Christy Desmet
“DING, DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD”: POSTMODERN
FAMILIES
IN WILD AT HEART AND TWIN PEAKS
When asked why The Wizard of Oz figures so prominently in Wild at
Heart, David Lynch said that "somewhere along the line it struck me that
Sailor and Lula would be the kind of people that could embrace that kind of
fairytale and make it really cool" (Lynch on Lynch 194). In Lynch's hands,
The Wizard of Oz becomes a different, if "really cool," fairy tale. Instead of
reinforcing the film's traditional moral that "there's no place like home,"
Lynch evokes The Wizard of Oz to explore familial relationships in a world
characterized by the death or degeneration of the father, the figure on
whom traditional values such as "home" depend. Focusing instead on the
ambivalent figure of the witch-mother, Lynch participates in a postmodern
reconsideration of the Freudian family romance. Motifs from The Wizard of
Oz appear sporadically in Blue Velvet, where Dorothy Vallens embodies at
once the questing daughter and the castrating phallic mother. Wild at Heart
makes extensive, and sometimes heavy-handed, reference to the film. Here
Lynch untangles the mother-daughter dyad, exploring more fully the
mother's role in the female bildungsroman. Direct references to The Wizard
of Oz are harder to find, but equally significant, in Twin Peaks; here Lynch
concludes his anatomy of the family romance with an unflinching look at the
daughter's fate in a world without mothers. Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks
therefore complement one another, imagining possibilities for love and
family outside paternal Law and weighing the costs of a return to patriarchal
order.
I. “No Place as Home”: The Wizard of Oz as Postmodern Family
Romance
David Lynch is not the only contemporary writer with a fascination for
The Wizard of Oz. In a long essay that was first published in The New
Yorker, Salman Rushdie reads this classic coming-of-age story from the
perspective of a perpetual stranger, one who has experienced the loss of
both family and nation. The cyclone liberates Dorothy from the grayness of
Kansas and her drab life with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, propelling her into a
technicolor world of freedom, sensuality, and danger. Dorothy finally makes
her way back to Kansas and wakes up surrounded by her adoptive parents,
a bevy of solicitous farm hands, and Professor Marvel the fortune-teller, who
stops by Dorothy's bedroom window just for the purpose of completing the
family portrait.
"There's no place like home": Dorothy mouths the words, but Rushdie
knows better. His version of The Wizard of Oz reconfigures the Freudian
family romance, exposing the father on whom culture and repression depend
as a fake and liberating the mother from her role as blocking figure in the
child's psychological journey. Rushdie remembers his own father fondly as
"Oz, the Great and Powerful, the first Wizard De-luxe." Like Oz, the elder
Rushdie was a "good man but a very bad Wizard." Rushdie also confesses a
sneaking fondness for the wicked witches of Oz, who stand in for the missing
mother in his memoir. The "cyclone of feelings" unleashed between Dorothy
and Miss Gulch, the phallic "witch" who exploits Kansas’ laws governing
canine behavior, sends Dorothy on her odyssey (Rushdie 17). But in Oz, the
witch becomes a more complex, even a sympathetic, figure. There are good
and bad witches, but Rushdie has little use for Glinda:
Of course Glinda is "good" and the Wicked Witch "bad"; but Glinda is a
trilling pain in the neck, and the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check
out their clothes: frilly pink versus slimline black. No contest. Consider
their attitudes toward their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being
called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters; whereas the
Wicked Witch is in a rage because of the death of her sister,
demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We
may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but . . . the
Wicked Witch of the West could be said to represent the more positive
of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here. (42-43)
Even the bad witch’s fascist tendencies—keeping the streets clean and
“such trains as there might be, running on schedule”—seem more maternal
than Glinda’s brittle charm (42). The Wicked Witch, in fact, embodies the
principle of affective relationship and willed social connection that Rushdie
considers to be the true hallmark of "home." When we become adults,
Rushdie concludes, "we all become magicians without magic, exposed
conjurers, with only our simple humanity to get us through. We are the
humbugs now" (103). The symbolic death of the wizard and the dissipation
of his magic, however, allows for new definitions of family and home.
According to Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz teaches not the comfortable lesson
that "there's no place like home," as the movie script forces Dorothy from
Kansas to conclude, but a simultaneously sad and liberating truth familiar to
migrants of all kinds: "that there is no longer any such place as home:
except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for
us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which
we began" (103). In this new version of the family romance the Wicked
Witch, although unredeemably ugly, represents the anarchic spirit that
impels the world's wanderers beyond Kansas in search of new homes and
families. David Lynch, like Salman Rushdie, is drawn to The Wizard of Oz as
a cultural icon that undermines the conservative ideology of hearth and
home that it ostensibly celebrates. In an interview with Chris Rodley, Lynch
confesses: "I love The Wizard of Oz. . . . There's a certain amount of fear in
the picture, as well as things to dream about. So it seems truthful in some
way. It must've got inside me when I saw it, like it did with a million other
people" (194). Lynch, again like Rushdie, appreciates the way in which this
film undermines the family romance in the process of preaching family
values. When Rodley suggests that the appeal of The Wizard of Oz has
"something to do with the comforting conclusion that 'There's No Place like
Home,'" Lynch responds obliquely that "the family in The Wizard of Oz
weren't Dorothy's real parents. So it's all very strange. It makes you crazy!"
(195). Lynch implies that The Wizard of Oz redefines the family in nontraditional ways; Wild at Heart is his tribute to its anarchic potential.
