Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic

By Franck Boulègue and David Bushman

Few contemporary television shows have been subjected to the critical scrutiny that has been brought to bear on David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks since its debut in 1990. Yet the series, and the subsequent film, Fire Walk With Me, are sufficiently rich that it's always possible for a close analysis to offer something new – and that's what Franck Boulègue has done with Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic. Through Boulègue's eyes, we see for the first time the world of Twin Peaks as a coherent whole, one that draws on a wide range of cultural source material, including surrealism, transcendental meditation, Jungian psychoanalysis, mythology, fairy tales, and much, much more. The work of a scholar who is also a fan, the book should appeal to any hardcore Twin Peaks viewer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783206612

Franck Boulègue

Franck Boulègue is a film critic for various research journals and co-editor of Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks.

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2017 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2017 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Cover designer: Emily Dann

Front cover image: Twin Peaks (1990—1991). Lynch/Frost/Spelling/

The Kobal Collection

Production editors: Jelena Stanovnik & Matt Greenfield

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-659-9

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-660-5

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-661-2

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

We stand on a peak of consciousness, believing in a childish way that the path leads upward to yet higher peaks beyond. That is the chimerical rainbow bridge. In order to reach the next peak we must first go down into the land where the paths begin to divide.

Jung, 1953, p.60

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

It’s Happening Again!

Chapter 1: Birds, Mountain Peaks and Dreams for Sale

Chapter 2: Northwest Passage to the Ocean of Consciousness

Chapter 3: How I Slept Like a Log: Dreams, Nightmares and Secret Gardens

Chapter 4: Mirrors, Curtains and Windows: Introspection, Visions, Masks and Viewpoints

Chapter 5: Mythology and Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauties and Angry Gods

Chapter 6: Food, Clowns and Dance: Twin Peaks’ Carnival of Souls

Conclusion

Appendix 1: At the Roots of Meaning

Appendix 2: Filmic Influences

References

About the Author

Foreword

I’ve watched Twin Peaks – and by that I mean all thirty episodes, plus the feature film Fire Walk with Me – probably two dozen times, no exaggeration. I remember viewing the series week by week way back in 1990–1991, when it first aired on American network television (never missed an episode, even during the difficult Little Nicky-Evelyn Marsh-Lana Budding Milford times), and can even recall the run-up to the show’s premiere, as I was, at the time, a television editor at the entertainment trade paper Variety, where we seemed to run almost weekly stories documenting David Lynch’s rapturously anticipated dive into television (and ABC’s complete befuddlement over how to handle it).

Years later, and another lifetime: As programme director at the nostalgia-themed cable television outlet TV Land (spin-off of Nick at Nite), I spent two years lobbying for the displacement of our 11 p.m. weeknight drama, the bromitic (though admittedly popular) 1970s private-eye show Mannix, by something – anything – with a little sting, like, say, The Prisoner or, yes, Twin Peaks. Our Brady Bunch-obsessed VP wasn’t biting. What was I trying to do, sink the network? (Maybe, but that’s another story.) The good news: I spent hours and hours viewing brilliant but cancelled television shows. The bad news? Never got a single one of them on the air.

This brings us to The Paley Center for Media, my current place of employment, where our video library includes the entire run of Twin Peaks, meaning that ever since I arrived here twenty-four years ago I’ve been able to watch any episode, any time (yes, I’ve heard of Netflix). I have indulged, plenty. Sometimes, in my luckier moments, I am even required to watch, as in the winter of 2014, when we planned our commemoration of Laura Palmer’s Red Room promise to see Dale Cooper again in twenty-five years (lots of doughnuts, lots of coffee, plus a screening of a fan edit of the entire series stripping out every single piece of footage not pertaining to the Laura Palmer murder investigation). At my night job – as adjunct professor of television – I frequently teach Twin Peaks, often to students who resist anything pre-2000 – though, curiously, not Twin Peaks. Here’s my point: I know Twin Peaks. Or thought I did. Now, thanks to Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic, I’ve been humbled: turns out what I didn’t know about Twin Peaks could fill a book, which is precisely what Franck Boulègue has done here, in the pages that follow.

