[page 92] Abstract: This essay explores the connections between Twin Peaks, especially The Return, and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and looks for deeper meaning behind Lynch and Frost’s use of this mythic motif, applying feminist, feminist-inspired, and psychoanalytic scholarship in addition to the work of scholars dedicated to Twin Peaks. Special attention will be given to the analysis of the relationship between Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer, which, I will show, mirrors the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, albeit in quite a subversive way.
Keywords: Orpheus, Eurydice, mythology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory
Throughout centuries, the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—a tragic tale about a legendary musician and poet who failed to bring his wife back from the dead—has inspired a myriad of artists and thinkers. Among them are David Lynch and Mark Frost, who particularly turned to this myth in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the latest audiovisual installment of the Twin Peaks universe. Frost himself pointed this connection out while explaining the series’ ending, by comparing FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to Orpheus:
Cooper feels some sense of duty to undertake this last quest for Laura. He’s driven by it, and goes to great lengths to pursue it. And he encounters truly mortal danger, not just physically, but perhaps metaphysically. There are echoes of classic mythological themes. It’s Orpheus descending into the Underworld. You are playing with deep, profound, mysterious forces that will have unintended consequences. In the old mythology, as a mortal, to cross into the realm of what was thought of as the gods’, meant you risked everything. That’s what we’re seeing happen here. (Cotter)
One can sense the allegorical kinship between Orpheus and The Return’s Cooper: both function as heroes on a hellish quest [page 93] to bring a woman—Eurydice or Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee)—back to life. In order to do so, they need to cross boundaries of experiential reality. However, this is not the only link between the myth and Twin Peaks. This essay will explore those links, with particular focus on The Return, and theorize meanings behind Lynch and Frost’s use of this mythic motif, especially considering the connection between Cooper and Laura. But first, I will provide an overview of the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: An Introduction
Orpheus was a lyrist with extraordinary, even magical abilities. He was said to be the son of a Muse (probably Calliope, the patroness of epic poetry) and either Oeagrus, the king of Thrace, or Apollo, god of reason, music, intelligence, and sun, and his singing and playing of the lyre, or cithara, were so powerful that they were able to move “animals and inanimate nature” (Morford and Lenardon 362). He was also believed to be “one of the members of Jason’s Argonautic expedition” (360), as well as the founder of Orphism, a religious movement from around the 6th century BCE that taught that humans are creatures of duality, “partly evil and mortal but also partly pure and divine” (363), since they were made from the remains of Titans, ancient monsters, who were punished by Zeus for devouring his son Dionysus, god of resurrection. Thus, the human soul may reach an “apotheosis, a union with the divine spirit in the realms of the upper aether,” only if it undergoes many “stages of purification” (363), reinforced by various ascetic practices during its mortal incarnations.
The most well-known story of Orpheus also deals with death and rebirth—he journeyed to the Underworld, the realm of the dead and also called Hades, in order to retrieve his wife Eurydice, who was fatally bitten by a snake. The most renowned interpretations of this myth have been written by the Greek philosopher Plato and the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid. The latter two tell a story of a grief-stricken Orpheus, who charmed the gods of the Underworld into releasing [page 94] Eurydice under the condition that he would not look back until they both stepped into the upper world. Unfortunately, he became impatient and looked back before she stepped into the light, and she disappeared forever. Distraught, Orpheus spent his life playing beautiful music and rejecting women, eventually dying by the hands of the Maenads (or Bacchae), female followers of Dionysus (Bacchus in Latin myth), who dismember him in their religious frenzy. However, Plato, in Symposium (c. 385-370 BC), highlights that the gods were never in favor of Orpheus in the first place: Phaedrus says that “they thought he was soft (he was, after all, a cithara-player) and did not dare to die like Alcestis for Love’s sake, but contrived to enter living into Hades,” which is why they “did not give him the woman herself” but “an image” of her, and “made him die at the hands of women” (11). Additionally, only Ovid mentions Eurydice after she is cast back into Hades. In his Metamorphoses (8 AD), he wrote that the shade of Orpheus, after his own death, “fled below,” “and as he searched through the Elysian Fields,/ he came upon his lost Eurydice,/ and passionately threw his arms about her;/ here now they walk together, side by side,/ or now he follows as she goes before,/ or he precedes, and she goes after him;/ and now there is no longer any danger/ when Orpheus looks on Eurydice” (Book XI, ll. 85, 87-94).
