“My grandson does magic!”: The Legacy of Conjuring in Twin Peaks: The Return

[page 57] Abstract: Performance magic and sleight of hand have haunted the town of Twin Peaks since its original inception. The theatricality of Laura Palmer’s posed hands in the Black Lodge; Donna’s visit to Mrs Tremond, and her grandson; the ‘Between Two Worlds’ poetic refrain repeated through the original series and The Return—this is the background of magic in Lynch and Frost’s already surrealist world. The Return makes use of many of the traditional elements of conjuring: clear boxes, playing cards, doubles, disappearances and reappearances, Las Vegas, and, especially, the tense coin trick scene between Richard Horne and the drug dealer Red. Taking the coin trick scene as its focus, this essay explores the variety of allusions to stage magic and conjuring in The Return and their origins in the show’s previous seasons and Fire Walk With Me.

Keywords: magic, conjuring, tricks, theatricality

Performance magic and sleight of hand have haunted the town of Twin Peaks since its inception. The theatricality of Laura Palmer’s posed hands in the Black Lodge; Donna’s (Lara Flynn Boyle) visit to Mrs. Chalfont or Tremond (Frances Bay)1  and her grandson (Austin Jack Lynch) leading to her absurdist announcement and the title of this paper after revealing his ability to transport handfuls of creamed corn; the ‘Between Two Worlds’ poetic refrain which is repeated through Seasons One to Three: this is the background of magic and conjuring in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s already surrealist world. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) makes use of many of the traditional elements of stage conjuring, including clear boxes, curtains, playing cards, doubles, sudden disappearances and reappearances, the landscape of Las Vegas, and, especially, the tense coin trick scene between Audrey Horne’s troubled son Richard (Eamon Farren) and the enigmatic drug dealer Red (Balthazar Getty). Conjuring’s bedfellows of esoteric magic and mysticism are equally abundant, particularly through the use of the Hermetic phrase ‘as above, so below,’ but it is through explor-[page 58]ing the role of performance magic in The Return, this essay argues, that we can find overt signs of foreboding within the series and its links to magic history.

In summarizing The Return’s narrative and visual techniques, Dominique Chateau has noted that The Return “presents a very special form of storytelling at different levels: diegesis, story development, succession of scenes, rhythm (especially slow), dominant coloring (red, black), and so on” (120). Chateau’s comments have a natural progression which is equally applicable in the readings of this paper: that the succession of scenes and the rhythm of The Return is reminiscent of the structure of traditional magic shows and magicians’ stage patter. Taking the coin trick scene between Richard and Red as its focus, Chateau touches upon the variety of allusions to stage magic and conjuring in The Return and their origins in the original series (1990-1991) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). It also considers the role of fan favorite character the Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) in cementing Twin Peaks’ engagement with performance magic in both The Return and the unaired shorts created by Lynch. It argues that the proliferation of conjuring, particularly through the lens of the coin trick scene, and correspondingly understanding the death of the Log Lady in The Return, is key to providing some context towards the classically surreal ending of the series. This essay ultimately considers conjuring as a symbol of existential dread through every series of Twin Peaks, specifically acting as an indicator of impending death in The Return.

The Magician Longs to See

Before exploring the symbols of conjuring in The Return, it is first necessary to examine the pervasive air of conjuring and magic which forms a large part of the surrealistic atmosphere of the original series and Fire Walk With Me. A consistent mantra of Twin Peaks is the infamous “Fire Walk with Me” poem, first heard as part of a monologue delivered by MIKE (Al Strobel), also known as the One-Armed Man and traveling shoe salesman Phillip Michael Gerard, in Episode Two of the [page 59] original series. The poem reappears at a crucial moment in The Return, which itself elaborates upon many previously unknown elements, such as the significance of the convenience store:

Through the darkness of future's past,

The magician longs to see.

One chants out between two worlds:

“Fire walk with me.”

We lived among the people.

I think you say, convenience store.

We lived above it.

