In Twin Peaks

I grew up in Twin Peaks. Or at least, a 30-minute dri­ve away. Through forest­ed back roads, lies an iden­ti­cal town to my own: North Bend, Wash­ing­ton State. And North Bend and Sno­qualmie is where David Lynch and his col­lab­o­ra­tors filmed the pilot and much more for the entire­ty of 25 years of Twin Peaks.

It was seized from the indige­nous Sno­qualmie and Sal­ish peo­ples by bru­tal vio­lence, then col­o­nized by some of the last Amer­i­cans to make their way to a remote cor­ner of the Pacif­ic North­west. There’s the inher­ent dark­ness in Amer­i­can life that hides in the grain of Lynch’s images, right there. I imag­ine those set­tlers were out­casts and odd­balls, and they arrived so late at the start of the 20^th cen­tu­ry they couldn’t total­ly con­quer the land­scape, and it got inside the fam­i­lies who moved there. Two of them were David Lynch and Kyle McLach­lan, and they’ve both spo­ken of bond­ing over their Pacif­ic NW childhoods.

I believe it’s pret­ty obvi­ous that Mandy doesn’t exist with­out David Lynch’s work. Any time you make a film there are oth­er works of art you’re fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of, such as Nico­las Cage in Wild at Heart, that con­nects you to a shared con­ti­nu­ity of cin­e­ma. And there are shared val­ues and beliefs as artists that Lynch lit a gigan­tic fuck­ing fire under our ass­es with. Def­i­nite­ly a cer­tain kind of humor. But more impor­tant­ly, I think it’s also that Panos [Cos­matos] and I shared child­hoods in those forests and moun­tains, and that we both had and were pos­si­bly per­ma­nent­ly warped by the Dune (1984) action fig­ures that improb­a­bly or inap­pro­pri­ate­ly were sold that Christ­mas to young chil­dren like us. Over the years I’ve said very lit­tle about the process of writ­ing Mandy, but the one thing I’ve stood by that’s all I need to say, is that for me, as the co-writer for the direc­tor, it was all about help­ing my friend not get lost in the woods.

Peo­ple from the Pacif­ic North­west share a sense mem­o­ry of those ante­dilu­vian, pri­mor­dial trees, every­thing mist­ed by rain, fog, and loom­ing moun­tains. We all know the mem­o­ry of lone traf­fic lights sway­ing, or din­ers glow­ing like faint can­dles in the night. None of those were shots from a tele­vi­sion show when, and where, I was grow­ing up. It was doc­u­men­tary footage. Or maybe more than that: mem­o­ries, dreams.

The first per­son I con­tact­ed when I heard we’d lost Lynch was my sis­ter, and we bare­ly need­ed words to share the loss. It was like los­ing fam­i­ly, a beloved uncle we’d nev­er met or heard from. He was try­ing to get us to expe­ri­ence life beyond lan­guage. We’d grown up with­out reli­gion, but Lynch gave us sym­bols, mys­ter­ies, inter­pre­ta­tions that could lead you to mean­ing if you let it. We did talk about how Twin Peaks is at times indis­tin­guish­able from our memories.

There’s a lot of heav­i­ness implied there, about how we grew up in the shad­ow of what they called the Green Riv­er ser­i­al killer. In my own high school, I don’t recall an exact Lau­ra Palmer, but I do remem­ber the sweet­est punk girl named Kirsten. In the space of a few months, she got preg­nant, crashed her car into the high school Principal’s, her lit­tle broth­er died in a freak land­slide, and then a light air­craft crashed in her front yard. That was real­i­ty, just down the road from Twin Peaks. That our entire whole­some town and every sub­ur­ban home was full of vio­lence, repres­sion, oppres­sion, racism, homo­pho­bia and secrets, that we drove by our local tribe’s reser­va­tion that our land was stolen from almost dai­ly is some­thing we’re still work­ing out as adults. What year is it, indeed.

