Cooper: “Donna, this is serious business – more serious than Laura falling in love with someone other than her boyfriend. Much more serious than you know.”

• More serious than even Cooper knows, really. Two women have been murdered, and one has been raped and left for dead. That’s, quite clearly, deadly-serious business. But this is just the beginning.

Cooper: “Here’s something we haven’t seen before.”

• Cooper and Truman enter the train car crime scene and discover “a mound of dirt approximately a foot and a half in diameter,” half of a gold heart on a necklace, and a scrap of paper with the words “Fire walk with me” scrawled in blood. There’s something cultish and ritualistic about all of this, which is perfectly in keeping with the overall mood that Lynch is establishing here.

• The Horne’s mentally-handicapped on Johnny? In the Native American headdress? No idea what that’s about. Is bizarre.

• Audrey’s weirdly infantile acting out against her father by telling the cheese-eating Norwegians that Laura was killed, that there is a killer lurking in the town, plays bizarrely against Badalamenti’s jaunty score. It sets up yet-more tonal dissonance, as a genuine tragedy is used for a petty, giggly prank.

• Laura’s safety deposit key yields more intrigue and a growing sense that Twin Peaks ain’t just a folksy small town, nor are its residents the sort of Mayberry archetypes that the setting and their behavior suggests. The discovery of “Fleshworld” magazine (where Ronette Pulaski apparently advertised her….services) and over ten grand in cash (love how Cooper just knows this by quickly flipping through the stack of bills). There’s that seedy underbelly again, turning over to show itself to us. Again, the sense that Laura’s death is more complicated than simple random tragedy is stirred, and there’s something fundamentally unsettling about the sense that Laura Palmer’s secret life is a dark pool, and we’ve only skimmed the surface of it.

• Leo Johnson looks a lot younger to me than I remember. In fact, a lot of the characters/actors on this show do. It’s strange – as I’m getting older, I’m noticing that my perception of aging is changing. When I first watched this show back in the day, Leo Johnson seemed like an adult – a scary, abusive, weirdly-haired adult. Watching his scene with Shelly last night it struck me that he looks far more like a kid than a grown-up. What a strange effect of aging that is.

Cooper: “Who’s the lady with the log?”
Truman: “Oh, we call her the Log Lady.”

• The Log Lady became an early iconic character for this show, and for obvious reasons. Cooper and Truman’s meeting with the town elders helps to drive home the continuing seriousness of the situation here. There’s no guarantee that the murders will stop – in fact, Cooper seems to anticipate that they’ll continue. The setting of a curfew continues the theme of a town shutting down almost entirely, from its main business to its school to its nighttime streets.

• Bobby’s drunken, whacked-out, car hood surfing routine is quintessential Twin Peaks to me. It’s bizarre, a teensy bit eerie, weirdly funny, and lasts juuuuust long enough to be both too long and not long enough (a trick that Family Guy attempts, over and over again, with a depressing lack of success). It’s that last, herky-jerky dip he makes that really sells the moment.

• Julee Cruise, the chanteuse who sings “Falling” in the pilot, is one freaky-looking lady. Listening to her voice, I’d always pictured her as a Monroe-esque torch singer, but instead she appears to be one of those butch-female-biker torch singers you hear so much about. Or don’t. Such was the first season phenomenon of Twin Peaks that Cruise briefly became at least marginally famous. The soundtrack to the show, which Cruise sang on over several tracks, became an unlikely hit.

• The fight at the Roadhouse is both affecting and goofy. It’s the natural outpouring of a day’s worth of roiling emotion, and it’s also completely artificial. There’s actually a guy dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, for chrissakes.

James: “It all makes some kind of terrible sense that she died – that someone killed her.”

• This is maybe James’ finest moment in the series, a hushed confession to Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle acts her ass off in this scene, both actors achieving a kind of naturalistic intimacy that’s almost electric in its, again, voyeuristic aspects) that confirms the darkness underlying Laura’s homecoming queen image. James’ description of Laura paints the picture of a lost soul, a troubled woman far removed from the picture-perfect photo of her that we see, in various locations, throughout the episode. This present darkness will only grow as the episodes go on, and the complexity of Laura’s past, the confusion in her character, is one of Peaks’ finest achievements. This town may be swell, cherry pie, generous donuts and excellent coffee all included, but it’s also a place where a girl that everyone claimed to have loved can apparently fall into very real despair and self-perceived damnation.

