[page 107] Abstract: This essay shows how David Lynch has continually revised Laura Palmer’s role throughout the Twin Peaks narrative and argues that in Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch revises Laura’s role again, likening her to the Hindu avatar, Kalki, who was sent to Earth by divine beings to end the current dark age and restart the cycle of ages. Hindu philosophy informs Lynch’s work and worldview. This paper shows how Lynch incorporates this philosophy into The Return. At its core, The Return is about the Hindu concept of the Kali Yuga, a “dark age” of suffering, and burgeoning evil. At the end of the Kali Yuga, the Hindu deity Vishnu sends to Earth his tenth (and final) avatar, Kalki, who ends the dark age and restarts the cycle of time with the Krita Yuga, an age of purity and creativity (what Lynch refers to as the “golden age”). This Hindu cycle is at play in The Return. The character known as The Fireman occupies the role of Vishnu. When he is alerted to the final years of the dark age (an atomic explosion and the release of the demonic entity, “BOB,” into the world), he generates his most powerful avatar, Laura Palmer, to bring an end to the dark age. The essay discusses how Lynch connects Laura to imagery of a white horse (Kalki’s symbol), and how she is distinctly connected to the number ten (referred to in the narrative as the “number of completion”). Finally, the essay discusses Dale Cooper’s potential role as Vishnu’s ninth avatar, Buddha, and his task to prepare the world for the coming of Laura (Kalki).
Keywords: Laura Palmer, Dale Cooper, The Fireman, Hinduism, Vishnu, Buddha, Vedic
Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return posits that Laura Palmer shares a connection to The Fireman—that godlike, mysterious being who seemingly watches over the Earth. In fact, Part 8 strongly implies that Laura was created by The Fireman and sent to Earth for a significant mission. If that’s the case, how do we reconfigure Laura’s role in this revised and expanded Twin Peaks narrative? How do we make sense of these baffling developments? [page 108]
The presence of Laura in The Fireman’s golden orb, ostensibly sent to Earth to counter the advent of BOB, challenges a story we thought we knew. We thought Laura was a mere human being, a victim of abuse who endured years of torment but who eventually found the courage to face her abuser and deny him (or it) any further purchase on her soul, a woman who ultimately defied the forces that sought to contaminate her. Laura, who had been deceived into thinking she had no worth, found in the end that she was a good person—righteous and holy—and strong enough to defeat the evil forces working to undermine her.
But now . . . now we are presented with a profound revision to this story. Now we have to rethink everything that has come before and readjust the existing narrative to accommodate an enigmatic new identity for Laura. Where once we might have asked “Who is Laura Palmer?,” Part 8 of The Return, with its revelation that Laura is the creation of The Fireman and Señorita Dido, demands that we ask a different question, demands that we ask, “What is Laura Palmer?” A difficult question, to be sure, but I believe the answer is there, cryptically embedded within the text of The Return, with clues scattered throughout the eighteen hours. Let’s examine these clues and attempt an answer. Let’s find out what Laura Palmer really is.
After the original Twin Peaks was cancelled in 1991, David Lynch could have made a follow-up feature film that picked up where the story left off. No doubt he would have had the financing for such a project and, quite possibly, the creative cooperation of Mark Frost. But Lynch chose a different direction. He chose to make his sixth feature film about the last week of Laura Palmer’s life and fashioned a story that gave Laura a prominent and meaningful place in the Twin Peaks narrative. “I was in love with the character of Laura Palmer and her contradictions: radiant on the surface but dying inside,” explained Lynch. “I wanted to see her live, move and talk” (qtd. in Rodley 184). [page 109]
No other character has obsessed Lynch as much as Laura. After completing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch still wasn’t done with Laura. He wrote and directed new introductions (featuring the Log Lady, Margaret Lanterman) for each episode of the original series and, once again, sought to reorient the Twin Peaks text to foreground Laura. In the first introduction, the Log Lady explicitly tells us, “Laura is the one.” She is the one character around which all the others orbit. Laura occupies the center; she “is the one that leads to the many.” As I wrote in an essay for Wrapped In Plastic, these statements show that “Lynch is asking viewers to assess (or reassess) [the original Twin Peaks] with a different Laura Palmer in mind—the Laura Palmer who was so vividly brought to life in Fire Walk with Me” (287). Decades later, when Lynch revisited the world of Twin Peaks for The Return, he ensured Laura would play a part and that her role would be expanded and revised yet again. In The Return, Laura becomes a crucial component of the narrative, a role Lynch signals in every opening sequence by showing us an ethereal image of Laura’s face, her famous homecoming picture, now a saintly image with a golden halo shining around her right eye.
