From Silent Hills (P.T.) to Twin Peaks (T.P.) “Fire walk…with me.”

From Silent Hills (P.T.) to Twin Peaks (T.P.) “Fire walk…with me.”

By Jack Heart & Orage

“I walked. I could do nothing but walk. And then, I saw me walking in front of myself. But it wasn’t really me. Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality. The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?”¹ 

The warning is issued by the illumination of a flashlight on a bloody brown paper bag sitting atop a table in an otherwise unfurnished concrete room. The bag quivers in gesture to the words it speaks then falls silent and inanimate. Behind the bag, over the table, we see groups of five carved into the wall as if someone is marking time.   

The ghoulish scenario is part of an ‘interactive teaser’, as gaming aficionados were encouraged to call the “Playable Teaser [P.T.]” version of Silent Hills. The game was released for PlayStation 4 in August of 2014 as a free download for the PlayStation Network. P.T. was developed by Kojima Productions, under the pseudonym “7780s Studio” and published by Japanese entertainment giant Konami; the owner of the rights to the Silent Hill series.

Hideo Kojima –who directed and designed P. T.– is considered in the trade to be one of the top ten greatest game developers of all time. He closely collaborated with Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro, acknowledged as the current master of horror in cinema.

Silent Hill is regarded by many of the more cerebral gamers to be closer to a new religion than a game. There are seemingly innumerable web sites and YouTube videos devoted to analysis of the metaphysical and psychological symbolism used in the games and the two major movies they spawned. After years of wrangling with Konami for the movie rights, French director Christophe Gans got the green light to proceed and began his script in 2004 with screenwriter Roger Avary. Upon its completion, the studio balked at the nearly all-female cast, and the script had to be rewritten to incorporate some male characters outside the faceless Pyramid Head.

When Silent Hill was finally released in 2006 it would gross almost a hundred million, against a seemingly orchestrated effort by college educated film critics not to understand basic Occidental theology. The second movie Silent Hill Revelations wasn’t released until 2012. It achieved moderate commercial success in spite of again taking a beating by the priesthood of Brokeback Mountain…

Both movies are tightly based on lore that was promulgated by the first three games; the product of a Konami developmental team whose very name –Team Silent– advertises the nature of their game. Team Silent made four games; the last one called The Room was released in 2004. Konami would make five more after that, but none of them would live up to the work of Team Silent.

The Room would become more or less the template for Kojima’s 2014 P. T. version of Silent Hill. In P.T. the protagonist awakens in a house whose family seems to have been horribly murdered. The protagonist has no memory of their past or what they are doing there and are guided through a constantly changing hallway by a series of macabre clues like the talking bag and strange chatter periodically heard from the radio. P.T. was advertised as a promotional for a far more extensive Silent Hills game to be released by Konami some time in 2015 – 2016.   

The first Silent Hill game was released in 1999. Its theme, accompanied by eerie other worldly music that insinuates itself into the deepest corners of the listeners' consciousness, was set in a town drenched in hallucinogenic drugs and warped into a singular minded purpose to incarnate its god. In this confabulation of circumstances, realities converge and create monsters where once there were people. The game is played through a man who is trying to find his adopted daughter in the maelstrom of the towns shifting realities and hostile monsters. Unbeknownst to him –her being adopted– his daughter contains the god they are trying to incarnate.  

Keiichirō Toyama, the Japanese director and writer of the games alternate universe scenarios, gave all credit to the influence of David Lynch and his trademark television series Twin Peaks. Akira Yamaoka, the composer of the musical score gives Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch’s composer for Twin Peaks, the same kind of credit for his musical compositions.

Christophe Gans also credits Lynch’s work with influencing his movie, along with the 1990 movie Jacobs Ladder about a man who is dead, killed long ago in Vietnam. The man continues his mundane life in an alternate reality created by his consciousness. Slowly his reality is being overrun by demons, until he understands that he died in battle back in Vietnam and finally admits this to himself. The demons then become angels. 

The second Silent Hill game came out in 2001 and introduced Pyramid Head as the red god and the invincible lord of the darkness, who rapes and brutalizes the other monsters habitually. Pyramid Head kills everything in his path but never harms the game's protagonist, who is the player, a man who is looking for his dead wife in the alternate reality of Silent Hill. In the third game, which came out in 2003, the protagonist is the now eighteen-year-old daughter of the first game's protagonist. She returns to Silent Hill as the teenage equivalent of a warrior goddess seeking vengeance upon the priestess for the recent murder of her adoptive father.             

Based on the P.T. promo Twin Perfect, a YouTube channel, which has achieved cult status among many of the game's devotees as the definitive Silent Hill experts, anticipated “Silent Hills will include doppelgangers, multiple realities and ghostly revenge.”² But they question Kojima’s ability to create something that will live up to the legacy of Team Silent. Twin Perfect laments that in the P. T. promo “the mixture of sex and death that made the original games disturbing on such an extreme level is absent…”³

No one would have to worry long. In spite of the almost ecclesiastic awe, the P.T. promo inspired among gamers Silent Hills was abruptly canceled in 2015, supposedly over a split between Kojima and Konami. Its mantle was picked up in 2016 by a game called Allison Road, in which the player wakes up in a house with amnesia to find he has brutally murdered his whole family. The developmental rights for Allison Road are owned by a company listed as Lilith Ltd…

The endings on the Silent Hill games are open-ended, with about four or five different ones possible, depending on the actions of the player. All of the Team Silent games feature an alien ending as a possibility. It’s usually referred to as “the joke ending” by gamers. 

One of the clues spoken on the radio during the P. T. game is an announcement made in Swedish that seems to be referring to thespian Orson Welles infamous 1938 Halloween radio broadcast of the classic 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Welles presented the first forty minutes of his sixty-minute broadcast as an actual news bulletin, describing an alien invasion of earth that was supposedly taking place as he spoke. Many people listening at the time believed it, reputedly causing pandemonium amongst Welles listeners.

