My introduction to the Pacific Northwest was in my childhood bedroom in metro Detroit, Michigan, watching video rentals of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s series Twin Peaks. This was the early aughts and I was about the same age as homecoming queen Laura Palmer, a deeply lonesome teenage girl, nostalgic for another time and place; another world entirely. In empire-waist polyester, I’d feed cassettes into the tape deck of my wood-paneled Buick Roadmaster cruising to the independent video rental store and sifting through titles as if panning for gold, the one gleaming nugget that could quell my ache.
Like countless others, when I came across David Lynch my world cleaved in two: before Lynch and after, my entry ticket the director’s 1986 neo-noir Blue Velvet. Set in an indeterminate time zone, the action plays out in the fictional Lumberton, but what could be mistaken for Anyplace, USA. Beyond the mowed green and white picket fence, our protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), discovers a severed ear in a field. Jeffrey tumbles down the rabbit hole as he tries to solve this mystery, confronted with the dualities—the lightness, the darkness—of both the American dream and psyche.
Lynch and Frost used the murder mystery format as a vehicle to steer viewers onto uncharted terrain, subverting and surpassing expectations in every scene.
Drenched in nostalgia and mutable as a dream, I got lost in Lynch’s world. Here was someone who shared my same ache. My life was low ceilinged and Blue Velvet was the escape hatch, opening up to a sky frenzied with stars, the possibilities of what a story could be.
Then came Twin Peaks like a hydraulic jack, tearing the roof off its beams. Lynch co-created the series with television writer Mark Frost after sitting through a screening of 1960s soap opera Peyton Place. Originally titled Northwest Passage, it was pitched as a serial about the murder of a homecoming queen. Major network television and art house film weren’t exactly congruous in 1990, the year Twin Peaks first aired on ABC.
But instead of snuffing out Lynch’s creativity, the restrictions of working within a genre format seemed to whip up its flame, as it did in Blue Velvet. The first season of Twin Peaks (the only season that can be rightfully credited to both Lynch and Frost) paved the way for genre-defying television. New growth is a result of a canopy set ablaze.
Lynch and Frost used the murder mystery format as a vehicle to steer viewers onto uncharted terrain, subverting and surpassing expectations in every scene. There is darkness, there is humor, there are, thanks to frequent Lynch player Grace Zabriskie, primal screams. In the pilot episode we find Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) washed ashore, her dead body wrapped in plastic. Who killed Laura Palmer? the network’s tagline teased each week, in what would appear to be the show’s central mystery.
But every true fan knows that the show offered up a far slipperier line of questioning. Lynch never wanted to reveal Laura’s murderer, preferring instead his exploration of place, one where the rot is beginning to show, where appearances deceive. The homecoming queen is dead. There is a fish in the percolator. The owls are not what they seem. The fictional town of Twin Peaks is a curtain pulled on the underpinnings of a long-lost dream.
I’d been dreaming of the Pacific Northwest for years before I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Mammoth red cedar, mist-shrouded mountain, gray skies and bright flannel, mystery: naturally, the primary source of this vision was Twin Peaks. I took any chance to escape the city, in search of the glowing sign of the roadside diner, the perfect slice of cherry pie, a North America—quaint and rugged—I’d never seen.
I never made it to northern BC during my stay in Vancouver but would find there, years later when I began research for my debut novel, the place of my dreams. My debut novel Fireweed is set in Prince George (PG), a city nine hours north of Vancouver in the interior, home to the most pulp and paper mills in North America and known as the unofficial capital of northern BC. Twin Peaks’ opening credits could have been filmed in PG: the smokestacks from the mills shoot up past the spruce, the birds peck at mountain ash berries from the red-garlanded trees. The waitresses lap the local diner with a coffee pot in hand, patting the backs of the flannel-clad patrons and calling them by name.
The town’s mascot, Mr. PeeGee, was built in the 60s, a boyish figure fashioned out of logs, a nod to the city’s main industry. Donning a baseball cap and waving a Canadian flag, he’s emblematic of the optimism of the era; the North American Dream. Smiling, he stands at the busiest intersection in northern BC: Highways 97 and 16, the byname for which is the Highway of Tears, due to the pattern, dating back to the 60s, of women vanishing along its length. The dream is, of course, a lie, its surface cracking to reveal the nightmare underneath.
If Lynch taught me anything it’s that the psyche is as vast as the makeup of our galaxy, and the roof is waiting to be torn from its beams.
It’s the Highway that brings me up to PG, the Highway that sparks the idea for Fireweed. The majority of the Highway’s victims were Indigenous and their stories were unearthed only after the first white middle-class woman went missing in 2000. Like so many others I was outraged to learn this—incensed, heartbroken, galvanized. Like a Lynch protagonist, I tumbled down the rabbit hole in search of answers. Like that of a Lynch protagonist, my search for answers only led me to discover how complicated truth can be. There is a duality present in our interest in social justice.
On one hand, there’s the natural instinct to help and on the other a desire to see ourselves as helpful. The conversations around race in North America can generate feelings of guilt and shame, which in turn generate a need for redemption, the quest for eliminating social injustices often shaped by self-preoccupation. When we pick up a novel based on lived oppression and violence, what is it we hope to gain? In what ways are our good intentions clouded by stickier motivations?
Jeffrey Beaumont has his own stickier motivations in his quest to help Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a nightclub singer, mother and victim of sexual violence whom Jeffrey is told is linked to the ear. “Hit me,” Dorothy pleads and Jeffrey obliges, horrified by his own moral elasticity. But Lynch doesn’t judge; he bears witness, a mode of observation that is, in the end, far more disquieting.
Taking inspiration from Twin Peaks, I used the thriller as my vehicle for Fireweed. I wanted to mimic Twin Peaks’ conventional packaging; the familiarity of the book’s premise (a lonely housewife turns amateur detective when her neighbor goes missing) and accessible style cloaking something far pricklier than what readers may have anticipated.
In Fireweed I venture out into unknown terrain in attempts to expose our most vulnerable instincts. There is darkness, there is humor, there might be, depending on the reader, primal screams. The book’s risk is to insist upon nuance in a climate dominated by extremes. I ask its readers to sit with a potentially painful reflection. But if Lynch taught me anything it’s that the psyche is as vast as the makeup of our galaxy, and the roof is waiting to be torn from its beams.
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Fireweed by Lauren Haddad is available from Astra House.