Wild at Heart reorients the family around mother-daughter
relationships; but for Lynch even more than for Rushdie, the witch-mother
inspires fear as well as fascination. While Lynch brings the mother center
stage in his female bildungsroman, he also reduces her to a witchy
stereotype, whose blood-red nails and nasty laugh betray a grasping,
murderous nature. Sailor, Lula and their son find love and make a family
only when Marietta Pace Fortune, the witch-mother, has been declared
"most sincerely"—if symbolically—dead. Only the residue of Lynch's complex
narratology testifies to the lost power of the mother within the nuclear
family.
II. Matricide and Modern Love in Wild at Heart
Fire plays a big part in Sailor and Lula's relationship, and matchsticks
become one of the elements that united them but which also
threatened to destroy their relationship. And through all this, they stay
locked on each other—they understand it, and they're above it in a
weird way. Modern love, man, it's so fantastic! (Lynch on Lynch 195)
Fire is the Wicked Witch's weapon of choice. Fire is also the wicked
mother's weapon of choice. In Barry Gifford's novel, Lula tells Sailor that her
daddy was a victim of lead poisoning, incurred from cleaning old paint from
their house without a mask. Suffering from memory loss and from fits of
violence, the father finally "poured kerosene over himself and lit a match"
(8). In Lynch's nightmare account, by contrast, Clyde Fortune is brutally
murdered by the hoodlum Santos and his people, deliberately burned to
death with kerosene while Marietta's laugh echoes in the background. Fire,
as Lynch acknowledges, is also the symbolic stuff of Sailor and Lula's
passion. The smoldering cigarette, a flash of flame from a match, are the
emblems of their love (Lynch on Lynch 195). Thus, the daughter's initiation
into sexuality is linked visually to the mother's usurpation of the patriarch's
place in the family. The witch-mother presides over as well as frustrates the
daughter's passage into adulthood.
In Freud's family romance, the mother plays only a minor role. Freud
charts the (male) child's gradual disenchantment with his parents as he
becomes an autonomous individual. Freud not only minimizes the mother's
role in the romance, but he also claims that the girl's imaginary repudiation
of her parents is weaker than the boy's. Thus, for Freud the family romance
is primarily an affair of fathers and sons (298-300). Nevertheless he also
acknowledges that the mother, a locus for any child's most intense sexual
curiosity, becomes the subject of the child's fantasies about her infidelity
and secret love affairs. It is this subtext—curiosity about and revulsion
towards the mother's imagined sexual escapades—that is central to Wild at
Heart.
Lynch toys with cultural revulsion against the sexualized mother in
Blue Velvet. Wearing the technicolor red lipstick and ruby slippers of Judy
Garland's character, Dorothy Vallens is a grown up and degraded version of
Dorothy Gale from Kansas. James Lindroth, analyzing allusions to The
Wizard of Oz in Blue Velvet, recognizes Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy as a
phallic Wicked Witch who is both seductress and castrator. In Wild at Heart,
Marietta Pace Fortune is more wicked and less sexy than Dorothy Vallens. In
the Barry Gifford novel that inspired Lynch's film, Marietta is simply a fond
but overprotective mother. In Lynch's version, by contrast, Marietta
attempts both to seduce and kill her daughter's lover. In a flashback,
Marietta, her voice slurred with drink, makes a pass at Sailor. "Mama will
light your fire," she promises Sailor, who is caught at the urinal in a
vulnerable position. When he rejects her as a "piece of shit," Marietta
threatens to "cut off your balls and feed them to you," effecting an easy
transition from seductress to castrating witch. Marietta also carries on a
middle-aged affair with Johnny Farragut. Wearing too much makeup, a
voluminous blond wig, and flashy cocktail dress, Marietta becomes a
“carnivalized version” of the sexual mother, to use Martha Nochimson's
phrase (53).
If Marietta's pathetic attempts to recover her lost sex appeal are
transparent, her evil is both more dangerous and more difficult to discern.
Through a series of misogynistic flashbacks, we learn some horrific facts
about Marietta Pace Fortune. She has murdered her husband in cold blood.
She tries twice to have Sailor killed, in part because he is taking Lula from
her and in part because he witnessed Clyde Fortune’s murder. Marietta and
Santos are also involved in a drug ring with the decadent Mr. Reindeer.
Through this connection, Marietta unwittingly causes the death of her lover,
Johnny Farragut. As the flashbacks take on a paranoid logic of their own, the
car crash that killed Lula's sexually abusive Uncle Pooch—a casually
mentioned piece of gossip in the Gifford novel—comes to look very much like
the work of Marietta Pace Fortune.
Wild at Heart stigmatizes Marietta as a wicked witch, guilty of every
archetypal female crime against man. Marietta also impedes her daughter's
psychological journey into adulthood, seeking to separate her from Sailor
and to imprison her and her young son in the maternal home. Like The
Wizard of Oz, Wild at Heart dramatizes the mother-daughter dyad in a world
where father figures are impotent, corrupt, or nonexistent. The movie
therefore threatens to become a cautionary tale of the consequences that
follow when the father fails to intervene between mother and child. Lynch
takes to its misogynistic conclusion a feminine threat that is only hinted at in
The Wizard of Oz. Lynch, however, interrogates his psychosexual morality
play in several ways. First, he considers the possibility of a non-traditional
family. Gifford ends his novel with Lula and Sailor separating, quietly but
with a certain sense of despair. Sailor, by implication, will be trapped in a
cycle of crime and incarceration. Lula, who has been doing "just fine"
without Sailor, will raise her child alone. In his most significant departure
from Gifford's plot, Lynch insists on a romantic conclusion; however, he also
uses The Wizard of Oz allegorically to measure the price and the probability
of such a happy ending.
