A Woman in Trouble: My Life and Illnesses Filtered through Twin Peaks
This essay was originally published in the "As Seen on TV" print issue of Witness (Volume 34, number 1, spring 2021)
Pilot
David Lynch loves women. And he really loves women in trouble.
If you’d slapped a tight cardigan and saddle shoes on me in 1990, when Twin Peaks premiered and I turned sixteen, I would have been just his type. Precocious, out of place in my world—a sensitive, traumatized vamp. I grew more troubled in my 20s, the windswept landscape inside my borderline-personality-disordered body as haunted as Ghostwood Forest. But the seedlings were there in adolescence. Already, I didn’t know if I wanted to stay or go.
Distracted by inner turmoil, familial battles, and relationship skirmishes, I missed the television premiere of Twin Peaks. Friends raved about it and dug into cherry pie. I had to catch up on video.
I remember swallowing a handful of sleeping pills before watching Episode 4. I popped the VHS tape in. I wanted to die. But I also wanted to see where the story was headed.
Unscripted
J. G. Ballard wrote that a film director is like a prince in search of a kingdom. Lynch fits this description better than most, his camera conquering this and other worlds. He peeks under the topsoil and through crimson curtains to spy the seedy and uncanny details that arabesque our lives. He films identity as fluid. His characters often encounter shadow sides of themselves in narratives that play on ancient myths of twins and duality. I sensed him a kindred spirit in a more grounded body.
Mine lost more ground with each year. Things grew worse for me in my late 20s. My thoughts were a tsunami, my memories a flood. My sense of self was lambent flame, flickering on and off like the fluorescent light in a Twin Peaks morgue. I would gasp for air, grasp at other people. I felt like I had nothing to hold on to but lovers and friends, and I drove them away almost as fast as I attracted them.
The young adults on Twin Peaks were damaged, too, but glamorous. Ambrosial Audrey Horne sways by a jukebox to heavily punctuated jazz. Her face dreams through the trees, as if majestic eyebrows could fix supernatural terrors in place. There is evil in the woods, yes, but I was comforted by the town’s warmth. Besides, external evils frightened me far less than the ones within me.
Lynch would have been content to keep the evil abstract, in the distance. When he shot the pilot, he didn’t even know who Laura Palmer’s killer was. To viewers of that opening chapter, it seems like it could be anyone in the town because it could have been anyone. While filming on location in Washington’s Snoqualmie Valley, Lynch felt his way through the low skies and drenched green, looking inside himself for an endless story to unspool. Unlike me, he had faith in the richness in there, rooted like a tree and bearing fruit.
Episodes
Every great story has a boudoir, the satiny bower nested at its core. The narrative G-spot. For Twin Peaks, it is the mystery of who murdered the homecoming queen, bold and brutalized Laura. Lynch’s writing partner, Mark Frost, was inspired by the unsolved murder of comely Hazel Irene Drew, which took place in 1908 in Taborton, New York, where Frost’s family summered. But from the start, Lynch just loved the idea of Laura. Radiant on the outside, dying within.
However, Twin Peaks also creates a literal inner sanctum in One Eyed Jacks, the red-draped bordello-casino just north of the Canadian border. Each of its assignation rooms gleams like a jewel box. Inside them, daughters in Noh masks hide from lupine fathers. Freud would have lost his mind there. Its prostitutes flock the frame like Martha Graham dancers in playing-card-themed lingerie, every movement choreographed to chance desire.
I never managed to tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue, like Audrey does during her interview at the brothel. But in the late 90s, a dream came true for me when I was hired at One Eyed Jacks—not in Canada, but Tokyo. A popular hostess club in the nightclub district of Roppongi, this One Eyed Jacks was staffed by lovely girls from around the world, who chatted and flirted with men while they drank on the ground floor. There were more private rooms on the second floor. (For the record, I only ever visited them with small groups of other selected hostesses, and nothing more shocking occurred than the usual drinking and guests bragging about penis size.) Still, this establishment got the atmosphere all wrong. The ground-floor space was too large, and the stage dancers seduced to tedious pop hits rather than eerie Badalamenti music. But the name made me happy.
