You Need To Visit Twin Peaks - Part One
Pie Heaven, Primal Fear and the Ghost of Marilyn Monroe
*Editor’s Note: The Preview edition to this Feature is the true intended introduction. For proper context and the ideal reading experience be sure to digest that first if you haven’t already by clicking here.
PART ONE OF A THREE PART SERIES
The world of Twin Peaks is vast and dense. Within there exists a galaxy of characters and subplots to follow. Even the considerable space of a three-part feature article series is merely a coffee mug attempting to contain the ocean of connections, layers and theories available to enthusiasts of the mythology.
This is a key to the enduring, almost timeless appeal of the program. Questions are posed, striking imagery is presented but the answers and true meanings are rarely delivered, only hinted at. It’s up to the viewer to ponder and decide.
This is also what makes the series so fun and engaging. In a parallel quest to Agent Cooper’s determined journey to bring the killer of Laura Palmer to justice, so are you the viewer tasked with the challenge of making sense of the show as a whole. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense at all. Or does it?
Unlike clear-cut trials of tangible evidence and credible testimony, you can’t prove anything after watching Twin Peaks. It seems to fulfill the creative team's intention to leave you utterly baffled, bewildered and mystified. This is to your benefit and makes the show endlessly rewatchable.
In order to proceed with our analysis in any coherent way we need to start with an outline of who, what and most importantly, where. We’ll move forward with the assumption that you have not watched Twin Peaks before, or if you have that it’s been a long time since then and you’ll be thankful for this recap. We won’t be able to delve into the psychic powers of the Log Lady or question the disappearance of Major Briggs with any efficiency or clarity if we don’t start out on the same pathway through the woods together.
As noted in the preview for this issue, while some plot points must be mentioned to convey the arc of the narrative, this review will be spoiler-free. The truths behind the secrets of Twin Peaks will remain yours to uncover or rediscover.
For those of you brand new to the shadowy universe of Twin Peaks, the central drama revolves around the disturbing murder of popular local teenager Laura Palmer, the disastrous ramifications her death has for the community and the journey of main protagonist Special Agent Dale Cooper, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to solve the mystery. The plot is neatly summarized by the unofficial tag line for the show and ultimate water-cooler conversation question in the spring of 1990 -
“Who killed Laura Palmer?”
Twin Peaks can be described as an action comedy drama or a murder mystery soap opera. The numbers of colorful people that populate the tale are extensive. The biggest, most important character of all is the sense of place, hence the title of the show.
THE WOODS
You can’t see the forest for the trees.
Only fools deny the beauty and power of nature. Forests are places of serenity and spirituality intimately connected to the wellsprings of Life itself. The Druids believed it was impossible to worship God or the Goddess in any building made by man, so all their rituals and ceremonies were performed in the woods, usually in clearings centered in circles of tall trees.
Some characters in the show eventually discover a circle of twelve sycamore trees deep in the Ghostwood National Forest outside the town. The trees surround a rocky pool of black liquid flanked by two more sycamore trees. This eerie location is a supernatural portal to another world beyond our own. The area is named Glastonbury Grove, in a direct reference to the burial place of the legendary King Arthur and his often-downplayed connection to the ancient pagan Druid religion.
The forest is sacred. It is also a place of danger. Humans - especially humans reared in the age of technology - are far out of their element in the dark night of the forest. Fear of the dark woods is a deep, primal fear from the earliest days of our time as human animals on the planet Earth. While the trees seem stoic and passive, silent and unmoving, they really see and know everything about human weakness, frailty and our collective fall from grace as worshippers of calculated science over primordial nature.
You may think you can hide your secrets in the woods, but you can never hide your secrets from the woods. All the most sophisticated updated navigation equipment in the world is worthless in the deep woods. Wi-Fi is non-existent. Connection lost. Power down. Network not available. No one can hear you scream.
If a tree falls in the woods but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
THE TOWN
The fictional town of Twin Peaks lies in the Pacific Northwest. The name derives from two mountains that exist in the real town of Snoqualmie, Washington. This is where all the action takes place. Despite the regional exterior and landscape-specific backgrounds, it’s a stand-in for Everytown, USA. You have the high school and the police station, the diner, the hotel, the hospital and the bar. Like everything in Twin Peaks, they appear to be commonplace on the surface but what actually goes on behind closed doors is clandestine. This is a recurring theme throughout every episode.
Duality is everything in the work of series co-creator, director and mastermind David Lynch. Two locations worth special mention due to their contrasting duality are the Double R Diner and One Eyed Jacks.
The Double R Diner (“Double R” for Railroad) is a happy place. It’s where to find the best cherry pie in the tri-county area, as Agent Cooper confirms “This must be where pies go when they die.” The counter is usually staffed by the owner Norma Jennings and waitress Shelly Johnson. They’re both consistently good-natured and welcoming, presenting warm smiles and positive vibes even when their personal lives are in turmoil.