• On the other hand, the rapport between Donna and her father reassures us that not all is falling apart in Twin Peaks. The gyre may be widening, but there are decent, loving, genuine people in this town. Despite the darkness of the day’s events there is still a place for love among the spookily-whispering pines.

• Returning for a moment to savage imagery, Bobby’s roaring mouth here continues to evoke primal expressions of deeper, darker things. Lynch loves shots like this one, and they shore up the thematic notion that there’s a conflict going on in this show between animalistic and civilized behavior. Evil doesn’t shout or yell on this show – it roars.

• Do you see?

That’s a question that Twin Peaks is very interested in, and it’s a question that it shares with its spiritual heir, Lost. The devil in Northwest Passage is quite literally in the details – reflected back to the show’s characters and to its audience in ways literal and figurative. In the final moments of this episode we get only a glimpse at a greater Evil in this town, and that’s extremely fitting. Evil wears many faces in Twin Peaks – masks that hide the malevolence of its purpose. That Evil is both present and hidden here, in the show’s final seconds, is hideously appropriate.

• In a former life I used to know a guy who most people chose to describe as “a little ‘off’,'” but I knew the truth. I knew the truth because he used to claim that David Lynch’s films were best experienced with the aid of certain psychedelics/stimulants. Clearly the guy wasn’t a little off – he was drunk-on-the-blood-of–Kali Insane.

The majority of David Lynch’s oeuvre is already a bad trip pressed to a screen; experiencing it in the kind of altered state my friend advocated for seemed tantamount to saying “y’know, sanity’s fine. I can see why some of you go for it. But me? I’m ready to stare into the abyss and have that f*cker stare right back. Get a dude to handle my drool, mmkay?”

Lynch doesn’t screw with everyone’s head the way that he screws (so very, very effortlessly) with mine. Some folks find his films empty, exercises in surrealism and juxtaposed banality that don’t land their punches. If you’re among that crowd then you’re probably going to hate these columns. Much as I recognize and will write about the potential for, and existence of, overinflated, underwhelming melodrama and style without substance on this show, overall (with frankly frightening regularity) Lynch’s vision works my psyche over thoroughly. His way of portraying the emergence of Evil into a mundane world has the power to genuinely disturb me; that he can manage this feat through the careful deployment of soundscapes, extreme lighting and ordinary objects is astonishing. He touches, somehow, on the best/worst sort of fear there is – the uneasy prickle, the chill at the back of your neck you get walking a hallway in your home late at night; that sense that someone or something is THERE with you, present in some awful, inexplicable, invisible sense. Lynch conjures the shivers that precede the urge to flee like few others. And he does this without gore or expensive special effects or anything, really, other than sound, light and performance. Dread hangs heavy over the town of Twin Peaks. The clouds haven’t opened yet. The storm hasn’t come. It’s all hints and subliminal touches and a foreboding that becomes (for me) palpably thick, but there’s dread to spare here, both outright and hidden.

• This show is so relentlessly ODD. Hooray for America. Even if we couldn’t sustain our interest in the show (and even if, as some have claimed, the show’s runners couldn’t sustain the quality), I’m proud of us for taking this strange beast into our homes every week. Those are some of my impressions. What did you folks think? Having gotten a taste of the madness, I’m eager to jump back in for the next episode. Tune in next week, where things get even stranger.

This week’s Twin Peaks Ephemera

Each week I’ll link to a bit of pop culture ephemera that was created around the time of Twin Peaks’ airing or that was created due to the show’s influence/inspiration. This week’s link is:

Sesame Street’s Monsterpiece Theater Presents: Twin Beaks

Catch up on Lost & Found!

Lost & Found: And The Winner Is…
Lost & Found: An Introduction, A Proposition, A Preponderance of Purpled Prose

• Also introduced at the Great Northern is Leland Palmer, Ben Horne’s Attorney and Laura’s father. He’s played by the estimable Ray Wise, who makes magic out of the scene where he discovers that Laura’s been killed. The image of a police car pulling in silently behind him as he talks to his wife, reassuring her about Laura, is genuinely haunting and his emotional response to the news of his daughter’s death, the way he drops the phone and leaves his wife screaming in denial, is so raw it hurts. Mrs. Palmer’s cries are, again, near-primal. Almost animal. And that quality is something that’s reflected and emphasized throughout this show.

