What Was Twin Peaks? Part 1

Before it was anything else, Twin Peaks was a soap opera, a prime-time melodrama about murders, love affairs, drugs, double crosses, nefarious schemes, and dark secrets—to borrow the tagline for David Lynch’s aborted follow-up series, Mulholland Drive, it was about “good people in trouble.” Set in a cozy backwater town in the Pacific Northwest, five miles south of the Canada–US border, Twin Peaks was at heart voyeuristic, making its viewers feel as though they were spying on their neighbors. More than once, Audrey Horne, inspired to play detective by her new crush, Special Agent Dale Cooper, spies on men—her father, then one of her father’s underlings—recalling how Jeffrey Beaumont, in Blue Velvet, peered at Dorothy Vallens through the slats of her bedroom closet. Indeed, Lynch started work on Twin Peaks when his agent asked him to expand Blue Velvet into a TV series.

Accordingly, a later episode sees Audrey’s father, Ben, ask whether a rowdy group of investors from Iceland are on “nitrous oxide” even as his business rival, Josie, follows him and his lover, Catherine, to a motel, snapping photos from her car just like Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey.

Blue Velvet took place in Lumberton, USA, and Lynch similarly set Twin Peaks in a seemingly wholesome logging town that harbored dark secrets. But Lumberton mostly resembled an actual place, with its hardware store and its diner and tree-lined streets, even if Lynch ironized their depiction with close-ups of gleaming white picket fences, waving firefighters, and obviously fake robins. With Twin Peaks, which premiered on April 8^th, 1990, Lynch pushed that irony further. There has never been a small town like Twin Peaks, and there never will be. Twin Peaks was idealist, its characters archetypes—caricatures, but no less true despite their exaggerations. We meet roughly two dozen of its inhabitants, all of them adults; even the teens at the local high school are played by twenty-somethings. They are also, one and all, impossibly attractive. As FBI Director Gordon Cole later exclaims, “The world of Twin Peaks seems to be filled with beautiful women!” The people of Twin Peaks were ridiculously gorgeous, as well as classy, glamorous, well-dressed. Uniforms abounded. Men wore suits, while women wore sweaters, skirts, dresses. And when they moved, one caught hints of stockings and garter belts.

That was a metaphor for the show: decorum on the surface, with a hint of sexuality underneath. After Laura Palmer’s death, FBI man Dale Cooper arrives in town and starts tugging at various threads, revealing the tranquil, idyllic town’s sleazy underbelly. But while the show revolved around lurid things, Twin Peaks was never lurid. There was no nudity or language, and not just because the show aired on network TV. Twin Peaks was a tease—Audrey using her mouth to tie a knot in a cherry stem. It was dreamy and romantic, elegant, a companion to the prime-time soaps like Dallas and Dynasty that had dominated television and the culture throughout the 1980s. It wasn’t until the film Fire Walk with Me—which tellingly opens with a shot of a TV set exploding—that Lynch produced an R-rated installment, in which we, like Donna Hayward, got to shadow Laura Palmer on her rebellious late-night excursions, with their nudity and foul language and graphic violence and gore, and which tragically led to her grisly death at the hands of her father, Leland, wild-eyed and frowning grotesquely as he raised his arms toward heaven, unfurling an iconic sheet of plastic.

Until then, the sordid details of Laura’s secret life and murder played out only in our heads, and Twin Peaks was escapist, fun—an adventure. As Dale Cooper put it, “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have no doubt that it will be a place both wonderful and strange.” Today “Lynchian” is a synonym for “nightmarish,” but Twin Peaks, back in the beginning, wasn’t a nightmare. While it got strange at times, even outlandish, it remained grounded in the familiar, and we tuned in each week to watch the same characters visit the same locations. We wanted to go there, to hang out with them, to tag along with Cooper and Sheriff Truman as they visited the Double R Diner for coffee and cherry pie. Watching the series, we get the sense that time isn’t passing—that we’re caught up in the timeless nature of a remote town where entropy isn’t in effect. The plates of donuts are always full, the pots of coffee always fresh. We can eat donuts and pie and coffee all day without gaining so much as a pound. The series as a whole seems to glow, the lighting warm and soft, the tones earthy and wooden, mahogany, honeyish. At its heart, Twin Peaks was goodhearted. “Every day, once a day,” Cooper tells Sheriff Truman, “give yourself a present.” Twin Peaks was that present.

