*A revised entry will be published separately in 2023 for an updated character series (which will be collected here). This is the original entry written before The Return.
The TWIN PEAKS Character Series surveys eighty-two characters from the series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) as well as The Missing Pieces (2014), a collection of deleted scenes from that film. A new character study will appear every weekday morning until the premiere of Showtime's new season of Twin Peaks on May 21, 2017. There will be spoilers for the original series and film.
In a town that buries so much of its truth, the Singer's voice provides a chorus that not only comments on the emotion of Twin Peaks but gives it form.
Laura Palmer enters the Road House where the blonde performer, clad in a white dress on a stage enveloped in red curtains, is singing "Questions in a World of Blue". Laura weeps as she sits down at a table. Donna Hayward enters the bar and watches her. The bartender Jacques Renault gestures toward her and two men approach, offering money in exchange for sex. She mocks them and Donna approaches, knocking back a drink to show Laura that she's ready to tag along.
Friday, February 24, 1989
The singer is dressed in a biker's black leather this weekend, singing "Falling" while Norma Jennings and Ed Hurley discuss their love affair and dream of dumping their spouses. As the singer moves into "The Nightingale", Bobby Briggs and Mike Nelson arrive, stirring up some sardonic interest among the bikers. When Donna walks in, Mike yells at her and first Ed and then the bikers come to her rescue. As Bobby and Mike administer and receive beatdowns, the singer keeps crooning. FBI Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry Truman can hear the tune from outside, but they never go into the Road House.
Wednesday, March 1, 1989
Hiking through the woods, discussing Laura's murder from the week before, Cooper, Truman, Deputy Hawk Hill, and Dr. Will Hayward hear music wafting through the trees. It's a vinyl record of the Road House singer's "Into the Night" stuck on repeat, as they discover when they finally kick in the door of the cabin where it's playing. Cooper removes the needle and remarks, "There's always music in the air..."
Thursday, March 9, 1989
Wearing a red dress, the singer joyously recites "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" as Donna and James Hurley discuss a sober subject: the death of local recluse Harold Smith. Donna feels guilty but James shrugs it off: "Everybody's hurt inside." Truman, Cooper, and Margaret "The Log Lady" Lanterman arrive and sit at a table, as if anticipating something. Donna mouths the words of the song to James and he smiles. Time passes, and the singer is deep in a much moodier number, "The World Spins". In Cooper's vision she disappears, and then a giant dissolves into her image once again. Stunned, he watches as she resumes the final verse of the song. An old room service waiter approaches to console him, and Bobby looks around from the bar, vaguely upset. A mournful mood is sweeping over several Road House patrons, including Donna who bursts into sobs as James embraces her. Cooper listens to the music as it fades away, staring at the singer as if she can articulate the secret he feels but cannot speak.
Characters who encounter the Singer (or her voice) onscreen…
Laura Palmer
("Questions in a World of Blue")
("Questions in a World of Blue"/"Rockin' Back Inside My Heart")
("Questions in a World of Blue")
("Falling"/"The Nightingale")
("The Nightingale")
("The Nightingale"/"The World Spins")
("Into the Night"/"Rockin' Back Inside My Heart"/"The World Spins")
("Into the Night"/"Rockin' Back Inside My Heart"/"The World Spins")
("Into the Night")
("Into the Night")
("Rockin' Back Inside My Heart"/"The World Spins")
("Rockin' Back Inside My Heart"/"The World Spins")
("The World Spins")
The Singer’s journey
The singer is not quite a "character" in the sense of the others we've met so far. Her entire performance consists of singing, and she might very well be the person who plays her. What does have an arc, and a very neat one, is what happens as she sings. The "Questions in a World of Blue" number from the film was of course the last performance to be shot - and it contains a subtle echo of the singer's first scene: two men at the bar notice Laura and approach her, just as Mike and Bobby notice Donna in the pilot. But if we place this scene first in the narrative, the symmetry really emerges. The singer's first appearance is preceded by Laura staring at her own reflection as the pain and sorrow wash over her, and the singer's last appearance is followed by Cooper, staring up at the ceiling as if trying to collect and comprehend the psychic energy released by Laura less than two weeks earlier. If we fold the narrative over itself, that wave of inexplicable emotion washing over the characters echoes Laura's agony as she enters the Road House. The characters can feel this without being able to reach back across time and comfort her. The singer is the closest they have to a bridge.