Welles at the press conference after "The War of the Worlds" broadcast (October 31, 1938)

Translated into English the text of the P.T. radio announcement claims the legendary broadcast from seventy-five years ago was in fact true.

“Close your eyes.  

Let your ears listen, to the radio.  

Do you hear my voice? 

Can you hear your own soul's scream? 

Let us choose 

My voice that tells the future 

Or your tortured (inaudible) 

Well, what do you choose?  

You can choose, your life, your future.  

Wise as you are you might already have discovered it.  

Yes, the radio drama from 75 years ago was true.  

They are here on our earth and they monitor and see all.  

Don't trust anyone. Don't trust the police.  

They are already controlled by them.  

That's the way it has been for 75 years now.  

Only our best (inaudible)  

You have a right; a right to become one of us.  

So, welcome to our world. Very soon the gates to a new dimension will open.

2-0-4-8-6-3 

2-0-4-8-6-3…”⁴

204863 is the Gene model number for Populus trichocarpa (PT) in the Plant Transcription (PT) Factor Database. In spite of there being nothing but the hallway and some rooms in the P. T. game the 7780 studio logo appeared on a tree stump in the picture adorning the official P. T. website. A Google search using ‘7780 genome database’ will yield Populus trichocarpa genome in the Plant Genome Database right at the very top of the search page.    

Populus trichocarpa or the Black Cottonwood is a deciduous broadleaf tree native to western North America. It can attain fifty meters in height on the coast and is used for timber. It was the first tree to have its genomes fully sequenced, the results of which were published in 2006 the same year Silent Hill was released in theaters. This landmark scientific achievement was produced by “a large international research team, funded mainly by the US Department of Energy (DoE) [the DoE is the successor of the AEC]. They chose the poplar because of its rapid growth rate and potential for use as a biofuel.”⁵  

Genome-wide analysis of P. trichocarpa reveals significant somatic mosaicism between the roots, the leaves and the branches of the same tree. Somatic mosaicism is the occurrence of two genetically distinct populations of cells within the same biological specimen. In humans, somatic mosaic mutations may affect only a portion of the body and are not transmitted to progeny. In the analysis of P trichocarpa the variation within a specimen is as much as that found between unrelated trees. These results may be important in proving that evolution can occur within individuals, not solely among populations as postulated by main stream science.

Before the axe fell gamers had been speculating that the introduction of the P trichocarpa clue in the P.T. version would move the setting for Silent Hills out of what has traditionally been Centralia Pennsylvanian, the site of a real coal seam fire, and into the Pacific Northwest...⁶

Through the darkness of futures past,
The magician longs to see,
One..chance...out..between two worlds...
Fire...walk with me.⁷

When one talks of mixing “death and sex,” trees and logging, and the magnificent beauty of Americas Pacific Northwest with “doppelgangers” and “multiple realities” there can be only one Master Alchemist. It’s difficult not to believe that David Lynch has been there all along…

The summer of eighty-nine should have put an end to Crowley’s abasement of the eighties and the pretentious Christian morality that had allowed Europeans to smugly murder and dispossess fifty million Native Americans because they were “godless savages.” Later in America, those same Christian values would allow men to rationalize the most vicious war the world had ever seen. A war of aggression that they waged against democracy and their own brothers under the banner of a Union whose empty promises about freeing slaves cloaked designs for securing an unlimited pool of cheap labor from the agricultural South for the rapidly industrializing North. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century Germans would murder Germans, Italians Italians and the Irish whoever they were told, all fighting against their own best interests in the name of an Anglo-American Empire that had been brutalizing them for centuries. An empire that in its Christian madness believes itself to be the lost tribe of Israel…

In truth, the fires of nihilism had raged throughout the West since the Vietnam War. By the time David Lynch; arguably the twentieth century’s most gifted artist, weighed in with the first installment of what would be his magnum opus “Johnny” was ready for anything. The two-hour pilot episode of Twin Peaks aired on April 8^th, 1990 the evening of Palm Sunday. In Christian tradition Palm Sunday falls the week before Easter and commemorates Jesus Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  

“For Babylon the Beautiful, the Mother of abominations,”⁸ the entrance was a little more austere. Twin Peaks begins when the body of a beautiful young woman washes up on a rocky beach at the foot of a rustic sawmill. The Packard Mill is the financial heart of Twin Peaks, the fictitious logging town that provides the setting for Lynch’s story.

Twin Peaks is somewhere in Americas Pacific Northwest “5 miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the state line.” The location is among the first words spoken by Lynch’s protagonist; FBI lead investigator Special Agent Dale Cooper, as he enters the town. He is speaking into a tape recorder, which he does throughout Lynch’s series, obsessively addressing an entity which the audience never meets that he calls Diane, saying her name seemingly every other sentence he dictates into the recorder.

The most commonly used name for the Moon Goddess in pre-Christian Occidental theology is Diana; the Roman Goddess of the Hunt, of Witchcraft and the Moon. She has power over all animals and nature. She is older than Rome itself and in all likelihood was carried into the eternal city at its very beginning by the Sabines, the descendants of the Spartans.