When we first meet Laura in The Return, she has become something more than mortal. The “Laura Palmer” Dale Cooper encounters in the Red Room in Part 2 is transcendent, deliberate, in possession of an intellect vast and vertiginous. She straddles realms both earthly and celestial, and she reveals to Cooper an identity that shines with divine energy. Laura, here, is far more than the flesh-and-blood character of Fire Walk with Me, the woman who lived, suffered and died on the mortal plane. Laura of the Red Room is akin to a deity. She is a cosmic player. And she has a destiny for which she has been designed.
No doubt, The Return focusses on the intimate stories of its many characters and how they navigate the ups and downs of everyday life. It is a story about losing and finding love, about managing grief in the face of trauma, about dealing with the suffering we encounter every day. The Return is about trust [page 110] and faith, memory and regret, life and death. But the larger background against which these stories unfold involves an epic clash between good and evil. At its core, The Return is about the dark age that Janey-E describes in Part 6. It’s about how evil has manifested in the world and how this evil preys on the souls of human beings. Hindu mythology refers to this dark age as the Kali Yuga, a time of suffering, despair and burgeoning evil. During the Kali Yuga, “moral order will continue to decline, and evil will steadily increase” (Srinivasan 122). Fortunately, the Kali Yuga is the last age in a cycle of four ages. When the Kali Yuga comes to an end (and it will) the cycle of ages starts again.
Lynch is steeped in Hindu mythology. Wisdom from Hindu holy texts (often referred to as the Vedic texts) such as the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Ramayana and the Yoga Sutras inform much of his worldview. (Lynch quotes liberally from these texts in his memoir, Catching the Big Fish.) So, it’s not surprising that Hindu mythology forms the basis of much of The Return, particularly the “creation” of Laura Palmer in Part 8.
According to Hindu belief, Vishnu, the god who sustains all of reality, monitors the universe and, over time, sends to Earth a series of ten avatars to maintain order and help humanity during various crises. At the end of the Kali Yuga, when darkness reigns and there is little hope for humankind, Vishnu (along with his consort, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and well-being) sends to earth the tenth and final avatar, Kalki. Descending to Earth (avatar literally means “descend”) on a white horse, Kalki ends the dark age: evil is destroyed, moral order is restored, and the cycle of time begins again with the Krita Yuga, an age of purity and creativity (what Lynch refers to as the “golden age” (Lynch, Prints 10).
With all this in mind, it is hard not to see the idea of the Hindu cycle at play in Twin Peaks as a whole. Man detonates the first atomic bomb and ushers in the final years of the dark age, opening a door for evil to flourish in the form of BOB and the contaminating presence of the “frog-moth” (which hatches [page 111] from The Experiment’s wayward egg). Alarms ring in the realm of The Fireman and Señorita Dido, both of whom monitor the universe, occupying roles akin to the deities Vishnu and Lakshmi. The Fireman recognizes that BOB has escaped (perhaps as BOB has done throughout the ages), but this time there is a dire nature to BOB’s freedom. The Fireman realizes his most powerful—and final—avatar is required. And so, he creates Laura and sends her to Earth to bring an end to the dark age. During her life on Earth Laura will confront BOB but defeating him is not her true task. Ultimately, Laura must appear in the right place and the right time (one dark night outside the Palmer house) to fulfill her real purpose. She will scream then, powerfully and decisively, so that the dark age can be brought to “completion,” and a new age can begin. As a result, Laura effectively becomes the most crucial player in the narrative, a figure of both termination and renewal—the Omega and the Alpha of Twin Peaks.