I mean it like it is, like it sounds.

I too have been touched by the devilish one.

Tattoo on the left shoulder.

Oh, but when I saw the face of God, I was changed.

I took the entire arm off.

My name is MIKE.

His name is BOB. (S1E2)

Although it is unclear from the mantra’s generic use of “magician” whether it specifically concerns a stage or occult magician, it is the removal of the arm which is most significant for the purposes of this essay. From the late eighteenth century onwards, arguably reaching its peak in the ‘Sawing a Woman in Half’ trick of the 1920s, magic has long been concerned with the removal of body parts, and the loss of MIKE’s arm and its reappearance in The Return as a mysterious tree-like being in the Black Lodge are a central part of the narrative.

The theme of disembodiment will be returned to in the concluding section of this essay in considering Red’s threats to Richard Horne in The Return, but here it is important to note that representations of dismemberment were a key feature in the visual culture of magic during its so-called ‘Golden Age,’ generally accepted to be the period between 1850 and 1930. Such ephemera and texts range from official advertising posters for well-established magicians to the lengthy compendium Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions including Trick Photography (1897) by Albert Hopkins and Henry [page 60] Ridgely Evans, which details a range of decapitation or dismemberment tricks and the inner workings of popular trick automata.

On the topic of automata, it is notable that it is MIKE who receives Dougie Jones, the third iteration of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), into the Black Lodge in The Return with the words, “Someone manufactured you.” This declaration is reminiscent of many magicians’, and, indeed, generally their audience’s, reactions towards automata, particularly in the nineteenth century. In the Memoirs de Robert-Houdin (1859), the autobiography of one of the most famous performance magicians of all time, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin— who inspired Harry Houdini’s stage name—describes his various interactions with automata. These encounters include the Turk, a chess-playing automaton created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, which became arguably the most famous automaton of its time. Robert-Houdin is quick to bring into question notions of selfhood and agency regarding these machines in his writing, asking a writing automaton directly: “Who is the author of your being?” (161), a question to MIKE’s answer to Dougie in The Return.

Decapitation itself also features throughout The Return, with the ongoing mystery of the location of Major Garland Briggs’ (Don S. Davis) head and the meaning of his decapitated corpse being central to one of the main FBI plots of the series. While this case keeps many of the FBI characters preoccupied with attempts to track down the culprit, when read when the symbolism of stage magic in mind, the Major’s missing head takes on another, more theatrical meaning. Many popular magic tricks that debuted during the nineteenth century relied upon decapitation as a key feature of their shocking appeal. Hopkins and Evans’ Magic contains a full list of such illusions, including one simply titled “DECAPITATION” (48). The authors write that “the means employed in this illusion is the old-fashioned ‘defunct’ method of decapitation, and although this lacks the refinement and scientific interest of execution by electricity, it has a certain precision” (48). The illustration [page 61] accompanying these details features several suitably Lynchian-looking clowns and explains how this particular iteration of the trick features a Harlequin figure wielding a hatchet. The payoff of this late-Victorian decapitation trick is that the severed head smokes a cigarette—another favorite pastime of both Lynch and many of the inhabitants of Twin Peaks—before being replaced onto its body.

The use of saws and amputation as a theme in conjuring continued into the twentieth century. In a chapter examining the role of women in Edwardian stage magic, Katharina Rein points out that the introduction of the buzzsaw in the early twentieth century industrialized the now-iconic magic trick of sawing a woman in half, which was first debuted by P. T. Selbit in the 1920s. Buzzsaws, for the majority of Twin Peaks viewers, may first bring to mind the series’ original title sequence and interstitial screens showing the buzzsaws of the Packard Sawmill, which grows to become a key location throughout the series. Rein describes how the use of buzzsaws in the ‘Sawing a Woman in Half’ trick recreates the onstage “‘victim’ as a log; it also conjured up a picture familiar from popular melodramas: the helpless lady in mortal danger” (176). This reading of victims as logs is, largely through the character who we’ll return to shortly, equally applicable in The Return. The permeability of bodies in Twin Peaks is thus established from the start of the original series and will be vital when discussing Red’s magic trick in The Return later in this essay. Sheli Ayers, too, comments on the abundance of bodily violence in The Cinema of David Lynch, writing that the “body itself is susceptible the invasion of things, and it is precisely this problem that the heightened melodrama of Twin Peaks explores” (101), and an invasion cannot be much more explicit than a saw removing parts of the body.