According to the Gospel of Aradia, the witch’s bible, Diana created the world from her own essence and within that essence is contained all that is and all that will ever be. She then divided the darkness and the light, keeping the darkness of creation for herself which she rules over as the Moon and creating her brother Apollo to rule over the light as the Sun…

After Cooper gives his coordinates he adds “never seen so many trees in my life. As W.C. Fields would say, ‘I'd rather be here than Philadelphia.’” Cooper then gives an account of what he had for breakfast and his agenda for the opening day of the investigation. He finishes his opening monologue with “oh Diane. I almost forgot, got to find out what kind of trees these are. They’re really something.”⁹

The girl is wrapped in plastic but otherwise naked, apparently raped and beaten to death. She is found by Pete Martell, the husband of Andrew Packard’s sister, as he is walking along the riverside and is distracted by a foghorn. He remarks out loud “lonesome foghorn blow,”¹⁰ then turns to see the dead girl sprawled face down on the shore at the base of a boulder about fifty yards away. As he makes his way toward her the foghorn now accompanied by a ships bell grows more incessant. When he gets close enough to confirm that the gruesome package is indeed a body he dashes off to call the police.

The police and coroner arrive and identify the dead girl as Laura Palmer; Twin Peaks high school home coming queen, dedicated meals-on-wheels volunteer and seemingly All-American girl. Her parents are informed in what may be some of the most poignant film drama ever made for TV and we are introduced, as the audience making the rounds with the tragic news, to many of the key members of the cast that will supply the mystery that is Twin Peaks for the next sixteen episodes and twenty-five years.  

Strangely enough, for a show that got fourteen Emmy nominations for its eight first season episodes, only those eight and the first seven episodes of the second season, then the last are the actual product of David Lynch and Mark Frost. Frost and Lynch just walked away after it became inevitable that the murder of Laura Palmer would be solved at the end of episode seven. Episodes eight to twenty-one received little to no supervision at all from either Lynch or Frost. Consequently, they’re called the “mumbo jumbo episodes” ¹¹ and led to the show's cancellation after its second season even though by then it had already achieved cult status among critics as well as viewers. 

Lynch and Frost first met after the critical acclaim received by Lynch’s 1986 movie Blue Velvet. Lynch was hired by Warner Brothers to direct a movie about the life of Marilyn Monroe based on the best-selling book Goddess. Frost had been the lead writer for the Hill Street Blues; at the time the best television drama ever produced. The two worked together on the screenplay for Warner Brothers “Goddess” movie and although the movie never did get produced Lynch recalls being “sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story.” ¹² By 1988 Lynch and Frost were pitching the idea for Twin Peaks to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC)…

About a quarter of an hour into the premier episode a beat up Volkswagen pulls up to the Double-R Diner, a pivotal set for much of the drama in the Twin Peaks storyline. Inside the restaurant is Norma Jennings, the owner, Shelly Johnson the waitress who is tragically married to one of Twin peaks arch villains; Leo Johnson and Bobby Briggs the star quarterback for the high school football team, Shelly’s secret lover and Laura Palmer’s boyfriend. All of them are stunningly attractive. In the background seated at the counter is a man in a shiny steel helmet.

Out of the Volkswagen and through the door of the Double-R Diner rushes Heidi; a rotund and very plain looking waitress who speaks with a thick German accent but mostly just giggles when spoken to. Shelly who has been waiting for her to take over the shift slyly remarks “what kept you Heidi, seconds on knockwurst this morning?” Heidi sheepishly retorts “I couldn’t get my car started.” Shelly shoots back “too busy jump starting the old man huh?” Heidi looks down and giggles. Bobby interjects “I thought you Germans were always on time.” Heidi just looks at him and giggles, which she continues to do as she walks off to put her coat away.¹³

We do not meet Heidi again till Lynch draws the curtain on Twin Peaks for the twentieth century with a closing act so profound that even now after he has explained himself there are those who, like the Church of Silent Hill, will not understand it…

After the seventh episode in season two, called Lonely Souls by Twin Peaks German audience who gave the episodes names, mere mortals took over the reins of the show. In their efforts to emulate Lynch, whom they idolized, they tied it into a Gordian knot. Some of it was so silly it could have been in a latter-day sitcom. Nadine, Lynch’s thirty-five-year-old neurotic schizophrenic one eyed pirate of a housewife, develops super human strength and becomes the high school wrestling champion. Windom Earl, a mere mortal meant to play the villain till Lynch came back, rivals Bob, who is the Devil himself, in evil powers.

In a half hour Lynch’s A Team of writers, led by Frost, unravel the cinematic knot just as assuredly as Alexander the Great undid the original. But Lynch was unhappy with their last twenty-one minutes saying “when it came to the Red Room, it was, in my opinion, completely and totally wrong. Completely and totally wrong. And so I changed that part…”¹⁴

Because of similarities to a murder across the state line the year before the FBI descends on Twin Peaks and a federal investigation ensues. Under the relentless scrutiny of Agent Cooper, a student of Tibetan shamanism, a very different Laura Palmer emerges than the girl next door.  As Lynch’s story progresses the question asked by his audience, such as Noel Murray writing for the NY Times, is no longer who murdered Laura Palmer, if it ever was, but “rather how a popular, pretty, young Meals on Wheels volunteer in a placid small town could end up a cocaine-addicted murder victim who had sex with three different men in the hours before her death.”¹⁵

It’s a loaded question. The wilderness of America’s Pacific Northwest is noted for its strangeness, from UFO’s to Big Foot. People go into its sprawling pristine forests for recreational purposes and many never come out. In one state alone “since 1997, 189 men and 51 women remain listed as missing after trekking into the Oregon wilderness.”¹⁶ Those figures are from 2014. In many instances professional rescue workers with dogs failed to locate any trace of the missing. Those that are found never remember what happened. The stories go back generations.

There is the unsettling case of “two-year-old Keith Parkins, who vanished in April 1952 from his grandparent’s ranch near Umatilla National Forest in eastern Oregon. Nineteen hours later and over two thickly-forested mountains, twelve miles north of his grandparent’s ranch, Keith was found by rescue workers unconscious in a riverbed.”¹⁷ Either the locals knew little Keith could fly, or they knew something about the woods around Umatilla National Forest that never got published in the newspaper accounts…

The woods around Twin Peaks are called Ghostwood National Forest and they have their own supernatural lore. Three days after the murder, over Sunday dinner in the Double R Diner, Big Ed Hurly Nadine’s husband, Deputy Hawk a Native American intimate with the lore of Twin Peaks and Sheriff Harry Truman confide in Agent Cooper.

