A Confused and Wild Thing: On Being Trans in Twin Peaks
[Please note, this piece contains references to sexual abuse].
There is more than one trans woman in Twin Peaks. Or, there is more than one trans woman in Twin Peaks, the place in which the television show/film series is set. That’s important to remember going forward, and whenever you next rewatch it. I watched the whole thing again in the early part of lockdown, and rediscovered my love for everything about it, especially the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), which I’m fairly sure I now count as one of my personal favourites. But watching the whole thing in one short span of time solidifies something which is, of course, probably obvious to others: the show isn’t perfect, not by any means. I don’t have any interest in writing a piece telling you that actually this thing you loved is bad, but I do have an interest in exploring, specifically, the representation of queerness and specifically trans women in Mark Frost and David Lynch’s world.
Denise Bryson, the transgender (or, in the show’s ‘90s parlance, transsexual) character portrayed by David Duchovny, is not actually in much of Twin Peaks. She appears in a three episode arc in the show’s second season, at a point where it was struggling to maintain viewership after solving the murder of Laura Palmer. She appears again, one scene in Part 4 of The Return and then… that’s it for her. I didn’t really need to see more of her, of course. Her appearance in The Return is dated, immediately, by the simple fact that there is a man playing a trans woman, something which, by 2017, had already begun to be viewed critically by audiences. I’m fine with keeping Duchovny playing her - it's a matter of continuity, after all. It would have felt jarring to suddenly have somebody else sitting where we know Duchovny was in the mind of the show’s creators, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also jarring, from another angle, to still see a man doing his best to act out his approximation of a trans woman, something which is rarely, if ever, accurate or emotionally true. When you Google “twin peaks trans”, which, of course, I did to try and find some resources for this piece, most of the results relate to Denise, and specifically her appearance in The Return, with the occasional link to a web page talking about “peak trans”, a transphobic dog-whistle which, thankfully, has nothing to do with Twin Peaks.
Denise’s initial appearance, back in Season 2, is when Cooper, the show’s heroic (and flawed) FBI investigator, has been suspended due to accusations of involvement in drug trafficking. Denise is, like Cooper, a heroic FBI agent - the show is not, and never has been, interested in exploring the problems and horrific actions carried out by the FBI since its inception. It is, first and foremost, a horrific, surreal soap opera, and functions often on soap opera logic, where an FBI agent is a hero, even if they have a flawed personality, and if they are a villain then their villainy is absurd and demonic, like Cooper’s former partner Windom Earle. Denise appears to save Cooper. He is initially taken aback at her new name, clothes, and hair, but, ever the gentleman, he takes it in his stride, even when the local Sheriff's department makes crude comments behind Denise’s back.
Denise saves the day. In fact, her transgender status is a vital part of her heroism - she uses it to trick the drug smugglers who have framed Cooper into believing she is a waitress, only to pull a gun out from her garter belt. But this is also the problem with her character, especially in her initial appearance in Season 2 of the show. When Denise saves the day, is the show celebrating her, or snidely laughing at her? The idea that Denise can appear to be a harmless, only to reveal that she is in fact capable of violence, hiding a gun amongst her hyper-feminised underthings, is echoed now in transphobic rhetoric when moral crusaders argue that, well, how do we know trans women are really coming into public bathrooms to use the toilet, they could be hiding anything… I don’t think this is where Lynch and Frost’s thinking ever was, this is purely a product of a ‘90s cluelessness, a lack of consideration about who is being represented and what is being said about them. The show stumbles on a couple of these fronts, especially in terms of representation of Native Americans - I found this piece, Tensions in the World of Moon: Twin Peaks, Indigeneity and Territoriality by Geoff Bil for Senses of Cinema, to be fairly enlightening with regards to this topic. The problem of Twin Peaks often comes in the fact that, while criticising wholesome, quirky small town culture, it embraces a kind of folksy Americana, something which is inextricably infused with subtle bigotries of all kinds. There are no Black people in the town of Twin Peaks. There’s the whole… Mr Tojumora thing (Piper Laurie as Catherine Martell as a Japanese businessman), also in Season 2. The Return doesn’t really go far to correct any of these missteps, apart from, I think, in its handling of Diane, who, still played by a man, has risen to Chief of Staff of the FBI. And David Lynch himself, playing Gordon Cole, once Denise’s superior and now her inferior, tells her that he always believed in her. “Before you were Denise,” he says, or rather, shouts, due to his ever-malfunctioning hearing aid, “When you were Dennis, and I was your boss, when I had you working undercover at the DEA, you were a confused and wild thing sometimes. I had enough dirt on you to fill the Grand Canyon, and I never used a spoonful because you were and are a great agent. And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”
See, for all the issues I can find in this speech, and in trans representation in Twin Peaks as a whole… is there any better phrase to say to a bigot than fix your hearts or die? That’s what I wanted to shout at the writer I saw on the street, the one I knew to be horrifically transphobic. It's what I wanted to tell my Mum when she was crying, asking me what was I doing and why was I doing it to her. Fix your heart or die. Fix your fucking heart.