• I love that Bobby’s quasi-“rebellious” song choice in the RR Cafe is part calliope and part choir. The kids in Twin Peaks aren’t big on Top 40. They seem to be privy to a whole world of kooky acid-jazz manufactured solely for them.

• Lara Flynn Boyle had a personality? And warmth? Why didn’t anyone tell me? The Lara Flynn Boyle I know is a cold mannequin of a woman, prone to ice queen roles and (probably) eating the hearts of children to stay young. THIS Lara Flynn Boyle is charming, low key, and warmly welcome. What happened? And when?

• I’m a big fan of Bobby’s walk-shuffle into the Principle’s office.

• (Principle Wolchezk is played by dependable character actor Troy Evans, who you might remember from The Frighteners, or Demolition Man, or Ace Ventura)

• Sherriff Harry S. Truman represents the kind of bedrock decency that America loves to mythologize in its small towns. It seems to me that much of Peaks is “about” the Utopian ideal that America projects upon itself versus the grimier reality of life in American small towns. It’s “about” the clash between a dream and a nightmare. I put the word “about” in quotes, because I don’t think Lynch approaches things that intellectually at all in his work, and because the show is “about” other things as well. But despite the fact that this kind of stuff may not be intentional on the intellectual level, it’s nonetheless there, and well worth identifying and talking about.

• Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States, and was the President during Lynch’s boyhood (Lynch was born in 1946, Truman served as President until ’53). He was, by some accounts, “a folksy, unassuming President” in his demeanor, not dissimilar in his down-home phrases (“If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen”) from Lynch himself. Both Cooper and Truman have something of that same homespun outlook, though Cooper’s is projected through an oddball G-man lens.

• One of the more interesting aspects of this show lies in the hypocrisy of the majority of its characters. When Bobby tells Sherriff Truman that he loved Laura he may be telling the truth, but he’s also a hypocrite. He is, after all, deeply involved with Shelly (the RR Café waitress).

Mrs. Palmer: “Who’s upstairs?!”

• Maybe it’s just me, but Grace Zabriskie’s performance as Laura’s mother in this episode is genuinely disturbing throughout. When she asks the question above, it’s with a blind, rising panic that brings that patented sense of Lynchian dread front and center again. It’s as though, throughout the episode, she is sensing/feeling/intuiting something in the air that is greater/darker/scarier than any of them.

And the kicker is…she’s right.

• The struggle for control of the fate of the Packard Mill – introduced here as a battle of will between Catherine Martell and Josie Packard – is the least-interesting 1st Season subplot for me as a viewer. But even in this show’s less showy hills, there’s gold to be found. Catherine firing one of the Mill’s workers for existing in her general vicinity while she’s pissed off is a fun moment.

• The appearance of a beaten, near-feral-seeming Ronette Pulaski has lost none of its impact since it aired, although the Television landscape has changed considerably since people first got a look at the rope binding Pulaski’s bloody wrists. When Peaks first aired, the matter-of-fact violence of this scene was a genuine shock to the system.

• I don’t particularly care about James, the “troubled bad boy with a heart of gold and a jacket of leather (and also one terrifically-of-its-time Mullet).” He never made much of an impression on me, and while I appreciate his genuine baby-faced innocence (surely a huge factor in Lynch’s having cast him) he’s typically the least interesting male character on the show to me. When he pops up and acts against someone interesting (as he’ll do at the end of the episode), or when something interesting happens to him, I’ll talk about him. Otherwise? Notsomuch.

And this is a good place in general to emphasize that this show has a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own stories and secrets and motivations and quirks. This is one of the ways in which Peaks resembles the Soap Operas it both satirizes and celebrates.

• We’re introduced to Ed, owner of the local gas station, and Nadine, his Mad Pirate wife. Nadine’s drapes obsession is one of my favorite WTF touches in these early episodes. I mean…WTF?

• Special Agent Dale Cooper, timeless Man of Cool, enters Twin Peaks.