The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and Its Connections with Twin Peaks
Frost referred to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice within the
context of The Return’s ending. However, the original series (1990-91); David Lynch’s film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and deleted scenes released as Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (2014); and Frost’s epistolary novel, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017) also engage with the myth, and Laura is not the only female character resembling Eurydice. There is also Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), Cooper’s girlfriend, whom he follows at the end of the second season into the otherworldly Black Lodge, mirroring Orpheus’ descent into Hades. The threat to Annie’s safety is real: she was taken there by the [page 95] former FBI Agent Windom Earle (Kenneth Welsh), who had also killed Caroline (Brenda E. Mathers), his own wife and Cooper’s former girlfriend, who appears in the Lodge, taking Annie’s place a few times and suggesting the shapeshifting nature of extra-dimensional apparitions. Annie’s death is metaphorical rather than literal, as she is alive upon arriving at and when eventually escaping from the Lodge; her metaphorical death, however, is shown in the Fire Walk with Me deleted scenes and in The Final Dossier (70-71), which state that Annie ends up catatonic and eventually hospitalized. Frost’s book provides further details on her ordeal: among other things, soon after the incident she fell into some sort of “catatonic state” and made “her second suicide attempt” on the anniversary of the event (70). Some sort of a metaphorical double death happens to the original series’ Laura Palmer too: her lifeless body narratively opens the show, and then her uncannily identical cousin Madeleine “Maddy” Ferguson (also Sheryl Lee) eventually dies by the hands of the same killers before Cooper is able to catch them.
However, the more significant reference to this myth occurs in The Return, especially Parts 17 and 18. As mentioned, Frost verified the reference, thus confirming and/or inspiring several interesting articles and fan theories.1 In these episodes, we see Cooper trying to save Laura from perilous situations in two different timelines: in the first, he attempts to save her from her death, only to lose her, screaming, to an unknown force after he turns back to look at her; in the second, the version of Cooper known as Richard (Kyle MacLachlan) takes Carrie, another version of Laura (also played by Lee), home to Twin Peaks, which provokes her to scream again with such force that he seemingly returns to the Red Room. An additional connection to Orpheus and Eurydice, as members of fan forums have noted, is that the scene from Part 17 bears a striking resemblance to the painting Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (Orphée ramenant Eurydice des enfers, 1861) by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.
Links can be made between Twin Peaks and Orpheus and [page 96] Eurydice-inspired films, as well. Since the original series aired, it has frequently been compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), an adaptation of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel The Living and The Dead (D’Entre les morts, 1954). Vertigo itself has been considered a rendition of Orphic tragedy (see Brown; Berman) because its male protagonist John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) has to deal with two deaths of the same woman: Madeleine (Kim Novak), a woman to whom he was attached who supposedly committed suicide but was actually killed by her scheming husband (Tom Helmore); and a made-up character played by an actress called Judy (also Novak), who later dies by falling from a tower just like the real Madeleine. According to the aforementioned sources, this plot especially echoes the fates of the original series’ Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson, whose name is a direct reference to to of Vertigo’s characters; there are parallels in the last two parts of The Return that connect Laura and Carrie to this story as well (“‘Vertigo;” Puddicombe; Lončar, “When”). Fans have also noted similarities between The Return and Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending (1957) (Raviotta). A detail that cannot be ignored is that one of main character Xavier’s distinguishing features is a snakeskin jacket just like the one worn by Cooper’s evil doppelgänger Mr. C (also MacLachlan).
Especially striking connections can be made between Twin Peaks and Jean Cocteau’s oneiric “Orphic Trilogy” (Boulègue 22-24; Wolpert), all of which use dream logic as well as depicting characters who continuously die or transform into something else. The first film of the trilogy, The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète, 1932), follows a Poet (Enrique Riveros) who enters the dreamy, hotel-like Otherworld, situated behind a mirror, on the suggestion of an ancient female statue (Lee Miller); although the plot is not that of Twin Peaks, one can compare the Poet to Cooper and the Otherworld to the Black Lodge. Lynch and Frost’s use of the mirror motif is similar to Cocteau’s—mirrors in Twin Peaks frequently reflect the de-[page 97]monic spirit BOB (Frank Silva)—as is their conception of otherworldly space itself: not only does the Black Lodge’s Red Room consist of many rooms occasionally filled with ancient female statues, but one of its entryways is in the Great Northern Hotel.
