In January, acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch died. He is known for films such as “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet,” but is also behind the award-winning show set in the Pacific Northwest, “Twin Peaks.” While much of the show was shot in a Los Angeles-based studio, exterior shots were filmed in Washington towns, including North Bend, Snoqualmie and Falls City. Katherine Cusumano is a freelance journalist and essayist. She, along with Oregon photojournalist Riley Yuan, went out to Twede’s Cafe in North Bend after hearing of Lynch’s death and reported on what they saw there for Longreads. Cusumano joins us to share her memories of the show and the legacy it has on the world around us.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. David Lynch died in January. The acclaimed filmmaker was known for big screen classics like “Blue Velvet,” “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive.” But for a lot of fans, it’s the small screen where he made his biggest mark. The iconic ahead-of-its-time TV series, “Twin Peaks,” was set in rural Washington and featured many exterior shots from the evergreen state. That led Portland-based freelance journalist and essayist Katherine Cusumano to head up there recently. She, and Oregon photojournalist Riley Yuan, went to Twede’s Cafe in North Bend after hearing about Lynch’s death. Cusumano wrote about what she saw on Longreads and joins us now to talk about it. It’s great to have you here.
Katherine Cusumano: Thanks, Dave. I’m thrilled to be here.
Miller: I’m sure there are listeners who maybe have heard about “Twin Peaks” but have never seen it. How do you describe it for total newbies?
Cusumano: “Twin Peaks” is actually this interesting pastiche of teen drama, crime procedural and soap opera. It starts with this inciting incident where the body of Laura Palmer is discovered on a beach in Washington, and that incites this FBI investigation into what happened to her. But there’s this really massive cast of characters who are drawn into this mystery.
Miller: Let’s have a listen to a scene from the pilot, the very first episode. This is when the FBI agent, Agent Cooper, is driving into town for the first time and he has a little voice memo recorder, the kind of thing people had before cell phones. And he is making notes for his secretary. Let’s have a listen:
“Twin Peaks” Dialogue [recording]: [Agent Cooper] “Diane, 11:30 a.m. February 24, entering the town of Twin Peaks. It’s 5 miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the state line. I’ve never seen so many trees in my life. As W.C. Fields would say, ‘I’d rather be here than Philadelphia.’ 54 degrees on a slightly overcast day, weatherman said rain. You can get paid that kind of money for being wrong 60% of the time and be working.
“The mileage is 79,345, gauge is on reserve, riding on fumes here. I gotta tank up when I get into town. Remind me to tell you how much that is. Lunch was $6.31 at the Lamplighter Inn, that’s on Highway 2 near Lewis Fork. That was a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat, slice of cherry pie and a cup of coffee. Damn good food. Diane, if you ever get up this way, that cherry pie is worth a stop.”
Miller: When did you first watch the show?
Cusumano: I actually first came to “Twin Peaks” when I was in high school, which was some 15 years after it went off the air. I was watching it in my room on my little laptop screen, like a crummy, pixelated stream. But I realized recently, actually, that I think one of the things that really drew me to it in the first place was maybe the same instinct that led me to journalism, to being a reporter, which is this interest and curiosity about nosiness in the stories that are hidden or lurking just behind established narratives.
In David Lynch world, I think especially in “Twin Peaks,” which really crystallizes this, there is always this dreamscape or some other like surreal alternate reality that is lurking just out of step with our visible, tangible reality. “Twin Peaks” is a really great encapsulation of that.
Miller: And you were interested in that, and you could tap into it as a high schooler as well?
Cusumano: I think that the driving mystery of it was really what I was tapping into, and the way that it seemed to gather both the elements of crime procedural with something more surreal, something a little bit more fantastical.
Miller: I think I use the word pilgrimage in my intro, and I’m not even sure if that’s a word that feels accurate to you. What made you go up to North Bend to a place now called Twede’s Cafe, where some of the show was filmed?
Cusumano: I had been interested in going up there for a while, as a very longtime fan of this show. But it was really incited by learning that Lynch had died, which I learned about, as I’m sure many people did, on the internet. I was scrolling through social media, seeing all of these tribute posts roll in. People posting photos, quotes, and I found that actually very comforting in a way. It felt like a lot of people gathered in a room sharing stories. At the same time, I recognized it was a kind of a false sense of comfort, that we weren’t really talking to each other, it was a lot of people talking.
And I thought maybe going to the physical place the next day, going to these places where Lynch had visited where he had filmed this show, would help me both personally frame my own sense of loss. And also as a reporter, I was just interested in what stories people might have to share. I felt a really irresistible opportunity in that way.
Miller: What was the scene there?