Sheriff Truman, who acts as Watson to Agent Coopers Sherlock Holmes, explains to Cooper Twin Peaks generational secret society, called the Bookhouse Boys, which they all belong to. After being prodded by Cooper, the Sheriff starts by saying “Twin Peaks is different, long way from the world. You’ve noticed that.” Cooper agrees and the sheriff continues “that’s exactly the way we like it but there’s a back end to that. Maybe that’s the price we pay.” Cooper asks what that price would be and the sheriff answers resolutely “There’s a sort of evil out there. There’s something very very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want; a darkness, a presence. It takes many forms. But it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we’ve always been here to fight it.”¹⁸

The night before Cooper had dreamed. He was a much older man, in his fifties, seated in a room with walls of red drapes and a black and white chevron floor. A dwarf in a red suit stood by a pole with his back turned. The dwarf quivered in anticipation and images flashed through Cooper's mind. A one armed man then recited:

“Through the darkness of futures past,
The magician longs to see,
One..chance...out..between two worlds...
Fire...walk with me.
We lived among the people I think you say convenience store?
We lived above it. I mean it like it is, as it sounds. I too have been touched by the devilish one; tattoo on the left shoulder.
Ah, but when I saw the face of God, I was changed. I took the entire arm off. My name is Mike. His name is BOB.”¹⁹ 

The dwarf turns around and grasps the pole. It is the stand to a light fixture. There is one on each side of the two chairs that are side by side facing the chair Cooper is in. To the right of Coopers chair is a coffee table with a golden globe of Saturn on it. Laura Palmer is seated in the chair facing him on his right. Behind the two chairs, there is a statue of the Venus de Milo. There are no other furnishings. As the dwarf turns he claps his hands and says “let's rock” in a distorted voice.

The Red Room itself is a distortion of time, a reality within a reality, an alternate reality where the disincarnate, the dead and the living can all interact. It is closer to the Implicate Order of David Bohme than the superficial world of his Explicate Order, closer to the Sacred than to the Profane as defined by Mercia Eliade. It can be reached through dreams and visions and can be physically accessed from places around Ghostwood National Forest where portals open to it when the planets align in accordance with a map carved by prior Native American inhabitants into the wall of Owl Cave.

The Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest can be linked by both the Athabaskan language and through the presence of haplogroup X in their mitochondrial DNA to the Navajo of Americas Southwest. The Navajo believe their benevolent gods, called Kachina, dwell in other realities but are able to gain access to this one through portals that open up along the San Francisco Peaks and throughout the Four Corner region of Americas Southwest.

The Navajo also believe that an entity of a very different disposition can come through those portals; “a malevolent manifestation of a supernatural consciousness that is marked by murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia.”²⁰ They call this being of immense supernatural powers “yee nadlooshii,” which means to walk, to travel like an animal. Others call it a Skinwalker…

The Navajo are reluctant to even talk about the Skinwalker. They know it lives among the people and any discussion of it will invite its retribution. The Skinwalker exists only to cause pain and suffering. It is believed that a medicine man or woman who has reached the highest state of initiation into their mysteries can become a Skinwalker by murdering a close relative. Although they can be any animal they wish a Skinwalker is “typically seen in the form of a coyote, owl, fox, wolf or crow…”²¹          

Sitting down in the remaining chair facing Cooper to his left, the dwarf continued rubbing his hands together greedily. Laura touched her right finger to her right nostril gesturing to Cooper. The silhouette of Saturn’s shadow moved from left to right across the red drapes behind them. The distorted voice of the dwarf cackled in a seemingly nonsensical dialogue.

The next day over Sunday morning breakfast Cooper relates his dream to the sheriff and the Sheriffs intellectually challenged secretary; Lucy Moran. Cooper asks them “do you know where dreams come from?” The sheriff doesn’t and obviously neither does Lucy Moran so Cooper continues. “Acetylcholine neurons fire high voltage impulses into the forebrain. These impulses become pictures, the pictures become dreams - but no one knows why we choose these particular pictures.”²²

When the sheriff asks him how his dream ended Cooper sums it up. “Suddenly it was twenty-five years later. I was old, sitting in a red room. There was a midget in a red suit and a beautiful woman. The little man told me that my favorite gum was coming back into style and didn't his cousin look exactly like Laura Palmer, which she did.” The Sheriff asks what cousin?  To which Cooper replies “The beautiful woman. She's filled with secrets; sometimes her arms bend back; where she's from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air. The midget did a dance, Laura kissed me, and she whispered the name of the killer in my ear.”²³

Cooper cannot remember the name; consequently, Laura’s identical cousin from Montana; Maddy Ferguson is graphically murdered at the end of the Lonely Hearts episode making the apprehension of  BOB’s “vehicle,” as he calls the humans he possesses, inevitable. In a scene almost too realistic to watch Maddy is beaten to death by her uncle Leyland Palmer. Just like he had beat his own daughter Laura Palmer to death after trailing Laura and her friends to a cabin in the woods and interrupting their cocaine and alcohol fueled orgy with his own homicidal rage.

