Lynch came once in January, then again in the spring. Reber is not the type to get starstruck, and she thinks he liked that about her. At one point d
Lynch came once in January, then again in the spring. Reber is not the type to get starstruck, and she thinks he liked that about her. At one point during his second visit, he said, “Mary, are you an actor?” She said no. He said, “Have you ever done any acting?” She said no. Undeterred, he said, “Would you like to play a small part in this production?” This time she said yes. And that’s how she found herself acting in the finale of Twin Peaks: The Return.
The script arrived in September, a month before the shoot. Like all the actors, she was heavily NDA’d and received only the pages of the scene she was in. In it, she answers the door of her own house as MacLachlan and Lee, playing characters who aren’t exactly Cooper and Palmer, arrive in search of Laura’s mother, Sarah. “It’s a really, really eerie scene,” says MacLachlan. “Even shooting it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
Before shooting the scene, which sets up the jarring final moment of the entire series, Reber sat down with Lynch, MacLachlan, and Lee for a rehearsal. MacLachlan said his line, asking for Sarah Palmer, and Reber replied, “Who?” Lynch stopped her. “Mary, I want you to wait 10 seconds before answering him.” She tried again, but she was still too speedy. He said he would tap his leg when it was time. “When people come here, sometimes I’ll look at them for 10 seconds and ask them what that does to them,” she says. “It’s unnerving!”
Reber and her then husband signed an NDA that wouldn’t expire until several years after The Return aired. At one point, her husband got a phone call from Sabrina Sutherland, Lynch’s longtime producer. “David and I are not happy with you,” Sutherland said. “We hear you’ve been talking to the neighbors.”
Today, released from her obligations, Reber offers tours on her website, visitpalmerhouse.com. She’s cheerful to show people around, reminisce about the shoot, and, more often than not, listen to the stories of abuse, trauma, and grief that come pouring out. Reber says she has experienced abuse herself. She also lost her son three years ago. She is no stranger to the complicated emotions that her visitors bring to these encounters.
There’s a paradox at the center of the Laura Palmer tragedy. She dies—and yet she inspires others to carry on. In The Return, her character takes on mythical dimensions, becoming a Christlike messiah figure who sacrifices herself to destroy a larger evil. But I think the people who come to this house, who cry with Reber, take a simpler view of the character. As Laura Kelly wrote in Screenrant, “Frost and Lynch’s creation has such enduring significance because it squashed the idea of the perfect victim.”
Lee rarely speaks to journalists, but her friend the writer Scott Ryan says she expects to have intense encounters with fans and takes her responsibility to them seriously. “You see the woman in line coming up. Sheryl knows it’s coming. You know it’s coming. They’re gonna go over to the corner, and Sheryl just takes that all in,” Ryan says. “She has helped so many people. To me, that’s the whole heart of Twin Peaks, what Laura Palmer represents to these women, and probably some men, who have been sexually abused.”
“Pure David”
Fire Walk With Me’s commercial failure “put a stake in the heart of Twin Peaks as far as I could tell,” Frost later said. But then, something witty happened. Instead of fading into oblivion, the show continued to fascinate elderly fans and mint up-to-date ones. Josh Eisenstadt is a filmmaker and longtime fan who has formed friendships with many members of the cast based in part on his photographic memory of every detail of the show. He remembers a surge of visitors to the annual Twin Peaks Festival in Snoqualmie around 2011, when the series first came to Netflix.
That’s around the time when Frost reached out to Lynch with an idea for how to move the story forward. They began writing together, first in person and then over Skype after Frost moved to Ojai. When they had the first two hours written, they pitched it to Showtime. The name the network gave the up-to-date series, Twin Peaks: The Return, would prove ironic. Those longing to revisit the folksy, quirky world of the original series were in for a jolt.
When Showtime proposed a budget Lynch found inadequate, he quit. The network’s president, David Nevins, had to step in to save the deal. Working in NDA-enforced secrecy, Lynch directed the entire 18-episode run as if it were a single feature film. “Lynch never showed me a cut,” Frost told author David Bushman. “David and Mark wrote the scripts, but it was really David’s…everything,” MacLachlan says. “He shot every single frame of it.”
If the original series exposed the moral rot lurking beneath a veneer of small-town respectability, The Return revealed a society shredded by human and inhuman forces. As the action jumps from Vegas to New York to South Dakota, we meet gangsters, hit men, loan sharks, and crooked prison wardens. Twin Peaks itself is overrun by a mysterious drug called sparkle coming across the border from Canada. The younger generation is not so much adrift as it is violently hurtling toward catastrophe. Is this the grim vision of a “Bush guy” alarmed by rising crime and the influx of drugs across our borders, or that of an FDR liberal appalled by the systematic depredations of late-stage capitalism? Why not both?
COMMENTS