What Was Twin Peaks? Part 2

In the first part of this series, I described how the first season of Twin Peaks was fundamentally a soap opera, a lovingly ironic take on popular prime-time soaps like Dynasty and Dallas. That version of the program, sultry and cool, reached its peak on 23 May 1990, in a cliffhanger-packed finale.

Four months later, Twin Peaks returned for a second season. But it wouldn’t be the same. Over the following twenty-two episodes, the show’s soap operatic qualities faded away—quite literally. The soap-within-a-soap, Invitation to Love, disappeared, no longer playing on anyone’s TVs. It’s heard but once in the second season, in the background, briefly—an afterthought.

What took its place? While it would be going too far to claim that Twin Peaks turned into a sitcom, it must be said that the show’s second season is much goofier than the first, littered with five-dollar words, camera mugging, and canted angles. Oddity replaced elegant aloofness, as Twin Peaks switched from running cool to hot. Many characters turned wacky, weird for weirdness’ sake, wrapped up in cornball scenarios. This is especially evident in the character of Deputy Andy Brennan. In the first season, Andy’s green, dropping his pistol during a raid, and vomiting and crying when exposed to violence and death. But in the first season finale, Andy mans up, saving Cooper from Jacques Renault, then summoning the courage to ask Lucy why she’s been giving him the cold shoulder (which leads to her telling him she’s pregnant). The start of the second season sees that progress wiped clean as Andy regresses, becoming a clown who steps on loose floorboards and knocks himself out, and who wraps his own fingers up with Scotch tape while trying to hang up sketches of BOB—a fitting image for the series’ new direction.

Andy’s joined in his buffoonery by Nadine, who emerges from her coma transformed into an immensely-strong amnesiac who thinks she’s still in high school, as well as Ben Horne, who goes from villainous to vaudeville, chomping on celery stalks in lieu of cigars as he comically re-stages the Civil War. Amplifying these antics is a cavalcade of guest stars, including Ian Buchanan as the aptly-named Dick, a cartoonishly smarmy cad, and David Lander—Laverne and Shirley’s Squiggy—who turns up three times in what could almost be three separate parts. This Twin Peaks, the more comedic Twin Peaks, the slapstick Twin Peaks, crescendos when, late in the second season, a weasel runs amok in the Great Northern Lodge after biting Dick.

Compounding this zaniness is the fact that, behind the scenes, the powers that be at ABC forced Lynch and Frost to reveal who’d murdered Laura Palmer, which hamstrung the show. TV is always all about stalling, but presumably some of the show’s more comedic plot lines were never intended to drag on for so long. But Lynch and company needed something to pass the time while they struggled to figure out some reason for Agent Cooper to stay in town, as well as a larger, overarching storyline—another mystery to replace Laura Palmer’s murder.

But Laura was one of a kind, irreplaceable. Late in the second season, we’re introduced to Lana Budding Milford, who’s meant to recall Laura: Dr. Jacoby attests to her prodigal sexual prowess, and every man who sees her is instantly smitten. Just like Laura, Lana has the talent of making fellows feel special, the sole object of her affections.

But unlike Laura, Lana’s a cartoon—the sitcom Laura, the Looney Tunes Laura. Lacking is Laura Palmer’s duality, her mystery.

With Laura gone, and its soap opera missing, Twin Peaks looked elsewhere for a mystery, for a new animating spirit. It found it by taking a turn toward the supernatural, reorienting itself around “the evil in the woods.”

It’s bracing now to remember that the first season of Twin Peaks was largely devoid of the supernatural. The White Lodge and Black Lodge aren’t mentioned by name until well into the second season—more than halfway through the show’s initial run. Prior to that, there’s just Sheriff Truman’s single vague warning to Coop that the “old woods” surrounding Twin Peaks contain an “evil […] a darkness, a presence”—after which the matter is dropped for quite some time. And while BOB and MIKE appear early on in the first season, it’s not clear they’re supposed to be spirits. In the first show after the pilot, Sarah Palmer screams, recalling having seen a long-haired man in Laura’s bedroom, barely hiding behind the bed—a man whom we later learn is BOB.