“Is it a symbol for something else?”

Of the variety of diegetic elements in the beleaguered second season of Twin Peaks, Mrs. Chalfont is one of the most enigmatic minor characters. She appears in the company of [page 62] her grandson Pierre, an amateur magician, and although the two are at their most unfathomable in the prequel/sequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, their brief appearance in the original series, in Episode 9 (S2E2), is most significant here. This appearance of Pierre is especially notable given that he is portrayed by Austin Jack Lynch, son of David Lynch, who exhibits a strong resemblance to his father. The combination of Pierre’s interest in magic and his visual similarities to David Lynch thus aligns magic with creation and ultimate power in the series, with Pierre arguably acting as an avatar for the show’s own co-creator.

Pierre’s brief trick is conjuring the creamed corn from the plate to his own hands. Creamed corn is notably key to the mythos of Twin Peaks as a whole. It’s also known by the name garmonbozia; is the life essence of many of the demons and spirits of the Twin Peaks universe, including the Arm; and is frequently vomited up by several of the Cooper iterations in The Return. The meaning of the creamed corn has, like other aspects of Twin Peaks, been the subject of much debate and interest for many years, 2  including in regard to its Aztec roots. I am less concerned, however, with the corn itself than with the legerdemain movement surrounding it and additionally with its role as an existential link between two magically coded characters.

Creamed corn is central to another key Twin Peaks character who does not at first appear to engage directly with this preoccupation surrounding conjuring. The Log Lady, Margaret Lanterman, provides a prism through which the use of conjuring as a narrative device in Twin Peaks can be observed. Tellingly, there is a direct link between the Log Lady and Pierre’s magic. In 1993, David Lynch wrote and directed what are known as ‘The Log Lady Introductions,” brief monologues delivered by the Log Lady to introduce each episode for the reairing of the show that year. The Log Lady’s monologue prefacing Episode 9 contains several notable points, particularly in relation to the symbolism of creamed corn throughout the original and new series: [page 63] 

As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside.

Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does.

Where does creamed corn figure into the workings of the universe? What really is creamed corn? Is it a symbol for something else? (“Log Lady”)

Lanterman’s opening comments are in themselves indicative of magic of a different sort. ‘As above, so below’ is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a key figure in Hermeticism whose ascribed works have been highly influential on Western esotericism and occultism. Lanterman’s consideration of protons too is notable in its further connection to Mrs. Chalfont, as one of her original lines, later cut, from Fire Walk With Me was: “Why not be composed of materials and combinations of atoms?” (Pierce 34), and we of course now know that atoms are crucial in The Return. It is important to highlight, too, that—although it is perhaps occult magic that we more often associate with science on an alchemical level—particularly during the nineteenth century, there is a long history of conjuring and science being linked in their equally performative elements. This was most clearly seen through the adoption of often pseudo-scientific titles such as ‘Professor’ by magicians but also in a desire to use increasingly modern technology for tricks during the Victorian period in an effort to be seen as innovative and authoritative. 3 After delivering her enigmatic final question, Lanterman, continuing to look directly into the camera, gives a slight, knowing raise of her eyebrows, indicating that from her perspective, just as in her affirmation of her preceding statement, the creamed corn definitely is a symbol for something else.

