Going Back to the Double “R”

By Mark Slade

What happens to a small town when the Homecoming Queen is murdered? If it is a David Lynch film, all kinds of strange and kooky things happen.

With the news of David Lynch and Mark Frost bringing back Twin Peaks for Showtime, I couldn’t help traveling back to 1990 and watching the pilot episode. It’s not horror, you say? I beg to differ. Wasn’t Twin Peaks just a fad and a soap opera? Yes, and yes. It did last about as long as a wart on Lynch’s ass, but that doesn’t mean it was any less brilliant, weird, and it helped shape TV that exists today. But let’s dip back into the Double R for a cup of coffee and a damn good piece of pie so I can prove to you that Twin Peaks was much more than a fad and a soap opera. More importantly, it was a great piece of horror captured on film.

It opens with that iconic first scene. Josie Packard (Joan Chen) humming to herself, applying black lipstick to her lips while enjoying her own visage in the mirror. Josie owns the lumber mill in Twin Peaks and lives with Pete (Jack Nance) and Pete’s wife Katherine (Piper Laurie) (who was Josie’s very wealthy husband). Pete is up early to go fishing. In just one instant, we can tell this marriage between Pete and Katherine is a loveless one. The stern look she gives Pete when he playfully touches her cheek is all the info the audience needs. Just as Pete is walking along the beach to his pier, he sees something by the water. Something wrapped in plastic. He gets a little closer before he realizes it is a body wrapped in that plastic, and it’s a woman. Furthermore, Pete knows who the woman is.
“Harry,” Pete says into the phone. “It’s Pete Martell…she’s dead…”

There are scenes with Bobby Briggs in the Double R, chatting up Shelley (Mädchen Amick) and Norma (Peggy Lipton), the owner of the café, but Bobby is supposed to be at football practice. Instead, he is there to carry on his affair with Shelley while her boyfriend Leo is on the road. He takes her home, and they see Leo’s truck in the driveway. In the meantime, Laura’s mother (Grace Zabriskie) discovers Laura isn’t home and desperately calls Bobby’s parents. They decide Laura must be with her father, Leland Palmer (the prodigious Ray Wise). The scene shifts again back to the beach where the body is, and Sheriff Harry S. Truman (played by Michael Ontkean), a Deputy Andy (Harry Goaz), and Doctor Hayward (Warren Frost), Donna’s father, are examining the body. Deputy Andy is supposed to take pictures, but emotions get the better of him and he has a problem with breaking into tears any time he is faced with a dead body. They turn the dead girl over and, of course, it is Laura Palmer (that iconic image and sad music in the background has made this clip infamous—Sheryl Lee wrapped in plastic with beads of sand on her forehead).

News of her death travels fast. At school, people weep with heavy hearts (especially the principal), except her boyfriend, Bobby, who is hauled into the station for questioning. They learn that another high school student, Ronette Pulaski, is also missing. Sheriff Truman has a case on his hands bigger than he expected. The mill shuts down because of the terrible news, in spite of co-owner Katherine’s gripes.

The scene shifts again and Ronette Pulaski is found walking across a bridge and train tracks. The girl is bruised and bloodied, her clothes torn, and from her wrists dangle threadbare ropes. She’d obviously been tortured.

Now we cut to motorcycle bad boy–good guy James (James Marshall) and his Uncle Ed (Everett McGill) at Ed’s gas station. The conversation is minimal and to the point. “Laura is dead,” James says. Ed quips, “Yeah…I heard.” The conversation is interrupted by Ed’s not-so-sane wife Nadine, who also wears a patch over her eye. “Ed! They said those drapes would be ready by 10 a.m.! I want those drapes hung by nightfall!” All through the pilot and first season, Nadine (Wendy Robie) is obsessed with discovering noiseless drape runners.

Now enters the most famous and main character of the series: Special FBI Agent Dale B. Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). Riding along a winding road in his rented car, Cooper talks incessantly into a tape recorder to his secretary (?) Diane. He tells the tape recorder what he had for lunch, the price of it, and of course (another running gag in the series) “Cherry pie. Damn good cherry pie.”

Next, Sheriff Truman and Cooper see Ronette in the hospital. Apparently, this became a case for the FBI because Ronette had walked from outside the Canadian border back into American soil. Ronette is suffering from shock. It appears that she was raped several times. It turns out the only connection between Laura and Ronette was that they were in the same high school. Not being able to question Ronette because of possible neurological damage, Cooper examines her fingernails. Ronette begins to talk while unconscious. She whispers, “Don’t go in there…don’t go in there…”

The one-armed man shows up in the hallway of the hospital while Cooper and Truman are waiting for the elevator to go to the morgue. As does kooky Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn), Laura’s psychologist. Jacoby reveals that Laura’s parents didn’t know she was seeing him as her patient. Right away, Cooper suspects Jacoby. In the morgue, the lights start to flicker as Cooper examines Laura’s body. Cooper discovers something under her fingernails and asks the M.E. to leave the room. In strict confidence, he shares his findings with Truman. Under the ring finger, the killer left the letter “R.”

