Dreams + Douglas Firs

“I find myself in need of something new, which, for lack of a better word, we shall call magic.”

“Fire walk with me.” This mysterious, evocative phrase is one of the most recognizable artifacts of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s 1990 television show Twin Peaks.  For most of my life, I understood “fire walk with me” to be an invitation to take someone’s hand and walk over hot coals together. It conjured a feeling that was as intense as, but the opposite of, a leap of faith. You know what you need to do, and you need to do it with speed and certainty, or else you’ll get hurt. I came to think of the show as an exhilarating trial, and beyond it—relief? Elation? Darkness underfoot?

Like most people younger than Twin Peaks, I grew up with an instinct for when media was ‘doing a Twin Peaks’—surrealism, theatricality, dynamic and uncomfortable camera angles, a deliberate excess of red—without having actually seen the show. I don’t think I knew anyone my age who’d watched the show either, only the things that were made in its wake. It was an understanding passed around like a bit of suburban legend, something much referenced but only witnessed directly by a friend of a friend of a friend.

When I finally watched the show several years ago, it wasn’t in the hopes of enjoying it—it was to better know the things I already liked that referenced it: dream pop, eerie video game cutscenes, tree-based supernatural mysteries. I had an unnerving sense that I’d seen it all before (and perhaps, through various homages, I had), but I couldn’t finish it. Teenage years full of reality TV had in no way provided me with the necessary endurance for soap opera escapades, and Mulder and Scully’s combative relationship with belief left me unequipped to handle Special Agent Dale Cooper’s steady smile and undaunted devotion. The show was too strange, and not strange enough.

But you really cannot talk about cosmic mysteries without talking about Twin Peaks. Special Agent Cooper has countless detective children, scattered across all mediums. So I gave it another go, this time wanting to understand it on its own terms. While doing various chores, I watched the investigation of the murder of homecoming-queen-with-a-dark-secret Laura Palmer. Up until near the end of the mystery, I was convinced Twin Peaks just wasn’t for me. Then, in the beginning of episode nine from season two, appropriately titled ‘Arbitrary Law’, forensics expert Albert Rosenfeld pulled Cooper aside and said to him:

“The only one of us with the coordinates for this destination in his hardware is you. Go on whatever vision quest you require, stand on the rim of a volcano, stand alone and do your dance, just find this beast before he takes another bite.”

Then I got it. I watched to the end of the original two seasons, and then I watched it all over again.

Usually, when a detective is urged to do whatever is necessary to stop a killer before he strikes again, that ‘whatever is necessary’ involves doing the wrong thing in the name of doing the right thing. Violent interrogations, unethical violations of jurisdiction or privacy or personhood, acting on hunches, planting evidence, devil-deals with organized crime.

But in a cosmic mystery, doing ‘whatever is necessary’ can mean more than breaking the rules of procedure—it can mean breaking the rules of reality.

Albert’s advice to Cooper led me to contemplate the ways in which various transparent or dubious investigative methods have been used in the cosmic mysteries I’ve studied so far. By taking inventory of Cooper’s unconventional investigative methods, we can see how they work alongside lawful proceedings and unlawful actions, and better understand the detectives that he’s inspired.

This is where I usually say ‘spoilers ahead’, but Twin Peaks has so many moving parts and funky characters that this write-up would be three times as long with a proper synopsis. If you don’t know the gist of the show, please feel free to find spoilers elsewhere and come back.

On the cusp of discovering the identity of Laura’s killer, Cooper credits most of his advances in the case to FBI guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck. He doesn’t mention the dreams and the visions he’s been having.

When he first arrives in Twin Peaks, Cooper seems a little unbalanced, swinging between businesslike over-precision and touristy eagerness for Twin Peaks’ Americana offerings, like big trees and cherry pie. Either way, his mood awkwardly contrasts the melodramatic, mourning locals of Twin Peaks. But right away he displays an unflinching ability to face the gruesomeness of the crime, when, during an excruciatingly long close-up, he extracts a cut out letter from beneath a fingernail. He worked on a previous case like this one. He may be an outsider, but he brings necessary context and methodology to the investigation.

Cooper is an impressive sleuth. He knows to look for someone with a motorcycle because he sees its reflection in Laura Palmer’s eye on a videotape, and he immediately knows who everybody is secretly sleeping with based on body language. He even dabbles in the pseudoscience of handwriting interpretation. Sheriff Harry Truman jokes/complains that when he’s around Cooper, he feels a little like his Dr. Watson.

All this, I think, is to establish a baseline of mundane competency. Cooper isn’t the guy you only call when things gets weird. He’s not tempted by the strange or inexplicable. The first time he finds the phrase “fire walk with me”, his interest falls instead on half a heart necklace—the clue that already implies a connection, a next step. He doesn’t bite when Log Lady comes by and tells him that her log saw something that night. (Knowing what her log saw would save him a lot of time and trouble, but he’s not ready to ask until much later.)

Laura’s diary gives Cooper the clue that she was scared about meeting ‘J’ the night of her death. After Cooper realizes that half the people in town have names that start with J, he’s ready to try something a little unorthodox: the Tibetan method.

The ‘Tibetan’ method came to Cooper in a dream. (He claims that since then he’s become quite invested in the wellbeing of the people of Tibet, but this is never elaborated upon.) Basically, he sets up a glass bottle on a log in the woods and throws rocks at it while thinking about the individuals possibly connected to the crime, and the details he knows about them. If he hits the bottle, the person’s worth looking into. (It’s a very convenient way for the show to speed through the some biographical facts, just as the viewer is starting to have to remember a lot about a lot of people.) Cooper claims it’s a way for mind/body coordination to tap into intuition. It certainly seems kind of like dowsing, or even more physically active forms of scrying.