When Sailor gets out of prison for the second time, Marietta tries once
again to prevent Lula and Sailor from coming together. Lula, however,
symbolically severs relations with her mother by throwing a glass of water at
a photograph of Marietta. The bad mother's face magically dissolves into
smoke as surely as the Wicked Witch of the West melts when Dorothy
accidentally throws water on her. But Lula's resolve alone is not sufficient to
effect a satisfactory reunion. After their first meeting Lula and Sailor vow to
part, as they do in Gifford's novel, but are prevented by a fantastic event
imported by Lynch directly from The Wizard of Oz. As Sailor lies unconscious
in the road, having been beaten by thugs on his way back to the train
station, he receives a visitation from Oz's Glinda the Good Witch, played
here by Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee. As a true dea ex machina, Glinda counsels
Sailor not to "turn away from love" and so prevents him from abandoning
Lula and their son. Glinda's status in the film's diegesis, however, is unclear.
She may be a figment of Sailor's conscience or his concussed imagination. In
terms of her physical appearance, Sheryl Lee mimics the original Glinda
closely. Her white robes look very much like those worn by Billie Burke. Lee
arrives from above in an authentic copy of the Glinda's transparent bubble,
which separates her spatially from Sailor without placing her clearly in an
alternate reality. Because there are no diegetic breaks or true ellipses within
what Christian Metz calls the "linear narrative syntagma" or sequence (129),
it is impossible to evaluate the ontological status of Glinda and her message.
Her eleventh-hour appearance, which adds a touch of camp to a already
melodramatic scene, simply calls attention to the staged quality of the film's
happy finale. The possibility that Sailor, Lula, and Pace constitute a new kind
of family is raised but not resolved.
Second, Lynch rehabilitates the witch-mother by scrutinizing the social
forces behind her myth. Our perception of Marietta as witch derives primarily
from flashbacks that are loosely associated with Sailor's consciousness.
Lynch, however, erodes the denotative function of those episodes. First, he
establishes a continuity of color between the so-called flashbacks and the
primary narrative: both feature lurid tones filtered through film noir lighting,
so that the distinction between memory and experience becomes blurred.
Lynch also uses strobe lighting to disrupt the smooth flow of movement
within the flashback scenes, making narrative sequence difficult to follow.
Finally, Marietta's role in these episodes, although crucial, is complicated by
the fact that only her off-screen laugh places her as wicked witch at the
scene of the crime. Calling into question Marietta’s relation to the Wicked
Witch as cultural icon, Lynch gestures toward the account of the family
romance offered by feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous. In The Newly
Born Woman, Cixous links the witch as cultural scapegoat to the hysteric as
scapegoat of the family romance. Analyzing the history of Freud's account of
female hysteria, Cixous shows that although Freud begins by believing in the
father's literal seduction of the daughter, he ends by attributing the
daughter's supposed "fantasies" of paternal seduction to an (unintentional)
seduction that occurs as the mother tends to her child's bodily needs. Thus,
as Cixous points out, Freud transfers blame for family dynamics from the
father to the mother via the daughter (52). In Wild at Heart, Lynch makes a
comparable point by showing how Marietta is constructed as witch in
response to the fact of family incest. Although the narrative flashbacks are
difficult to interpret, in one significant instance—where Lula describes a
quasi-incestuous seduction—dialogue and visual representation clearly
contradict one another.
In both novel and film, Sailor and Lula exchange sexual memoirs
freely. With no evident emotion, Lula tells Sailor how she lost her virginity at
age thirteen to her father's friend and business partner, "Uncle Pooch," an
exploitative Toto-figure who lures Lula into an early adulthood. From her
casual tone, Lula seems to regard the seduction as inconsequential;
furthermore, she asserts that her mother "never found out" about the
incident. In a visual replication of the encounter, however, we see not only
that Pooch has bloodied the nose and mouth of Lula, who weeps
disconsolately, but that Marietta pursues him out the door in impotent rage.
Lula, it seems, has lied on both counts. Thus, the identification of Marietta as
a witch-mother can be seen as part of a collective coverup, an unconscious
repression on all sides of an unsavory and violent act of incest that
motivates the family romance.
Uncovering the incestuous origins of the family romance, Lynch begins
to rewrite the oedipal master plot as Marietta's tragedy. When Dorothy first
lands in Oz, Glinda the Good Witch asks whether she and Toto are witches.
No, replies Dorothy, witches are old and ugly. Only bad witches are ugly,
Glinda offers by way of correction. We can chart Marietta's degeneration
from beautiful, good witch to ugly, alcoholic, bad witch as a function of
losing her daughter Lula. In the scene where Lula calls her mother for the
first time after her flight with Sailor, Marietta is dressed in a white negligee
that exposes her bosom, a blowzy version of Glinda the Good Witch's white
robes. At the same time, she stares directly into the camera, opening her
mouth in speechless agony and flexing her red-painted nails at the audience
in imitation of Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West.i Her
inarticulate scream and the distorted face, full of pain but free from tears,
give Marietta an uncanny resemblance to Cixous’ account of the hysteric's
bodily contortions and of the witch's demonic possession. As she reminds us,
according to popular myth the witch cannot shed true tears. The witchhysteric is therefore caught in a double bind. If she laughs, she is a witch. If
she cries, the tears are not real signs of sorrow (The Newly Born Woman
17). In just this way, Marietta's body expresses an extravagant yet amoral
range of emotion. Crying without tears, laughing without joy, she has much
in common with Oz's hydrophobic Wicked Witch of the West.