When I revisited the show last year I wrote that Cooper comes across to me as a kind of Hardboiled Optimist. He can be disarmingly goofy and he’s a man with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of goodwill but he’s also disarmingly tough, straightlaced; G man meets gee whiz. Cooper’s complications and quirks make him, as mentioned, my favorite Televisual character. He amuses me, interests me, and frankly, kinda inspires me. There’s something deeply admirable to me about his oddball enthusiasm and the way it seems to fuel his deadly-earnest commitment to ideals of justice, goodness, the open heart.

Blah. Blahblahblah. You get the idea.

• Dr. Lawrence Jacoby pops up to talk with Cooper and Truman at the hospital, and succeeds at making himself seem super-creepy. Have you noticed that as he’s talking to them he’s also conspicuously fingering his tie in such a way as if to look like he’s….well…touching the Hula Girl lasciviously in her special naughty place? No? Just me? Well, its true. He is. See above. And that’s the kind of bizarre and subtly-obscene detail that hints at the seedy, rotten side of Twin Peaks, a side that comes further to the fore in this episode.

• This is just gross. Cooper locates the letter “R” shoved under Laura’s fingernail, a detail that will eventually make sense. I think.

• The attendant on duty during Cooper’s examination of Laura’s body tells them that he thinks there’s something wrong with the transformer, making the lights in the morgue flicker like strobes. It’s a funny, weird detail and it adds to the overall spookiness, but this is also a detail that’s worth remembering.

• Having visited and spoken with Laura’s parents, Cooper and Truman proceed to look through some of Laura’s personal effects. Among them is her newest diary (I think Cooper says its got 18 days’ worth of writing in it), which contains a safety deposit key that’s taped to one of the pages in a clear plastic baggie – a baggie with Cocaine residue inside. It’s the first hint that Laura’s fate might be more complicated than it seems. The next bit of small, seedy evidence that implicates Twin Peaks as also being more complicated than it seems, to Cooper, to its residents, to us.

Great Cooper Line: “Diane, I’m holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.”

Andy: “Tell Harry I didn’t cry.”

• Deputy Andy’s habit of crying at murder scenes plays, at first (at least to me), as a kind of jet-black comedy. That’s not to say that he’s not genuinely weeping, or that the scene becomes comic, it’s just to say that it’s weird and uncomfortable and inspires a kind of nervous laughter in me. But as the police find the location where Laura and Ronette were tortured/raped, Andy’s tears suddenly don’t seem even remotely comic, even in the nervous uncomfortable way. It’s moving. Andy, who seems like a sweet, gentle soul, has stared Evil’s handiwork deep in the face, and it’s shaken him. It’s very easy to feel for him in that moment. For all its secrets, its sins and eccentricities, Twin Peaks is still a small town with certain innate ideas, collectively speaking, about itself and what it represents. Those idea(l)s are embodied in characters like Deputy Andy, the sorta fella you imagine would walk an old woman home on his way to pick some flowers ‘fer his sweetheart. And those idea(l)s are shaken, the embodiments of those idea(l)s are shaken, by the perversity and opaque violence of the abandoned train car.

Cooper: “Bobby, here’s how this works: we ask the questions, and you answer the questions that we ask – briefly, and to the point.”

• Here we get our first real indication of how Dale Cooper deals with his suspects. The cordiality is there, but its founded on a curious steel. Cooper’s friendly, but he’s a no-bullsh*t-on-my-shift hardass when he wants to be. Again, that’s a fascinating combination to me. He treats Bobby with a firm hand, but is always polite, always upbeat, and yet he ends their interrogation by telling Bobby, in a surprisingly mocking tone of voice, that “you didn’t love her anyway.”

• Voyeurism is one of those running themes in Lynch’s work – Jeffrey’s peeping tom act in Blue Velvet, the mysterious videotapes of Lost Highway, and in this instance, the act beginning to sift through the memories and effects of the dead.

ONE MORE PAGE BREAK? DAMN FINE!

Northwest Passage  (S1, Pilot)

Cooper: “Diane, I’ve just opened Laura Palmer’s diary. This is the last entry, dated February 23rd.”