It’s a gathering place for friends and families, a calm port in the storm for Cooper and Sheriff Truman to take a break from the madness of the case. It’s a safe haven for food, nourishment, friendship and happy times. They even have a jukebox full of classic oldies. People come into the diner stressed out, anxious and afraid but they leave satisfied, replenished and renewed with a sense of hope. Who doesn’t love a good diner?
One Eyed Jacks is the opposite. People go there looking for a good time or to make some money and they leave in ruins, if they leave at all. This is not a moral stance against the activities that take place there, it’s a statement of what happens on the show. On the surface, One Eyed Jacks is a gambling parlor and gentlemen’s club just over the other side of the Washington state border in Canada. This is convenient because it’s outside the jurisdiction of Twin Peaks and United States law enforcement.
The fact that One Eyed Jacks is a brothel is not a well-kept secret. It’s also the central hub for drug smuggling operations into Twin Peaks. It’s not a colorful Vegas-style party palace you visit with friends for gleeful abandon over a weekend of well-intentioned debauchery. One Eyed Jacks is a place where souls are bought and sold, akin to or much worse than the place described in the song “The House of the Rising Sun.” It makes the House of the Rising Sun seem like Chuck E. Cheese’s. Everything corrupt, wicked and twisted in Twin Peaks has some connection back to One Eyed Jacks. Keep your distance.
WHO KILLED MARILYN MONROE?
The original inspiration for the tragic character of Laura Palmer was none other than Marilyn Monroe.
While most associate Twin Peaks as the masterwork of David Lynch, it’s unfair to omit the significant credit due to Mark Frost, co-creator and co-author of the original script. It may be Lynch’s otherworldly visions that take the show into realms of the infinite but Frost and Lynch worked closely together to shape and bring the concept to life.
After first collaborating in 1987 on the screenplay for a film titled One Saliva Bubble - a gonzo comedy about a top secret government weapons project that goes chaotically awry when stray spittle from a security guard penetrates the computer system, causing it to go haywire and induce the local townspeople to swap identities, set to star Steve Martin and Martin Short but ultimately unmade due to the sudden bankruptcy of producer Dino De Laurentiis - Frost and Lynch continued their collaborative efforts with an adaptation of the book Goddess: The Secret Lives Of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers.
In the David Lynch biography Room To Dream, Mark Frost explains:
“An agent at CAA brought us together to work on a feature called Goddess for United Artists. We both wanted to expand the story beyond strict realism and inject lyrical, almost fantastical moments to it, and we started seeing a synchronistic way of working together.”
Eunice Murray was Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper at her residence in Brentwood, the neighborhood west of and adjacent to Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. On August 5th, 1962 Eunice was awakened suddenly in the middle of the night around 3:00 AM with a foreboding sense of something wrong in the house. Rising to investigate, she saw a light on in Marilyn’s room but found the door locked. In a panic, she phoned Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist, who broke the bedroom window to gain entry only to find Marilyn dead in her bed.
Toxicology tests found lethal amounts of chloral hydrate and pentobarbital in her blood and liver. The percentages were so high that authorities ruled out death by accidental overdose. In the decades since, many believe her death was an execution via lethal injection somehow directly related to her personal involvement with President John F. Kennedy.
In light of the press reports insinuating Marilyn was suicidal, Eunice Murray was later quoted responding; “It is my feeling that Marilyn looked forward to her tomorrows.”
The film conceived by Frost and Lynch intended to explore these macabre connections. Unnamed producers overseeing the project at United Artists deemed it unworthy of being greenlit. In a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair, Lynch confirmed;
“You could say that Laura Palmer is Marilyn Monroe, and that Mulholland Drive is about Marilyn Monroe, too. Everything is about Marilyn Monroe.”
The questions of the unmade screenplay eventually made their way into the dialogue of Twin Peaks Season 1, Episode 1 (not the Pilot) - “Traces to Nowhere”.
One of Agent Cooper’s most eccentric and prominent character traits is talking into a handheld mini tape recording device to his colleague in the FBI named Diane, who we never see on screen. The understanding for this habit is that Cooper, as an agent in the field, collects and sends these self-recorded monologues back to Diane as a real-time transcript of his daily work on the case.
After dismounting from hanging upside-down on an exercise device like a bat in his hotel room at the Great Northern, Cooper confesses to Diane via his tape recorder:
“Diane, it struck me again earlier this morning; there are two things that continue to trouble me, and I'm not just speaking as an agent of the Bureau but also as a human being: what really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys? And who really pulled the trigger on JFK?”
Stay tuned next week for our next installment, as we plunge deeper down the murky pool in Glastonbury Grove and detail why -
YOU NEED TO VISIT TWIN PEAKS - PART TWO
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