Twin Peaks: “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” and Beyond (Part 3)

Now that Episodes 14 – 16 have been covered, part 3 of this series about the central mystery in Twin Peaks will go back, as Lynch did, to the beginning and what set the events of the series in motion.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992): A Midnight Show

I hadn’t finished the second season before going seeing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me last month, but that’s OK, because the movie was a prequel focusing on the days leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder. It also included the investigation into the death of Teresa Banks, which took place a year before and had the same MO. If you haven’t seen up to Episode 14/”Lonely Souls” of the show and have not been spoiled about the major reveal, though, it would be best to get there before seeing this.

Fire Walk with Me begins contains two narratives. It begins with the investigation into the murder of Theresa Banks in an extended prologue, and then goes into the final days of Laura Palmer. In an extended prologue, FBI Regional Chief Gordon Cole, played by David Lynch himself, assigns Special Agents Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) to the case. Desmond is similar to Cooper in his perceptiveness and somewhat quirky, unorthodox investigative, though he’s more forceful. He acts as a mentor to Stanley during the course of the investigation and has a likable demeanor. His ways of getting the locals, including a hostile sheriff’s department, to cooperate with the FBI’s investigations provide a good amount of humor in an otherwise dark film.

Audience expectations that Desmond would be a hero who might help uncover clues to the mythology of Twin Peaks are subverted when he mysteriously disappears. The last time he is seen, he is picking up a ring, and while the ring reappears later, he does not. Cooper, investigating Desmond’s disappearance, only finds the words “Let’s rock” scrawled on the missing agent’s car. The same words were spoken by the Man from Another Place (the dwarf in the red suit who first appeared to Cooper in his dreams in Twin Peaks), implying involvement of the Black Lodge, though he would not know this at the time.

After the prologue, we are re-introduced to the town of Twin Peaks, and here, Lynch shows his skills at tapping into both warm familiarity and unease. There’s something very reassuring to hear the opening theme song of the show as we see Donna and Laura leave for school and walk past picture-perfect lawns and suburban homes, sometimes running other townspeople. It feels almost like a second opening credits sequence for the movie and ends a darker note with Laura snorting a line of cocaine in the bathroom, setting the audience up for the darker second story.

Lynch takes the story to some dark places as the narrative progresses toward its nightmarish, tragic conclusion. Though the show might have its lighter subplots, quirky characters, and moments of sentimentality to balance out the show’s exploration of lost innocence and the dark underbelly of suburbia, the film is generally pretty grim. The moment Laura discovers the identity of Bob’s host is not a twist to those already familiar with the show, but it is a shocking, disturbing scene, because it occurs during a rape and due to the relationship between the perpetrator and victim. Her death scene where she is tied and murdered in an abandoned train car is brutal, visceral, and difficult to watch, particularly because the view is obscured by darkness and all we hear are her heartrending screams.

There is plenty of trademark Lynchian weirdness, both humorous and unnerving, and in both the surreal and the grounded drama, there is a strong sense of unease, decay, and of loss of control. In the prologue, Lynch struts out surreal humor with the character of Lil the Dancer. In the role of Gordon Cole, he introduces her to agents Desmond and Stanley to perform something of an interpretive dance, providing clues to the agents before they leave on their assignment. There’s a pretty great cameo by David Bowie as Phillip Jeffries, another FBI agent who went missing. He suddenly reappears at the FBI regional headquarters, seemingly unhinged and speaking in a raving, incomprehensible manner while we see images of the supernatural characters from Twin Peaks, before disappearing again. Both this and the disappearance of Agent Desmond highlight the lack of control of law enforcement at protecting the innocent and their own. (Hint: If you don’t want to mysteriously disappear, don’t join the FBI in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe.)