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.” – Baltasar Gracian

When Twin Peaks first appeared back in the Ancient Year Of 1990 it became an instantaneous cultural phenomenon. If you were alive, sentient, and within range of a water cooler/school locker, then the question of “Who killed Laura Palmer” was, for a brief moment in time, largely inescapable. David Lynch graced the cover of Time magazine. Kyle MacLachlan hosted Saturday Night Live for the first and last time in his career (and those of you who rent/buy the Gold Box containing all of the episodes will also get a skit from that show featuring a very, very funny Phil Hartman as Leland Palmer). T-shirts bearing Laura Palmer’s face/”Who killed Laura Palmer?”/Agent Dale Cooper sold like hotcakes. There were several spin-off books, including The Autobiography of Agent Dale Cooper: My Life and Tapes, and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. The show was critically-acclaimed almost across-the-board, leading to cover stories like this one:

None of this was business as usual.

Twin Peaks entered a Primetime Network landscape that had carefully, rigorously defined audience expectation over decades and proceeded to gleefully, chaotically subvert and destroy those expectations; Long-standing television conventions were twisted, changed, made unfamiliar and strange. No one had ever seen anything quite like it, and no one’s seen anything like it since, although it’s served to inspire a host of subsequent creative types in all areas of the arts, from Television to film to Black Metal, and on and on anon. Oddball/cult/genre shows sprouted in its wake, with shows like The X-Files, Northern Exposure, Carnivale, and Lost (to name just a few) all carrying obvious indebtedness to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s weirdo-epic. Some of what Twin Peaks does, stylistically and narratively and etc., has become increasingly common in the time since then – enough so that it might be hard for some of you to fully appreciate just how singular and bizarre the show seemed when held up against its competition and the arguable entirety of past Network programming. But once we get a little deeper into the series (like, say, the next episode) you’re going to realize that this is still, 20-plus years later, the strangest Network show you’ve ever seen.

Twin Peaks is both parody and melodrama, wielding a potent combination of wry irony and bone-deep sincerity that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely successful. This strange mixture of eccentricity and normalcy, of artificial-seeming behavior and raw, real emotion, of quirky character piece and horror show defines Twin Peaks from the start and helps mark it out as a singular creation. This is a place where florid clichés and uncomfortably-organic passions, sincerity and irony, kindness and violence abide so closely together that it becomes difficult to identify where one ends and the other begins. Which is, I think, very much a point (though not the point).

Enough with the rambling introduction. If this is your first time among the wind-tossed Douglas Firs, welcome. If you’re returning to this town for another trip on Lynch’s Scary-Go-‘Round, welcome to you as well. We’re going to have a lot of fun exploring this weird world together. As was the case in the Lost columns, I’m sure I’ve missed things here that you think are important/interesting. I invite you to point this stuff out in the comments and to share your thoughts on the episode. I ask you to please keep spoilers to yourself, both in the comments, and in the Lost & Found thread. If you know what’s coming don’t ruin it for those that don’t. If you want to talk about that stuff you’re invited to create a Message Board thread and discuss them there. I’ll hint at future events in these columns from time to time, and I’ll discuss general themes in ways that will hopefully help to shade future episodes more finely, but I won’t be giving anything away on a character or narrative level.

Thoughts:

• The show’s quietly winding opening credits set the tone for us straightaway – composer Angelo Badalamenti’s main theme flows along with a kind of aching, shadowy beauty and the long, static shots of a Mill’s machinery at work are vintage Lynch. The whole thing, including the amazingly-long list of actors that strobes past us, serves as a kind of overture – a scene-setting that functions for me the way that, say, Lawrence of Arabia’s overture served David Lean’s intention to dip his audience into an immersive, lengthy experience. It’s difficult to imagine a Network giving the thumbs-up to this kind of lugubrious/languid sequence in this day and age. Lost’s entire “opening credits” consisted of them shoving the title at you as if contractually-obligated to do so. Much as I appreciate the whiff of nostalgia that these credits invoke I’ll probably be FFing through them from this point on.

• A couple of people have commented that the pilot was slow and/or boring for them – a comment that I think is worth addressing up front, because it’s a subjectively-valid one.

This is a strangely stately show in terms of its overall pace, and it’s definitely of another era in a number of ways. This episode in particular has the feeling of an extended requiem, and that might be off-putting to some of you. Some people can’t watch older films or read older books because the disconnect between the way that people live and speak and make entertainment now, and the way that older entertainment was created/presents the world of its own time, is just too much for them. If you came of age after Twin Peaks aired, you’re used to a much different style of film/TV-making than the one presented in this show, in the same way that I’m used to a different style than my parents were. Then there’s the objective fact that David Lynch is ultimately not a “television guy.” He’s an indie/avant-garde film guy, and his goals and interests as an artist are different than you’re/we’re used to. He’s interested in slowly dipping you into this fictional, off-kilter world in his own way, and at his own pace.

