• indicates passages added or revised since 2017, if you want to skip directly to fresh material (in this case, just in the "Books" section near the end); this is a revision of an earlier piece written before the book Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier.
Vivian is crisp, calm, and articulate – she will destroy your confidence with artfully phrased passive aggression rather than overt hostility.
Vivian shows up in Twin Peaks on a honeymoon with Ernie Niles. She expresses keen interest in the food at her daughter Norma’s diner, the RR. Norma, initially pleased to see her, quickly grows weary but Vivian seems oblivious or indifferent – maybe both. Norma tells her mother she’s nervous about the arrival of a mysterious food critic, M.T. Wentz, and Vivian asks Norma about her husband “Henry” (everyone else calls him Hank), who just got out of prison. Then she introduces her own new husband to Norma. Later, Vivian returns to the diner to help out in the kitchen. She greets Hank when he reappears after a long absence, eavesdropping on his argument with Norma before cutting in. Hank gets along with his mother-in-law; he chuckles off her needling questions about his criminal record and eagerly accepts her invitation to a meal at the Great Northern Hotel. At dinner, Vivian criticizes the salmon before taking a bathroom break with her daughter. When they return, Hank proposes a toast.
Saturday, March 11, 1989
Vivian sits at the counter for a country breakfast. By now Norma’s irritation is palpable but Vivian keeps plowing forward with her “helpful” comments. She spits out her omelette, teases Norma about the quality of food, and suggests ingredients outside of the RR’s budget.
Wednesday, March 15, 1989
Vivian lingers in town nearly a week after her arrival, having clearly overstayed her welcome. When she arrives at the diner this evening, a distressed Norma is removing all of the fancy decorations. When told that M.T. Wentz wrote a terrible review, Vivian completes Norma’s quotation and confesses, as if it’s all a delightful misunderstanding, “I wrote it.” Norma is horrified to find out that Vivian savaged her own daughter’s business in print but Vivian digs in her heels: “It’s simply not a good restaurant.” Norma responds, “I want you out of my restaurant…and out of my life.” A peeved Vivian finally has nothing to say, and strolls out of the RR Diner as Norma cries.
Characters Vivian interacts with onscreen…
Norma Jennings
Ernie Niles
Hank Jennings
Vivian’s journey
In a way Norma, not Vivian, is the character with a clear arc in this situation (I’ll save that discussion for Norma’s own entry). Vivian doesn’t change much from the time we meet her to the moment she walks out that door, but she does slowly reveal herself. At first we might mistake her for a genuinely affectionate mother but Vivian’s war of verbal attrition takes its toll on us as well as Norma. Furthermore, the quality of her comments decline; when she first tries her daughter’s food (rudely snatching a potato from a customer’s plate) she offers praise. Even her backhanded compliments are, at least nominally, compliments. By the next morning she’s literally gagging on Norma’s eggs and on the final day, she’s entirely dismissive of her daughter’s feelings, presenting a coldly genial front which is the final straw. Vivian has some strong parallels with Hank: like him she declines to declare her intentions upfront. Unlike him, she doesn’t indulge in much flattery. However, they do share a certain brisk “friendliness” that disarms a person like Norma, who approaches the world more straightforwardly, making it difficult for her to fend off their parries. As this mother-daughter catastrophe unfolds over a few days, we witness a crucial snapshot of a much longer relationship; this is a microcosm not only of Norma’s difficulties with her mother, but also her husband.
Actress: Jane Greer
Twin Peaks features its fair share of Hollywood legends, and Greer certainly belongs in that pantheon – particularly for her work as Out of the Past's Kathie Moffat, one of film noir’s iconic femme fatales. Greer was signed by Howard Hughes as a teenager after posing for LIFE Magazine; she later sued RKO/Hughes, won, and then continued to appear in his films! (This site features a quick rundown of her career with some great photos.) Greer developed her performing skills at fifteen, when her face was partially paralyzed by palsy and she was forced to undergo expressive exercises to restore movement. Her film career petered out in the early fifties, but she was a TV regular for about a decade and continued to act onscreen until semi-retirement in the ninieties (Twin Peaks was one of her last roles). Interestingly, she had a quick cameo in one episode of Saturday Night Live in 1987 – on an episode hosted by Robert Mitchum, her Out of the Past co-star.