In the same Lonely Hearts episode prior to Leyland Palmer’s spectacular revelation as the killer Cooper, recording the latest find in his investigation to Diane, described Laura Palmer’s secret diary. “There are repeated references to a BOB. He was a threatening presence in her life since early adolescence; there are intimations of abuse and molestation on a regular basis. He is referred to on more than one occasion as a friend of her fathers.” ²⁴ 

In psychoanalysis, Laura’s recollections of her father’s deprivations as the work of BOB are called a screen memory. The trauma of being repeatedly raped by her own father has led to a split in her personality. In a conversation over his hospital bed with the sheriff and Cooper, after he is nearly murdered himself, Laura’s psychiatrist and one of her numerous lovers; Dr. Lawrence Jacoby confides that Laura “was leading a double life, two people…”²⁵

Jacoby is a Kahuna shaman much like the real life Dr. Andrija Puharich; the shadowy key to understanding what MK Ultra really means. It was Puharich’s colleague Dr. Ewen Cameron who developed the “Psychic Driving” techniques that according to urban legend are used by intelligence agency’s to split a personality and facilitate the creation of a mind controlled slave.²⁶ 

Beneath Laura Palmer’s high school homecoming queen veneer her appetites for cocaine and depraved sex are insatiable. She frets in her diary that her best friend Donna Hayward would abandon her if “she knew what my insides were like; black and dark and soaked with dreams of big big men and different ways that they might hold me and take me into their control.”²⁷ In an audiotape to Dr. Jacoby she taunts him about the sex she is having with Leo Johnson; Shelly’s husband. “I think a couple of times he’s tried to kill me. And guess what? As you know I really got off on it. Isn’t sex weird? This guy can really light my F-I-R-E.”²⁸

While being counseled for grief Laura’s boyfriend Bobby Briggs tells Jacoby Laura wanted to die, that she saw the human race as so “sick and rotten”²⁹ that it was incapable of good and that “every time she tried to make the world a better place something terrible came up inside her and pulled her back down to hell to go deeper and deeper into the blackest nightmare.”³⁰ Tearfully Bobby admits that Laura debased him, that it was her who had made him sell drugs to the other high school kids. Jacoby already knows and tells him “Laura wanted to corrupt people because that’s the way she felt about herself.”³¹

    

Laura Palmer’s autopsy revealed that when she had been tied up prior to being raped and murdered it was not even the first time that night she had been tied up. The first time was as foreplay to sex with Leo Johnson and his cocaine dealing accomplice the disgustingly obese Jacques Renault. In his hospital bed, Jacoby tells Cooper that on her last visit to him Laura “seemed to have reached a kind of peace with herself. Now I believe what she had in fact arrived at was a decision to end her life.”³² When the incredulous Cooper scolds him that Laura Palmer did not kill herself Jacoby replies “No, no but maybe she allowed herself to be killed.”³³

BOB is no screen memory; others around Twin Peaks have seen him. A police sketch is made and even Leyland Palmer who is possessed by him has distorted memory’s of BOB flicking matches at him when he was a child. But only Phillip Gerard the one armed shoe salesman knows who BOB really is and that is only when he is in a trance induced by being deprived of his antipsychotic medication. While he is in just such a state Cooper asks him who or what he is. He answers that his name is Mike and he is an “inhabiting spirit.”³⁴ When Cooper asks then who is Phillip Gerard he says “he is host to me.”³⁵

Cooper then questions Mike as to his relationship with BOB and Mike tells him that BOB “was his Familiar.”³⁶ When Cooper asks where BOB is from Mike tells him “that cannot be revealed.”³⁷ Cooper then asks him what BOB wants and Mike looks surprised that he would even ask. He recites with sardonic glee “he is BOB, eager for fun. He wears a smile. Everybody run… Do you understand the parasite? It attaches itself to a life form and feeds. BOB requires a human host. He feeds on fear and the pleasures. They are his children…”³⁸

  

Margaret Lanterman or the ‘Log Lady’ is a seer who lives in the woods outside Twin Peaks, close to where Laura was murdered. She heard Laura and her entourage pass by her cabin that night on their way to the cabin of Jacques Renault to party. Margret would later relate what her log, which is her familiar that she always carries with her, saw on that fateful night for Laura. Hesitatingly Margret begins; “dark, laughing, the owls were flying, many things were blocked.”³⁹ She then says “the owls were near. The darkness was pressing in on her…”⁴⁰

An attempt is made on Cooper’s life and he is shot three times in his bulletproof vest. As he lays there attended to only by a seemingly doddering old hotel waiter who doesn’t even realize he’s been shot Cooper has a vision of a giant who tells him three things in his investigation will come to pass. There is a man in a smiling bag, the owls are not what they seem and without chemicals, he points. The man in the smiling bag is Jacques Renault in a body bag murdered that night by Leland Palmer. Mike, when deprived of his medication, can see BOB so without chemicals he points to the real killer.

Shortly after his vision of the giant the implacable Cooper, shot that night and back on the job by morning, is paid a visit by Major Briggs, Bobby’s father. The Major is also on the job, for the military in a top secret capacity. Although all he will tell even Bobby about what he does is "it's classified" Briggs explains to Cooper that part of his job is monitoring radio transmissions from deep space. Briggs tells Cooper what they get is almost invariably background noise; “space garbage.”⁴¹ But on the night he was shot they did get one clear message. “The owls are not what they seem.” ⁴²Taken aback Cooper asks him how he knew the message was for him. Briggs shows him a printout from a little later and inserted into the “rows and rows of gibberish”⁴³ he see’s Cooper printed over and over again.

That night Cooper dreamed of the giant saying the owls are not what they seem, Bob's leering face materializes into the dream and superimposing itself over it is the image of an owl.

By the time they got to the end of the final episode of Twin Peaks for the twentieth century Lynch was more than ready for his closing remarks. Make no mistake about it Lynch and probably Frost too knew they couldn’t finish saying what they were saying for another quarter century. They say so right at the end of episode 3 and the beginning of episode 4. “Suddenly it was twenty-five years later. I was old, sitting in a red room…”

The first thing Lynch changed in his writers script for the ending was a scene from Windom Earle’s cabin of the final demise of Leo Johnson; a man who had survived being shot two different times at point blank range, done in by a box of red legged tarantulas, a spider that school children now commonly keep as pets. Instead, Lynch substituted the Double R Diner.