There are additional similarities between Twin Peaks and Cocteau’s second film, Orpheus (Orphée, 1950), based on his eponymous theatrical adaptation of the myth (1926). In the film, a poet named Orpheus (Jean Marais) embarks on a journey into the Underworld, called the Zone, to resurrect his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa), but he is more mesmerized by the Princess (María Casares) representing death than driven by love for his wife. To access the Underworld, often represented via negative imagery and reverse motion photography and speech, he must use mirrors, which are placed in his bedroom, along with objects such as a chevron-patterned rug, floral wallpaper, and magical rubber gloves. These audiovisual techniques and motifs are also used to depict Twin Peaks’ Otherworld: the Black Lodge is also referred to as the Zone in The Return, and some of its spaces also feature a chevron-patterned floor (the Red Room) and floral wallpaper (the rooms above the convenience store, first shown in Fire Walk with Me, or the Dutchman’s Lodge in The Return). Its occupants sometimes also walk and talk in reverse, including BOB, who interestingly only dies after Freddie Sykes (Jake Wardle), the unlikely hero of The Return, punches him with a magical gardening glove.
Unsurprisingly, the third film, Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960), also serves as an inspiration to Twin Peaks, especially its third season. In this film about film, as in the artist’s body of work, Orpheus is equated with the author, played by the director himself, who needs to repeatedly die in order to learn and create, most suitably in the medium of film, which he calls “a petrifying source of thought” that “brings dead acts to life.” Exemplifying the analogy between the art of film and human creativity, the Poet is able to travel through space-time, which he readily demonstrates and at one point asks: “What year is it?,” which is the same question that [page 98] Cooper/Richard asks at the end of The Return while trying to bring the previously dead but somehow now alive Laura back to her former life. These and many other connections between Cocteau’s Orphic films and Twin Peaks show that Cocteau’s Orpheus was a major influence on Frost and Lynch (who, as a creator with surrealist tendencies himself, praised Cocteau's work in the 1987 installment of BBC’s Arena [1975-] that he hosted on Surrealist cinema).
Cooper’s Complicated Relationship with His Eurydice
As one can see, there is an undeniable mirroring between Twin Peaks and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in its various artistic interpretations, suggesting that the series thematically engages with the Orphic journey. Cooper can be viewed as a version of the mythic poet, a symbol of knowledge, creativity, and a desire to deal with life’s mysteries, including the death of a very special woman: Eurydice. Throughout Twin Peaks, one can argue that Annie, Caroline, Maddy, and Laura all embody this mythic woman. As Frost suggested, the most evident parallel between Orpheus and Cooper can be found in The Return’s finale, where the latter is actively pursuing Laura/Carrie and saving her/them from her/their demise. However, there is a significant difference between the myth and The Return’s narrative: while Laura plays the role of Eurydice, she—in the form of Carrie—does not seem eager to follow Cooper on their journey, and unlike the Underworld version of Eurydice, Carrie is not a passive and silent shadow of the woman formerly known as Laura: in the last few minutes of the series’ finale, she resists Cooper’s efforts to bring her home by screaming so sharply that she causes a power cut.
In other words, not only does The Return emphasize the importance of the Orphic metaphor in Twin Peaks, but it also indicates that there is something deeply wrong in the relationship between Cooper and his Eurydice, especially in the form of Laura. Even though he wants to save her, she does not react well to his desires, and he might be suffering, as Tammy Preston notes in The Final Dossier, from “white knight syndrome, [page 99] the irresistible urge to rescue every damsel in distress he came across” (57). When one adds that Cooper’s shadow self, Mr. C, is a rapist and killer of women who wears a jacket made of snakeskin—the predator that killed the mythic Eurydice—it is safe to conclude that Cooper has a problematic relationship with certain women in his life. To explore this notion further, I will consider feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Feminist Perspectives on the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: A Selection
While studying the myths and doctrines surrounding Orpheus, many scholars have pointed out their patriarchal shortcomings. For example, W. K. C. Guthrie argues that
active misogynism was a part of Orpheus’ character, and that he was not simply a passive and innocent victim of the mad frenzy of Maenads. This personal antagonism of Orpheus to women, and their resentment of it leading to his violent death, were represented as the ground for practices current in historical times. In Konon’s version of the legend, Orpheus showed his dislike by his refusal to allow them to participate in the rites he taught, and at the end Konon mentions that entry into the sacred precinct round the shrine of Orpheus is still strictly forbidden to women. (49-50)
