In PRESTIGE PREHISTORY, Pop Heist critic Sean T. Collins takes a look at classic TV shows that paved the way for the New Golden Age of Television — challenging, self-contained series from writers and filmmakers determined to push the medium forward by telling stories their own way.
Twin Peaks Season 1, Episode 4
“Episode 3” aka “Rest in Pain”
[NOTE: The pilot episode of Twin Peaks is not numbered; this, the fourth episode, is officially designated “Episode 3.”]
Original Airdate: April 26, 1990
Writer: Harley Peyton
Director: Tina Rathborne
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Mädchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Everett McGill, Jack Nance, Ray Wise, Joan Chen, Piper Laurie, Eric Da Re, Harry Goaz, Michael Horse, Sheryl Lee, Russ Tamblyn, Grace Zabriskie, Miguel Ferrer, Walter Oklewicz, Royce D. Applegate, Jed Mills, Wendy Robie, Kimmy Robertson, Gary Hershberger, Don Davis, Charlotte Stewart, Robert Bauer, Catherine E. Coulson, Clay Wilcox
“I have only been in Twin Peaks a short time,” says FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. “But in that time, I have seen decency, honor, and dignity. Murder is not a faceless event here. Laura Palmer’s death has affected each and every man, woman, and child, because life has meaning here. Every life. It’s a way of living I thought had vanished. But it hasn’t, Albert. It’s right here in Twin Peaks.” Let’s consider some of those lives, then. Let’s look at the complicated, contradictory lives of the people in and of Twin Peaks.
Consider Albert Rosenfield, the person to whom Coop is speaking. Apparently the top forensics man in the FBI — Cooper asked for him by name when selecting his team for the Palmer/Pulaski case — he comes up with a mountain of evidence in the brief time he’s allowed with Laura’s body. He’s so determined to do his job that he’s willing to get in a physical fight with Doc Hayward and Benjamin Horne, friends of Laura’s parents there to collect her remains for burial, when they want to take her away too soon.
Which kind of points to the other big thing about Albert: he’s a huge asshole. He’s enormously smug and condescending, not in neither a professorial nor an aristocratic manner. He insults your intelligence to your face with the rapid-fire patter and mean mug of a 1950s movie detective. When he gets walloped by Sheriff Truman, you’ve never been so happy to witness an act of police brutality. (Except, of course, for the fact that Albert landed right on top of Laura Palmer’s corpse, turning this act of slapstick comedy into a sick joke.) Albert’s insults are so inventively mean, however — “Look,” he smirks when Harry chimes in about animal-attack wounds on Laura’s body, “it’s trying to think” — that it’s hard to stay mad at him when he’s that funny.
Consider Dr. Lawrence Jacoby. This small-town psychiatrist with the sartorial stylings of a Doctor Who lead is trusted by the townspeople despite his, ahem, unconventional demeanor that makes him seem like a charlatan. He gets called in by the Hornes to help with their developmentally disabled adult son, Johnny, who’s disconsolate now that his tutor, Laura, is gone.
But when Coop finds him at Laura’s grave late at night while staking the location out, he discovers a different side to Dr. J. Jacoby knows full well he’s a phony and a cynic who didn’t really care about Twin Peaks’ problems — until getting to know Laura Palmer changed that for him. That’s why he didn’t attend her funeral during the day: He couldn’t bear the thought of it. “I hope she understands,” he tells Coop, tears in his eyes, the ghost of a bitter smile on his lips. “I hope she forgives me.” Perhaps this also explains why Dr. Jacoby dug up James’s half of her heart necklace, rather than anything more nefarious: He couldn’t bear to part from the person who taught him how to care again. (If we believe his version of events, that is.)
Consider Ed and Nadine Hurley. On the surface they’re an archetypal unhappy couple, with Ed seeking solace from his shrewish and borderline crazy wife in the arms of the beautiful diner owner, Norma Jennings. But this episode finds Nadine radiant with afterglow, the day after her triumphant discovery of perfectly silent drape runners apparently earned Ed, whose grease was integral to the process, a night of passion. Resting her head against her much taller husband, the previously comical Nadine tells the story of how she was just “a little nobody, a little brown mouse” when Ed and Norma were the big couple on campus.