In Laura’s narrative, we see the disintegration of her family as the story progresses. Laura and her friends find themselves in outrageous, increasingly dangerous situations. A night out with Donna turns into an alcohol- and drug-fuelled nightmare that almost ends in a date-rape, and a drug deal with Bobby ends in a real murder. Strange figures visit Laura in broad daylight and in her dreams; paintings in her room seem to come alive at times; and she is haunted and abused by the supernatural entity and her would-be murderer Bob.

The characters from the Black Lodge, including the Man from Another Place, the One-Armed Man Mike, Bob, an older woman and her masked grandson (previously seen by Donna) all make appearances. Their presence is generally marked with a sense of unease, as they deliver cryptic, portentous statements, or speak incomprehensibly. Lynch’s strong point is to insert the strange into the seemingly mundane. Through the use of distorted, cacophonous sounds, sudden change in colors and visuals, close-ups, and sudden appearance of bizarre, deranged characters, he makes the stranger moments in the film all the more unsettling.

I admit I wasn’t too crazy about the idea a full-length film about Laura Palmer’s last days. The details of her life and the identity and motivation of the murderer had been explored in the show after all. Lynch nonetheless manages to create a very unnerving, dark film. The dual-narrative that follows two protagonists who fall victim to paranormal forces feels hopeless, and Fire Walk with Me enriches, but not necessarily clarifies, the mythology of the world Lynch created in Twin Peaks, as we get a greater sense of the forces at play, though their motives remain inscrutable.

It’s not hard to see why Fire Walk with Me was not a huge commercial and critical success. As a standalone narrative on its own, it doesn’t really work too well, and the film’s lurid subject matter, including teenage promiscuity, drugs, rape, prostitution, and murder, and grim tone can be off-putting. With its references to the show, it’s very much a movie made for fans of Twin Peaks. Even then, it doesn’t always offer the answers or closure that they seek, and it’s not at all readily comprehensible to those unfamiliar with Twin Peaks. That said, the hazy, mysterious, dream-like (even nightmarish) atmosphere does make Fire Walk with Me a great experience late at night. It helped that the interior of the State Theater in Ann Arbor where I saw the movie looks a bit like the Black Lodge with all of the red drapes. As I was leaving, I overheard a guy say, “I’m not going to sleep for a week.” I can’t think of a better compliment for something like Fire Walk with Me.

Twin Peaks: “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” and Beyond (Part 2)

It was only after I’d written my post earlier this month about “Lonely Souls” that I’d found out Twin Peaks episodes originally didn’t have episode titles; they were simply numbered in the order that they came after the pilot (treated as if it were episode 0) and were titled later. So officially, “Lonely Souls” would have been “Episode 14” (the first season only had 7 episodes after the pilot.) That has been amended, and I guess I’m doing a three-part thing about Twin Peaks and the Laura Palmer mystery now.

Episodes 15 and 16 (S2E8/9)

Picking up after Laura’s killer has struck again, “Episode 15” is a slow-burner that lets the tension simmer. We know the identity of the killer, yet the police continue to operate on a red herring. Cooper feels instinctively they have the wrong man by arresting Ben Horne, but he’s missing a vital piece of clue from his dreams and visions. A pivotal moment comes as Cooper and Sheriff Truman pull over the real killer, who has a body hidden in a golf bag in his trunk, for reckless driving. The killer show Cooper his golf clubs, and as the FBI agent looks the other way, he picks up the club and assumes an attacking posture, as if ready to use the golf club as a weapon with which to beat down our intrepid FBI agent. Cooper is called back to Truman’s police car before we could find out if the intent to strike was there or simply the killer spirit Bob’s influence on his demeanor. As this encounter draws to a close, with both sides parting ways, we are left with the horrifying notion that evil can hide in plain sight, beneath a veneer of respectability and normalcy, and evade justice. As the episode concludes, Audrey has recovered from her ordeal and is visiting Cooper to thank him when he learns of the discovery of a fresh corpse.