Actress: Julee Cruise
Long before she was involved with Twin Peaks, Cruise appeared in several Minneapolis stage productions of children's classics, filmed and featured on television. Naturally, given the theatrical and Minneapolis connections, one might assume Cruise was linked Mark Frost. On the contrary, few Twin Peaks alums are more heavily intertwined with the career of David Lynch. Lynch met Cruise through Blue Velvet, his first collaboration with the composer Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch was looking for someone who could match the vocal quality of Elizabeth Fraser, whose cover (with This Mortal Coil) of "Song to the Siren" Lynch was unable to acquire for the film (he would later find a place for it in Lost Highway). Badalamenti turned to his old acquaintance Cruise for advice, but none of her recommendations panned out so she finally volunteered herself. Even though she was a show-stopping belter by nature, not a whispering crooner, she attempted the effect that Lynch and Badalamenti sought, and all three were amazed with the results: "Mysteries of Love", a hit song from the Blue Velvet soundtrack. Lynch, Badalamenti, and Cruise recorded a whole album, Floating into the Night, several years later. One of the songs, "Falling", became the instrumental theme for Twin Peaks and Lynch cast Cruise to sing the vocals onstage in the pilot. Later that year she starred as the "The Dreamself of the Heartbroken Woman" in Lynch's live stage show Industrial Symphony No. 1 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performing a forty-minute stream of Lynch/Badalamenti compositions amongst surreal setpieces. The performance was released on video the following year during the Twin Peaks craze. Her association with the series led to fame and acclaim; "Falling" appeared on the pop charts while Cruise replaced Sinead O'Connor on Saturday Night Live (when that singer dropped out to protest the episode's guest, Andrew Dice Clay), went on tour, and was eventually incorporated into the B-52s. Meanwhile, she fell out with Lynch and Badalamenti during the production of their second album Voice of Love, eventually reconciling and discussing their turbulent collaboration in the documentary Secrets From Another Place. (UPDATE 4/1: I initially forget to link her extensive interview with Brad Dukes.) (performance pictured: Industrial Symphony No. 1)
Episodes
Writers/Directors
Unsurprisingly, the singer was primarily directed by David Lynch - all of her visual appearances to be exact, while her one vocal needle-drop was handled by Lesli Linka Glatter. Mark Frost's teleplays (one in collaboration with Lynch, the others solo) always mention her in detail - the part was obviously written with her in mind, with the pilot script even name-dropping "The Nightingale." Cruise's role in the film was written by Lynch and Robert Engels.
Statistics
The singer's music is heard for roughly sixteen minutes (including when the band plays but she's not singing). She is in four scenes in three episodes and Fire Walk With Me, taking place over a couple weeks. She's featured the most in episode 14, when she sings "The World Spins" for the grieving bar. Her primary location is the Road House. She shares the most screentime with Donna. She is one of the top ten characters in episode 14.
Best Scene
Episode 14: The singer provides the soundtrack for the heart and soul of the whole series.
Best Line
“Is it me? Is it you? Questions in a world of blue...”
Additional Observations
• There are a few other "lines" I wanted to choose but they didn't quite work. One evocative lyric "Moving near the edge at night/Dust is dancing in the space" (from "The World Spins") is partially cut off in the episode. My favorite Julee Cruise lyric of all is never featured on the series at all, nor is the song. "Floating" kicks off Floating into the Night when Cruise sings, "When you told your secret name, I burst in flames and burned..."
• *I'll probably have to address it again elsewhere, but the Fire Walk With Me timeline is a little hard to pin down. I'm locating Laura's Road House encounter on a Sunday night because in The Missing Pieces Lynch shows an establishing shot of a church with parishioners filing outside several minutes before a deleted scene from the Road House/Pink Room trip. Keep in mind too that the next day was historically a holiday (President's Day).
• In my Journey Through Twin Peaks series, I always bracketed each of the four parts with a Julee Cruise song that wasn't featured on the show. With the clips cued up to the appropriate spot: Part 1 kicks off with "Floating" and ends on "Up in Flames"; Part 2 stretches from "Mysteries of Love" to "Movin' on Up"; Part 3 opens with "I Remember" (picking up a different part of the song a few minutes later) before closing with "I Float Alone"; and Part 4 is launched by "She Would Die for Love" (whose lyrics eerily evoke the narrative of Fire Walk With Me) and concludes with "Until the End of the World".
•
SHOWTIME: Yes, Cruise is on the cast list for 2017! (Apologies to the early readers; I initially got this wrong.) This is great news. She will be joined by later Lynch collaborators like Chrysta Bell but nothing will top seeing the original Road House muse, hopefully in her original haunts. She's been cloaked in red (framing violence), white (marking lost innocence), and black (on a day of mourning). How will she appear this time?
Tomorrow: Margaret "The Log Lady" Lanterman
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Yesterday: Black Rose "Blackie" O'Reilly
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