Cusumano: We rolled up, and outside, actually, already this memorial had started to form. People left behind bouquets of flowers, photos, some letters. And inside, it was pretty packed. I mean, it was a Friday of a holiday weekend, but it was also the day after Lynch had died. I talked to maybe a dozen people in the diner. One of the things that I was really struck by was, there were, of course, people who had come because they were super fans. This is a show and a body of work that had meant a lot to them. But there were actually just as many people who maybe hadn’t had a strong personal connection to the show. Either hadn’t even seen it, or had started watching it recently, or had family who really loved it, but they themselves felt like they should go to this place to memorialize this director, which I think just speaks to the wide reach that it had.
Miller: Why this place? I mean, what’s special about this particular cafe?
Cusumano: “Twin Peaks” was filmed across the Snoqualmie Valley in three towns – North Bend, Snoqualmie and Falls City. A lot of those places are actually only exteriors. So what you see in the show doesn’t reflect what the interiors of those places look like, at least right now.
Miller: A lot of that was eventually in sound stages in L.A., right?
Cusumano: Exactly, yeah. Lynch actually wrote in his memoir that he thinks that the pilot of “Twin Peaks” is the only part of it that is really “Twin Peaks,” because it is the only one that was shot on location … which I think might be a little bit of an overstatement. But it does speak to how important the place was to him.
But the thing about Twede’s is, it is one of the only places where you can go inside and the inside looks like it does on screen, too. You go in and you can interact with it. You’re implicated in what’s going on there. You can get your cherry pie, you can get your coffee, which are the canonical Dale Cooper orders in the show.
Miller: Is that what you got?
Cusumano: Of course! Absolutely.
Miller: Was it good?
Cusumano: Yeah. I’m a real sucker for a bottomless black coffee at a diner. That just really does it for me.
Miller: What did you hear from the woman who now owns Twede’s about what the show has meant to her?
Cusumano: Rachel Bennett is the owner of Twede’s now. She bought it in 2020 and she has a really fascinating story. She actually grew up in the area and for most of her high school experience, she would not watch the show. She was like, “I went to a high school just like this high school. It just felt too close to home. I didn’t need to see that experience reflected back at me.”
She left for college and then, sometime in her mid-20s or so, decided that she would start watching it. She had seen a couple of other Lynch films at that point, and was like, “all right, the time has come,” and became, I think she said not quite obsessed by it, but like a little manic about it.
And then when she moved back to her hometown later, she got a job at Twede’s, and pretty quickly the owner said, “Hey, I’m going to sell it.” She was seized by this like, “Oh, what if I bought it?” And the legacy of “Twin Peaks” had not totally been that previous owner’s bag. So she also, I think, envisioned a world in which she could more fully embrace that filming history in the way that she steered the diner.
Miller: I want to play one more short clip. This is a short conversation between Agent Cooper, who we heard earlier, and the local sheriff, Sheriff Harry Truman.
“Twin Peaks” Dialogue [recording]: [Sheriff Truman] “Like I said, we’re glad to have you here.”
[Agent Cooper] “Sheriff, what kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here? Big, majestic.”
[Sheriff Truman] “Douglas firs.”
[Agent Cooper] “Douglas firs.”
Miller: How did the natural setting, the deep, dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, affect the feel of the show?
Cusumano: Actually, it’s funny, a friend of mine just this weekend asked if I thought that it could have taken place anywhere else. I do think the specificity of place is both one of the reasons that it is a site of such pilgrimage for fans of the show and also is a huge reason that Lynch himself wanted to set it there. He grew up between Montana, Washington and Idaho. His dad was a forestry researcher with the USDA, studied tree diseases, and he has talked about how important the natural world was to him as a child.
He actually moved to Alexandria in high school and said that he hated the trees, hated the nature there, which I think speaks to why this particular area … I do think that different places can maybe harbor different types of hauntings and so much of the show is about haunting, is about how physical places can hold on to the things that have happened there, especially the sort of traumatic events.
Miller: What do you see as the legacy of this series?
Cusumano: I think that, in a sense, I mean, it aired originally between 1990 and 1992. “The Return,” the third season, aired in 2017 …
Miller: We won’t talk about that, I guess.
Cusumano: I do think that at the time it was this proto prestige TV. This was a director who was coming just on the heels of a Best Director Oscar nomination for “Blue Velvet,” was very much a guy who’s rooted in art house, who was making a fairly mainstream network television show, and that just was not really done at the time. I came across a quote from David Chase, “The Sopranos” creator, recently, who said that, “Anyone making a one-hour drama today who says that he was not influenced by David Lynch is lying.”
Miller: Katherine, thanks so much.
Cusumano: Thank you.
Miller: That is Katherine Cusumano, a freelance journalist and essayist who went up to North Bend the day after David Lynch died.
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