Somehow fate intervened and Ed wound up with Nadine instead. Clearly this gives her life meaning, but it’s made Ed’s life hell. Somehow, both positions are rendered sympathetically. What’s more, Nadine’s inability to remember Ed’s nephew, James, indicates a tenuous grasp on reality that changes how her antics and outbursts come across. Could she have suffered some kind of neurological damage at the same time she lost her eye?
Consider Bobby Briggs. Much like Dr. Jacoby, Bobby has behaved bizarrely since Laura’s murder, from beating up Big Ed at the Roadhouse in the premiere to physically attacking James at her funeral in this episode. He’s prone to bursting out yelling in a way that suggests he doesn’t have complete control of himself. He poses in front of the little religious shrine in the home of his well-meaning but hilariously stiff father, Maj. Briggs, like he’s Jesus Christ himself.
But at Laura’s funeral, he becomes the first person, outside of perhaps Agent Cooper, willing to be honest about who Laura was and what she was suffering from. “Everybody knew she was in trouble, but we didn’t do anything,” he announces angrily, being sure to include himself as someone who ignored her cries for help. “All you good people. You wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did!” When you put it all together, does it seem more like a young man in pain, or a murderer trying to deflect attention?
Consider Leland Palmer. He, too, has an uncomfortable outburst at Laura’s funeral. Perhaps triggered by the fight between Bobby and James, he quite simply melts down, throwing himself atop his daughter’s coffin. The hydraulic apparatus designed to lower it into the ground then malfunctions, yanking the sobbing man up and down. “Don’t ruin this too!” shrieks his wife, Sarah, who’s been decompensating in her own way as well.
Some mourners, like Shelly Johnson, find the whole thing comedic enough to reenact for the amusement of the diner patrons at the Double R. (She’s also hiding a gun in her home to protect her from her psychotic husband Leo, the prime suspect in Laura’s killing at the moment, so cut her some slack.) And it’s true, there’s something funny about it, and not just the slapstick-comedy nature of the incident.
Leland’s grief is so over the top that it provokes nervous laughter, the kind you let out when what you’re watching is too intense to take seriously, for a moment at least. It’s hard to watch him weep and wail on the coffin, or again on the dance floor at the Great Northern, as he begs for someone, anyone, to dance with him in Laura’s place. I bet Sarah could do with some attention, too, but what happened to their daughter is pulling them apart, not bringing them together. That’s a second tragedy.
What’s worrisome is that Leland has another family member to worry about while this is going on. Laura’s cousin Madeleine — a brunette with big glasses but a lookalike in every other way, played by Laura actor Sheryl Lee — arrives in town for the funeral, and is there to witness the catastrophe at the cemetery. We’ve already seen Sarah superimpose her daughter’s face on the girl’s best friend, Donna Hayward. It isn’t difficult to imagine Madeleine being cast in that same role, whether she wants to play it or not.
Consider the Martell-Packard family. Pete Martell, the soft-spoken, mustachioed man who discovered Laura’s body, has been trying to help his sister-in-law, the glamorous widow Josie, uncover his wife Catherine’s skullduggery. But Catherine has the place bugged, and makes off with the sawmill’s doctored financials before Josie can show them to her beau, Sheriff Truman, with whom things appear to be getting hot and heavy. Josie also implicates Catherine in the death of her own brother, Andrew, Josie’s late husband.
What I wonder is simply this: How and why are Catherine and Pete together? Their relationship is even more openly hostile than Big Ed and Nadine’s was, prior to their drape-assisted breakthrough. Yet there’s respect of a kind, isn’t there, in the way Catherine directly confronts Pete with her knowledge of his involvement — and disappointment in her voice when she says he could have at least been a man about it and asked Catherine about the safe just as directly. It’s the first time, ironically, I’ve felt like there was probably something real there, once upon a time.