My signature approach to Twin Peaks is through the noir lens, darkly. Hard-core Peaks fans know that David Lynch and Mark Frost are aficionados of the classic cycle of noir films, hardboiled, crime-centric B pictures produced by Hollywood studios in the 1940s and 1950s, characterized by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 as belonging ‘to a class that we used to call the crime film, but would best be described from this point on by a term such as criminal adventures, or better yet, such as criminal psychology’. Multiple Twin Peaks denizens are namesakes of classic noir characters, including Laura Palmer, a nod to the title character in Otto Preminger’s masterful 1944 crime thriller, titled simply Laura. Grouping Twin Peaks within this style of film can be an unconventional choice, in that classic noir is typically tellurian, eschewing the supernatural. However, the argument can be made that the black spirits roaming the Twin Peaks universe are merely metaphors for the darkness in our own souls, and what is noir ultimately about if not that?

Connections of this sort transcend academic exercise. They illuminate and challenge, prying our minds open to new avenues of interpretation. ‘Buddha urged people to investigate things – he didn’t just command them to believe’, the Dalai Lama has said (the quote seems appropriate, given the influence of Eastern thought on the series – read all about it in the pages ahead). Investigate! Isn’t that what drives the Twin Peaks narrative? The great, overriding gift of Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic is that it offers provocative new approaches to our critical appreciation of Twin Peaks, profoundly and innovatively investigating the artistic, spiritual, cultural and psychological influences on David Lynch and Mark Frost as they created and executed first the series and then (Lynch, but not Frost) the film. Nietzsche, Jung, Kafka, Hopper, Ernst, Duchamp, Cocteau, Blavatsky, Carroll, Bettelheim, Campbell – all of them are here, along with many distinguished brethren. Franck’s expansive knowledge of these titanic thinkers, and his virtuosic articulation of this erudition, is, for lack of a better word, awesome, in a literal sense. As a television historian, I’m particularly enthralled by his excavation of the obscure 1987 BBC Two programme Arena, in which Lynch discusses the work of twentieth-century surrealists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Jean Cocteau – I had to find and watch it! – but this book really brims with citations of films, paintings and literature that are so convincingly linked aesthetically or thematically to Twin Peaks that they cry out for direct interaction by any intellectually curious fan of the film and series.

In his introduction, Franck writes that ‘Twin Peaks is fundamentally about one thing: the process of individuation described by Carl Gustav Jung, that is to say, the integration by the various characters of the unconscious elements of their personalities in order to evolve as individuals’. Clearly, so many of the souls who pass through Twin Peaks undergo metamorphoses of this sort, perhaps none more so than Dale Cooper, the seeker, who journeys thousands of miles in search of truth, finding, yes, evil beyond comprehension, but also transformative love, so profound he is willing to sacrifice his soul for it. Reading Twin Peaks: Unwrapping the Plastic is itself a journey, on the other end of which we arrive wiser, clearer and more appreciative than ever of this truly wonderful and strange place known as Twin Peaks.

I can’t wait for season 3.

David Bushman, Paley Center for Media, New York City

Acknowledgements

First, I wish to thank Diana Heyne for the editorial work she has contributed to this book. Without her numerous revisions, my text might very well have sounded like something written by The Man From Another Place!

To Scott Ryan of the Red Room Podcast, thank you for the perfect picture of Big Boy. One of these days, I hope we will be able to share a damn fine cup of coffee in just such a place.

Many thanks to Cherie Sampson for reading my unfinished manuscript, clarifying elements related to Transcendental Meditation and suggesting various connections to Native American mythology. I am very grateful for your comments and support.

My gratitude also goes to David Bushman for his expertise, his advice and especially his willingness to contribute the foreword to this book. It has always been a particularly rewarding experience working and exchanging thoughts with him.

Many thanks to the staff of Intellect Press who have followed this project since its beginning in late 2013: Gabriel Solomons, May Yao and Jelena Stanovnik. Thank you for taking a chance on a weird Frenchman obsessed with an old American TV series from the early 1990s!

And last but certainly not least, I am, as always, completely indebted to my beautiful wifey Marisa C. Hayes, whose attentive comments, suggestions, editing and corrections on this book helped to transmute an awkward first draft into a beautiful text. To quote Deputy Hawk from Twin Peaks:

One woman can make you fly like an eagle

another can give you the strength of a lion

but only one in the cycle of life

can fill your heart with wonder

and the wisdom that you have known a singular joy

It’s Happening Again!