In The Return, Margaret Lanterman is dying, in parallel, sadly, with Coulson herself. Showtime released a reprisal of [page 64] the Log Lady Introductions for a teaser trailer for The Return, showing Lanterman and the Log once again addressing the camera, primarily discussing the values of both demons and notes, before a montage of the entrance to and interior of the Black Lodge and notable moments from the original series. Read with the symbolism of conjuring in mind, the continuing presence of Lanterman’s iconic log, noted throughout the series as a support object for her to process her grief, could signify her approaching death as the metaphorical saws approach. Her primary role in The Return is that of a mystic, delivering enigmatic visions of the future and warnings to Hawk via telephone. During one of their conversations, the Log Lady tells Hawk: “You know about death, it’s just a change, not an end” (Part 15). The Log Lady’s final speech plays upon the spiritual underpinning of many of their conversations, but the wording of this statement is even more notable when read with the transformational power of conjuring, as well as its role as a symbol of existential dread in The Return, in mind.

Ayers has noted that in Twin Peaks as a whole, “death-as-reification becomes the object of Cooper’s contemplation and the means of Laura’s redemption” (100), but I argue that the death of the Log Lady and the ultimate climax of Laura’s house being occupied by an avatar of the Tremond/Chalfont conjurers act as the final stage of Lynch’s three-part magic act. Jehangir Bhownagary, in his work setting out the formal structure of magic tricks, has noted that a key part of any magic performance is change and transformation, as the magician “leads the spectator into the turbulence of disordered reason” (32). This exact turbulence surrounds many characters throughout Twin Peaks, but especially in The Return. It is key that it is a form of Mrs. Tremond/Chalfont who opens the door of the house in the finale, given her background of acting as a conduit through which Lynch’s depiction of existential dread and conjuring tricks is made manifest. Whether we will ever see the hidden mechanics behind the trick, or indeed its true “meaning,” is another matter entirely. [page 65]

“Have you ever studied your hand?”

In the wider universe of The Return, performance magic is equally present in one of the show’s new locations: Las Vegas, the home of Cooper iteration Dougie Jones and a high concentration of well-known modern magic acts such as Penn & Teller and David Copperfield. As Chateau notes, when Cooper emerges from the Black Lodge, mistakenly into the form of Dougie Jones in a Vegas suburb, he “has gained some special abilities and a thaumaturgic gift” and later exhibits “a kind of guru-like telepathic power over things and others” (137), all qualities which magicians openly cultivate through their stage performances and are particularly useful in the already magic-saturated world of the Vegas strip.

However, it is the drug dealer Red, who moves in and out of various locations in The Return, who is arguably most directly aligned with conjuring. His coin trick, performed in front of Richard Horne, the violent son of Audrey Horne and Mr. C (the “Evil Cooper”), to intimidate him in Part 6 is a moment in The Return that again involves a focus upon hands. Through this enigmatic scene, we also return to the theme of saws, a key symbol of modern stage magic, when Red creatively threatens: “I will saw your head open and eat your brains if you fuck me over.” The background of the scene features Red’s henchmen as onlookers, but primarily concerns an isolated incident between Red and Richard in the shared space of suspended disbelief inherent to magic tricks. Seconds prior, Red notably asks Richard if he has ever studied his hand during an awkward tai chi interlude. During this scene, Red and his henchmen are intimidating Richard in a warehouse at, notably, the old Packard Sawmill, when Red suddenly laughs slightly and takes a coin from his pocket, holding it out to Richard in the palm of his hand.

The camera flits between Richard’s confused face and Red’s look of concentration as he checks that Richard is, to use a common magic term, watching closely. The camera refocuses on a close-up of Red’s hand, echoing his question to Richard, and follows his legerdemain as he moves the coin around his [page 66] hand until he suddenly flips it into the air. It is notable here that there is none of the traditional Twin Peaks background music in this scene–a common feature of much of The Return–only the whirring of generators broken suddenly by the ‘ping’ of the coin being flipped and then spinning. The camera then focuses entirely on the coin spinning in mid-air against a concrete background. Slowly, the viewer (like Richard) begins to realize that the spin is going on for an uncomfortably long time. The coin revolves in the air for thirty seconds, and towards the end of its rotation, an ominous refrain begins to creep in in the background. Richard is transfixed, and Red is watching his reaction throughout. When the coin finally lands, Richard visually flinches, then puts a hand to his own mouth, from which he produces a coin in confusion.