“Episode 16” is the last of the three episodes that bring the Laura Palmer case to a close (more or less). There’s a lot of other stuff going on too, here and in the past couple of episodes, that remind me of the character development from the first season. Norma is visited by her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship, while Hank bonds with Norma’s mother’s husband, who is a former convict whom Hank befriended in prison and trying to hide his past. Ben Horne’s fortunes continue to decline as he sits in a jail cell and faces the repercussions of his insurance/arson murder plot from season 1. One of the charms about Twin Peaks is in how it explores the townspeople’s lives, and for a show that would be hard to describe as “realistic,” there’s a sense of realism in how they cope and move on in the aftermath of tragedy while dealing with their own problems.

Donna becomes instrumental in helping Cooper achieve a major breakthrough in the case. She and James run into Deputy Andy Brennan, feeling down and repeating “J’ai une âme solitaire” (from Harold Smith’s suicide note), and after learning where Andy had picked up the phrase, Donna remembers that a woman to whom she delivered meals had spoken the same words. She visits the woman’s home only to find someone else living there, who hands her an envelope from Harold containing pages from Laura’s secret diary that she turns over the Cooper. The entries describe a dream in which Laura finds herself in a red room and relays information to Cooper, sharing the exact same dream that he had soon after his arrival in Twin Peaks in Episode 2 (video below).

What happens next is more or less a surreal take on the resolution of a murder mystery where all the clues come together for the lone detective to reveal to the relevant parties. The realization about his dream prompts Cooper to gather a number of townspeople with strong ties to Laura Palmer together. The arrival of an old room service waiter from the hotel, who seems to have a connection with the Giant who appears in Cooper’s visions, proves to be key, as his cryptic statement, “that gum you used to like is going to come back in style” (a phrase that Cooper had heard in his dream), triggers Cooper to recall his and Laura’s shared dream and what she had said to him, followed by more visions and the Giant returns a ring back to him, with the camera zooming into emphasize the visual of a closed circle. The scene is brief, but I love the way it was filmed. Thunder and lightning in the background during a climactic scene is nothing new, but it’s effective here when combined with the ubiquitous red drapes that Lynch seems so fond of and adds tremendously to the atmosphere of “un-realness” and unease.

Dale Cooper in Episode 16 gives a thumbs up after having figured out the identity of Laura’s killer after experiencing visions.

The killer is brought to the police station on false pretenses, and Cooper convinces Sheriff Truman to lock him up in an interrogation room before offering an explanation. Captured, Bob confesses to his crimes and forces his host to injure himself fatally by slamming his head repeatedly on a steel door before departing. Here, the episode transitions from a murder mystery to the conclusion of a horror story and then to a tragic melodrama, all with comfortable ease. Bob remains as creepy and frightening as before with his outbursts and gleeful confessions of his crimes. The former host to the malevolent spirit expresses regret and begs for forgiveness, and he sees a vision of Laura before succumbing to his wounds. The dark and tragic circumstances, swelling of the familiar ending theme, emotive acting, and the simple yet affecting image of Cooper holding the man and comforting him in his last moments combine to work extremely well on an emotional level, making this scene a heartbreaking conclusion to the Laura Palmer case.

Additional Thoughts

From what I’ve read about the show, Lynch had not wanted to reveal the killer at this point, but he faced pressure from the studio that was concerned about ratings, as viewers grew frustrated with the slow pace and lack of resolution. Some have felt that the resolution was rushed and blamed this for the decline in quality in the second half of the season. True, there were some really bad subplots after the main mystery was resolved that felt like they were bad filler material. Ben Horne’s Civil War re-enactment subplot where he imagines himself as leading the South to victory was uncomfortable and dumb. I also hate James Hurley’s storyline where he runs away from Twin Peaks after the second murder trying to find some inner peace on a road trip, only to fall for a wealthy woman who’s conspiring to kill her wealthy, abusive husband with the couple’s driver (I think that’s what he’s supposed to be?) and pin the blame on James. As a character, James is earnest and means well. I liked him in season one, but everything he did in season two was dumb and annoyed me.