Laura’s role as the tenth avatar of The Fireman (i.e., Vishnu) is hinted at throughout The Return. In the Red Room in Part 2, Laura (or someone who looks exactly like her) presents her true self to Cooper. She opens her face to reveal a glowing white light within. This is the divine Laura, the one designed by The Fireman. When this Laura screams and is flung from the Red Room, Cooper sees a white horse manifest in her wake. As Hindu mythology tells us, a white horse is the symbol of Kalki, the tenth avatar. A white horse has haunted the Twin Peaks narrative since the original series. In the second season, Sarah Palmer saw a white horse in the living room of the Palmer house the night Leland/BOB killed Madeleine Ferguson. And in Fire Walk with Me, Sarah saw a white horse just after Leland drugged her. In these early iterations of Twin Peaks, the appearances of the white horse were exclusive to Sarah, and their meaning was obscure. Some speculated that the horse represented death (the Judeo-Christian Bible describes Death, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as riding a pale horse), while others believed that Lynch had placed the white horse into these scenes [page 112] because he was fascinated with the French film Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949), in which a white horse is slaughtered. “[Lynch] did tell me about that same movie years ago,” Mark Frost acknowledges. “This to him was an indelible, powerful image” (qtd. in Bushman 136).
As an artifact of the original Twin Peaks, the white horse remained an ambiguous symbol, but when Lynch returned to the story for The Return, he saw an opportunity to give the white horse a new and specific connotation. If Laura represented an avatar akin to Kalki, then a white horse would logically be associated with her. At the end of The Return, Cooper travels to Odessa, Texas, to find Laura living under the guise of Carrie Page, and white horses abound: At Judy’s, the diner where Carrie works, a white horse (a coin-operated children’s rocking horse) guards the entrance. In Carrie’s home, a small statue of a white horse sits at the center of her mantle, and Carrie herself wears around her neck a small horseshoe pendant, a talisman linking Carrie/Laura to an equine presence. Carrie Page is Laura Palmer is Kalki, and the horse is explicitly linked to her. No other character in The Return intersects with the white horse. It is Laura’s symbol exclusively.
But Laura’s symbolic connection to Kalki goes beyond the white horse. In Part 10, the Log Lady waxes poetic to Hawk about the nature of reality and the destiny of the universe: “In these days, the glow is dying. What will be in the darkness that remains? Watch and listen to the dream of time and space. It all comes out now, flowing like a river. That which is and is not. Hawk, Laura is the one.” Margaret, attuned to reality’s deeper resonance, knows the end of the dark age is coming. “The circle is almost complete,” she says, prophesying the completion of the cycle of ages. She knows Laura will be there at the end, ready to face and eliminate “the darkness that remains.” The Log Lady is counseling Hawk about what and how to pay attention. Her words resemble guidance found in the Bhagavad-Gita, a critical passage from which reads:
What is real never ceases to be. [page 113]
The unreal never is. The sages
Who realize the Self know the secret
Of what is and what is not. (Blue)
This kind of Hindu cosmology resonates in The Return, and while Lynch is not deliberately depicting Hindu myths, “his method of telling stories profits from the vocabularies of Vedic texts . . . and gives him ways to speak about multiple levels of reality” (Nochimson, David xv). Indeed, the Log Lady’s words describe a deeper reality beyond the material world defined by five senses. The soul is eternal, but the physical world is not. The Log Lady advises Hawk to ignore the distractions of the corporeal world. She hints that answers will be found in this deeper reality (where “it all comes out now flowing like a river”) and that perhaps Laura has already achieved this transcendence. And when the Log Lady tells Hawk, “The circle is almost complete,” she foreshadows Cooper’s remarks in Part 17, where he explains that the numbers, 2, 5, and 3 (or 2:53, as seen on a clock) add up to ten, “the number of completion.” If 2, 5, and 3 occur “time and time again,” as the Evolution of the Arm told Cooper, then “the number of completion” occurs time and time again. Indeed, at the end of every fourth age, Vishnu sends Kalki to restart the Hindu cycle of time: Kalki, the tenth avatar, the number of completion.
We still haven’t fully answered the questions, though: How do we accommodate this new identity of Laura given the existing narrative, the one that precedes events in The Return? If Laura is an otherworldly being designed by gods, doesn’t that threaten to undermine her earlier story, especially the one depicted in Fire Walk with Me?
Not necessarily.
