Twin Peaks

Unwrapping the Plastic

Franck Boulègue

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783206612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

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.

Chapter 1

Birds, Mountain Peaks and Dreams for Sale

Gone Fishing

In the opening lines of David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Princess Irulan asserts: ‘A beginning is a very delicate time’, a statement that could easily have been uttered by the director himself. In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006, p. 1-3), Lynch regularly returns to the belief that ideas, including those that form the basis of creative inspiration, are similar to ‘thought bubbles’, or ‘fish’, surfacing from the depths of the ‘ocean of consciousness’. This is Transcendental Meditation’s equivalent of the more familiar unconscious mind of psychoanalysis where ideas can be ‘caught’ and associated with other ideas in order to form the beginning of new creative works. It is difficult to know exactly where the aforementioned ideas originate since the bottom of the ocean remains mysterious and out of reach for most, but according to Lynch, one only has to remain open and alert as these ideas surface in order to ‘catch’ them. Lynch likens this process to a fishing trip; the better one becomes at fishing, the bigger the fish one can expect to catch. Twin Peaks begins with just such an opening sequence, during which the viewer follows the character of Pete Martell (Jack Nance) as he leaves home to go fishing while ‘the lonesome foghorn blows’. It doesn’t take long for him to catch the biggest fish of all: Laura Palmer, a siren wrapped in plastic.

In addition to what lies at the bottom of the ‘ocean of consciousness’, Lynch is also preoccupied with the notion of that which comes ‘before’, a cyclical rather than linear time travel that brings the audience back to the origins of Lynch’s universe. Lynch’s keen interest in the decade that defined his childhood, the 1950s, is typical of his expression of longing for a lost Paradise, a Golden Era that is now largely out of reach but which seems to give coherence and structure to the world and underscores that which is lacking in the present day. This subject appears to be at the heart of the dispute that ended the partnership between Lynch and Mark Frost during the development of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). While the latter hoped to continue the story where the series had ended, with the revelation that Special Agent Dale Cooper had become possessed by BOB, Lynch used the film as an opportunity to reach further back in time to events that preceded the television series: the final days of Laura Palmer. Although Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990) and Scott Frost’s The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Cooper: My Life, My Tapes (1991), provide readers with additional glimpses of life in Twin Peaks before the time of the series, neither of these works of fiction captured the legendary essence of Twin Peaks as well as the film shot by Lynch himself.

Figure 1: Pete catches a Big Fish.

With this in mind, it seems worthwhile to investigate where the seminal ideas for Twin Peaks originated. The conclusions reached may lead to a broader understanding of both the series and the film, as well as facilitate new perspectives on the creative forces that continue to influence Twin Peaks’ co-creators. Since the series pilot first aired on the ABC network in the United States on 8 April 1990, it is obvious that the actual filming took place several months beforehand, and that the writing of the script began even earlier. But what of the original idea? What were the first sparks that ignited the vision of Twin Peaks in the minds of Mark Frost and David Lynch, the first little ‘fish’ (to borrow from Lynch’s ocean of consciousness metaphor) that led to what remains, even twenty-five years later, one of the most defining moments in television (and film) history? In order to approach the question, one must first swim back from Black Lake, even before Pearl Lakes, travelling upstream to those twin peaks of creation, Lynch and Frost, whose multifaceted imaginations spawned the world contained in the series.

Lynch and Frost assert that the first image, the source of all that was to come, was that of a young nude woman swaddled in plastic, lying abandoned on a lakeshore.¹ According to Mark Frost:

The show just came out of us (David and I) sitting in a room until we hit on the idea of the dead girl as a way into the town […] Literally that story David has told, ‘There’s this town and this wind …’ and he made this gesture with his hands, ‘and then there’s a dead girl and then a whole bunch of stuff happens’ […] my grandmother told me about a girl who had been murdered and found on the shore of a nearby lake […] That obviously had a lot to do with how Laura came into our lives.

(Dukes, 2014, pp. 6–12)

This was the ‘big fish’ that led to the central idea for Twin Peaks: the character of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) emerged as the starting point of everything that was to follow. Without Laura’s murder, Twin Peaks would have been an entirely different story. Yet even the series’ central plot device and the way it evolved from episode to episode did not appear from out of the blue. Lynch and Frost came to the set of Twin Peaks with successful careers as film-maker and scriptwriter, respectively; both found inspiration in the work of creative forerunners and through other creative disciplines. David Lynch, for example, began his career as a painter before turning to film-making and continues to paint, has exhibited his photographic work internationally, and has released several recordings as a singer/composer. This interdisciplinary approach has certainly left its mark on his creative process as a director. Similarly, Mark Frost’s recurring interest in certain cultural figures and themes (including Sherlock Holmes and theosophy) is readily apparent in his novels alongside his scriptwriting for television and film.