On the other hand, and I’m saying this without full knowledge of the production history, I think it’s a bit unfair to say that rushing to solve the mystery caused the show’s problems. Before the reveal of “Episode 14,” I felt that the show was stagnating and failing to hold my interest, as with its plot and character development that seemed to be going nowhere. Plus, I hated the Nadine in high school subplot, and that’s been going on since the beginning of the second season.

I haven’t finished the second season by this point (after seeing Fire Walk with Me at that midnight show, I decided to take a break), but so far, I don’t have a problem with where the show is going with the mystery surrounding the White Lodge/Black Lodge or Windom Earle. Post-“Episode 16,” the show features guest appearances by a pre-X-Files David Duchovny as a cross-dressing DEA agent Bryson who arrives and helps Cooper clear his name after he is framed for drug smuggling. The real culprit is a former criminal associate of Ben Horne’s who took over Horne’s brothel after murdering the Horne-appointed brothel owner. His drug operation provides him with the means to frame Cooper, whom he blames for the death of his brother (whom Leland Palmer killed in season one while held as a prime suspect in Laura’s murder). It’s a generally well executed storyline, and Bryson is a great character on top of being a positive depiction of a non-heteronormative role, played fantastically by Duchovny.

To me, “Episode 16” was a strong episode, and I didn’t find it rushed. Could the resolution have been stretched out over a longer period? It’s probable. I’m sure it could have been taken to the end of the season and beyond, while the townspeople’s interconnected lives and the mythology of the woods around Twin Peaks, the White Lodge, and the Black Lodge were worked in. Maybe that approach could have even avoided some of the bad filler storylines, or maybe not. I wonder if a show like Twin Peaks would have fared better now as a cable drama with shorter seasons. The first season was great, and there were only 8 episodes including the pilot, whereas the second season was a full 22-episode season and needed more material. But these are all hypothetical scenarios. I was just glad for the forward momentum in the second season, because I was growing weary of the meandering between the premiere and “Lonely Souls.”

The end of the Laura Palmer arc was cathartic as it could be, but it did not offer full closure, and I would not call it entirely emotionally satisfying or a feel-good conclusion, because while Bob’s host dies, the malevolent force remains. Lynch’s approach not only leaves room to further develop the supernatural mythos, but he also manages to elevate the element of horror, leaving the viewer uneasy and uncomfortable about the perpetual nature of evil.

Twin Peaks: “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” and Beyond (Part 1)

(Note: This post has been edited as of Saturday, November 23, 2013, and now acts as the first of three posts dealing with the trio of Twin Peaks episodes about the end of the investigation into Laura Palmer’s murder, as well as the prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. This was a standalone titled simply “Twin Peaks, S2/E7, ‘Lonely Souls’” previously.)

A little over a year ago, I finished the first season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks over the course of a weekend on Netflix, and I recently began watching the second season with the intention of finishing it before I go to a midnight show of the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me this weekend. The show feels somewhat dated (it is so obviously a product of the early 1990s) and filled with melodramatic music and larger-than-life characters. At times it is a sincere soap opera; at other times, it is funny, self-aware and poking fun at the excesses and ridiculousness of the genre it resembles.

Twin Peaks aired for two seasons in 1990 to 1991, and though it was short-lived, it has achieved something of a cult status. Set in a fictitious Pacific Northwest town after which the show is named, Kyle MacLachlan plays eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper who arrives to investigate the murder of the popular, well-liked high school girl Laura Palmer due to suspicions of a serial killer at work. As he begins to uncover the mysteries surrounding the murder, he also discovers the town’s secrets, from shady businessmen, murder plots, prostitution rings and even malevolent supernatural forces at play.

