BIRDLIME > RESEARCH PROJECTS > TWIN PEAKS > SERIES MISCELLANY
Anyone familiar with Twin Peaks should check out Julee Cruise’s 1989 album Floating Into The Night with Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch (composition and lyrics, respectively). The album is rooted in an initial collaboration with Cruise, “Mysteries of Love,” which was created as a substitute for This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” intended for Blue Velvet. “Mysteries of Love” proved fertile ground for Cruise, Badalamenti, and Lynch; this spawned album and, to a lesser extent, its sequel, are Lynch’s only musical projects that I really find compelling. Fully half of FITN was performed in Twin Peaks: “Falling,” “Into the Night,” “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart,” “The World Spins,” and “The Nightingale.”
As reflected in the title, Floating Into The Night is split in half: the first half dreamy and sweet with hints of darkness, and the second half washed in uneasy anticipation and sorrow with hints of lightness. The lyrics are in conversation with Lynch work both preceding and following the Twin Peaks period; “Into The Night” quotes Frank Booth’s “now it’s dark,” while the line “she’ll never go to Hollywood” in “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart” has resonance with Mulholland Drive and Audrey Horne’s planned connection to its story. The final lines of the latter song are especially beautiful, and slightly eerie, in their use of familiar Twin Peaks imagery and themes:
Do you remember our picnic lunch? We both went up to the lake
And then we walked among the pines, the birds sang out a song for us
We had a fire when we came back, and your smile was beautiful
You touched my cheek and you kissed me, at night we went for a stroll
The wind blew our hair, the fire made us warm
The wind blew the waves, out on the lake
We heard the owl in a nearby tree
I thought our love would last forever
Of the songs which Cruise’s in-show performer doesn’t sing, only “The Swan” gets a brief appearance in the show, during the meeting between Josie and Truman in the pilot. It’s instrumental and little-known outside of Twin Peaks soundtrack nuts but it’s a fun catch. The less-exposed songs on FITN are well worth checking out, and “The Swan” is a particular favorite. Along with “I Remember,” it creates a fantastically eerie and haunting atmosphere – a dream going sour and dark. As a bonus, “The Swan” received a somewhat inexplicable but lovely cover by pianist George Winston on his 1999 album Plains.
The second Cruise album, The Voice of Love, also contains a few Twin Peaks tracks. Released in 1993, it feels as much in conversation with FWWM as the first did with the original seasons, not merely because several tracks appear in the movie. “Questions in a World of Blue” is sung at the FWWM Roadhouse scene and instrumentals of “She Would Die for Love” and “The Voice of Love” appear as the title theme and the final scene score of the movie, respectively. Beyond that, “Friends For Life” feels illustrative of Donna and Laura’s very tender relationship in FWWM while “In My Other World” and “She Would Die For Love” feel especially attuned to Laura’s emotional state. Could the “he” who knows, cares, dreams, and cries in the latter refer to Cooper? Leland?
Finally, as a footnote, there is Industrial Symphony No. 1, a sort of creative bridge between Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart featuring performers from both works (much as Rabbits utilized Mulholland Drive actors two years after the latter’s release and was subsequently included in Inland Empire). It was performed in 1990 and features Cruise’s “I’m Hurt Bad” (the jukebox song Bobby plays for Norma in the pilot) as well as “Up in Flames” (appearing on TVoL). The latter was also performed by Koko Taylor in Wild At Heart, which also features an instrumental version of TVoL’s “Kool Kat Walk.” Phew.
One of the intriguing details not retained from the International Pilot is part of Mike’s phone call to Cooper, in which he tells him he knows who killed Teresa Banks and that he also knows about “the stitches with the red thread.” If this ever referred to a particular detail of the Laura Palmer case, its meaning is lost to the ages now. Possibly it was meant as a seed of detail to be plotted out later. Some viewers take it as early foreshadowing of Lil’s dance in FWWM, where Chet and Sam take note of threading in her dress (an indication that drugs were involved in the case).
One of the more noticeable loose plot threads from S01 is the unresolved identity of the masked man who stands behind Leo during his meeting with Bobby in the woods in S01E02. Although there are a few candidates that make sense – a Renault, or even Ben Horne – it seems that we are meant to believe that it’s none other than Leland, based on his appearance in S01E8 in similar attire. Not only does this mean that Leo isn’t aware of his presence but it’s another detail about Leland’s less-than-wholesome activities that don’t involve outright murder, which we get a glimpse of in FWWM but not so much anywhere else in the original seasons.
Albert’s examination of Laura’s body in reveals that, according to him, Leland washed his hands with industrial soap before holding Laura’s head and kissing her. While every other detail Albert uncovers during the testing in S01E04 is followed up on, the soap detail is not. It’s not part of Laura’s death scene (nor does it make sense for Leland to have industrial soap on him at the time). Could it be connected to Leland’s insistence on Laura’s washing her hands? If Leland really did wash his hands, is it some kind of psychological cleansing?
One weird and largely insignificant detail that I have never seen brought up is how exactly Jerry manages to successfully vet Tojamura. Jerry’s a goon but seems to be 100% on the same page with his brother’s business dealings; that is, there is no reason that Jerry would lie to Ben about checking references in Japan. The only semi-reasonable explanation is that Catherine somehow utilized old East Asian business connections of her brother (who she stayed with after the mill fire, remember) to manufacture a network for her phony businessman, but this is pretty spurious.
Probably the most elegant reasoning – not that there needs to be reasoning, per se – that I’ve ever heard for the appearance of MIKE and BOB as partners in a show that features Mike and Bobby as teenage friends is that, as MIKE and BOB traffic in garmonbozia, so too are Mike and Bobby involved in the high school drug trade. A link is made between the drugs that flow into Twin Peaks and the otherworldly substance of garmonbozia, which flows into the Lodge from Twin Peaks (and not infrequently as a result of cocaine and the horrific “Chinese designer drugs” of S03).