those characters will be 25 years older, and obviously can’t carry the show all by themselves. Some or all will have grown children, who may figure in the plot, and there will surely be new characters without any link to the previous generation. The cast list for new characters includes stars like Naomi Watts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Laura Dern, James Belushi and Balthazar Getty—additions posted by Deadline.com in early March 2016 were Patrick Fischler and David Dastmalchian (Andreeva). We will see familiar sights like the Double R Diner and the sheriff’s station, but there may be new places as well—will anything have come of the Ghostwood project, for example?
Because Lynch will be directing all the episodes and have the final say on their scenarios, as was the case with the original series finale, we can hope that the Showtime series won’t be plagued by the kind of clumsy story lines that characterized the late second season. Yet with Frost involved, we can also hope that it will also bring back the elemental appeal that made Twin Peaks a phenomenon in the first season. We won’t know for sure until 2017, according to the latest reports.
It’s like being in the waiting room.
1. From the film as shot, slightly different from Lynch and Engels Shooting Draft Aug. 8, 1991, 90.
2. Film as released; Shooting Draft, 124; but without the exact context of the film as shot.
Anderson, Michael J. Personal conversation with John J. Pierce.
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Harris, Mark. “The Foreign Version.” Entertainment Weekly Apr. 6. 1990. http://www.lynchnet.com/tp/articles/ew1990c.html.
Harris, Will. “Sherilyn Fenn Talks David Lynch and How Twin Peaks Should Have Ended.” A.V. Club. http://www.avclub.com/article/sherilyn-fenn-talks-david-lynch-and-how-twin-peaks-200898.
Horne, Jerry. “Between Two Worlds: Josie’s Fate.” Twin Peaks Archive. http://twinpeaksarchive.blogspot.com/2011/07/between-two-worlds-josies-fate.html.
Lynch, David. Lynch on Lynch. Rev. ed. Ed. Chris Rodley. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005.
Lynch, David, and Robert Engels. “Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me, Teresa Banks and the Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer.” Shooting Draft, August 8, 1991. http://www.lynchnet.com/fwwm/fwwmscript.html.
Lynch, David, and Mark Frost. Welcome to Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.
Miller, Craig, and John Thorne. “We’re Going to Talk about Judy—and a Whole Lot More! An Interview with Robert Engels.” Wrapped in Plastic 58 (April 2002).
Northwest Passage. Dir. Adam Baran.
“One Ring to Rule Them All.” Twin Peaks Gazette. http://www.twinpeaksgazette.com/article-articleID=94.cfm.html.
“Packard Mill Conspiracies.” Twin Peaks Gazette. http://www.twinpeaksgazette.com/article-articleID=97.cfm.html.
“Physics of the Lodge.” Twin Peaks Gazette. http://www.twinpeaksgazette.com/article-articleID=91.cfm.html.
Thorne, John. “Judy, Judy, Judy.” Above the Convenience Store. April 6, 2009. http://abovethestore.blogspot.com/2009/04/judy-judy-judy.html.
“‘Twin Peaks’ Canceled as a Saturday Regular.” New York Times Feb. 16, 1991. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/16/arts/twin-peaks-canceled-as-a-saturday-regular.html, “Twin Peaks Season Three: Everything We Know So Far.” Whatculture.com. http://whatculture.com/tv/twin-peaks-season-3-everything-we-know-so-far.php/10,
Twin Peaks The Entire Mystery and The Missing Pieces. CBS/Paramount, 2014. DVD.