Because it was good, because it was a soap opera, the people making it knew not to rush, knew to proceed slowly—at times too slowly. Recall how the series began. The first character we meet is Josie Packard, humming idly while languidly admiring herself in a mirror. In another room, Pete Martell gathers his gear and sets out to go fishing. Walking down the beach, he spots what looks like a human figure wrapped in plastic.

He calls Sheriff Truman, who calls Doc Hayward. The two men unwrap the package, revealing the blue-tinged corpse of Laura Palmer.

Slowly, the news spreads, introducing us to the other characters: Laura’s parents, Sarah and Leland, both of whom break down in hysterics; Laura’s friends Donna and Bobby and James at the high school. Their principal, recounting the sad news over the PA system, bursts into tears. A young woman, screaming, runs across the campus, her hands covering her face.

The ensuing episodes introduce us to yet more characters: Special Agent Dale Cooper, Dr. Jacoby, the Log Lady. The sinister Renault brothers. Albert Rosenfield, a naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence. The hard-of-hearing Gordon Cole. Just like the characters, plotlines multiply, interrupting and delaying one another, slowing proceedings down even further. But why rush? One episode, late in the second season, sees Cole and Cooper essentially hanging out at the Double R Diner, flirting with Annie and Shelly.

The slow, small-town pace gave us time to appreciate the show’s rich texture, replete with curious details and characters: the eye-patched Nadine, demanding that her kindly husband, Ed, hang entirely silent drapes; the thuggish Leo, who abuses his wife, Shelly, over the fact that their plastic-shrouded, unfinished house isn’t spotlessly clean. Just like Blue Velvet, which exposed Jeffrey and Sandy to the deranged villainy of Frank and Ben, Twin Peaks delighted in partnering good but bland characters with colorfully wicked counterparts whose eccentricities proved fascinating. Meanwhile, the Great Northern Lodge was the source of its own curious comings and goings: the Norwegians with their smorgasbord, the Icelanders, the barbershop quartet harmonizing over breakfast, the pinup girls scurrying right to left in their matching swimsuits.

A knot in a cherry stem, the pleasure of the tease. At Laura Palmer’s funeral, we see someone standing, his back to the camera, staring at a crucifix in the funeral parlor, imitating its gesture, then reaching for it. Only when he turns his head do we realize that it’s Bobby.

It’s like a game of peek-a-boo, something familiar being taken away for a moment, then returned. Dale Cooper pinches Sheriff Truman’s nose, surprising him, surprising us, but still remaining good old Dale Cooper. No matter how strange the show got, or how long we had to wait, there was always a payoff for the excursion, a cheerful, loving reward for our patience.

More than anything else, Twin Peaks made us wait to find out “Who killed Laura Palmer?” But Laura Palmer’s death was just the way in, a means of setting the plot in motion, a way to get everyone talking; neither David Lynch nor Mark Frost ever intended for her killer to be caught. The point was never forward progress. Instead, they constructed Twin Peaks around dualities, parallels, echoes—constantly circling back. We open with Josie regarding herself in a mirror, and end with Dale Cooper, possessed by BOB, giggling evilly to himself in front of a mirror he’s just fractured with his forehead. In between, in an early episode, the Horne family dinner, silent and dreary, is interrupted by the arrival of Ben’s kooky brother, Jerry, who’s brought with him baguettes studded with butter and brie. Meanwhile, the wholesome Hayward family welcomes to their table Donna’s new boyfriend, James. After dinner, the parents head upstairs, leaving Donna and James to tentatively make out on the sofa. Ben and Jerry Horne, at the same time, head across the border to the brothel One Eyed Jacks. That “great northern” country, amusingly, is presented as the other of Twin Peaks, a font of decadence, a wilderness peopled by French-Canadian brothel owners and drug dealers. (It’s like a parody of the anxiety some Americans feel about the Mexico–US border.) And of course Laura Palmer herself was duality incarnate: virgin and whore, homecoming queen and raging drug fiend. As her best friend Donna puts it, “Laura was living a double life. She was two people.” To understand Twin Peaks, we viewers had to learn to read those parallels, to pick up on those recurring associations and rhymes. We had to become like Special Agent Cooper, who deciphered clues from his dreams.

