This is one of my ten short essays about Twin Peaks Season 3. Click this link to read my introduction to this series.
If there’s a true precursor to the seemingly unprecedented strangeness of Twin Peaks 3, it is the superb half-hour prologue to Fire Walk With Me: Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, etc etc. In his monograph on Lynch, Michel Chion makes the point that Deer Meadow, the setting of this prologue, is effectively the opposite of Twin Peaks in every way (its evil doppelgänger, one might say). On arriving to investigate the murder of Teresa Banks, FBI Agent Chet Desmond discovers an alienating town with a hostile sheriff’s station, an unfriendly diner with bad coffee, and no discernible community spirit.
Deer Meadow and Twin Peaks seem to have merged together in this new series. Harry Dean Stanton’s eerie Fat Trout Trailer Park once seemed a world away; in 2017, however, we discover the trailer park transplanted like an organ into Twin Peaks without its being rejected. The two towns are overlaid and their differences neutralised.
There is an even more significant reason why this sequence is the spiritual precursor of Twin Peaks 3 though, and it has to do with Gordon Cole’s cousin Lil.