At the counter of the Double R are Bobby Briggs and Shelly who is once again waiting for Heidi to take over the shift. Heidi bursts through the door and Shelly slyly remarks “what kept you Heidi, seconds on knockwurst this morning?”⁴⁴ Heidi sheepishly retorts “I couldn’t get my car started.”⁴⁵ Shelly shoots back “too busy jump starting the old man…again [again is said in unison with Bobby]?”⁴⁶ Heidi looks down and giggles. Bobby interjects “I thought you Germans were always on time.”⁴⁷ Heidi just looks at him and giggles, which she continues to do as she walks off to put her coat away...

Major Briggs and his wife are seated in a booth. They are joined by Dr. Jacoby and Sarah Palmer; Laura’s mother who has had visions, sometimes of a white stallion, since the very beginning when she found out Laura was dead. When she is seated she goes into a trance and in an eerily distorted voice reminiscent of the Red Room she tells Briggs “I’m in the Black Lodge with Dale Cooper. I'm waiting...for...you.”⁴⁸

Cooper is already in the Red Room. Taking advantage of the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter he has entered it through an open portal in the woods in a place called Glastonbury Grove, after the legendary burial place of King Arthur. The open portal is by a puddle of a substance that smells like scorched oil and is encircled by twelve young sycamore trees.

Sycamore Trees are a recurring theme in Twin Peaks with the opening of the portals. In fact upon Cooper’s entrance into the Red Room he is treated to a live performance of a jazz ballad written specifically for the occasion by Lynch and his much lauded composer Angelo Badalamenti. ‘Sycamore Trees’ is performed by legendary jazz vocalist Jimmy Scott.

“And I'll see you
And you'll see me
And I'll see you in the branches that blow
In the breeze
I'll see you in the trees
I'll see you in the trees
Under the sycamore trees…”

The Bronk Laboratory at Rockefeller University in Manhattan, famous for the Allées of Sycamore trees that frame the walkway to its entrance…

Ostensibly Cooper is in pursuit of Windom Earle and Annie whom Earle has kidnapped but Cooper has had an appointment with the Black Lodge since time itself began. The dwarf in the red suit tells him “When you see me again, it won't be me. This is the waiting room.”⁴⁹ Laura Palmer comes in and sits down next to the dwarf, facing Cooper. She winks and snaps her fingers saying “Hello Agent Cooper. I'll see you again in 25 years. Meanwhile...”⁵⁰ She then makes a sign like a T with her hands.

The doddering hotel waiter who was there after Cooper got shot appears in Laura’s place on the chair. After making a noise like an Indian in a John Wayne movie he gets up and brings Cooper coffee; repeating over and over coffee, coffee... When Cooper goes to drink the coffee he sees it has solidified, it then becomes viscous and pours from the cup like goo. The giant appears in the place of the waiter and tells Cooper he and the waiter are “one and the same.”⁵¹ The dwarf suddenly says “wow BOB wow, Fire walk with me”⁵² and all hell breaks loose.

Cooper periodically pursued by the now shrieking like a banshee Laura Palmer makes his way through the phantoms of those who have been murdered and manages to locate Windom Earle in the maze of red drapes. There is a confrontation and Earle tells Cooper he will let Annie go in exchange for Cooper’s soul which Cooper accedes too. Earle then fatally stabs Cooper but as he does BOB intervenes and runs time backward to before Cooper was stabbed. There are flashing strobe lights and BOB is seen crouching like a cat on a kill over the now seated and immobilized Earle. He growls at Cooper that Earle is not allowed to ask for his soul so now he will take Earle’s soul, which he does in a flash of fire telling Cooper to go as the soulless Earle goes limp.

Cooper is now pursued through the red rooms and corridors by a maniacally laughing clone of himself that the dwarf, scowling in distaste, calls a doppelganger.  In the pandemonium, Cooper seems to escape back to Glastonbury Grove with the badly injured Annie. They are tended to by the sheriff who has been stoically waiting there for him.  But in the very last television scene for twentieth century Lynch lets his audience know in no uncertain terms that what came out of the other dimension is not Cooper but his “doppelganger.”

Cooper gets up from the bed where he is recuperating and inquirers to Annie’s condition then tells the sheriff he wants to brush his teeth. Locking himself in the bathroom he looks in the mirror and sees BOB leering back at him. He smashes the mirror with his head, bloodying it and laughing maniacally as he repeats “how’s Annie, how’s Annie. How’s Annie?”

Two months after the final episode was televised Lynch would have a shooting script for his Goddess movie; Twin Peaks Firewalk With Me. ⁵³ The covers the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer. It would be a prequel to the series. In fact he would end up shooting so much footage that he would have to cut three hours from it to make the two hour and fourteen-minute movie that was released in the summer of ninety-two. Some of the best scenes, scenes demonstrating Lynch’s breathtaking familiarity with the deepest secrets of the universe, may have been left out.

In the script wise cracking FBI forensic specialist Albert Rosenfield questions Cooper about their need to use word association; calling it “mumbo jumbo.”⁵⁴ Cooper answers him “The very fact that we are talking about word association means we are in a space that was opened up by our practice of word association. The world is a hologram, Albert.”⁵⁵

At critical junctures in the movie, Lynch goes off script to insinuate things that were too taboo at the time to even discuss in the main stream media. They still are; things like the electrical universe theory which postulates that it is electricity and not gravity, as insisted by academia, that rules the universe...