I already said that Denise is not the only trans woman in Twin Peaks, and, if it wasn’t obvious already, I will make it explicit here that the other is Laura Palmer.
Well, obviously Laura Palmer isn’t actually trans in the canon of the show. She’s cis - in fact, very cisgender. The idealised teenage girl at the heart of small town America is, of course, a white, blonde, cisgender girl. But that ideal is false. Laura Palmer is an angel, but not the kind of angel that her loved ones want her to be. She is the sort of angel that reverberates through time (at least, she is in The Return), she is the opposite of the evil that possesses her father in Fire Walk with Me. She goes about her life, always at a remove from those around her. Her parents do not really know her, her friends do not really know her. But conversely, those who know her secret self, the one that fucks strange men and takes coke, do not know the Laura that was Prom Queen. Sure, they know that she was Prom Queen - the offer of “fucking the Prom Queen” is enticing to them. But they don’t know what she was like in that role. They don’t see her loving her friends gently. It's a double life that cuts both ways. It’s a confused and wild thing to be young, and to be unsure of who you are. Home isn’t safe; for Laura that is as much a place of violence as the red-drenched nightclub she is taken to. Her father is possessed by a monster, or is a monster. He creeps into her room at night and rapes her. Home is, for many young trans people, a difficult concept to parse, because it does not have the same warm feeling that it may have for many others; home is not a place where you can run to at the end of the day, it is a place you may run from, only to have to return to like Persephone returning to Hades at the end of Summer. Laura gets out, even if she dies to do it, she finds her way to the eternal bliss inside the Black Lodge, only for Cooper to cruelly rip her from this in The Return, in the mistaken belief that ‘saving’ Laura means preventing her murder. And he takes her back home. The worst thing he could do. We will not be saved by being reconnected to our homes, we need new homes, and that was what Laura had before he took that from her. There’s a fantastic piece by Willow Maclay on her blog, Curtsies and Hand Grenades, which is about this very thing, this sinking of the gut in realising that Laura is back home, that it is all coming back, that she is going to die again (and again and again and again…). Maclay writes:
“The essence of this final sequence is one of a lingering trauma within the heart of Twin Peaks. Dale, never considered that this may be the most horrific place to bring a victim of sexual abuse. It was never a nuanced idea for him to think beyond his "by the book, goody-two-shoes, idealism". He never considered the girl, and neither did the Twin Peaks audience [...] Laura Palmer was never taken seriously, and by extension, it feels like my own past trauma wasn't either. The image of her screaming face hangs over me, reminding me everyday that there is no scrubbing the past out of existence, and the place of my own personal hell still exists. The posters I stared at with anxious terror are still up. The tv which sometimes lit the room in a flickering haze when I heard the door creak is still hung on the wall, and my father still walks this earth. The only thing keeping my own peace of mind is miles and distance, but that is not permanence. It is not reassurance. It is not sanctuary.”
And I think that ending resonates, too, with a transfeminine reading of Laura - I may be in the process of mending my relationship with my parents after my great betrayal of identity, but there is still a long, uneven road ahead. In lockdown, I fled the room I was staying in, fearing an impending mental break. And I fled home, to my parents, in a different city - other people did not have this luxury, of course, but I seized upon it greedily. I went home to find it changed in small yet subtle ways: new plants in the front garden, new furniture, a door sanded down. My childhood bedroom was still there. One time, I became convinced my parents were going to kick me out, and that I would have no place to go. Now I was there again. I, too, was changed. Like Laura, I was older now, with new traumas mixed in with the old. The room I had been staying in was no Black Lodge - well, it had been riddled with black mould, for sure, but there were no soft velvet curtains or blue angels rising through the air. Still, it had been a place where I felt a modicum of peace, but the world had torn me away and back to this old place. I walked through the rooms, looked behind every door. I lay on my bed and looked at the old ceiling I used to cry to. Laura Palmer might not be trans, but I am. It felt like time was compressed, and I was both an adult and, at the same time, a teenager again, confused about her identity, wearing dresses in secret. What year is this?
Alison Rumfitt is a writer who lives and works in Brighton, UK. Her pamphlet The T(y)ranny, which is about why she dislikes The Handmaid's Tale, was published by Zarf Editions, and is still available to buy as a physical item for a limited time. It is also available as a PDF. Next year, her full-length collection of poetry and essays WHO WILL SURVIVE AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM will be inflicted on the world by the87press, and she has written a haunted house novel which she is currently trying to get someone to publish. Her Twitter is @hangsawoman
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