In the first of a series of pieces on Twin Peaks, Stewart Gardiner discusses how the seminal television show has been preparing for its 2017 return since before the beginning.
By Stewart Gardiner // David Lynch and Mark Frost lit out for the territory with Twin Peaks, creating a truly unique and immersive viewing experience. In 1990 it was TV impossibly ahead of its time. Indeed, it has always seemed strangely out of time. Lynch’s use of 1950s elements alongside the contemporary even makes it look ageless. Television may have caught up to Twin Peaks in the interim, but I suspect it is about to fall behind once again. In the run up to the show’s return, I’ll be examining what came before. However, remaining true to the spirit and mechanics of Twin Peaks I won’t be starting at the beginning and advancing forward in a straight line. Instead, I’ll begin by looking at how the television series interacts with Fire Walk With Me and David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead.
Future Past
“Through the darkness of future past / The magician longs to see / One chants out between two worlds / Fire walk with me”
The idea of “future past” permeates Twin Peaks, within and without. These two states placed together squeeze the present out of the frame. Twin Peaks occupies that space where the present once was. Narrative circularity abounds: a “golden circle of appetite and satisfaction” represented by the talismanic Owl Cave ring, an abundance of doughnuts and more. What comes after precedes what went before and so on into infinity. Fire Walk With Me is a prequel that nevertheless inches the story beyond the last episode of its initial run, albeit in cryptic rather than concrete terms. The relationship between the television series and the film is itself circular in nature.
That the story is about to pick up twenty-five years later may be something akin to a miracle for the fans who never dreamed it would return. Yet there’s a beautiful inevitability about it too, with “twenty-five years later” built into the narrative. It is indeed happening again.
Fathering Twin Peaks
If Eraserhead is a nightmare about fatherhood then Twin Peaks is a nightmare about the father. The zeitgeist defining mystery of “Who killed Laura Palmer?” didn’t come with a singular solution. Parasitical spirit Bob killed Laura, yes. That is established early on. But it was only part of the answer, since Bob requires a human host. The humanity of Twin Peaks works both ways. There is the beatific Agent Cooper on one hand. On the other is Bob, who embodies “the evil that men do”.
Network pressure forced Lynch and Frost to reveal the identity of the killer long before they wanted to. Lynch would rather not have revealed it at all in fact. This narrow outlook of ABC executives resulted in depleted ratings and the eventual cancellation of the show. Lynch and Frost nevertheless crafted one of the most memorable and disturbing hours of television in response to the ruling. Episode 14 “Lonely Souls” reveals the real killer as Laura’s father Leland. It is no less troubling because Bob has possessed Leland. Circularity is also duality in Twin Peaks and Leland gave up his innocence during childhood.
Fire Walk With Me brings the horror home by getting underneath the fingernails of the Palmer household during the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life. The portrait of Bob/Leland is an unflinching one. Leland invited Bob into his life as a child and Bob makes him forget and remember as he wills it – but does that let Leland off the hook? Not according to Fire Walk With Me which portrays the father as the worst of all things. He is a monster with a terrible sexual appetite.
Fade Away and Radiator
Lynch’s five-years-in-the-making debut feature Eraserhead presents a closed off world of young parenthood within a bleak, industrialized city. It is the aftermath of sexual intercourse that is the nightmare here. The resulting child is less baby than monstrosity, a creature whose constant screams are as inhuman as its sickness is appalling. The cumulative effect is one of negation, the creature as anti-matter in the confines of the apartment. After Mary X escapes back to her parents, there is no respite for Henry X except to retreat into the even more interior world of the radiator.
The tiled flooring and drapes of the radiator world may make it another room of the Lodge, that cosmic staging area of future/past and Black/White in Twin Peaks. The Lady in the Radiator appears as benevolent and dangerous as other denizens of the Lodge (the Man from Another Place, the Giant or even Cooper himself). When Henry reaches out and touches her it brings on the deafening white of oblivion. It’s a precursor to Laura’s brutal, operatically presented, death as seen in Fire Walk With Me. Henry chooses to escape this life and so does Laura. She would rather die than allow Bob to possess her. It shows a strength of will her father never possessed.
A Hole in the World
The shared world building of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and Fire Walk With Me includes other physical motifs beyond drapes and flooring. Mounds of dirt appear with increasing significance. A heaped pile of earth also suggests its opposite: a hole in the ground. The hole is an equal, but negative space. These mounds are emblematic of another world, further representations of the golden circle of appetite and satisfaction. The mounds in Eraserhead are mockeries of nature. Why are they even indoors? Dead branches protrude from the dirt, as if someone had dug up the sycamore trees at Glastonbury Grove, the gateway to the Lodge. A scrap of paper with “FIRE WALK WITH ME” scrawled in blood on it appears in the pilot episode. It sits against a mound of dirt on the killing floor.
Fire Walk With Me amplifies the significance. During the investigation into the murder of Theresa Banks (Bob/Leland’s first victim), Agent Chester Desmond finds a mound of earth under a trailer. It is a location that apparently has nothing to do with the case, but he intuits that it does. The Owl Cave ring sits on top of it like an offering. He tries to take it, but instead fades away to nothing. Agent Desmond has none of the expressive joy for living that Cooper has. Yet both use intuition in trying to solve these murders. It may appear that Desmond failed where Cooper succeeded, but both end up in another realm, shut out of the present.
Twenty-Five Years Later
“I’ve been with Dale, and Laura. The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can’t leave. Write it in your diary.”
Words spoken by an out of time Annie Blackburn to an almost out of time Laura Palmer. This is the central “future past” scene of Fire Walk With Me and indeed Twin Peaks as a whole. It might even lie at the heart of understanding how Twin Peaks will conduct itself in the third season. Mary’s inexplicable nighttime return in Eraserhead prefigures the scene in terms of staging.
Laura accepts a painting that acts as a conduit between this world and that of the Lodge. She is in a state of vivid dreaming when a bloodied Annie Blackburn appears in bed next to her. The Dale Cooper who returned from the Lodge possessed by Bob in the finale is not the real Cooper, Annie explains. Rather, it was his doppelganger who escaped from the Lodge. For all the darkness of this future past, there is hope within Annie’s message. Therein may lie the path of season three. Cooper’s return from future past would therefore mirror the return of Twin Peaks itself.
“I’ll see you again in twenty-five years,” Laura tells Cooper in the Lodge during the finale. “TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER” reads the caption over the Red Room dream sequence in the European version of the pilot. The story is about to pick up from where it ended and after it began. I can’t wait until the end of May when Twin Peaks becomes my present again.