I couldn’t get enough of cities like Tokyo. In them, my inner turmoil was transformed into a constellation of neon lights, dance clubs, art galleries, restaurants. All were safer playgrounds than my own mind. For years, Tokyo was my favorite place on Earth, its infinite distractions sealing off my screaming hollows.
Climbing into bed at dawn after working all night, I thumbed through trusted playbooks to orchestrate sleep: imaginary mansions I explored room by room, chapters from books I was reading, and episodes from Twin Peaks. There were horrific moments in the last, sure—killer BOB crawling directly into the frame, or Leland Palmer’s danse macabre with Madeleine Ferguson, Laura’s identical cousin. But everything was tucked inside a quaint town, whose sexy, quirky people were watched over by Douglas Firs. And there was always a next episode to greet you when you woke, while I doubted my next waking.
TV Movie
Laura Palmer would have sympathized with my plight. It took me a while to realize the radical valor of Laura, portrayed by robbed-of-awards-for-it Sheryl Lee in the television series and the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The movie documents Laura’s final seven days and ends with a graphic depiction of her murder by her father Leland, who is possessed by the killer BOB. The film was booed at Cannes, and the lemming critics tore it apart when it premiered in 1992, a year after the television series was cancelled by ABC. Lynch had fallen out of fashion by then.
I travelled an hour to see Fire Walk with Me. It scared the hell out of me, but I knew it was a masterpiece. Film critic Mark Kermode described it as the best horror film of its decade, but it is also hagiography, chronicling the trials of a martyr on her way to a place with the angels. During its runtime, I became a woman who transcended her suffering. As someone who was hurt by her father and her mother, many times over, Laura—a teenage drug addict and prostitute with deep wells of compassion inside her—became my spirit guide.
Like Laura, I descended into drug abuse around the time I turned 30, and my earlier hostessing had skirted the boundaries of prostitution. When a lover called me “a Laura Palmer” figure, I took it as a compliment. Despite her gruesome end, she gave me an archetype. She gave me a story of myself that I could hope to understand.
Dream Sequence
A few years after the original Twin Peaks ended, David Lynch fell in love with the devastated textile factories and dark corners of Łódź, Poland. In 2005, he shot parts of Inland Empire there, its fading mansions like beautiful corpses rotting in the snow.
In 2012, I moved to Lublin, a university town 180 miles from Łódź, on a Fulbright. I had missed Inland Empire when it came out; back then, I was wandering through drug addiction’s fairyland of lost time. So I rented it from the video store on the ground floor of my one-hundred-year-old apartment building in the Old Town. I had miscalculated on one count: The Polish parts weren’t subtitled, and I knew only a smattering of words at that point. I yearned to know the language of the Lost Girl, an ethereal prostitute listening to a radio show in a Polish hotel room.
But maybe it was with me like Laura Dern’s creepy husband says of his wife’s grasp of Polish: “She understands more than she lets on.” Or maybe that’s how it was with my burgeoning grasp of how to live and thrive. In Poland, the flame of selfhood inside me, which for twenty years had wavered at the slightest hurt or threat of abandonment, grew eternal. All of a sudden, joy wildflowered my days. To paraphrase Jerry Horne, it was like some strange and twisted dream, but very welcome.
Was it age or place, my work or my marriage, putting an ocean between myself and my cadre of psychiatrists (and their meds), or one of Laura Palmer’s angels? I don’t know. All I know is that my heart no longer stopped at each of the world’s betrayals.