Episodes
*Episode 17 (German title: “Dispute Among Brothers” - best episode)
Writers/Directors
Vivian was introduced in Scott Frost’s teleplay, received one scene in a Mark Frost/Harley Peyton/Robert Engels episode, and was wrapped up by Tricia Brock. She was directed by Caleb Deschanel, Tim Hunter, and Tina Rathborne.
Statistics
Vivian is onscreen for roughly seven minutes. She is in five scenes (with a costume change for each one) and three episodes, taking place in three days over the course of a week. She’s featured the most in episode 15, her arrival. Her primary location is the RR Diner and she definitely shares the most screentime – all of it, in fact – with Norma...
Best Scene
Episode 17: Vivian’s reveal – and Norma’s shutdown – provides payoff for the tension developed by the actors and directors for several episodes. This moment is subtler than the broad strokes of the storyline might suggest.
Best Line
“M.T. Wentz…c’est moi!”
Books
written early in 2017: In Mark Frost’s novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Norma’s mother appears several times. There’s only one problem: the mother we meet in this book is an entirely different character. Named Ilsa Lindstrom, she works as a waitress at the very diner “M.T. Wentz” savages… and dies in 1984, five years before the events of Twin Peaks. This is possibly a simple oversight – Frost has said he didn’t rewatch the series much after it aired and he may have forgotten the existing character when sketching in Norma’s family history (to be honest, I didn’t even notice until someone else pointed it out). That said, Vivian-related material covers a sizable chunk of season two, stretching from the first comical mention of M.T. Wentz to Ernie’s involvement in the Dead Dog Farm standoff. Is it possible Frost wrote her out of Twin Peaks history on purpose? Annie is also missing from the book, though she isn’t replaced – a fate that only Vivian experiences in the entire Twin Peaks ensemble.
•Well, now we know. In his 2017 release The Final Dossier, written at least partly in the wake of Frost's first book (and the fans' response), the author valiantly attempts to reconcile the second season with The Secret History, underscoring what a difficult hill that is to climb. Still, it's an admirable effort. In the new book, we learn that Norma's father Marty Lindstrom had a secret mistress in the early seventies, and - as it turns out - a second family when a daughter was born out of wedlock (finally, we get Annie's backstory, as well as her ultimate fate). Thus, while restored to the narrative, Vivian isn't really Norma's mother at all, an incongruous fact that Frost handwaves with the artful dodge, "The ever polite and fiercely private Norma introduced Vivian to friends and acquaintances as her mother, declining to elaborate on the twisted circumstances that had brought the woman - who had, all too briefly, been her stepmother - into her life." This skates by on the page but tends to fall apart when one re-visits the series, in which the entire emotional crux of the melodrama relies on the very personal and deeply-rooted relationship between mother and daughter. Onscreen, Vivian is no wicked stepmother who swooped in during Norma's adulthood; she's an all-too-real parent who has clearly manipulated her daughter since childhood.
Ok, so the retcon doesn't quite work, but it's still charming as hell. The M.T. Wentz subplot was never one of Twin Peaks' most compelling narratives which means that a) it's delightfully amusing, almost touching, that Frost would strive to make things right after clearly forgetting this character altogether and b) the resultant messiness is not exactly a tremendous loss to the overall story. Elsewhere in his surprisingly lengthy chapters on Norma's extended family, Frost digs deeper into Vivian's personality in ways that both do and don't gibe with the character we met in the series. On the one hand, he creates a compelling backstory for her; in contrast to the high-falutin' blueblood Republican depicted onscreen (or rather in a complicating but believable twist on that stereotype), Vivian has humble roots that she desperately tries to efface. Through cunning and indifference to human suffering - even that of her own (actual) daughter - she is able to achieve her lifelong quest for wealth and independence, much to the disgust of our narrator Tammy (who doesn't bother to hide her bilious impression of the ice queen).
On the other hand, the subtle viciousness embodied in Greer's cruel decorum is replaced by a heightened, almost cartoonish villainy on the page. Frost has a definite tendency toward overplaying the "treacherous" card when dealing with scheming, ruthless women. He overdoses on venom and ends up flattening complex antiheroines like Catherine and (especially) Josie, and this is evident in his treatment of the decidedly more minor Vivian and Lana as well, for better and worse. This approach tends to diminish whatever colorful complications a sensitive performer is able to wring from a rather thin part, but - to be fair - Frost's lovingly detailed expansion of Vivian's life story also offers much more to talk and think about than the more superficial, offhand approach of the original teleplays. Overall, I suspect - in this case at least - it's more of a gain than a loss.