As the witch or hysteric of the patriarchy, Marietta is also the
archetypal mother of psychoanalysis. Because of the scene's composition,
which relies heavily on the distorting lens of a close-up camera shot,
Marietta's features resemble those that Julia Kristeva observes in Giovanni
Bellini's Madonnas. Central to Kristeva's reading of motherhood in this series
of paintings are the detached face and the Madonna's hands, which in the
series of paintings become increasingly aggressive, fondling the child's
genitals or buttocks (Desire in Language 237-70). Marietta, reaching out to
the camera and fixing the audience with her stare, is just such a threatening
Madonna, the preoedipal mother whose body overflows its boundaries to
envelope both child and spectator. In a similar vein, Rushdie's essay on The
Wizard of Oz contrasts the geometrical precision of the Yellow Brick Road
and the Emerald City with the Wicked Witch of the West's lack of shape: she
disappears in a shapeless puff of smoke and eventually melts into an even
more shapeless puddle of liquid. What marks her as other is her violation of
boundaries, her amorphous nature. Marietta shares not only the witch’s
physical attributes—her shameless stare and her reaching hands—but also
her diffusiveness. For Marietta's nearly detached face and hands, which
stretch forward toward the spectator, threaten to violate the most
fundamental boundary of the cinematic frame.
When the woman looks, as Linda Williams points out, she is inevitably
punished. In a shocking and unexpected gesture of self-abnegation that
concludes this scene, Marietta covers her face and hands with red lipstick—
lancing the wrists in imitation of a suicide gesture—then vomits in the toilet.
The red marks on Marietta's wrists may figure the gaping wound of woman's
lack, the proof of her castration that validates masculine subjectivity. As
Stephen Heath argues, "if a woman looks, the spectacle provokes, castration
is in the air, the Medusa's head is not far off; thus, she must not look, is
absorbed herself on the side of the seen, seeing herself seeing herself,
Lacan's femininity" (92). Marietta certainly has the Medusa's wild hair and
she is immediately punished for her look and her grasp in a way that
suggests "castration is in the air," in two senses: Marietta stands for
castration; being "absorbed on the side of the seen," she is herself also
"castrated" by being reduced to a cinematic object of the (male) gaze.
Turning away from the camera to vomit in the toilet (another behavior
characteristic of Freud's hysterics), Marietta presumably sees her own
reflection. That she also "sees herself seeing herself," in Heath's formulation,
is suggested by the connection between this scene and a later image of
Lula's teenage abortion, in which we observe from above Lula's screaming
face, distorted by the abortionist's magnifying lens. A retreating shot of
Marietta's feet in her black slippers recalls the shriveled feet of the Wicked
Witch of the East which, deprived of the ruby slippers, peek out forlornly
from under Dorothy's house. Like the witch, Marietta has been stripped of
her power and punished for her usurpation of the male gaze.
Marietta's dramatic response to her daughter's departure nevertheless
permits a less patriarchal reading, one based on the tie between Lula and
Marietta created by Lula's pregnancy and signified by their mutual tendency
to vomit. Kristeva initiates her study of the Bellini Madonnas with a
meditation on pregnancy. "The discourse of analysis proves that the desire
for motherhood is without fail the desire to bear a child of the father,"
Kristeva begins (Desire in Language 238); and indeed, Lula herself
comments on Sailor's resemblance to her dead father. But for Kristeva,
motherhood is "impelled also by a nonsymbolic, nonpaternal causality," an
"excursion to the limits of primal regression [that] can be phantasmatically
experienced as a reunion of a woman-mother with the body of her mother.
By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she
becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity
differentiating itself" (239). In Wild at Heart, the opposition between good
witch and bad witch temporarily breaks down in the phantasmatic
experience of pregnancy. Thus, Lula's red-tipped hands, which we have seen
stretched out in sexual jouissance, are now linked by metonymy rather than
by metaphor to her mother's grasping hands.
As the fantasy of woman's reunion with the body of her mother, Lula's
odyssey comes to involve increasingly a failure of separation and
differentiation, which as analyzed by Kristeva in Powers of Horror, is also the
experience of abjection. Abjection for Kristeva is that which "disturbs
identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.
The in-between, the composite" (3). In her study of the witch-hysteric,
Cixous uses the term "contagion" to explain the same phenomenon: "when
the line is crossed, contagion is produced" (The Newly Born Woman 4). The
experience of abjection (or contagion) recalls if it does not reproduce the
child's preoedipal experience of the mother's enveloping body, a body
without boundaries. Lula's vomit on the floor of their hotel room, radio
reports of necrophilia and of man-eating crocodiles introduced into the
Ganges to devour polluting corpses, Lula's story of her cousin Dell applying
cockroaches to his anus—all bring the young lovers face to face with
abjection. Perdita and Bobby Peru also introduce into the lovers' odyssey an
element of abjection, culminating in the robbery scene when the clerk's
severed hand disappears in the mouth of a dog and Bobby Peru's brains fly
across the parking lot after he is shot by a policeman. Not all of the lovers'
encounters with abjection are cast in the negative terms of defilement,
however. In a fantastic scene that Lynch constructs from a casual reference
in Gifford's novel, Sailor and Lula watch accident victim Sherilyn Fenn die
before their eyes. Bleeding profusely, so that the boundary between the
body's interior and exterior is violated, this paradoxical figure of the walking
corpse epitomizes the experience of abjection. Yet while the girl's final
concerns—a missing pocketbook, her comb, and the sticky stuff in her hair
(a clot of blood)—are grotesquely trivial, her repeated plea that Sailor and
Lula not "tell her mother" points to a persistent nostalgia for the mother and
for the experience of unity with her.