Cliffhangers
As tied to location as it is, the time period of the original Twin Peaks dances between eras, most often finding a groove with the 1950s in that decade’s style and hypocrisies. Yet in Twin Peaks: The Return, aired on Showtime from May to September 2017, we are ripped out of timelessness and planted firmly in post-2008 economic crashland. Allegedly, Mark Frost was inspired by the housing crisis and envisioned the good Agent Cooper emerging from the Black Lodge, where we last saw him in Season Two’s finale, into a foreclosed Las Vegas tract home—which is exactly what happens in The Return.
Set recognizably in the twenty-tens, conspiracy theories and health problems run rampant in the new series. We witness not evil in these woods but sickness in this town. Corruption, body horror, and decay color the screen far more often than cherry pie filling.
By the time The Return aired, I was saddled with a new chronic illness. In December 2016, while teaching at a liberal arts college in the small city of Kofu, Japan, I was diagnosed with systemic lupus after a vicious flare landed me in the hospital, unable to walk or eat. Five months later, as The Return premiered, I was still crawling toward recovery, pill boxes peaking higher than books on my nightstand.
Because of the time difference, the episodes of The Return aired in Japan on Monday morning at 10am rather than Sunday night. Any iteration of Twin Peaks is odd to watch in daylight, but the November-colored tone poem of The Return suited daytime better than the earlier series, at least.
Every other week, the airing coincided with my bimonthly, Monday morning visit to the prefectural hospital to get my blood drawn, check in with my rheumatologist, and receive my mountain of pills. After a phlebotomist drained me, I had to wait for an hour or two for the data to be analyzed and my rheumatologist to free up. Lynch’s abhorrence of people watching his work on their phones notwithstanding, I couldn’t help myself. I’d pass the time devouring the latest installment of The Return on my iPhone.
The most felicitous viewing experience occurred with Part 11, which Showtime titled “There’s Fire Where You Are Going” after a message from the Log Lady. One set piece in Part 11 offers a master class in sight lines as David Lynch’s Gordon Cole, Miguel Ferrer’s Albert, and several other players investigate mysterious coordinates and fend off threats from our world and beyond. I paralleled their visual vectors as I tried to keep one eye on my phone and one on the LED “serving now” screen that would tell me when my doctor was ready for me, all while exchanging glances with the innumerable Japanese elderly who were either smiling or scowling at me.
As a vortex opened up in the sky and Lynch was almost sucked inside, my number flashed.
Aired in Foreign Countries
The Return ventures to Argentina, but within the world of the original Twin Peaks and the film, “foreign” only goes as far as Canada. At the start of the most outré sequence in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me—featuring the strobe-lit “Pink Room,” a small club that allows orgies amidst the beer bottles—one character intones, “Welcome to Canada.” The movie and the series never get more specific than “Canada,” which, between the Pink Room and One Eyed Jacks, becomes metonymy for a wild frontier.
From the first time I watched the series, my view of Canada was colored by this casting. I wanted to jet across the waters like the Horne brothers into a world of perennial night and decadence. Although . . .exactly which waters are they jetting across if the eponymous town is “five miles south of the Canadian border” and twelve miles west of Idaho’s?
In 2010, I married a Canadian. After spending several years outside of the country, I became a permanent resident of it in 2018. And, well, what a disappointment in terms of surreal nightclub access. I live in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, where the Pacific Northwest drinks high tea. To be fair, border cities like Winnipeg and Surrey are sketchier, if not places you’d sneak off to for an oneiric bacchanal. All of British Columbia’s towns adjacent to Washington State would run screaming from backwards-talking dwarves and giants spouting clues.
Maybe it’s for the best. The savage appetites of Lynch’s Canada would hardly have served me well beside the discomfiting comforts of middle age, steady employment, home ownership, and all the rest.
Finales
Television series are stories of creators under pressure, time dictating art. But this situation is what we all face in our finite lifetimes; we just think our deadlines further away than they often are. Twin Peaks’ cast, over the years, lost several from its ranks to such unsuspected departures.