Consider Audrey Horne. An archetypal spoiled little rich girl, she spends her mornings slinking around Agent Cooper, the much older man in whom she’s taken obvious sexual interest. A brief note about that, by the way: Kyle MacLachlan was in his late 20s when this was filmed and looked younger; Sherilyn Fenn was in her mid-20s and looked a whole lot older than the high schooler she was playing; both are among the most beautiful people you ever did see. A lot of their flirtation reads a lot weirder than it looks on screen as a result.
Coop’s attitude toward Audrey serves a purpose, though: It gives him an excuse to get a handwriting sample (he asks her to write down the name of her “incredible” perfume) and determine she’s the person who left him the mysterious note about “Jack with one eye.” Audrey fills him in that the place is a brothel north of the border. Surely the drugs coming into town from that direction — via Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs, and a pair of French-Canadian brothers, Bernard and Jacques Renault (Clay Wilcox and Walter Oklewicz), who signal to each other using a red light on the roof of the Roadhouse — are connected.
Audrey also tells Coop that Laura, among her many other after-school gigs, worked at the perfume counter at her father Benjamin Horne’s department store, just like Ronette Pulaski did. Does Audrey know she’s jamming up her father here? Because that’s what’s happening, isn’t it? Laura worked for her dad, whose lawyer is Laura’s father. Laura may also have been an underage sex worker at an establishment her dad frequents. It’s not entirely clear if Audrey knows this, but we also learn this episode that she eavesdrops on goings-on at the Great Northern Hotel via secret passageways and peepholes. She certainly gets an earful of her father insulting Johnny, whom she loves enough to also care about Laura’s fate via the commutative property. That would make me want to take my father down too.
Consider Dale Cooper. The unusual agent’s prophetic dream of Mike, Bob, Laura, and the Red Room didn’t crack the case, unfortunately; the wording of the dialogue makes it a little unclear, but when Coop tells Harry and Lucy he can’t remember the name of the killer that the dream-Laura told him, he’s saying he forgot it by the time he woke up, not that he was too lazy to tell it to Diane in his tape recorder overnight.
What he meant when he told Harry “I know who killed Laura Palmer — no, it can wait till morning” is that the answer is contained within his dream, and can be retrieved from it. The one-armed man named Mike for whom Deputy Hawk has been hunting; his greasy-haired associate, the murderous Bob; the cryptic statements of the dream-Laura and her dwarf companion, the Man from Another Place: All of it, Coop believes, is connected with the case.
Not without good reason. Already, two of the nonsensical lines from the dream have come true. “She’s my cousin,” the Man said of the woman in the dream, “but doesn’t she look almost exactly like Laura Palmer?” That’s as good a description of Leland’s niece Madeleine as I can come up with. “Sometimes my arms bend back,” said Laura in the Red Room — a description that matches the ligature marks and rope fibers Albert discovers on the body.
It’s not just Coop who believes that something supernatural may be at work here. Harry, Hawk, and Big Ed sit Coop down at the Double R one night to tell him about a secret society they belong to, one that has guarded the town from evil for generations. For the past 20 years they’ve been meeting in a private bar called the Bookhouse, hence their moniker the Bookhouse Boys. It seems that in addition to working as a vigilante patrol against ne’er-do-wells like Bernard Renault, they’re also dedicated to fighting a more immaterial evil, a strange presence in the woods.
But despite his involvement, and his knowledge of his tribe’s spiritual traditions, Deputy Hawk is sanguine about the situation. “Laura’s in the ground, Agent Cooper,” he says over beers at the Great Northern, when Coop asks if her soul has migrated to the land of the dead about which Hawk has told him. “That’s the only thing I’m sure of.”
There’s something pointed, I think, in what comes after. The two lawmen are there to witness Leland’s breakdown on the dance floor, and it’s they who stand him up and carry him home. Their heads may be in the metaphysical clouds, they may be speaking of traveling souls and prophetic dreams, but in the end they’re two men who put their beers down to help someone who’s suffering get back on his feet. In the history of television, no show has pulled off this balancing act between the sacred, the silly, the scary, and the sad quite so well.
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