But BOB wasn’t BOB then—not yet. It’s not clear he’s even real. Moments before she remembers having seen the man, Sarah mistakes Donna Hayward for her daughter, embracing the teen while crying out, “Oh Laura, my baby!” Watching the scene, it’s easy to conclude that the poor woman, understandably traumatized by her daughter’s death, isn’t in her right mind.

Beyond that, the only source of mysticism in the first season is Dale Cooper—who’s an outsider, not a native of the town. While we glimpse MIKE and BOB and the Red Room, the show implies that this strange business is taking place not in Twin Peaks, or out in the woods, but inside Cooper’s head—that it’s the FBI man’s subconsciousness working overtime while he dreams.

This is laid out in the second episode proper, “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer.” In that episode, Cooper explains how, three years prior, he awoke from a dream “deeply moved by the plight of the Tibetan people,” as well as with the realization that he

had subconsciously gained knowledge of a deductive technique, involving mind-body coordination operating hand-in-hand with the deepest level of intuition.

(An Orientalist streak runs throughout the series; Dale’s double here is Dr. Jacoby, who’s fixated on Hawaii.) Cooper, having dreamed of Tibet, has become a surrealist detective, so to speak, attributing his extrasensory abilities to “magic”—but only because he doesn’t understand them, even as he proves willing to trust them (unlike Albert, his foil, who relies solely on forensics).

In this regard, Cooper’s a clear stand-in for David Lynch, sharing an M.O.—“modus operandi!”—that favors chance and intuition over conscious decision making. Cooper demonstrates his method by throwing rocks at bottles while Truman reads the names of suspects aloud—a scene that also helps recap the plot, as well as who all these characters are.

Later that episode, Cooper dreams. As he tosses and turns, we cross-dissolve between images of him and a one-armed man dressed in black, who is standing in what appears to be a hospital or a lab. The man, who tells us his name is MIKE, recalls how he used to live above a convenience store with BOB, his partner in crime, until MIKE “saw the face of god” and cut off his left arm, the source of his evil.

Cooper keeps dreaming, cross-dissolving now with BOB, who’s lurking in a shadowy boiler room (one clue among many, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that Twin Peaks drew inspiration from A Nightmare on Elm Street). BOB calls out for MIKE, promising to “catch you with my death bag,” as well as to “kill again.” We recognize BOB as the stranger whom Sarah Palmer saw, and of course the names “MIKE” and “BOB” match the names of two other characters on the show—which is the kind of rhyme Lynch likes using in order to bind material together, in lieu of, or in addition to, narrative’s causal logic.

But still, so far this would all seem to be taking place inside Cooper’s head.

Cooper next dreams that he’s grown old, and is sitting in a room with bright red curtains, near Laura Palmer and a little man in a red suit. The man, moving strangely, cries, “Let’s rock!” then sits down, rubbing his hands, which make a ringing sound. The room itself is heavily stylized, decked out with fluted floor lamps, a copy of the Venus de’ Medici, …

…and a zigzag-patterned floor presumably borrowed from Surrealist Jean Cocteau’s classic film Orpheus. See in particular this scene…

…which also features a pair of magic rubber gloves, one of which Lynch went on to borrow when making Twin Peaks’ Season 3.

Back in Season 1, however, we’re still watching Cooper dream. Laura Palmer smiles at him and raises a finger to her nose as a shape drifts by behind the curtains. The little man claims that the woman beside him is his cousin, and happens to “look almost exactly like Laura Palmer.” “It is Laura Palmer,” Cooper insists, then asks the woman, “Are you Laura Palmer?” “I feel like I know her,” the woman replies, “but sometimes my arms bend back.” The little man interjects: “She’s filled with secrets. Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.” As if on cue, Angelo Badalamenti’s score picks up—“Dance of the Dream Man”—and the little man stands and starts dancing in front of a strobe light. Meanwhile, the woman gets up and slowly crosses to Cooper, kissing him full on the lips, then whispering in his ear. Gasping, Cooper wakes up, the music fading out, replaced by a drone.