In order to examine these influences further, this book proposes to explore a genealogy of the themes and imagery developed in Twin Peaks via an intertextual reading of the series and film. It has become quite common to discuss the legacy of Twin Peaks and how it revolutionized the small screen, laying a foundation for a new Golden Age of television, from The X-Files and the surrealist Carnivàle, to HBO’s recent True Detective anthology series. But while the current wave of auteur television is indeed indebted to Twin Peaks, there seems to be little discussion or analysis of how the production of Twin Peaks was influenced by the works of other artists, or more specifically, how its images may be linked to paintings and historic films. This chapter is not an attempt to suggest that the architects of Twin Peaks plundered other artists’ creations, but rather seeks to highlight a selection of intentional references Lynch and Frost may have made in tribute to works of art and figures they admire, as well as less conscious links that exist between their own work and that of their predecessors.

A Week of Kindness

In 1987, between the release of Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), the director hosted an episode of the BBC Two programme Arena entitled Ruth, Roses and Revolvers. During its opening, the narrator of the documentary suggested that this was an excellent opportunity to discover ‘the work of his [Lynch’s] kindred spirits of the past’. The episode Lynch presented is named after a short film created by the artist Man Ray (1890–1976) for the omnibus project, Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), a collaborative film produced by the German avant-gardist Hans Richter (1888–1976). The original film opens with the words: ‘This is a story of dreams mixed with reality’.

The Arena programme proves to be quite revealing concerning the development of Lynch’s own work in relation to early twentieth-century experimental cinema. For the episode, Lynch screened excerpts from various surrealist films that have had an influence on his own artistic development. He stated on camera:

If surrealism is the subconscious speaking, then I think I identify with it and I could say that I was somewhat surrealistic. I think that films should have a surface story, but underneath it, there should be things happening that are abstract; there are things that resonate in areas that words can’t help you find out about, and these are subconscious areas.

(1987)

André Breton (1896–1966), the French founder of surrealism and author of its multiple manifestos, provided these definitions of the psychological state of surrealism:

Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. […] Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

(1924)

This concept of ‘automatic writing’ provides one possible link between surrealism and the series Twin Peaks. The renowned book Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), written in 1920 by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, for example, was authored using such a technique. Breton and Soupault became the receptors of an inner speech, which they translated into words, thus escaping the narrow confines of mundane rational connections. Their idea was to write as quickly as possible without censoring anything, in this manner letting go of conscious control and doing so in a liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. It is likely that the strict time constraints inherent in the filming of a TV series, in addition to climatic conditions and long outdoor shoots during the pilot, may have led to similar moments of abandon for Twin Peaks’ creators, thus producing beautiful ‘accidents’ (de Lauzirika, 2007). Of course Lynch and Frost did not improvise everything on set, but it is well documented that they were able to recognize and make use of unplanned moments such as technician Frank Silva’s reflection in a mirror during the filming of the pilot. Silva was then integrated into the story, becoming the central figure of BOB, typifying the sort of experience that allowed the series to continually evolve with flexibility and openness to the unexpected.

In the aforementioned Lynch Arena episode, the selected extracts in order of appearance were: Ruth, Roses and Revolver (Man Ray); Entr’Acte (René Clair); Emak Bakia (Man Ray); The Girl With a Prefabricated Heart (Fernand Léger); Ghosts before Breakfast (Hans Richter); The Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov); Discs (Marcel Duchamp); Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau) and Desire (Max Ernst). Four of the nine segments screened, those by Ray, Léger, Duchamp and Ernst, belong to the larger omnibus film Dreams That Money Can Buy, while Ghosts before Breakfast was shot by Richter, the same artist who coordinated the former. Another noteworthy omnibus film created by Hans Richter entitled 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) also features contributions by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and a segment by Jean Cocteau. Part Freud, part Lewis Carroll, this film likewise appears to resonate with the symbolism of Twin Peaks through an emphasis on mirrors and chess games, as well as in its use of birds and ‘backwards’ or ‘reverse spe...