Cooper reads Laura’s diary. She mentions she hates asparagus and wonders: “Does that mean I will never grow up?” The last entry reads, nervous about meeting “J” tonight. He also discovers white residue on the diary and a key to a deposit box. The residue is more than likely cocaine.

A weepy Deputy Andy calls in to say they found the location of the crime, where Laura and Ronette were tortured: an abandoned train car. He also tells the operator to tell Truman he didn’t cry.

During the interview with Bobby, we come across the golden eye of the film, the pearl. There was a video of Laura while she was alive. She and her best friend Donna are having a picnic with the mysterious “J.” Bobby didn’t shoot that video. The camera pans in very close to Laura’s eyes. There in the pupil is the reflection of a motorcycle. The “J” is the bad-boy good-guy James. Cooper sees it, and so does Bobby.

For the sake of space here, I’ll have to cut some characters (Twin Peaks has so many characters, it’s not funny). But some have become closely connected to the show. Albert (who doesn’t appear in the pilot, but in the next few episodes, is played by Miguel Ferrer), the FBI’s pathologist; Benjamin Horne (Richard Beymer), who owns the Great Northern Lodge and is Leland’s business partner; and there is Hawk (Michael Horse), the American Native deputy. There’s also Audrey Horne, Ben’s daughter, who ends up being a prominent character in the show, and it made Sherilyn Fenn a star. Another figure from the show that seeped into pop culture is the Log Lady (Catherine Coulson). Supposedly, David Lynch invented this character while filming Eraserhead.

At the abandoned train car, Cooper and Truman see the dank and dark area is covered in blood. There are pieces of plastic with what looks to be (I could be wrong) torture devices wrapped up and possibly flesh. There is also part of a heart locket lying in a mound of dirt. Below that is a torn piece of newsprint with a message written in blood: “Fire—walk with me…”

Twin Peaks has just as many scenes of kookiness as there are bizarre and poignant ones—sad and frightening. The kooky one that stands out, which isn’t as iconic, is with Ben’s other child—the mentally challenged young man Johnny. Johnny is wearing an Indian chief outfit, banging his head continuously on a dollhouse. You see, Laura was his tutor. Johnny doesn’t understand that Laura will never tutor him again. This character would have been great to explore. If I’m not mistaken, Johnny made his only appearance in the pilot film.

Inside the deposit box, Cooper and Truman find ten thousand dollars and a dirty magazine. There is a page marked, and they find a picture of Ronette Pulaski circled. Below that is a blurry picture of Leo’s semi, with someone standing in front of it. Leo finds two different brands of cigarettes in an ashtray. He questions Shelly and threatens her. The phone rings at Ed’s gas station. Ed answers, and Norma is on the line. Apparently they are seeing each other in secret.

There was a lot of that in the show. That was the soap-opera aspect of the show. Nevertheless, this was a David Lynch show. The finish of this film is the horror aspect.

Laura’s mother is lying on the couch, dozing, when she sees a vision of hands digging in the ground to take the gold locket that James and Donna had buried.

The character of Bob, who as the series moves on, is evil embodied. He has such a strong presence that he can push people, from a spirit point of view, into doing horrible things. However, Bob does not appear in the American telecast of the pilot, and the actual vision Laura’s mother sees is of Bob in Laura’s room. That footage was used for Episode 2 and the original ending to the European version. Set decorator Frank Silva played Bob in the show. Lynch has said there was a mistake when Silva was caught on film. When he viewed the rushes, Bob was created, and it seemed all the pieces fell in place to make a different kind of TV series that to this day networks still try to recapture. Just think: If ABC had not taken a chance on Twin Peaks, there would be no Seinfeld (a quirky sitcom), no Breaking Bad (main character is a meth dealer), no X-Files (quirky, supernatural, alien-related stories), and the rip-offs such as Picket Fences and Northern Exposure (both of which lasted longer than Twin Peaks).

Lynch made Fire Walk with Me, the sequel feature film, without Frost (not sure why that happened). That film is typical weird Lynch, but no less a decent film. I’m always curious to see the deleted footage from that. I’m not sure anyone in their right mind would have sat through a five-hour film of Twin Peaks. Maybe Mark Frost was somewhat Lynch’s editor in script stages, possibly a better film would have transpired. Who knows? Now, in 2016, Kyle MacLachlan will be back, along with Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise, and Sherilyn Fenn. I’m sure most of the cast will appear in Showtime’s “Third Season.” I have to say, I can’t wait.