As it happened, Twin Peaks had its own double, the soap opera Invitation to Love, glimpsed sporadically on the town’s TV sets throughout the first season. That show-within-a-show was Lynch and Frost’s way of showing their hand, of signaling that their series was fundamentally ironic. “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was the direct descendant of Dallas’s “Who shot J.R.?” (The Simpsons—another ironic program set in small town America—also parodied Dallas by asking “Who shot Mr. Burns?”) Twin Peaks was to Dallas what Invitation was to Twin Peaks: a mirror held up to another mirror. Shot largely on sound stages, Twin Peaks was self-consciously artificial, tightly composed, with bright lights and dark shadows straight out of German Expressionism and film noir. The acting was slightly pantomimic, deliberately awkward, as though the proceedings were a stage play in an otherwise dark room.

Fittingly, the characters and their schemes revisited well-worn mystery tropes borrowed from juvenile adventures, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew: the Bookhouse Boys went spelunking in Owl Cave, and Cooper used corny expressions while flashing a thumbs-up sign, which others took to flashing back at him. The plot revolved around secret diaries, secret passageways, and secret tape recordings, while sleuthing involved false wigs and mustaches. Other plot twists hailed right from Ellery Queen, like when Leo shoots Waldo, the myna bird that happens to know a clue. (The murdered bird’s blood, obviously fake, splatters piled rows of donuts.)

Those kinds of events happened on Twin Peaks precisely because they were clichés—the kinds of things that happen on soap operas and in hokey mystery stories. Lynch and Frost borrowed liberally from those and other sources, naming their hero after Gary Cooper, One Eyed Jacks after the Marlon Brando Western, and stealing a one-armed man named “Philip Gerard” straight out of The Fugitive. Another episode tells us that “there was a third man,” a nod toward the Graham Greene and Carol Reed classic. And Laura Palmer herself hearkened back to the deceased beauty at the center of Otto Preminger’s thriller Laura.

Just like in that film, Twin Peaks‘ Laura comes back to life, this time in the form of her brunette cousin, Maddy (itself a swipe from Vertigo). And also just like in Laura, Laura Palmer’s portrait presides over the proceedings, smiling at us with her Mona Lisa smile from behind the final credits, haunting us, haunting everyone.

Like her namesake, Laura Palmer smiled because she knew something we didn’t: who had killed her. Her portrait marked the end of each episode, an enigmatic reminder that we were no closer to solving the series’ central mystery. What kept us watching, then, was everything else, including the desire to know what would happen next: like any good soap opera, Twin Peaks always ended with a cliffhanger. This reached its apogee in the first season finale, written and directed by Mark Frost, who crammed the installment with cliffhangers. Leo sets an incendiary bomb at the Packard Mill, right beside Shelly, who’s bound and gagged. Pete braves the flames to try and save Catherine, who goes missing. Nadine attempts suicide, and winds up in a coma. Lucy tells Andy that she’s pregnant. Bobby frames James by stashing cocaine in his motorcycle’s gas tank. Ben Horne visits the new girl at One Eyed Jacks, unaware that she’s his daughter, Audrey. Dr. Jacoby has a heart attack. Leo gets shot, by Hank, while trying to murder Bobby. And as Leo sinks back onto the couch, he glimpses Invitation to Love, on which an actor has just been shot. That man, shocked, turns as he sinks downward, and for a moment we’re confused: who’s watching whom?

That moment summarizes the episode—summarizes the whole first season—an ironically melodramatic show surprisingly tinged with sadness. Then the moment passes, and we cut to the Great Northern Lodge, where Dale Cooper answers a knock at the door of his room only to get shot, the same way that J.R. got shot. That gunshot, the ultimate cliffhanger, marks the end of the first season. It also marks the end of the soap-operatic Twin Peaks.

…To be continued! In the meantime, if you enjoyed this post, please check out the following:

• “How A Nightmare on Elm Street influenced Twin Peaks”;
• “Poltergeist III: Déclassé, Perhaps, but Great”;
• my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture;
• Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies, my collaboration with artist Andrew DeGraff.

Advertisement