Seconds later, Red catches what appears to be the original coin from the air in his own hand. Red opens his palm, and when Richard checks the coin from his mouth, it has vanished. Richard continues to look alarmed as the camera moves to a deliberate and slow close-up of the coin in Red’s outstretched palm. Red announces, “this is you” in reference to the tails side of the coin where it has landed, before flipping it over and saying “this is me” of the heads side. Red maintains authority throughout the coin flip trick and, in several ways, establishes his dominance over Richard even further from the confusion and alarm his seeming control of time instills. Richard is also established to be high on drugs during this encounter, having snorted some of Red’s drugs at the beginning of the scene, and Lynch invites us to wonder whether this incident is just a result of the drugs, Richard’s questionable mental state throughout the series, a mystical occurrence of the type not uncommon in Twin Peaks, Red’s skill at magic tricks, or a combination of all of the above.

The hand is a highly symbolic part of the body in conjuring and Red’s trick—along with his direct question to Richard, “Have you ever studied your hand?,” which draws attention to his own—situates it as a focal point of this scene in The Return. Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny provides a summary of items [page 67] which induce his concept of the uncanny in a viewer or reader, and hands equally feature prominently there in the form of being “independent” and “detached” from their original bodies (150). Hélène Cixous’s later reading of the uncanny emphasizes the importance of hands to this approach, as she writes that “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff’s, peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition” (633, emphasis added). 4 We see all of these throughout Twin Peaks as part of its inherently uncanny atmosphere, and alongside the hands associated with conjuring by Red, the new character of Freddie Sykes in The Return proves invaluable through his sacrifice of his own hand to a mystical green glove that grants him superhuman strength.

Victorian posters for magicians like Herrmann the Great knowingly highlighted the importance of the hand to magicians as figures of authority on-stage. An undated poster of Herrmann’s (see Figure 1) illustrates, consciously or subconsciously, Cixous’ interpretation of hands cut off at the wrists, and the hands themselves are demonstrating sleight of hand techniques independently, completely separated from Herrmann’s disembodied head in the top left corner. Herrmann’s poster is in itself unusual in the way it deliberately draws attention to the methods behind the tricks that he performs onstage: rather than playing into the supernatural pretense of many mid-Victorian magic posters, the reality behind the techniques is the visual focus of Herrmann’s advertising. This poster, then, like Red’s continued [page 68]

emphasis upon hands in an illusory capacity, engages with later conceptualizations of the significance of the disembodied hand, and Michael Mangan highlights that magic itself often emphasizes the “unstable points of intersection between that which is known to be illusion and that which is thought to be uncanny” (xxvi).

The Victorian magic historian Arprey Vere noted in his Ancient and Modern Magic that, by the time of the book’s publication in 1879, magic is “no longer a secret and mystic profession” but is instead open to “any person having dexterous hands and a large amount of self-possession and impudence” (111); the depictions of both Red and Richard throughout The Return certainly fit within the attribution of impudence. Both possess the kind of confidence and audacity often either performed or genuinely felt by magicians in their role as manipulators of an audience’s expectations of reality, or lack thereof, during the confined space of a magic trick. The ominous musical refrain and atmosphere of confusion that creeps in during Red’s illusion is equally evocative of magic’s role as a foreboding element through Twin Peaks, but particularly in The Return.