These beguiling scenes, at this point in the show, represent not some otherworldly realm, or even anything supernatural, but rather the unconscious deductive technique that Cooper earlier described. He’s a detective; he figures things out, and isn’t just given answers by ghosts (at least, not yet). Indeed, upon waking, the lawman immediately calls Sheriff Truman and dramatically declares, “I know who killed Laura Palmer.” (That’s that episode’s cliffhanger.) Come the next episode, however, he’s forgotten who that is. The dream has faded, providing more evidence these bizarre scenes are taking place inside his head.

As well as, possibly, Audrey’s head. The series suggests early on she enjoys a psychic rapport with Agent Cooper—hence her schoolgirl crush. The second episode sees her dancing, just like the dream man, to Angelo Badalamenti’s music (a track entitled “Audrey’s Dance”) until her father turns it off. Next, in the “Zen” episode, she plays the piece again on the jukebox at the Double R Diner. After talking with Donna about recent events, she exclaims, “God, I love this music! Isn’t it too dreamy?” While Donna and other patrons gawk, Audrey stands up and resumes dancing, her arms stiff, her fingers splayed, her long-lashed eyes lightly closed. Dancing is dreaming, as well as falling—falling into the night, and falling in love. Floating in time and space. Like with Invitation to Love, there’s a metatextual tinge to these scenes, a subtle suggestion that Audrey is hearing something that other people can’t—the series’ soundtrack?

In Season 2, however, the show’s approach to this type of material changed, transforming it from sultry, surrealist dreaming into something realer, more vicious—demonic possession, a nightmare made flesh. Lying in her hospital gurney, Ronette Pulaski screams after being shown Andy’s police sketch of BOB. Her scream echoes Sarah Palmer’s, and Laura Palmer’s. Whoever the man is, she’s seen him, too.

Meanwhile, over at the Great Northern, Dale Cooper, lying and bleeding to death on the floor of his room, is visited for the first time by the Giant. It’s presumably a vision, Cooper’s hallucination—but it carries with it the hint that something more is going on, and that Twin Peaks is haunted by supernatural forces. The next time the Giant appears, at the Roadhouse, he seems less like an hallucination, and more like an extra-dimensional emissary—an angel, so to speak—tasked with guiding Cooper’s hand.

Over the course of the second season, the Giant’s guidance grows less cryptic, more direct. When Annie tells Cooper, as they dance, that she’s decided to take part in the Miss Twin Peaks Contest, the Giant freezes time and reappears, waving his long arms and mouthing “No!” (By this point, Cooper’s been retconned into a guy who gets clues from ghosts.)

Which is to say that, over the course of the second season, the dreamy material transforms, going from being the product of Cooper’s subconscious mind to something external, manifest, present. Twin Peaks transforms with it, becoming a different sort of town, a place where the universe’s clockwork periodically bleeds into view, becoming visible—like Brigadoon, or a spectral Aurora Borealis. Leland Palmer recalls having met BOB as a child at Pearl Lake. Maddy starts having her own visions, seeing a blood stain on the carpet, then BOB in the Palmer living room. Meanwhile, Donna, who’s taken over Laura Palmer’s Meals on Wheels route, encounters a strange old lady and little boy in a tux. The boy (played by David Lynch’s son) makes a helping of creamed corn disappear from a meal tray, then reappear in his cupped hands, before vanishing again.

The elderly lady, Mrs. Tremond, tells Donna her grandson “is studying magic,” which implies we’ve just witnessed a trick—a sleight of hand. But the supernatural is no longer something happening inside Cooper’s head, or something that he alone can see.

The more fascinated Twin Peaks became by the supernatural, the more it lost interest in the mundane. Over the course of the second season, the high school largely disappears, as does Audrey’s snooping. Sheriff Truman, too, recedes into the background. He was initially meant to be the show’s other protagonist, a “true man” (“The buck stopped here”) who would stand by Dale Cooper, two-fisted and straight. He was also Coop’s tour guide to Twin Peaks, describing the locals, the local color. Which made him less useful as the show turned from mortal matters to the comings and goings of aliens and phantoms. So Truman’s replaced by Deputy Hawk and Major Briggs, the latter of whom worked for Project Blue Book (the US Air Force’s real-world investigation into UFOs), and who therefore knows things like the fact that Cooper’s name appeared repeatedly in transmissions from outer space.

