Laura Dern as Diane Evans in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Most of the people the author talked to at the Philadelphia Film Society’s The Return Marathon agreed that Diane is Philly.
Author’s Note: Episodes 1 and 2 of Song of Lynchadelphia (Season 3 of Hidden City’s Song of Philadelphia Podcast) focused on the creative big bang that took place during David Lynch’s time in Philadelphia, between 1965 and 1970. Episode 3, available today on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, examines the wild ways in which the city—Lynch’s impression of the city—manifests itself in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and the Twin Peaks universe.
I don’t think David Lynch owes everything, as an artist, to the years he spent in Philadelphia. I have no doubt he would have pursued the “art life” anywhere—his soulmate Jack Fisk told me the drive to do so existed in his friend long before Lynch followed Fisk to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I don’t think Philadelphia is Lynch’s only influence either. The personal memory of the picket-fence, lots-of-woods, lots-of-chrome world of his childhood in the Northwest plays a key role in Blue Velvet and the Twin Peaks universe. Hollywood ghosts haunt the character names in the first two seasons of the TV show: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (Lynch’s Gordon Cole double) and Otto Preminger’s Laura (Laura Palmer, Waldo Lydecker), among others. In Twin Peaks, Lynch also inserts playful nods to people who had a major impact on him early on: a mentor in the arts (Bushnell Keeler), a high school sweetheart (Judy Westerman), a Germantown printmaker who gave him work when Lynch dropped out of PAFA (Roger LaPelle, whose last name means “shovel” in French, turns into a rant in Dr. Amp’s online videos in The Return, Lynch’s 2016 reboot of the original show).
But Philadelphia, as Lynch put it himself multiple times, was his greatest influence. Although the city is visible only in a couple of shots in his entire filmography (the Liberty Bell in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the William Penn statue on top of City Hall in The Return), it finds a spiritual way onto the screen. Philadelphia exists in Lynch’s cinema as an aura, not as a physical presence. Take Eraserhead, Lynch’s “Philadelphia story.” Not only does the film recreate the sights and sounds that Lynch experienced while he lived here, but it also offers a cinematic translation of powerful personal memories attached to the city: the memory of the “fear,” the “violence,” the “corruption,” and the “insanity” that Lynch identified as the fabric of Philly in the second half of the 1960s; the memory of sleep deprivation as a young father (Lynch was 22 when his daughter Jennifer was born).
The daily grind of parenting, seen from the perspective of a man who has other desires to pursue, takes monstruous proportions in the film. When they started working on Mulholland Drive, Lynch told Fisk that the original idea for the film came to him after a frightening encounter in the back of an L.A. diner.
Early in the film, two men with no apparent connection to the main plot sit at a diner called Winkie’s. They are there because one of them has had two bad dreams about the place. In the dreams, the man says, “there’s a man in the back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it.” The dreamer wants to get rid of that “god-awful feeling.” When they go outside to make sure it was just a dream, a soot-covered creature appears in front of them. The dreamer collapses and becomes unresponsive. How is that a trace of Philadelphia? Soot. In two interviews of Lynch that I have used extensively in the Lynchadelphia season, Lynch mentions that Philly was a filthy place when he lived here. “The buildings were soot-covered.” “The walls were covered with a black soot.” In his imagination, soot is both a plot signal that something bad is happening or about to happen, and a Philadelphia memory. It is the artist processing the negativity of what he experienced in the city and turning it into art, painting it on film.
When the Woodsmen appear to David Lynch’s Gordon Cole character in The Return, they are standing on a staircase that looks straight out of a Philly row house
In Twin Peaks: The Return, the characters known as the Woodsmen are soot-covered. Gordon Cole describes them as “dirty bearded men,” while his sidekick Albert Rosenfield says one “looked like a homeless man.” When three of them appear in a vortex to Gordon Cole, they are standing on an old staircase that looks straight out of a Philly row house. Lynch’s character strangely waves to them, as if he wanted to be sucked into the Philadelphia memory. Albert grabs him by the arm and holds him back just before the Woodsmen take him away.
Another character in The Return, Diane, is widely seen in the Philly Lynch fandom as a personification of the city’s mood. Diane is a chain-smoker. She drinks large amounts of coffee and liquor. When Cole and Rosenfield visit her in her Philadelphia apartment (the outside shot of the façade is of a New York brownstone), Diane makes it very clear that they are not welcome. “Fuck you, Gordon… Fuck you too, Albert.” Most of the people I talked to at the Philadelphia Film Society’s The Return Marathon agreed that Diane is Philly. George Griffith, the actor who plays Ray Monroe in The Return, is from Philly. In high school, at the end of the 1980s, he was obsessed with Twin Peaks. When he met Lynch, years later, he introduced himself as “George Griffith from Philadelphia.” Together, they invented a character whose “playfulness when approaching menace” is a reminder of Philadelphia.
A Philadelphia apparition in LA: Bonnie Aarons (who plays the figure behind the dumpster) and David Lynch on the set of Mulholland Drive
In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the FBI has its headquarters in Philadelphia. You could see that as just a funny reference to Lynch’s time here. I think it is much more than that. The scene, which Lynch replays in The Return (“I saw myself, from long ago, in the old Philadelphia offices”), is the center of the Twin Peaks mythology. It is also connected to the Mulholland Drive diner scene: a character tells another about a dream they had, and something epically bad happens. What’s going on? Who’s the dreamer?
I think Lynch himself is. Philadelphia is the name of the dream place where he is giving us unrestricted access to his creative mind, while hinting that it’s all a dream, and that we too live inside the dream. We share the “powerful, uneasy feeling” that comes over Gordon Cole as we become aware of the possibility that we too may be characters, shadows pretending to be real.
At the end of the day, this is what Philadelphia is in the Lynch universe: both the origin of the art life and the realization that life is but a dream. What I love most about Lynch and his characters is that they reach deeper into the dream even after the suspension of disbelief has been shattered. And we’re invited to reach along. It’s one of the most powerful contradictions I’ve experienced in front of any art form, and it’s a legacy of Lynch’s time in Philadelphia.