A year before Laura is murdered Leyland, under the direction of BOB, murders her friend Teresa Banks who is trying to blackmail him. While working the case the lead investigator for the FBI; Special Agent Chester Desmond disappears after finding a ring connected to the murder of Banks under the trailer of Mrs. Tremond and her grandson at the Fat Trout Trailer Park in Deer Meadow, not far from Twin Peaks. Desmond’s disappearance is simultaneous with a visit to FBI headquarters paid by Special Agent Phillip Jeffries who had disappeared two years earlier.


Jeffries apparently is an electrical hologram that has been transported two years into the future. Moving between time he bypasses FBI security to turn up at the office of the Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole; where he describes a meeting of the Black Lodge “above a convenience store”56 to the stunned Cooper, Cole and Albert.


In place of an actual narrative description, the movie shows deliberately confused snippets of interaction in a dingy room between the various entities that constitute the Black Lodge. There are subtitles where the dialogue cannot be understood because of their distorted voices. The meeting is seemingly led by BOB and the dwarf who sit separately from the others at a table across from each other.
The dwarf says “Garmonbozia, this is a Formica table, its color is green.”57 Garmonbozia is represented in the scene as creamed corn which sits in a pan on the table. In reality, Garmonbozia is the pain and sorrow they extract from their human hosts.

Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, who disappear along with their trailer when Desmond vanishes, are also at the meeting along with a couple of woodsmen and the jumping man. BOB grimaces and a disembodied voice is heard saying “we live inside a dream.”⁵⁸ The grandson points, slowly saying “fell a victim.”⁵⁹ The dwarf, laughing sinisterly announces “with this ring I thee wed.” The image of tongue fills the screen panning out to a giant mouth with perfect teeth pronouncing “electricity…”⁶⁰

Bob claps his hands and a portal to the Red Room opens up. He slinks through it followed closely by the dwarf; effectively adjoining the meeting. Back at FBI headquarters, Jeffries appears to be screaming in pain as he vanishes. The screen shot of him fades to hazy blue static and the sound of electrical interference. It then switches to wires hanging from the telephone poles outside, then back to Cole who shouts “he’s gone! He’s gone! Albert, call the front desk!”⁶¹ Albert is standing with the phone already in his hand saying “I got the front desk now. He was never here. And news from Deer Meadow! Agent Chet Desmond has disappeared.”⁶²

Right before Desmond picked the ring up from underneath the trailer and vanished he had been examining a pole in the trailer park with an electrical junction box on it. He had examined the same pole and junction box in his earlier initial visit to the Fat Trout Trailer Park. Both times he said nothing but it’s obvious that he sees something important. Right next to the box on the pole is the number 324810 over a larger 6. The 3 is partially concealed by a wire but is easily distinguished as a 3.

The numbers as they appear in the movie

and as they would look without the wire in front of the 3 below…  

“So, welcome to our world. Very soon the gates to a new dimension will open. 

2-0-4-8-6-3 

2-0-4-8-6-3…” ⁶³  

Citations

1 – Sweetest13Poison. "P.T. [Silent Hills] The Brown Paper Bag." YouTube. YouTube, 30 Apr. 2015. Web. 26 July 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPyVdfESyI4.

2 – Twin Perfect. What We Can Expect from Kojima's Silent Hill 3:46. Twin Perfect Channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfkbcK25NE

3 – Ibid 6:11.

4 - Struan, John. "The Swedish Radio Transmission in P.T. Hides A Major Revelation." Kotaku. Kotaku.com, 20 Aug. 2014. Web. 28 July 2017. http://kotaku.com/the-swedish-radio-transmission-in-p-t-hides-a-major-re-1624276494.

5- Brill, David. "First tree joins genome club." Nature News. Nature Publishing Group, 14 Sept. 2006. Web. 27 July 2017. http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060914/full/news060911-12.html.

6 – Outsidexbox. "5 Silent Hills Theories So Creepy They Might Be True." 11:22. YouTube. YouTube, 09 Oct. 2014. Web. 28 July 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CRW3M1NMQQ.

7 - Twin Peaks, Season 1, Episode 3. 41:00. Dir. Tina Rathborne. By Harley Peyton. Perf. Sheryl Lee, Kyle MacLachlan, Dana Ashbrook, James Marshall and Eric Da Re. American Broadcasting Company (ABC), April 19, 1990. Television.

8 - Crowley, Aleister. The book of Thoth: a short essay on the tarot of the Egyptians. New York: Weiser, 1976. PART TWO: THE ATU (KEYS OR TRUMPS) page 137. Www.thule-italia.net. Web. 5 Aug. 2017. http://www.thule-italia.net/esoterismo/Aleister%20Crowley/Aleister%20Crowley%20-%20The%20book%20of%20Thoth.pdf.

9 - Twin Peaks - The pilot episode. 36:00. Dir. David Lynch. By David Lynch and Mark Frost. Perf. 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 . American Broadcasting Company (ABC), April 8, 1990. Television.

10 – Ibid. Opening Scene

11 – Murray, Noel. "‘Twin Peaks’ Season 2, Episodes 8-21: The Mumbo Jumbo." The New York Times. The New York Times, 11 May 2017. Web. 06 Aug. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/watching/twin-peaks-recap-season-2-episodes-8-21.html.

12 - Lynch, David, and Chris Rodley. Lynch on Lynch. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Print.

13 - Twin Peaks - The pilot episode. 16:00.

14 - Lynch, David, cited in Lynch on Lynch (Revised Edition), edited by Chris Rodley. (2005, Faber and Faber), p.182

15 - Murray, Noel . "‘Twin Peaks’ Season 2, Episode 22: When You See Me Again, It Won’t Be Me." The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 May 2017. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/watching/twin-peaks-recap-season-2-finale.html.

16 - Heart, Jack. "Footprints of Evil." Veterans Today. N.p., 27 Dec. 2014. Web. 13 Aug. 2017. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/12/27/the-footprints-of-evil/.