But late­ly I’ve been com­fort­ed rewatch­ing Twin Peaks. Just as a grey haired Bob­by Brig­gs says in the Return, hilar­i­ous­ly, hys­ter­i­cal­ly, and in a way that gen­uine­ly moves me to tears: ​“Man, that brings back some mem­o­ries”. What’s easy to for­get about David Lynch, what none of his imi­ta­tors ever get right, is the sin­cer­i­ty, the truth, the light­ness. There’s such a sol­id, unshake­able belief in the human poten­tial for love. There’s ide­al­ism about peo­ple and accep­tance and sheer won­der and amaze­ment of everyone’s indi­vid­u­al­i­ty – even, in 1991, a trans per­son. There’s absolute belief in small joys and plea­sures to near reli­gious lev­els: cups of cof­fee, cig­a­rettes, clothes and hair, cou­ples kiss­ing, great, great music.

The thing I’d like to point out about such a unique artist, who left such an expanse of imag­i­na­tion for us all to explore and pon­der for the rest of our own lives, is how, yes, his work was sur­re­al and abstract, and mys­te­ri­ous – but that often dis­miss­es how it was also sin­cere, ground­ed, truth­ful, true. There’s a con­stant sen­sa­tion in Lynch’s art that once you look away from it, you’ll encounter some kind of sim­i­lar high strange­ness in the world, if only because he’s illu­mi­nat­ed that it’s all around us all the time. The memo­ri­als that sprang up as if by mag­ic out­side the Bob’s Big Boy in Los Ange­les and Twede’s in North Bend are tes­ta­ment to it. He made art that syn­chro­nizes you with the world in ways that are easy to forget.

Long ago I left the woods for New York City, but in April 2014 I took a girl­friend to North Bend as we road tripped down the West Coast – a vis­it to part of the puz­zle pieces that I’m made of. We went to the gor­geous water­fall, stayed at the hotel at its top (rea­son­able rates, fan­tas­tic room ser­vice, lots of wood, stag­ger­ing fresh air and ter­rif­ic sleep). The next day we drove into North Bend, head­ed for the din­er for the pil­grim­age of cof­fee and cher­ry pie.

A large part of the town had been destroyed. Vapor­ized into debris. A mys­te­ri­ous gas explo­sion at a piz­za restau­rant had lev­eled a large part of town days ear­li­er. We were still able to get incred­i­ble cof­fee. But it was the per­fect way to share with some­one that this was the Twin Peaks I grew up in. Not a TV show, but a place I love so much, where you’ve got­ta be pre­pared for the tragedies.

In this hor­ri­fy­ing time, when the dark­ness is seep­ing into every Amer­i­can house, radi­at­ing out­ward from the biggest one, I note how much the vibe and aes­thet­ic of America’s politi­cians resem­ble Lynch’s most ter­ri­ble vil­lains, all abu­sive men. When I see sway­ing trees at night now, I’m nev­er scared. They remind me they’re even old­er than the dark­ness we brought with us, and it could be inside any­one, some­thing Lynch con­tin­u­al­ly explored.

So many of us are hang­ing on to Lynch’s line: ​“Fix your hearts or die.” I think it’s an all timer, a line that will out­live us all, and the good that Lynch believes in, how he used the word ​“beau­ti­ful” all the time to describe so many things in life and art, will have a resur­gence some day as the fuck­ing clown comics per­ish and are for­got­ten. As some­one who came from Twin Peaks, I urge you, I offer a clue, to make sure to look out for all the beau­ty and love David Lynch left for us to revis­it in his absence, as we keep work­ing on fix­ing our hearts, and fight­ing for all the strange, beau­ti­ful, mys­te­ri­ous peo­ple to live.

To com­mem­o­rate the life and cre­ative lega­cy of the peer­less film­mak­er David Lynch, Lit­tle White Lies has brought togeth­er writ­ers and artists who loved him to cre­ate ​‘In Heav­en Every­thing Is Fine‘: a series cel­e­brat­ing his work. We asked par­tic­i­pants to respond to a Lynch project how­ev­er they saw fit – the results were haunt­ing, pro­found, and illuminating.