The writing of this book was already well under way when a simultaneous ‘twin tweet’ by David Lynch and Mark Frost on the 3rd of October, 2014 suddenly changed everything: ‘That gum you like is going to come back in style’. This well-known line concerning gum, originally uttered by The Man From Another Place in the mysterious Red Room, announced the revival of one of the most creative series in television history. In many ways, Twin Peaks redefined the rules of small screen productions and helped launch a new and on-going Golden Age of American television. Now, in an appropriately strange twist of fate, the series is poised to benefit from the very advances it helped pioneer.

For many fans, the commercial and critical failure of Lynch’s 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (TP:FWWM) seemed to sound Twin Peaks’ ultimate death knell. TP:FWWM was screened during the Cannes Film Festival only one year after Lynch received its prestigious Palme d’Or for Wild at Heart in 1990, and was actually booed. Fellow film-maker Quentin Tarantino, who walked out of the premiere, went so far as to state in an interview with Elia Taylor that, ‘David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie’ (Marsh, 2013). Today it is difficult to understand such a visceral reaction to TP:FWWM, a film that has since been re-evaluated. The type of behaviour associated with this initial response to the film is examined in The Art Spirit (Henri, 1923), a collection of philosophical and artistic texts by the American painter and teacher Robert Henri (1865–1929) and, incidentally, a book highly valued by Lynch himself:

Critical judgment of a picture is often given without a moment’s hesitation. I have seen a whole gallery of pictures condemned with a sweep of the eye […] The works, whatever one might think of them, were the results of years of study. The ‘critical judgment’ of them was accomplished in a sweep of the eye. All kinds of critics, professional, artist, student and lay critic are prone to bring with them their preconceived ideas. Many of them are outraged if they do not find what they expect. Such people want peace – they want no new sensations, and they want nothing that is hard to get.

(Henri, 1923, p. 190)

In spite of the drama that surrounded the release of TP:FWWM, and the 25-year gap since the Twin Peaks series began, what at first sounded like a Lynchian dream is actually coming to pass. After years of continuous support by a large fan base whose interest has never dwindled, Twin Peaks and its residents are set to return to the small screen in the near future.

Originally broadcast on the ABC network in the 1990s, Twin Peaks’ new incarnation was slated to migrate to Showtime in 2016 for a limited series of nine new episodes co-written by David Lynch and Mark Frost. In April 2015, Lynch suddenly announced via social media that he would not be returning to direct the nine episodes after all. The Twin Peaks fan base was thrown into turmoil. The cast campaigned to bring Lynch back as director, threatening not to participate in the new series without him on board. Approximately a month later, a satisfactory compromise appears to have been reached, with Lynch scheduled to shoot not nine, but eighteen new Twin Peaks episodes. The quarter of a century that has elapsed since Twin Peaks first graced our screens has obviously seen many changes. Lynch and Frost will now be able to take the viewer into previously uncharted territories, freed from many of the artistic constraints still in place when the series aired. Today’s new level of creative freedom on television should ensure that the rebirth of this ‘soap operatic thriller’ will lean more towards the operatic side of things, as was the case for the long overlooked masterpiece that is TP:FWWM, a much darker and more powerful work than its televised counterpart.

Contemporary technological and societal changes will also likely affect the new Twin Peaks series. Shows like The X-Files, Lost and Sherlock have already reflected such changes. In 1990 there were no ubiquitous cell phones or Internet, and it will be interesting to observe how these developments will be integrated into the third season. If one can judge by the role new technology plays in the on-going book series written by Mark Frost for young adults, The Paladin Prophecy, it seems clear that these advances can be successfully inserted into the narrative of Twin Peaks. The segue from the 1990s into the 2010s should operate smoothly, with fascinating new outlets for Lynch and Frost to spread the Lodge entities, who are traditionally connected to the flow of electricity. If the new incarnation of Twin Peaks aims at reflecting the demographic realities of the United States in the twenty-first century, one can also hope to see more racial and ethnic diversity in the series. Contrary to all expectations and the many assertions made by David Lynch over the years that Twin Peaks would never return to television, the time to finally consign Laura Palmer’s body to earth has not quite arrived. She is about to be resurrected yet again, or more appropriately, reincarnated, according to the Eastern spiritual philosophies, which are at the heart of the series. This won’t be the first time that Laura has resurfaced: she appeared to Dale Cooper in a memorable dream sequence in episode 3 and was later revived again as Maddy Ferguson, Laura’s cousin. Now the wait is nearly over to see what form Laura’s latest incarnation will take.