As expected with Lynch’s works, the characters are quirky and have deep secrets, and the mood can be surreal, funny, mysterious, or disturbing. I wanted to write about an episode I watched last night, “Lonely Souls,” the seventh episode of the second season, because it was (or felt like) a turning point in the series and left me feeling exhausted and bewildered. I plan on writing about the subsequent episodes in which the case is solved before moving on to the prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Episode 14, or “Lonely Souls” (S2/E7)

As expected with Lynch’s works, the characters are quirky and have deep secrets, and the mood can be surreal, funny, mysterious, or disturbing. I wanted to write about an episode I watched last night, “Lonely Souls,” the seventh episode of the second season, because it was (or felt like) a turning point in the series and left me feeling exhausted and bewildered.

The first season saw a number of plot threads come together in the season finale. Cooper and the local police had uncovered evidence in their investigations, and a suspect was in custody but hospitalized. A convoluted murder and arson plot to collect insurance money consisted of so many double-crossing and involved so many characters came to fruition, but not in the way some of the players expected. In a daring cliffhanger, the suspect in custody had been murdered; several characters’ fates were left hanging; and Cooper was shot by a mysterious assailant in his hotel room.

In the season 2 premiere, Cooper is visited by the apparition of a “giant,” who is really a very tall, lanky man that offers clues and riddles to help Cooper. Although initially unsure of the giant’s cryptic messages, by the time of “Lonely Souls,” he had come to believe that the visions of the giant were indeed there to help him in his investigations. I do not believe it was the first hint that something supernatural was afoot, but it was one of the big signs. I bring up the giant, because he reappears in the climax of this episode with a cryptic message, “It is happening again,” at the moment that Laura Palmer’s killer strikes once more.

Before getting to that, I just wanted to say a couple of things. First, I don’t know if the subtitles were from Netflix, or if they were carried over from another source, but when the Twin Peaks police find a suicide note that says, “J’ai une âme solitaire,” which Cooper then translates to “I have a lonely soul,” the subtitles read, “J’ai une homme solitaire.” Problem? The subtitle was saying, “I have a lonely man,” and with the gender wrong. “Une” is the feminine article in French for “a,” and “a man” in French would be “un homme.”

Second, season 2 hasn’t been holding my attention as much as the previous one. The previous season felt like it had more development and sense of urgency, whereas things have mostly remained the same for the first few episodes, with the exception of Audrey Horne’s (Sherilyn Fenn) amateur detective misadventures that landed her in trouble with the owner of a brothel in Canada she went undercover in to find out about Laura’s murder, prompting Dale and Truman to overstep their jurisdiction in an unofficial capacity in order to rescue her. But this episode was a bit of a major shakeup, so hopefully the show maintains the momentum (I am watching this show mostly spoiler-free, except for a major plot point in this episode and a few others, over twenty years after it has gone off the air).

In previous episodes, Laura’s friend Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and cousin Maddy (Sheryl Lee, who also plays Laura) had discovered Laura’s secret diary in the possession of Harold Smith, a shut-in whom Laura had befriended through delivering food to him as part of a community service project, and attempted to steal it. Though they failed, he felt betrayed and was found having committed suicide in this episode, and scraps of Laura’s diary were recovered for Cooper to analyze. Maybe I’m heartless, or he wasn’t that well written, or his “you’re just like all the rest” speech to Donna felt a bit too much like what Travis Bickle said in his outburst to Taxi Driver to Betsy after she rejected him, but I didn’t really care about this character. It wasn’t a very good subplot, I thought, so it was a good thing that came to an end in this episode and gave Cooper and Sheriff Truman evidence to act on.

Much of the humor in the past couple of episodes comes from Leo Johnson and Cooper’s superior from the FBI. While Cooper is always dictating something into a cassette recorder to a certain “Diane,” his superior Gordon has a hearing problem and forces others around him to always repeat themselves and shout. On the darker side, but still somewhat slapstick-like, Leo Johnson, who had been a part of the murder and arson plot from season 1 and then shot by another conspirator under instructions to eliminate him, remains in a vegetative state, while his wife Shelly and her lover Bobby, both of whom he had tried to kill in the previous season’s finale, throw an ironic “homecoming party” for him.