17 – Ibid.

18 - Twin Peaks, season 1, episode 4. 33:00. Dir. Tim Hunter. By Robert Engels. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Piper Laurie, Richard Beymer, David Lynch, Grace Zabriskie , Chris Mulkey, Jed Mills and Al Strobel. American Broadcasting Company (ABC), May 3, 1990. Television.

19 - Twin Peaks, Season 1, Episode 3. 41:00

20 - Heart, Jack. "The Human: Jack, Orage & friends. Jack Heart writings." The Cross, the Rabbi & the Skin Walker (reblog). N.p., 6 Dec. 2011. Web. 17 Aug. 2017. http://jackheart2014.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-cross-rabbi-skin-walker-reblog.html. First published on the now defunct Open Salon.

21 - "Navajo Skinwalker Legend | The Wichery Way." Navajo Legends. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Aug. 2017. http://www.navajolegends.org/navajo-skinwalker-legend/.

22 – Twin Peaks, Season 1, Episode 4. 6:00.

23 – Ibid.

24 - Twin Peaks, Season 2 Episode 7. 25:00. Dir. David Lynch. By Mark Frost. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Ray Wise, Richard Beymer; Frank Silva, Hank Worden, Julee Cruise and David Lynch. American Broadcasting Company (ABC), November 10, 1990. Television .

25 - Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 1. 47:00. Dir. David Lynch. By Mark Frost and David Lynch. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Ray Wise, Richard Beymer, Grace Zabriskie, Chris Mulkey , Miguel Ferrer , Don S. Davis and Victoria Catlin . American Broadcasting Company (ABC), September 30, 1990. Television.

26 - Heart, Jack, and Orage. "MK Ultra – Cybernetic Mutation, Remote Controlled Slaves, Dragon Soldiers and a Zombie Empire; Paint it Blue…." Veterans Today. N.p., 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 25 Aug. 2017. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/01/28/mk-ultra-cybernetic-mutation-remote-controlled-slaves-dragon-soldiers-and-zombie-empire/.

27 - Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 4. 17:00. Dir. Todd Holland. By Jerry Stahl, Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, and Robert Engles. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan , Michael Ontkean , Madchen Amick , Dana Ashbrook, Richard Beymer Lara Flynn Boyle , Sherilyn Fenn, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Everett McGill , Jack Nance, Kimmy Robertson ,Ray Wise and Joan Chen . American Broadcasting Company (ABC). October 20, 1990. Television.

28 – Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 1. 16:00. Dir. David Lynch. By Mark Frost and David Lynch. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Ray Wise, Richard Beymer; Grace Zabriskie, Chris Mulkey , Miguel Ferrer, Don S. Davis, and Victoria Catlin. American Broadcasting Company (ABC), September 30, 1990. Television.

29 - Twin Peaks, Season 1, Episode 6. 26:00. Dir. Lesli Linka Glatter. By Mark Frost. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Richard Beymer, Chris Mulkey and David Patrick Kelly. American Broadcasting Company (ABC), May 10, 1990. Television.

30 – Ibid.

31 – Ibid.

32 - Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 1. 47:00.

33 – Ibid.

34 - Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 6. 43:00. Dir. Lesli Linka Glatter. By Harley Peyton and Robert Engels. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean , Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle , Sherilyn Fenn, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Everett McGill, Jack Nance, Kimmy Robertson as Lucy Moran, Ray Wise and Joan Chen . American Broadcasting Company (ABC), , November 3, 1990. Television.

35 – Ibid.

36 – Ibid.

37 – Ibid.

38 – Ibid. 

39 - Twin Peaks, Season 1, Episode 6. 31:00.

40 – Ibid.

41 - Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 2. 43:00. Dir. David Lynch. By Harley Peyton. Perf. Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Madchen Amick , Dana Ashbrook, Richard Beymer, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, Warren Frost, Peggy Lipton, James Marshall, Everett McGill, Jack Nance, Kimmy Robertson, Ray Wise and Joan Chen . American Broadcasting Company (ABC), October 6, 1990. Television.

42 – ibid.

43 – ibid.

44 - Twin Peaks, Season 2, Episode 22. 30:00.  Dir. David Lynch. By Mark Frost, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, and David Lynch. Perf. Heather Graham, Grace Zabriskie, Wendy Robie, Don Davis, Charlotte Stewart, Gary Hershberger, Mary Jo Deschanel , Catherine E. Coulson, James V. Scott, Dan O'Herlihy, Carel Struycken, Hank Worden, Michael J. Anderson, Frank Silva, Phoebe Augustine, Jan D'Arcy. American Broadcasting Company , June 10, 1991. Television.

45 – Ibid.

46 – Ibid.

47 - Ibid.

48 – Ibid.

49 – ibid. 32:00.

50 – ibid.

51 – Ibid.

52 – Ibid.

53 - Lynch, David , and Bob, Engels. "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me." Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - Script. Lynch/Frost Productions and Twin Peaks Productions., 8 Aug. 1991. Web. 02 Sept. 2017. http://www.lynchnet.com/fwwm/fwwmscript.html.

54 – Ibid. Scene 55 Shot 85.

55 – Ibid. Scene 35 Shot 52.  

56 - Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me . 29:00 – 31:00. Dir. David Lynch . By David Lynch and Robert Engels. Perf. Sheryl Lee, Moira Kelly, David Bowie, Chris Isaak, Harry Dean Stanton, Ray Wise, Kyle MacLachlan. New Line Cinema, August 28, 1992. Film.

57 – Ibid.

58 – Ibid.

59 – Ibid.

60 – Ibid.

61 – Ibid.

62 – Ibid.

63 - "The Swedish Radio Transmission in P.T. Hides A Major Revelation."