Ultimately, through examining the spectrum of characters who engage with elements of conjuring in Twin Peaks, culminating in a range of symbols seen throughout The Return, we can see that this is often an indicator of their future demise. The Log Lady, as mentioned previously, sadly dies along with Coulson, and Richard Horne kills a boy in a hit-and-run and is then himself dramatically electrocuted into ashes. Those performing magic themselves, however, largely survive: Red was described as having absconded from the law post-series by Mark Frost (“I’m Mark Frost”), and the mysterious Tremond/Chalfonts wait behind the door of Laura’s house in the finale of The Return. The reveal of the latter thus perfectly encapsulates this portrayal of magic tricks as symbolic of existential dread and predicting demise, from Laura’s cryptic scream to Cooper’s perplexed final query: “What year is this?” [page 69]

Notes

1. This character is variously referred to as both Mrs. Tremond and Mrs. Chalfont, which naturally causes viewer confusion in distinguishing her, or not, as the case may be, from Alice Tremond (Mary Reber), the woman living in the Palmer house not throughout but at the end of The Return. I refer to the character whom Donna visits in Season 2 of the original series as Mrs. Chalfont throughout in an attempt to minimize this confusion.

2. See, for example, David Titterington, “Garmonbozia and the United States’ Demonic Shadow” (25YL, 27 Feb. 2019, 25yearslatersite.com/2019/02/27/no-stars-the-united-states-demonic-shadow/).

3. For more on this topic, see Sofie Lachapelle, Conjuring Science: A History of Scientific Entertainment and Stage Magic in Modern France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

4. The “fairy tale of Hauff’s” to which Cixous is referring is Die Geschichte von der abgehauenen Hand (“The Story of the Severed Hand”), an 1826 story by the German novelist Wilhelm Hauff.

Works Cited

Ayers, Sheli. “Twin Peaks, Weak Language and the Resurrection of Affect.” The Cinema of David Lynch, edited by Erica Sheen and Annette Davison, Wallflower, 2004, pp. 93-106.

Bhownagary, Jehangir. “Creativity of the Magician.” Leonardo, vol. 5, no.1, 1972, pp. 31-35.

Chateau, Dominique. “The Film That Dreams: About David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Season 3.” Stories, edited by Ian Christie and Annie Van den Oever, Amsterdam UP, 2018, pp. 119-142.

Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”).” Translated by Robert Dennomé, New Literary History, vol. 7, no. 3, 1976, pp. 619-645.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Penguin, 2003.

Hopkins, Albert, and Henry Ridgely Evans. Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions. Sampson Low, 1897.

“I’m Mark Frost, co-creator of Twin Peaks and author [Ask Me Anything].” Reddit, www.reddit.com/r/twinpeaks/comments/7bn45h/comment/dpj82hr/.

“Log Lady Introduction: Episode 9.” Youtube, uploaded by Brock2097, 23 June 2012, youtu.be/j3IEMqv6LIg?si=IZJgUwS3Dswcl5Fw. [page 70]

Mangan, Michael. Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Magic. Intellect, 2007.

Pierce, John J. “Intercourse Between Two Worlds.” Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series, edited by Eric Hoffman and Dominick Grace, McFarland, 2017, pp. 30-47.

Rein, Katharina. “Sawing People in Half: Sensationalist Magic Tricks and the Role of Women on Stage in the Early Twentieth Century.” Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity, edited by Alberto Gabriele, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 163-191.

Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène. Memoirs of Robert-Houdin: Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer, edited by Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, Geo. G. Evans, 1859.

Twin Peaks. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, CBS Media Ventures, 1990–1991.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Directed by David Lynch, New Line Cinema, 1992.

Twin Peaks: The Return. Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Showtime, 2017.

Vere, Arprey. Ancient and Modern Magic; With Explanations of Some of the Best Known Tricks Performed by Messrs Maskelyne and Cooke. George Routledge & Sons, 1879.

Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth on Victorian magician autobiographies and representations of fictional conjuring. She has previously published in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and several edited collections. Her other research interests include occulture and contemporary Japanese literature. She was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo for 2022 and currently works in research and innovation at the University of Portsmouth.

MLA citation (print):

 Ashton-Lelliott, Beatrice. "'My grandson does magic!': The Legacy of Conjuring in Twin Peaks: The Return." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 57-70.