Wild at Heart remains ambivalent about the preoedipal mother. At the
same time, Lynch subjects the Oedipal rite of passage to heavy irony. The
happy ending of Wild at Heart, which excludes the mother, is possible only
because Glinda's appearance propels the film into the category of fairy tale.
Sailor's discolored and bulbous nose, incurred in a fight with street toughs,
suggests the continuing threat of castration that woman poses to man.
Furthermore, Lula's red lipstick and red fingernails seem to have hardened
into a darker ruby color that recalls Marietta's grasping claws and the lipstick
smeared across her face. There are, however, hints that the mother's
continuing presence is inevitable and even desirable. Certainly the
incestuous father, as represented by the unscrupulous Uncle Pooch,
continues to loom large as a threat to woman, even a pregnant woman like
Lula. It seems to be the fact of her pregnancy that spurs Bobby Peru to
display his sexual mastery over Lula if not his desire for her. Finally, the
child Pace, bearer of the matronymic, ensures that the maternal influence
will persist despite the alienation of daughter from mother.ii From this
perspective, Glinda's sudden appearance and Sailor's triumphant rendition of
Elvis Presley appear to be unconvincing intrusions of patriarchal ideology in
the guise of pop culture.
III. Nature and Nurture in Twin Peaks
In the darkness of future past,
The Magician Longs to See
One chants out between two worlds,
Fire, walk with me.
Twin Peaks, Pilot Episode
Wild at Heart opened in August 1990, after the conclusion of Twin
Peaks’ first season, which left the identity of Laura Palmer's killer in doubt.
The plot of Twin Peaks therefore answers that of Wild at Heart by posing a
familial mystery for its sequel. Wild at Heart banishes the mother from the
family romance; in Twin Peaks, the incestuous father runs rampant, his rage
and libido unleashed by the mother's virtual disappearance from the
domestic scene. Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks also share a visual
vocabulary, some of it derived from The Wizard of Oz. But while Wild at
Heart incorporates motifs from The Wizard of Oz as overt allegory, Twin
Peaks entices viewers with suggestive allusions sprinkled throughout its
twisted plot. In this way, the Wicked Witch and the forces she stands for are
seen as inextricable from the homey values of Kansas itself.
Hearth and home are threatened once again in Twin Peaks, but this
time the cyclone is a masculine force. Not Miss Gulch, not the Wicked Witch,
but the Magician himself destroys the American family at whose head he
stands. Although in the One-Armed Man's litany, the magician who "longs to
see" is primarily Agent Dale Cooper, Leland Palmer has already walked "with
fire" and been burned, and Cooper eventually supplants Leland as Bob's
chosen host. To paraphrase The Wizard of Oz, Leland Palmer is a "good
magician, but a very bad man." He kills his own daughter in an encounter
that seems logistically incoherent, even considering the information provided
after the fact by the series prequel, Fire Walk With Me. More impressive,
perhaps, Leland evades the long arm of the FBI for almost two seasons of
television. Neither his dramatically changed hair color nor his descent into
madness give Leland away. He is a good magician, indeed. But Leland is also
an incestuous father, the patriarch who resists the cultural imperative to
exchange his daughter and keeps her for himself.
As an incestuous father Leland Palmer is also the Wicked Witch, the
repressed that returns as nightmare. Leland’s dopplegänger Bob has the
grasping hands, fiery power, and threatening language of Margaret
Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West. Bob's characteristic stance, reaching
forward with a leer toward his intended victims, is perfectly witchy. His
characteristic threat, to "catch you with my death bag," echoes the Wicked
Witch of the West's famous promise to "get you, my pretty, and your little
dog, too!" (Langley, Ryerson, and Woolf 62). In The Wizard of Oz, the
Witch's taunts to the Scarecrow, "Want to play ball"? (as she tosses a ball of
fire in his direction) and "How about a little fire, Scarecrow!" (just before
Dorothy douses the flame with fatal water) resurface in James Hurley’s
memory of Laura Palmer chanting, "Would you like to play with fire, little
boy? Would you like to play with Bob?" (Langley, Ryerson, and Woolf 75 and
118, Lavery 222). In Twin Peaks, it is men who play with fire. Catherine
Martell orchestrates the burning of the mill, but Leo makes it happen and for
good measure, attempts to sacrifice his unfaithful wife Shelly to the flames.
On a larger scale, evil derives from the society of men. The Black Lodge,
Flesh World, One-Eyed Jack’s, and Jacques Renault’s cabin all testify to the
darkness of man's nature. For this reason, the Wicked Witch is a man, a
father rather than a mother.
Ironically, female candidates for the position of Wicked Witch abound
in Twin Peaks. Some are witches by virtue of their sexuality, others by virtue
of physical power or indomitable will. None is a witch-mother of Marietta
Pace Fortune's stature. Lana, the young vamp who marries aged millionaire
Dougie Milford, is overtly accused of witchcraft by a disgruntled brother
when her groom drops dead. But she is obviously harmless. Nadine, with her
black eye patch, recalls the phallic one-eyed witch of Frank Baum’s book.