Then there’s the awkward humor that I just don’t really get. Among the townspeople, Norma runs a diner, and she and Ed had dated and are still in love with each other. She is married to an ex-con named Hank who is still engaged in criminal activities, and Ed is married to the eccentric Nadine whom he dated to rebound from his breakup with Norma. Nadine came out of a coma after a suicide attempt (from the end of season 1), and she has regressed back to thinking she is in high school while gaining superhuman strength. It’s quirky in that David Lynch kind of way, but the whole thing just felt kind of awkward and not very funny to me, and I can’t pinpoint why.

So there’s some effective humor, and there are some quirks that don’t quite work. Luckily the former outweighs the latter, and the episode itself is quite eventful and full of revelations. There’s kind of an awkward moment when a newly introduced character turns out to be an old character, and it’s awkward because it’s a white person in Asian makeup disguised as a Japanese businessman. The character is in disguise for a reason, and it’s not a case of a white actor playing an Asian character as a mockery, but it’s still kind of awkward. On the other hand, the reveal is somewhat funny in the way it seemingly pokes fun at ridiculous soap opera twists; some of the characters’ previous moments are deliberately over-the-top as to be a joke about American perceptions of Japan; and the reunion that this character has with another is so heartfelt that I am mostly okay with it.

After the incident with Harold Smith, Maddy reveals that she is planning on leaving Twin Peaks. Donna, James Hurley, and Laura had been good friends, and James and Laura were secretly in a relationship, because Laura was officially dating high school athlete Bobby, who was himself cheating on his girlfriend with Shelly, the battered, dissatisfied wife of the abusive, criminal Leo Johnson. So yeah. Anyway. When Maddy arrived, it was as if they had a trio back together and began to play amateur detective. While Donna and James had fallen for each other, eventually an attraction formed between James and Maddy, and that became awkward for all involved. It initially looked as if everything would work out for this trio, and at the climax of the episode, James and Donna were seen reconciling and chatting at a bar just as the Lady with the log walks in Cooper with the sheriff.

Prior to that, though, Audrey’s father Ben Horne was taken into custody in connection with the murder of Laura Palmer. Parts Laura Palmer’s secret diary found at Harold’s was pieced together. Clues have led to Ben Horne’s arrest in this episode, on suspicions of having murdered Laura Palmer, because she had been working at the brothel that he owned and threatened to expose him in her diaries. But as this is a David Lynch mystery, that would be too easy of a solution, and like previous leads, this doesn’t directly take us to the real murderer, but it does reveal more of the corruption and the dark side lurking underneath the seemingly idyllic town.

The main thing about this episode is that we finally find out who really killed Laura Palmer. Various characters have had visions of a long-haired man with a frenzied look. The name Bob has come up a lot. It has been hinted at in the past, but now, we finally see that Bob has taken possession of someone in the town. I know the show has been out for over 20 years now, but I won’t reveal such a major plot point here. I will say that I’ve been spoiled long ago over the internet about who it was and who is killed in this episode, but the last 10 minutes or so of this episode gave me a lot of anxiety. The image of someone’s reflection change suddenly in the mirror was chilling and creepy, and as he chases his would-be victim around the house, the lighting, music, slow motion, distorted sounds all come together, and the end result was surreal, nightmarish, and genuinely terrifying. After the deed was done, we return to the bar. The vision of the giant disappears, and the musicians play on. The shocking brutality of what we have just witnessed, the death of a character we have gotten to know, the sad ballad, and the sight of an old man walking up to Cooper to say, “I’m so sorry,” of Donna breaking down and crying, and of Bobby with a concerned look, as if deep down they knew something terrible had happened again, gave the episode a heartbreaking conclusion.