Liz Locke states that Orphism was an “exclusively male religious sect” (4); women, “as far as we can tell from the legends, were disallowed from participating in the Orphic Mysteries,” and—according to Orphic theogonies—were not considered bearers of knowledge, since “knowledge is not birthed from the bodies of women” (17). She also finds it interesting that earlier versions of the myth named Eurydice Agriope, meaning “Wild-Eyed,” or “Wild-Voiced,” which “stands in diametrical contrast to Orpheus himself, who through music and Muse-inspired poetry tames and civilizes what is wild. He knows that the wild (Adikia, Disorder) must be brought under control, made human, useful” (19). [page 100]
Kaja Silverman’s Flesh of My Flesh (2009) explores the ways that the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has traveled throughout history. An excerpt of her introduction particularly resonates with this essay:
The first part of the myth [taking place in the Underworld] has a firm hold on the Western imagination. It was allegorically assimilated by paganism, Christianity, courtly love, Neoplatonism, humanism, romanticism, modernism, and even postmodernism. . . . As the myth journeyed through time, Eurydice’s second death stopped mattering; what was important about Orpheus’s backward look was the threat it posed to him. For Boethius, this threat was spiritual; the musician represented the “higher powers of the soul” and his wife, the “earthbound passions.” For the Christian Ovidians, it was moral; Orpheus was “a type of Christ, overcoming death,” and Eurydice a signifier for the world, the devil, and/or the flesh. When the myth was interpreted in this last way, Eurydice’s death became a “fortunate loss”—something that had to happen in order for Orpheus to succeed in his mision. And although many later writers saw Orpheus as the prototypical artist, rather than as a Christ-figure or a virtuous man, they continued to stress the danger to him of looking at her. (5-6)
Silverman argues that Eurydice eventually grew to represent dangerous irrational urges and/or the female object of the artist’s gaze.2 Due to this increasing cultural focus on Orpheus’ dominance over Eurydice, Silverman is not surprised that Ovid’s coda, in which the murdered Orpheus is reunited with Eurydice in a more equal way, has not received much attention. She traces it, though, in certain authors like the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, to whom there is a “redemptive quality to this kind of looking—the capacity to make the past happen again, in a new way. She also suggests that transformations in a person’s private past can precipitate changes in the historical past. When we turn around and [page 101] embrace the ‘partner’ we have repudiated, Salomé writes in her Freud Journal, ‘all the vanished people of the past arise anew’” (Silverman 8).
Scholars like Bracha L. Ettinger follow a similar line of thought, although in her work, Eurydice’s actions hold the key to abandoning patriarchal perspectives on life. As Judith Butler writes in the foreword to Ettinger’s book The Matrixial Borderspace (2006), Eurydice is always “already lost, already gone, already dead, and yet, the moment in which our gaze apprehends her, she is there. . . . She is coming toward us, she is fading away from us and both are true at once” (vii-viii). This specific presence within the absence invokes a unique spatiotemporal dimension of what Ettinger calls the Matrix, or the matrixial, which she equates with prenatal symbolic space, or borderspace, where I and the unknown non-I coexist, and transformative transferential potentialities emerge. Even though the real prenatal symbolic space is forever lost, the Matrix one should strive to is “accessible in post-Oedipal world,” particularly through visual artwork, which “urges us to relinquish the phallic gaze—which seeks to master, possess, and abject—in favor of a matrixial one” (Dumas 338).
Following what has been said about the myth, Twin Peaks arguably represents the theme of the Orphic journey, especially when it comes to Cooper, whom Frost confirmed functions as Orpheus. In many ways, Cooper fits the Cocteau-esque version of the ancient hero: a metaphorical time-bending artist who, through many personal transformations, leads the audience through three seasons of Lynch and Frost’s artwork. Similar is the fate of his Eurydice, although it appears that there are several of them—at some point, Annie, Caroline, and Maddy, as well as Laura, each embody this ever-shifting mythic female figure. The latter takes on her role the most often, particularly in The Return, the ending of which enacts the story of the tragic lovers but differs from its conventional narrative in that Laura, or Carrie, does not seem to reflect the “original” Eurydice’s conformity and meekness, signaling that something might be off in the relationship between Cooper and [page 102] her, as with other women in his life.
Feminist scholars have argued that this myth indeed illustrates a relationship based on male dominance over a gazed-upon, objectified and irrational woman who serves as the male artist’s inspiration better when repeatedly dead. After all, even the followers of Orphic religion frowned upon female engagement with their practices, reflecting Orpheus’ supposed disdain for women. When translating these notions to Twin Peaks, it seems that. underneath all of the moralism and chivalry of the original series’ Cooper, there lies a wounded man with problematic notions of women, as capable of creating a hostile “snake” of a persona like Mr. C as to embody “the white knight” known as Richard, eager to save women even when they do not want to be saved. Considering various versions of the myth, Cooper indeed echoes Plato’s view of Orpheus as selfish.