Nadine, however, is all puff and no smoke. Thwarted in her attempt to
patent her silent drape runners, she tries to commit suicide in the garb of a
soap opera heroine, then bounces back to become a high-school cheerleader
with superhuman strength. Retreating to teenage banality, Nadine enjoys
herself immensely and her husband Ed finds solace in the more attractive
arms of Norma Jennings. Josie Packard apparently engineered her wealthy
husband's death, but is moved strongly enough by Laura Palmer's death to
halt work at the mill and send Catherine Martell into a fury. Blackie, the
proprietor of One-Eyed Jack's, attempts to hook young girls on heroin and
turn them into prostitutes, but is herself a victim of as well as agent for
Benjamin Horne. Of all the bad women in Twin Peaks, Catherine Martell
comes closest in looks and motives to Marietta Pace Fortune. But even in
this case, woman’s evil has little to do with maternal power and passion. In
Twin Peaks, bad women are not mothers. Conversely, mothers are weak, not
bad. Mrs. Hayward is confined to a wheelchair. Sarah Palmer, who has
inherited the hysterical gestures and Medusa hair of Marietta Fortune, has
premonitions of disaster but no means to prevent it. Finally, there are no
good, beautiful witches in the mold of Glinda to save the women of Twin
Peaks. Blond Norma Jennings is benign, but rather passive. Caroline Earle,
Laura Palmer, and Annie Blackburne—all blonds—are doomed to die. There
is no dea ex machina, as there is in Wild at Heart.
In a world where the father has gone bad and the powerful mother
rendered negligible, “there is no place as home.” The town of Twin Peaks
offers all the trappings of happy home life. A slice of cherry pie and a cup of
joe are enough to keep Agent Cooper happy. But unacknowledged incest at
the heart of the family infects both town and home. Ordinary activities of the
kind Dorothy sees through the window of her cyclone-tossed house, such as
bicycling and fishing, are often dangerous in Twin Peaks. In the first episode,
for instance, Donna Hayward takes her sister’s bicycle on a forbidden trip to
the Road House in search of James Hurley. Doc Hayward comes to her
rescue after Bobby and Mike attack James, but the unresolved murder and
legal curfew intimate that Donna’s safety is only temporary. Pete Martell’s
obsession with fishing leads him to Laura Palmer’s corpse; the unexplained
appearance of a fish in Pete’s percolator emphasizes, however comically, the
defilement introduced into Twin Peaks by the discovery of that corpse. Evil
penetrates even to the center of the familial home. Bob appears several
times in the Palmer house: Sarah sees him crouched behind Laura’s bed,
while Maddy sees him in the living room. Bob/Leland murders Maddy in that
same living room. As the series progresses, reiterated shots of the staircase
leading to Laura’s bedroom and the fan turning inexorably at the top
produce increasing amounts of symbolic tension. The girl’s bedroom window,
which in The Wizard of Oz admits a friendly greeting from Professor Marvel,
provides Bob easy access for his sexual attacks on Laura in Fire Walk With
Me. As a result, the boundary between nature (the dark and dangerous
woods) and nurture (the familial home) is breached.
Outside the home, nature is dark, dangerous, and deceptive. Cooper
breathes deeply the scent of Douglas Firs, but the woods are more animate
and more menacing than Cooper at first senses. Firs waving animatedly in
the wind is a characteristic image on Twin Peaks. Nature in Oz is also
anthropomorphized, in ways that are more comic than dangerous. The trees
assault Dorothy and her crew when they pick apples, but are merely grumpy
rather than terrifying. The field of poppies is narcotic, but easily
counteracted by a snowfall. By contrast, the drugs of Twin Peaks, taken and
sold in the woods, are devastating to Laura Palmer. The Wizard of Oz
features artificial-looking crows and owls with red jeweled eyes. In Twin
Peaks, as the famous line goes, "the owls are not what they seem," but for
less decorative reasons. Waldo the mynah bird, who takes love bites out of
Laura's shoulder, participates in Jacques Renault's sexual perversions and in
Laura's torture, faithfully repeating her cries of pain. The Wicked Witch of
the West threatens to murder Toto; Waldo actually dies for his secret
knowledge.
Nature and nurture are both corrupt in Twin Peaks. As result, home
becomes an empty signifier. The series opens with the haunting image of
Ronette Pulaski stumbling across the suspension bridge toward town in a
daze. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy crosses a number of bridges: first, when
she is running away from home, then when she is rushing repentantly back
home, and finally, as she takes the Yellow Brick Road in search of the
Wizard. None of these crossings is particulary portentous; Dorothy seems
destined to cross confidently any number of boundaries. In Ronette’s case,
the return home offers refuge from her ordeal in the train car, but no relief
from continuing nightmares or from the hovering threat of Bob himself, who
haunts the hospital. For Ronette the survivor neither Oz nor home exists any
longer.
Laura Palmer's restless peregrinations might be seen as a search for
the beauty, safety, and relief from family that the land of Oz represents.
Laura runs away to the mountains with Donna and James Hurley, who is a
kind of faithful Toto. Donna, as she follows Laura's steps after the murder,
discovers her friend's fruitless search for a haven from predatory men and
her own abjection. Donna encounters traces of magic, such as the child who
makes the creamed corn disappear and his mysterious grandmother. In the
hothouse retreat of Harold Smith, she also finds natural beauty, exotic
flowers that recall those dotting the technicolor landscape of Oz. Harold
Smith himself is, however, a voyeur and a sexual threat. When the intrepid
Donna and Maddy invade Harold's sanctuary, he threatens them, then
attempts to fumigate the sanctuary, mutilates his face with a garden tool,
and finally commits suicide. Harold's little piece of Oz offers no sanctuary,
either for himself or for Laura Palmer. Finally, in Laura's odyssey
companionship proves deadly rather than comforting. Dorothy has three
male companions, rendered safely asexual by their animal personae. Laura
Palmer has three sexual companions, the Renault brothers and Leo Johnson.