At this first instance of Cooper using an unconventional detection method, Harry asks Cooper if this really came to him in a dream. Cooper says it did, with that smiling earnestness previously reserved for good coffee and Douglas firs.

Cooper’s unconventional methods are the way in which he explores the order of the universe. Twin Peaks is an interrogation of assumptions, half mystery, half soap opera. There’s more to the weird and vulnerable lives of the small-town residents of Twin Peaks than one might assume. And there’s more to the murder than anyone could guess. The heightened drama of the ultramundane serves as a counterweight to the supernatural elements. Cooper is equally drawn into both.

Shortly after Cooper utilizes the Tibetan method, he has a dream. Most people know it when they see it: a room with blood-red drapes, Kyle MacLachlan in theatrical old age makeup, a blond young woman in a black dress whispering in his ear the identity of her killer. The only problem is that when he wakes, he can’t remember.

His dream “is a code waiting to be broken. Break the code, solve the crime,” he tells Harry and sheriff’s office assistant Lucy. There are many clues to follow up on from this dream, many of which only make sense in retrospect—plausible, possibly confirmation bias-tainted proof that his dreams are relaying to him the details of the crime. After he’s shot, he begins to receive visits from a giant, which Cooper believes are dreams until the giant takes his ring as proof and tells him of things to come.

While Cooper incorporates these unconventional methods and acts on hints from dreams, he continues the case in an entertainment-standard way: bureau guidelines, deductive technique, instinct, and luck. That means forensics, interviews, serendipity, confluence, and breaking the law in the name of justice.

Twin Peaks is home to the Bookhouse Boys, the latest incarnation of a secret society of men dedicated to protecting the town from evil. Harry, Twin Peaks sheriff and Bookhouse Boy, credits that evil to a force in the surrounding woods. Right now, it’s manifested as a cross-border drug trade that some of the police are secretly investigating off the clock. Ed Hurley—local gas station owner—provides the justification: “someone’s selling cocaine to high school kids. That’s everybody’s jurisdiction.”

Cooper is quick to let himself get caught up in the mission of the Bookhouse Boys, though he later worries to Harry about the bureau guidelines he violated. Harry tells Cooper that he’s a good lawman, but he thinks too much. As one of the Bookhouse Boys, Cooper performs undercover investigations outside his jurisdiction, as well as an eventual hostage negotiation and rescue that results in multiple deaths.

In fiction, the choices that a detective makes are the tools of the storyteller—wrong or right, these actions serve some greater narrative or thematic purpose. The choices made in telling the stories of procedural investigations matter. It’s how a lot of people understand how law enforcement works, and it’s these stories that people think of when justifying injustice.

I’ve thought a lot about whether it matters that the killer is a supernatural entity. You could call it a parallel, using cosmic methods to solve a cosmic mystery and using unlawful methods to solve an unlawful crime. But I don’t actually think they’re comparable in terms of the weight of characters’ choices.

Others in town are investigating Laura Palmer’s death, and Cooper scolds them, saying their actions were dangerous. But nobody tells Cooper that his unconventional techniques are dangerous, that maybe he’s opening himself up to forces he doesn’t understand. I was struck by how much faith Cooper puts into the messages he receives from his dreams and visions. But in one private scene, he wonders if the visions might just be a result of the stress the investigation has been putting on his mind and body. It's common for a detective to balk at the mystery of cosmic events. Cooper’s nearly steady certainty, in contrast, seems otherworldly.

Clues from all investigations lead Cooper to local mogul Ben Horne, but he soon senses that Ben isn’t Laura Palmer’s killer. Sheriff Harry has questioned Cooper’s techniques throughout, but now, with hard evidence against Horne, Cooper’s insistence on Horne’s innocence strains their working relationship.

 Cooper asks Harry for twenty-four hours (a classic) to remember what Laura told him in his dream (a cosmic).

Cooper doesn’t tell anyone where he got his final deductive technique. He gathers together the man involved in all the various investigations, crafting a psychic web that triggers the memory of what Laura said to him in their shared dream: “My father killed me.”

Leland Palmer has been possessed by a violent spirit named Bob for much of his life. The giant reappears and returns Cooper’s ring, which is enough evidence for him.  Harry advises they’ll need stronger evidence. Cooper goes in for a confession. Bob escapes, killing Leland on the way out of his body.

After the investigation ends, it’s the Bookhouse Boys activities that get Cooper in trouble with authority, not the way his dreams and visions provided the connective tissue to the case. This amounts to a temporary suspension from the FBI and a job offer from the Twin Peaks police department. Reprisal, whether or not he deserves it, comes from beyond. The original series ends with him trapped in the red room that gave him the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer, while a mad doppelganger walks the Earth in his place.

Twin Peaks is a show about defying assumptions. Assumptions about small towns and homecoming queens, assumptions about why people do terrible things. Special Agent Dale Cooper himself claims to be a man with no secrets, but eventually, his secrets bring greater trouble to the town. But that means talking about the Black Lodge, which I’d like to discuss as part of a larger examination of where the creators of cosmic mysteries source their cosmic vibes. All that’s to say, more Twin Peaks down the line.

NEXT MONTH

Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.

The club is taking a break for the holidays. We’ll come back fresh in January to see how other another detective uses unconventional deductive techniques in Sara Gran’s novel Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, in anticipation of Gran’s upcoming short story collection, Little Mysteries, set to release in February 2025. See you in the new year.