• Twin Peaks is radically obsessed with Twins and twinning, right up to and including its titular mountains (hidden dirty pun!). People and places and objects and ideas have opposites, doppelgangers, mirrors (Lost fans, we’re clearly not done with mirrors and mirroring). But, where Lost highlighted the themes of twinning/mirroring/Othering in ways intellectual and philosophical and sub/textual, Twin Peaks illustrates those themes in ways emotional and primal and sub/conscious.

• The words “Directed by David Lynch” will remain a reliable indicator of quality in the episodes to come. There are other directors on the show who manage to pull off an impressive approximation of Lynch’s weirdly-singular combination of style and tone, but there’s nothing like getting a hit off of Lynch’s radioactive creativity straight from the source. I don’t believe that there’s a dud among the installments he helmed.

Pete Martell: “She’s dead – wrapped in plastic.”

• The discovery of Laura Palmer’s body sets off a chain reaction of emotion that seems to stretch out to nearly every person in the town. It’s a seismic event, and the show’s pilot is largely dedicated to showing us the immediate fallout. Her death is like dynamite thrown into a lake. The emotional explosion that follows causes the dead, the buried, the hidden to rise up, exposing secrets hidden by a darkly placid surface. It’s interesting to see how the knowledge of Laura’s death seems to pass without word to so many people. Characters like Donna and James don’t need to be told what’s happened to understand, in the larger sense, exactly what has happened. It’s as though this fate was expected on some level, and that’s an aspect that the show will dig deep into over the course of the series, beginning with this episode.

• Laura’s unveiling, and the gruesomely-realistic condition of her body is the sort of thing that’s common nowadays on CSI but by and large, at this point in time, you didn’t see this sort of thing on Television. It’s clear from the start that the Twin Peaks police force is fundamentally unprepared for the level of violence it investigates here.

• (Pete Martell is played by Jack Nance, who also starred in Lynch’s Eraserhead)

• Lynch’s weird mastery of everyday dread first raises its head fully as Laura’s mother walks through her house looking for her daughter. She does nothing more than stroll from room to room, and yet the screen seems to somehow pulse with unease. For me, the scene evokes the same kind of gut-level tension that I usually experience in horror movies in the moments before something unseen jumps out to frighten us. But nothing jumps. Instead, the dread simply remains, somehow summarized and made manifest in the form of a ceiling fan (Lynch has the uncanny ability to invest everyday objects with palpable menace). The fluttering panic that Grace Zabriskie plays in these scenes is horrifyingly real to me.

• Enter Audrey Horne, ethereally essayed by Sherilyn Fenn, who ferried many a young man into puberty when this show premiered. Fenn is unconscionably attractive, although she won’t reach the near-blinding pinnacle of Yowza she’s capable of until the next episode, when her hair miraculously lengthens. David Lynch possesses an unerring ability to cast uncannily beautiful women in his projects – nearly all of the main female characters on this show operate as degrees on the Stunning scale. Madchen Amick especially.

• The Great Northern, a hotel and conference center meant to serve customers of the Packard Saw Mill remains a wonderfully incongruous setting. I’ll talk more about it in future columns.

• Benjamin Horne, Audrey’s father, is introduced to us in the process of selling some “Cheese-eaters” (aka, non-English speaking Norwegians) on what he calls “The Ghostwood Project,” an effort to purchase and develop the Ghostwood forest into a country club. The Ghostwood forest will become increasingly important in the world of Twin Peaks, and the struggle to possess it is arguably waged on multiple levels throughout the show.

• Richard Beymer, who plays Ben Horne, played Tony in the film version of West Side Story. Interestingly, Russ Tamblyn, who played Riff, the leader of the Jets in West Side Story, was cast by Lynch to play the role of psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Jacoby. Lynch loves musicals!

• Want some more weird and useless trivia? Ben and his brother Jerry are named after Ben & Jerry, of Vermont Ice-cream-making fame.

Great, Bizarro Ben Horne Line: “My air sacs have never felt so good!”

GO DEEPER INTO THE WOODS AFTER THE PAGE BREAK!