Leo, by virtue of his name and vaguely Asiatic features, bears a particularly
unsettling resemblance to Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion. The animality of
Laura's companions, however, is deeply embedded, not a matter of campy
masquerade. At the same, the threesome of Twin Peaks, by virtue of their
drug use and tendency toward tragedy, have more in common with the
actors of The Wizard of Oz than with its characters. In a sense, Laura Palmer
and her masculine cohorts are merely body doubles for themselves, the
fallible humans one finds inevitably beneath the costumes of beloved
characters. Following the yellow brick road is at once a descent into
nightmare and a hollow enactment of a familiar masquerade.
Traces of the wonderful land of Oz can be found in Twin Peaks, but the
surreal features of that landscape are echoed most strongly in the dream
world shared by Agent Cooper and Sarah Palmer. In a vision preceding
Leland’s murder of Maddy Ferguson, Sarah Palmer sees the “horse of a
different color that you’ve heard tell of,” this time in basic white. The horse
reappears in Fire Walk With Me, when Leland drugs his wife and then enters
through the bedroom window to rape Laura. The placid, decorative horse
that paraded Dorothy through Oz has transformed into a portent of rage and
illicit sex. The Man from Another Place, a dwarf who offers Agent Cooper
cryptic and perhaps misleading information, is a descendent of the
Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. Where the dwarf comes from, as in Oz,
the “birds sing a pretty song” and “there’s music in the air.” But in the Red
Room, as Martha Nochimson has discussed, the Man from Another Place
performs a phallic dance before Laura Palmer, whose lurid costume
accentuates her sexual role as receptacle for the phallus. Thus the Man from
Another Place, like Laura’s companions in sex and violence, resembles the
Munchkin actors, who were famed for drinking, fighting, and sex off-camera,
more than he does the innocent characters they portray on screen. He is at
once a caricature and figure from nightmare. While in Twin Peaks there may
be “no place as home,” there is also no such place as Oz, at least outside the
phantasmatic domain of the collective unconscious.
Dream images and reality collapse into nightmare in Twin Peaks
because the fact of incest breaches the binary opposition between (good)
father and (bad) mother on which cultural stability depends. In Powers of
Horror, Kristeva reminds us that for Freud, the morality of man starts with
"the two taboos of totemism—murder and incest" (57). But while Freud
examined at length the originary murder of the father on which civilization
rests, he was more reluctant to confront the origins of the incest prohibition.
As Kristeva defines this "two-sided sacred," incest involves a confrontation
with "an unnameable otherness"—that is, with the feminine and with
abjection. The portrait of Laura as Homecoming Queen is a familiar sight to
Twin Peaks’ audiences, but all we see of Laura herself—or perhaps more
accurately, of Sheryl Lee—is the corpse that Pete Martell finds wrapped in
plastic and on which Albert Rosenfield attempts unsuccessfully to perform an
autopsy. The corpse, according to Kristeva, is a fundamental symbol of
abjection, that which disturbs system and order. Being both person and
object, the corpse—“that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s
sunlight”—breaks down the borders that ensure the subject’s integrity on
(Powers of Horror 3). In a ritual gesture, Leland Palmer attempts to shore up
the line between self and object by preserving the corpse in plastic. The
camera registers unsentimentally the failure of that effort by focusing
unsentimentally on Laura’s bluish lips and on the fingernails that continue to
grow after her death. Lynch’s account of Sheryl Lee’s heroic endurance in
freezing water while the discovery scene was being filmed merely
underscores the corpse’s refusal to be reduced to a sign (Lynch on Lynch
172). The dead body of Laura Palmer brings to the foreground the abjection
of incest, an eradication of sexual boundaries that Kristeva claims is
fundamental to patriarchy, but which brings it face to face with the feminine
unnameable.
Wild at Heart anatomizes feminine abjection on its own terms, in the
persons of Marietta and the dying Sherilyn Fenn. Twin Peaks, by contrast,
performs a double act of repression. Unable to deflect the crime of incest
onto the figure of the mother, the plot of Twin Peaks scapegoats the
daughter. Sheryl Lee, having played Glinda the Good Witch in Wild at Heart,
occupies structurally the place of the deceased Wicked Witch of the East in
Twin Peaks. As the series’ principal murder victim, she—like the initial witch
squashed by Dorothy’s house—-is the subject of an official coroner’s
certificate that declares her “most sincerely” dead. Freud, in his rejection of
the seduction theory, places responsibility for seduction fantasies on the
daughter. During one of the sexual assaults in Laura’s bedroom, Bob’s face
metamorphoses into that of Leland, answering for Laura the question she
continually poses to her attacker: “Who are you?” When Leland takes Laura
to the train car and ties her up in Fire Walk With Me, he says in an
anguished voice, “I always thought you knew it was me,” desperately
placing on his daughter the blame for her own abuse. By the logic of
repression, the daughter as witch is doubly responsible for incest. She is at
once the willing daughter—one kind of witch—and the mother who is blamed
for the father’s transgression.
Assuming the identity of wicked witch, Laura Palmer yields the ruby
slippers to Audrey Horne, who exchanges her sensible Oxfords for red heels
at school on the morning after Laura’s death. Audrey, as Dorothy, seems
impervious to the sexual and social bondage of other girls. In the first
episode, she roams freely through the Horne corporate headquarters and
becomes, like Dorothy, a kind of “national heroine” when she rescues the
Norwegians from Ben Horne’s attempt to exploit their desire for a new home
in the Northwest woods. Audrey, however, barely avoids violation by her
own father while doing undercover detective work at One-Eyed Jack’s.