Many of the most quotable lines from the original series are voiced by Jack Nance, portraying lovable lumberjack Pete Martell with bugged-out eyes. His drawl makes lullabies out of inconceivable speech acts like “She’s dead, wrapped in plastic,” “There was a fish in the percolator,” and “I didn’t want to get mink oil on my bedspread.” But the most striking line the actor ever uttered might be “I mouthed off to some punks and got what I deserved.”
Here’s the story I heard. While shooting Meatballs 4 on location, Jack Nance was arguing on the phone with his second wife, who threatened to kill herself if he hung up on her. At that moment, lightning knocked out the connection on Nance’s end. When he sent the police to check on her, they discovered she had died by suicide. Long troubled by alcoholism, Nance went on benders following her death and hurled racist epithets at some young Hispanic men outside a donut shop in the midst of one. They beat him up, and the actor explained what happened to him with that matter-of-fact sentence. The next day, his neighbor found him dead, the delayed reaction to a head injury sustained in the beating. A friend of mine eulogized him in a song his band recorded: “Jack Nance/dead as Rosencrantz/miss your wide-eyed glance.”
The moral of the story? Lightning strikes sometimes, and there’s nothing we can do.
Twin Peaks: The Return began shooting twenty-six years after the pilot, and in addition to Nance, other actors from the original cast passed away in the meantime, as well as several during or just after production of the new series, including David Bowie, Miguel Ferrer, Warren Frost, and national treasure Harry Dean Stanton. But it is Catherine Coulson, the iconic Log Lady and Nance’s ex-wife, who, at death’s threshold, delivers the bravest performance you’ve ever seen.
While he was shooting The Return, Lynch was cautioned by a friend of Coulson’s that she was dying from cancer—something that Coulson, determined to revive her role, had hidden from the director—and he needed to film her scenes now. A secondary filming unit flew to her in Ashland, Oregon, and Lynch directed over Skype as, only five days before Coulson’s own death, her Log Lady bids good-bye to Deputy Chief Hawk: “Hawk, I’m dying . . .You know about death. That it’s just a change, not an end. Hawk, it’s time. There’s some fear. Some fear in letting go . . . Hawk, my log is turning gold.” Her voice breaks. “The wind is moaning. I’m dying. Good night, Hawk.”
It’s not just her log—Coulson’s performance is alchemic, turning the base dread of mortality into a generous gift. Watching her, the audience feels her terror but is solaced by her grace. We die briefly and live again as Coulson’s final prayer wings on air.
Future Seasons
As he’s said many times, Lynch never wanted to solve the mystery of Laura’s killer, but impatient network executives forced his hand. Sixteen years later, during the 2007 “Slice of Lynch” featurette on the Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition DVD set, he still sounded angry about the revelation that had killed the greater mystery.
But Lynch also embraces the idea of other realms, forked paths. So maybe there is a world in which Twin Peaks never named the killer and kept going, week after week, year after year.
It’s 2020 in that world. The show has just aired its 720th episode on the 30th anniversary of its pilot. There is no Twin Peaks: The Return because the story never ceased. It has been ebbing and flowing for three decades. People stumble into other dimensions, fissure into doppelgängers, turn good and then bad again. The town’s history is checkered by countless affairs. Stunning women disappear in the woods, but their replacements show up at the Double R Diner, looking for work.
Much stays the same. Yet no daughter was ever raped and slaughtered by her father.
And maybe I was never sick. Why not?
An owl whispers, You would still suffer. We all do.
Would women still be in trouble?
Yes, always.
Then what would change?
In this alternative world, no one tidily solves an unspeakable murder. No one makes evil so simple that the heart shrugs, hardens, and turns away.
I’m here, in that other world. Pine needles slice the air. Hot coffee warms my throat. The world’s diegetic sound sharps and soars. I haven’t had a double life. I’ve had multitudes. Beautiful dreams and terrible nightmares all at once, with no resolution.
We’re all filled with secrets. And they grow more wondrous by the day.