From this point on, Twin Peaks plays increasingly like a preview of The X-Files, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, setting its sights on exploring a pantheon of strange, otherworldly beings, angels and demons eternally warring for human souls. Deputy Hawk talks about the White Lodge and the Black Lodge, and how his ancestors have long known about “the evil in these woods.” (The Black Lodge replaces Canada as the source of all decadence.) Agent Cooper’s former partner, Windom Earle, comes to town, revealed as someone who worked with Major Briggs at Blue Book, since which time he’s been obsessed with regaining access to the Black Lodge. In the penultimate episode, Earle kidnaps Annie in order to use her fear to open the Black Lodge, which can only be done while Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction…

The first season finale saw Twin Peaks at its most soap-operatic, being an over-the-top inventory of cliched set pieces and cliffhangers. Season 2’s conclusion sees the show reach its most supernatural, as well as its most surreal. The last twenty minutes, in particular, play out according to the logic of a nightmare. Cooper follows Earle and Annie into the woods, where red curtains appear in a clearing, behind an eerie pool of oil surrounded by a fairy ring of sycamore trees. The curtains part, and Cooper enters the Black Lodge, where he encounters, in turn, the Dream Man, Laura Palmer, the doddering waiter from the Great Northern, the Giant (who claims to be the waiter), and Maddy Ferguson, who cautions Coop to watch out for her cousin. Moments later, Laura Palmer reappears, now transformed into a milk-eyed doppelganger of herself. She screams a wild, piercing scream, looking terrifying—like a Francis Bacon painting.

Cooper flees, only to realize that he’s been stabbed. Following a trail of his own blood, he comes across Annie, then Windom Earle, who offers to trade Annie’s life in exchange for Cooper’s soul. When Cooper agrees, Earle knifes him in the stomach. But BOB, all angular gestures and cackles, intervenes, telling Cooper that Earle “is wrong. He can’t ask for your soul.” BOB ignites a geyser of flame above Earle’s head, reducing the man to a sullen, kneeling shell. As a blue strobe light intensely and irregularly flickers, Dale Cooper’s own glassy-eyed doppelganger scurries forth from behind the blood-red curtains to laugh manically beside BOB, then gleefully chase Cooper throughout the Lodge.

The evil twin catches up with Cooper as BOB leers at us in the foreground; there’s a clutching sound, followed by a long gasp. We cut back to the woods, where Sheriff Truman—who’s been sleeping, as though enchanted—awakens to find Dale Cooper and Annie lying beside the oily pool. The former blinks a few times before passing out again. Annie, however, remains unresponsive, her face smeared with blood.

In the final scenes, at the Great Northern, Doc Hayward and Truman watch as Cooper comes to again, although he tells them, “I wasn’t sleeping.” He asks how Annie is; Truman says that she’ll be fine. Cooper informs the two men that he needs to brush his teeth. With their help, he heads into the bathroom, where he empties a tube of blue toothpaste into the sink before ramming the mirror with his forehead. We see his splintered reflection is BOB’s; the evil Cooper, not the good one, made it back, and is now poised to wreak greater havoc than Twin Peaks has hitherto known.

This is a far cry from any soap opera—indeed, it’s constructed more like a movie, with a recurring series of images—Laura screaming, BOB leering, Annie covered with blood, and, especially, Cooper, bloodied and laughing—that seems inspired by the famous shot that concludes the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Also like Eisenstein, and like he did in Wild at Heart, Lynch intercuts the narrative action with non-diegetic inserts—shots of billowing balls of flame.

In the next part in this series, I’ll take a look at how the show’s transformation from soap opera to sitcom-slash-supernatural surrealism played out at the time, as well as describe the two different types of David Lynch fans. In the meantime—thanks for reading! If you’ve enjoyed these posts, please check out more of my writing:

• “How A Nightmare on Elm Street influenced Twin Peaks”;
• “Poltergeist III: Déclassé, Perhaps, but Great” (which includes some discussion of Twin Peaks);
• 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.