Audrey retains her virginity, a point emphasized in the aftermath of this
incident, but her close encounter with sexual violation suggests that female
safety, not to mention morality, is always under siege in Twin Peaks.
Twin Peaks offers fewer opportunities for resistance to patriarchy than
Wild at Heart does. The persistence of feminine abjection in the form of
Laura’s corpse, which refuses to shrivel up and disappear in an antiseptic
puff of smoke, suggests that the feminine cannot be eradicated altogether.
But positive ways to escape patriarchy are hard to find. The Log Lady,
ironically one of the few truly maternal figures in the series, achieves secret
knowledge and freedom only by exiling herself to the woods. Transvestite
dress provides FBI agent Denis(e) Bryson with relief from professional
stress, and Catherine Martell finds a moment of true romance with Pete
when, disguised as Mr. Tojamura, she gives her startled spouse a passionate
kiss. In this way, theatrical masquerade becomes an antidote to the cycle of
metamorphosis that turns women into witches.
If turning archetypal roles into campy drag offers freedom from family
in Twin Peaks, the show finally becomes pessimistic about the possibility of
escaping incest’s destructive logic, largely because that logic is embedded
deeply in the collective unconscious. In Cooper’s final vision at the Black
Lodge, which records the law’s final encounter with the unnameable
feminine, good girls transform inexorably into bad witches. Laura, who in the
first dream sequence sat demurely on a couch, now leers at Cooper,
screaming with open mouth in a gesture that recalls Blue Velvet’s Isabella
Rossellini. Laura’s dark-haired cousin, Maddy, appears to Cooper with her
face shrouded in darkness. Although at first Maddy looks away with the
virgin’s oblique humility, her hair has the artificially tangled look of Marietta
Fortune’s Medusa locks. Cooper’s former lover Caroline, now a vampirish
vamp, changes before his eyes into the saintly Annie Blackburne, suggesting
a disturbing continuity between adulteress and nun that realizes itself when
Cooper discovers that he has been shot. The identification between saint and
sinner, adulteress and nun, or even between giant and dwarf, all subject
Cooper to the unsettling experience of abjection, In one last feeble allusion
to The Wizard of Oz, Leland Palmer echoes Dorothy’s repeated apologies—
first for Toto’s destruction of Miss Gulch’s garden, then for killing the Wicked
witches of both East and West. To Cooper, Leland insists that “I did not kill
anybody,” but this excuse dissolves quickly into a maniacal giggle. In the
Black Lodge, the distinction between guilt and innocence has ceased to
operate. We have witnessed the vertiginous collapse of paternal law in its
unsuccessful attempt to repress the unnameable feminine by wrapping her
in plastic.
IV. Coda: “Which Old Witch?”
The Munchkins greet Dorothy, their national heroine, with a hymn of
praise: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead; /Which old witch?/ The wicked witch;
/ Ding, dong the wicked witch is dead!” (Langley, Ryerson, and Woolf 56).
Although the witch’s death is occasion for celebration, the event itself more
important than the identity of the individual witch. “Which old witch”
apparently does not matter. Glinda herself seems confused by the fact that
Dorothy claims not to be a witch. “Oh, well, is that the witch?” Glinda asks,
pointing to Toto in a rare moment of wit (Langley, Ryerson, and Woolf 53).
The nonsense phrase “whicholwitch,” by erasing the distinction between
good and evil, provides an opportunity for negotiating the paradox of home.
The possibility of new places and new identities depends on the verbal
confusion of the Munchkins’ song, which counters the misogynistic logic of
incest. If good girls turn bad, as they do inevitably in the patriarchal home,
it is also true that any old witch can, with luck and imagination, become a
national heroine. The converse, however, is also true. The phrase “which old
witch” implies as well the instability of distinctions between good and evil,
indicating how cycles of abuse and murder replicate themselves. The witch
as mother remains the ambivalent figure at the heart of this cultural
conundrum. Although a cultural scapegoat, the mother embodies also the
hope for love, freedom, and family. Without the maternal witch, there is only
the Wizard’s empty magic. What David Lynch shows, by suggestion in Wild
at Heart and more directly in Twin Peaks, is the danger of believing that the
witch can be eradicated and the folly of desiring her death. For Lynch, the
trip down the yellow brick road is without closure, and the search for a place
beyond the rainbow—beyond the abject mother—remains by definition out of
reach. To this extent, Lynch’s anatomy of home is less utopian than that of
Rushdie. “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top,” as Lula Pace
Fortune discovers. That’s why there is no place like home: “it’s just shit,
shit, shit, shit.”
Notes
i
For the classic still of Hamilton menacing the audience as well as Dorothy with her
long fingers, see Fricke, Scarfone, and Still.
ii
Sharon Willis has offered a strongly negative reading of Lula and Sailor's reunion,
suggesting that the camera shot that leads up Lula's skirt when she stands on the hood of
her car, dancing in celebration, comes from Pace's perspective. In this way, argues Willis,
the Oedipal cycle begins anew. But Lula and Sailor, it seems, have eyes only for each other,
at least at this moment. Pace, who sits in his mother's car, is poised for his own trip down
the yellow brick road, untrammeled by the Freudian baggage that destroyed Marietta. Sailor
and Lula's reunion therefore promises not the triumph of a traditional family romance but its
dissolution.