Additional Observations
• A close contender for best line, as cavalierly cruel if not as pithy: “Darling, I wanted to give you a good review. But this is just not a good restaurant! I can’t violate my professional ethics.”
• Until Vivian’s final scene, M.T. Wentz seems like a separate character with an independent trajectory. Louie and Ben discuss her (mostly assuming Wentz is a man) as a travel writer for the Seattle Post-Dispatch though by the time Vivian actually arrives, the emphasis is entirely on food criticism. Daryl Lodwick, the state prosecutor, is mistaken for Wentz, as is mysterious “Japanese businessman” Tojamura (actually Catherine Martell in disguise – another double identity in the vicinity of Vivian’s subplot).
• Through Ernie’s dialogue when Vivian is offscreen, we learn he met Vivian at a Republican fundraiser. She thinks he’s a financial analyst. As it turns out, Ernie is a charlatan and ex-con who served time for robbing a Savings & Loan (coincidentally, Hank recognizes him from prison and uses this information to blackmail him). Vivian, so intent on sniping at Norma, doesn’t even recognize the kind of man she's married. Of course, her affection for Ernie and even, it seems, Hank, betrays a weak spot for duplicitous men, sadly passed on to her daughter.
• In fact – I’ll dwell on this point more extensively in Norma’s entry – it’s when Ernie appears that Norma’s interactions with Vivian truly head south. Whether this is because of his personality, a deeper frustration about her mother and men, or simply because it shows that Vivian didn’t just come to town to see Norma, the surprise marriage to Ernie is obviously a point of contention between mother and daughter. Yet it’s never openly discussed by them, left to simmer on the backburner when other issues are raised to a boil.
• Vivian is mentioned twice after she leaves the series. First: when Ernie returns from a “hunting trip” (actually a visit to a whorehouse/casino), Norma tells him that her mother has gone back to Seattle, and he should join her. Second: when her daughter Annie shows up in Twin Peaks and gets a job at the diner. “How’s Mom?” Annie asks. “Well, we could talk about her or we could feel good for a change,” Norma mutters. “I vote for the latter.”
• Vivian was part of the original character series, when the qualification was three scenes with dialogue. Because the criterion has been shifted to ten minutes, she's now a bonus entry. She would rank just above Constance (the South Dakota forensics expert) and just below Knox (the Air Force officer sent to Buckhorn) on a combined list. Incidentally, in terms of screen time including characters from the third season, Vivian is now the 100th-ranked character.
• When I published my initial entry on Vivian I wrote the following in the "Showtime" section: Greer passed away in 2001. We can only imagine what happened after episode 17. Did Vivian find out about Ernie’s criminal history? (Considering his involvement with a hostage situation in Twin Peaks a few days after she left town, this seems likely.) Did she and Norma ever mend fences? How did she react to the violent kidnapping and hospitalization of her other daughter, Annie? Given her erasure in Mark Frost’s book, we’ll probably never know.
• It turns out, of course, that we do in fact get to know! After that previous paragraph was written, it only took a few months and another Mark Frost book to unravel Vivian's fate. In The Final Dossier, we discover that Vivian and Norma never spoke again after she left town (it's also revealed that "M.T. Wentz" was not a recurring character Vivian played but a spur-of-the-moment invention planted by her a week or two earlier purely to antagonize her hapless stepdaughter). Norma did try to reach out to her after Annie's post-Lodge comatose condition emerged, but Annie's cruel parent refused to help in any way. Meanwhile, Frost informs us that Vivian must have learned about Ernie's past quite quickly - even before their honeymoon - and perhaps planned the Twin Peaks trip primarily to trap him in Hank's machinations. They were soon divorced before she married for the fourth and final time, to a genuinely wealthy executive.
According to Tamara Preston's dossier, "I truly wish I could report that some version of karmic comeuppance at last paid this human wrecking ball a visit but, circumstantially, at least, no such evidence is in view. ... [After her new husband's death] Vivian was finally left wealthy, secure, and alone, and she seemed to prefer it that way. No more husbands. No more victims. The next time she got her name in the papers was when, after a brief, unspecified illness, she died in 2013 and joined Mr. Halliwell in his mausoleum."
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Next (active on Friday, January 20 at 8am): Johnny Horne
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Previous: Heidi
To immediately read a month of upcoming entries, updated weekly to stay a month ahead...
(at the time of publication, this includes revised full entries on bonus characters, plus full entries on new or revised characters among #86 - 52)
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