However, as the ending of the season unfolds, it seems that Lynch and Frost incorporated Ovid’s view of Orpheus too. Namely, in Part 18, just when Laura/Carrie, channeling Eurydice’s fear of Orpheus’ gaze, is about to scream and helplessly disappear again, this time forever, a change occurs. Unlike the “original” apparition, she defies Cooper’s displays of dominance (at one point he even grabs her arm!) and produces a scream so powerful that it causes a blackout that suggests the atomic blast from Part 8. Additionally, after this metaphorical ending, she does not disappear completely, suggesting a similarity between the series’ finale and Ovid’s coda. Apart from Ovid’s version of the myth, retellings stop mentioning Eurydice after Orpheus fails to take her out of the Underworld. This is not the case with Part 18 Laura, who is seen again in the next, very last shot of the series, standing—significantly—side by side with Cooper in the Red Room and whispering what one knows is the name of her killer into his ear. In The Return, this scene is a repetition of almost the same scene in Part 2, where Red Room Laura can be seen whispering into Dale’s ear before she disappears, screaming, foreshadowing the events of the last two parts. The last shot of the [page 103] season, on the contrary, does not depict Laura screaming while being taken by some external force. In contrast, it invokes a certain stillness, albeit an uneasy one, accompanied by very toned-down background music.
Suggesting that there is a certain equality between Cooper and Laura as the series’ Orpheus and Eurydice, all the while indicating that previously there was none, Twin Peaks exemplifies the interpretation of the myth that Silverman and others have praised. By finishing The Return with the shot of Laura whispering to Cooper the name of her killer, and simultaneously indicating that a certain destructive cycle has been broken, there is a suggestion that Cooper has finally started listening to what “Eurydice” has to say, without the distractions of the ominous gramophone sounds that The Fireman warned him about at the beginning of the season. In her compelling article on the connections between Ettinger’s theory and The Return, when it comes to the series’ ending, Raechel Dumas similarly concurs: “No longer does the traumatic object disappear under the gaze; rather, its traces rise to the surface in unanticipated and profoundly meaningful forms. ... As the final scene suggests, if there is a place to return to, it is the shared world of cryptic dreams where the gaze of mastery recedes” (343).
By subversively using the Orphic motif, The Return gives a new perspective on its meaning: perhaps Cooper’s main quest is to embrace, not master, the ever-shifting femininethat Laura represents, and to comprehend his, her, and, apparently, other women’s wounds. As Andreas-Salomé indicated, by having the capacity to make the past happen again, in a new way, one is able to precipitate changes in not only the personal but also the historical past. Together with Laura, Cooper seems to be trying to achieve exactly that. The process is long, but it is there.
Notes
1. For example, interesting observations have been made by Jeff Jensen (“Twin Peaks Finale Recap: ‘The Return: Parts 17 and 18,’” Entertainment Weekly, 12 Sept. 2017, ew.com/[page 104]recap/twin-peaks-season-3-finale), Michael Adam Warren (“Twin Peaks Finale Partly Explained by Mark Frost,” www.BlueRoseEpics.com, 2 Nov. 2017, www.blueroseepics.com/2017/11/twin-peaks-finale-partly-explained-by.html), and several members of fan forums, particularly the Welcome to Twin Peaks website (welcometotwinpeaks. com), in threads called “Cooper leading Laura” and “Dale Cooper & Laura Palmer in: Orpheus—Don’t Look Back!”; the archive at dugpa.com, especially in the thread “Is Major Briggs an Orpheus figure?”; and of course Reddit, most notably in threads named “Listen to the sounds—Cooper’s mistake,” “Parallels between the story of Orpheus and episode 17,” and “[All] Twin Peaks and Greek mythology.”
2. For further clarification of this notion, see also Judith E. Bernstock’s Under the Spell of Orpheus: The Persistence of a Myth in Twentieth-Century Art (Southern Illinois U, 1991); Margaret Bruzelius’ “H.D. and Eurydice” (Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, 1998, pp. 447-463); and Nora E. Offen’s “Eurydice without Orpheus” (Bard College Senior Projects, Spring 2011).
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Karla Lončar is a Croatian film scholar, film critic, and lexicographer working at the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography in Zagreb. Her doctoral thesis, which she completed at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Zagreb), explores Twin Peaks through the lens of feminist and psychoanalytic film theory.
MLA citation (print):
Lončar, Karla. "Looking Back: Twin Peaks: The Return and the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 92-106.