Bay of Laurels and Palm Trees

One should not be too surprised by this ‘eternal return of the same’ (to borrow the famous concept from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche). Laura’s very name constitutes an excellent indicator of her fate. ‘Laura’ is the feminine form of ‘laurus’, the first half of the Latin name for the bay laurel tree, laurus nobilis. In the Greco-Roman era, laurel leaves were used as a symbol of victory, honour or fame – in keeping with Laura’s role as the homecoming queen of Twin Peaks. Historically, ‘laureates’ were crowned with bay laurel to denote their achievements, a motif that continues to decorate various awards today, including diplomas, the Nobel Prize and award-winning recognition that films display framed by a laurel wreath during their opening credits on screen. Laura’s iconic picture in the high school’s hall connects her with this tradition of victory and honour.

Bay laurel was linked with the cult of Apollo (god of oracles, among other attributes) and traditionally symbolized eternal life because of the evergreen nature of the foliage. Laurel was also thought to favour oracular dreams, and the Pythia at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi was known to chew its leaves before prophesying.

In the story of Apollo and Daphne, the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s unwanted advances, one discovers the reason the laurel tree became sacred to the god’s cult. Apollo was also said to have been born under a palm tree in Delos, linking yet another tree, and incidentally, Laura’s surname, with the cult of the god. The indissoluble links between Laura and eternal life are made clearer by the choice of her family name. Palm trees signify victory, renown and triumph over death. This latter connection results from the fact that the harmonious disposition of the tree’s branches and leaves make them appear like the rays of the sun, glorious and immortal. Palms are also linked to martyrdom (as in the expression ‘he received the palm of martyrdom’), which in relationship to Laura may symbolize the victory of spirit over flesh.

Returning to the writing of Nietzsche, one finds that he makes a distinction between the Apollonian (linked to harmony, moderation, order and reason) and the Dionysian (characterized by ecstasy, gluttony and disorder). At the same time, the two gods were also brothers, and may be seen as complementary. Perhaps it is not so surprising that BOB ends up possessing Cooper at the end of season 2. Indeed, FBI agent Cooper, the series’ other peak opposite Laura Palmer, represents a very Apollonian figure, as BOB would be a good substitute for Dionysus. After all, in Roman Mythology, Apollo’s sister was named Diana!

Figure 1: Lawrence Jacoby and palm trees.

The Fury of My Own Momentum

The decision to write this book was made several months prior to Showtime’s announcement concerning the third season of Twin Peaks. Despite rumours, this was still a time when it seemed highly unlikely that the series would ever return to the screen. This book was conceived as an unofficial complement to the Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks book (Intellect Press, 2013) that Marisa C. Hayes and I edited, a collection of short essays by and for the fan base. After its release, I decided to continue my research on Twin Peaks in order to dig deeper into the symbolic and metaphysical core of this unique realm. I had the feeling that certain fundamental issues still remained unaddressed. This is how the idea for Unwrapping the Plastic emerged: it was envisioned as a book that would lift the veil on some of the artistic, philosophical and spiritual influences that have been crucial to shaping Twin Peaks. Although much has been said about Twin Peaks’ genre defying elements and its noir influences, I believe that familiarity with several additional themes discussed herein will prove useful for appreciating what follows in the third season.

This book addresses the universe of Twin Peaks as a coherent whole. It is therefore not limited to the television series or the film (TP:FWWM), and additionally considers elements from the book written by Jennifer Lynch, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), as well as Scott Frost’s The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Cooper: My Life, My Tapes (1991), and Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town (Frost, Lynch and Wurman, 1991). As these books demonstrate, the Twin Peaks universe