Hindu theology is clear: The latter avatars of Vishnu “are born into human life—for better or worse. They suffer through all the ills that mortal[s] . . . experience. They also incur a few very human flaws along the way.” (Srinivasan 114) In her mortal life, Laura was a woman who suffered many ills and developed notable flaws. While she lived, Laura had no idea that she had been sent to Earth to end the age of darkness and [page 114] restore the age of light. Laura was just a human being, born of mortal parents, albeit parents who had been unwittingly contaminated by great evil. She lived an innocent life but fell victim to the horror that possessed her father. Perhaps BOB was an inevitable part of Laura’s life. Sensing the threat that Laura posed, BOB knew that if she could be defeated—possessed as Leland had been—then The Fireman’s grand plan to restore order might be stopped, or at least delayed. The story we see in Fire Walk with Me supports this reading: Targeted by evil forces so she might become susceptible to their dark influence—to make her a new host for BOB—Laura is tortured and tormented. “I want to taste through your mouth,” BOB tells her, as he inexorably works to weaken her resolve.
But, as we know, Laura Palmer—the flawed and human Laura Palmer—found an inner strength and pushed back against the evil pressing upon her. In the end, Laura recognized her inherent goodness and denied her oppressors their grand prize. Laura may have died, but she died triumphant and certain of herself.
But, yes, there’s no getting around it, Laura died. Her short time on Earth came to an end before she realized her divine purpose, let alone took the action she was sent to Earth to perform.
After death, Laura finds herself despondent and bereft in the Red Room (appearing there, no doubt, because she chose to place the Owl Cave Ring on her finger). In these moments of despair, a new path opens: Cooper appears. A reassuring presence, Cooper places his hand on Laura’s shoulder and affirms her new existence. Laura sees an angel floating before her and is suddenly filled with joy. She has found a haven (if not a heaven) from the evil that pursued her. She is happy. She is safe. She is saved.
For decades this was the true and final ending of Twin Peaks: Laura Palmer, triumphant over evil and at rest beside Cooper’s soothing and knowing soul. It was enough, this ending. Laura was happy. And Cooper had fulfilled his mission. [page 115] He had welcomed Laura to a holy place. But, as The Return moves the story forward again, Laura’s ending in Fire Walk with Me is no longer a conclusion, but a middle point in a larger narrative. It no longer functions as the final moment of the story. It becomes instead the ending of a chapter.
Yes, time is slippery in the Twin Peaks narrative, and there is no way to definitively say one specific scene is the true endpoint in such an Ouroborean (or “Möbius-loopy”) story, but there’s no getting around the fact that events in The Return severely challenge the finality of Fire Walk with Me. The Return is rather explicit in telling us that Laura’s journey is not yet over. “I am dead,” the being who calls herself Laura Palmer says in Part 2, “Yet I live.” If that’s true, if Laura still lives in the real world and not simply in Cooper’s wishful fantasy, then perhaps she returned to Earth after appearing in the Red Room at the end of Fire Walk with Me. Perhaps she recognized her true role in the grand scheme of the universe and chose to return to Earth (with a new identity) where she would wait for the right time and place to do what she was designed to do. (Perhaps the very title of this new Twin Peaks story—The Return—is just an overt-but-ironic reference to Laura’s greatest secret.)
Despite the happy and conclusive ending of Fire Walk with Me, Lynch could not leave Laura out of the new story. “Lynch couldn’t let go of Laura Palmer as a character,” Mark Frost explains, when discussing The Return. “There was something about her that just possessed him. That became a little bit more his obsession than mine.” (Bushman 251)
Lynch had always been revising Laura’s role in Twin Peaks. He transformed Laura from a mere corpse into an enigmatic spirit, cryptically communicating with Dale Cooper in the “European ending” of the Twin Peaks pilot. He highlighted Laura’s import to the other characters in an improvised scene in the second season premiere, one where Harriet Hayward reads a poem infused with Laura’s spirit: “It was Laura/And I saw her glowing/In the dark woods I saw her smiling/ . . . / It was Laura living in my dreams/ It was Laura/[page 116]The glow was life.” He gave Laura agency and consequence in Fire Walk with Me. And he repositioned her as the central component of the story when he had the Log Lady declare in her first introduction: “Laura is the one.” Now, returning to the world of Twin Peaks again, Lynch saw an opportunity he didn’t have in those earlier instances. He saw a way to amplify Laura’s importance to the overall narrative. The ending of Fire Walk with Me may have been satisfying, but for Lynch it wasn’t enough. It pointed to a larger story yet to come.
Lynch tells us that “Fire Walk with Me is very important to [The Return].” Indeed, elements from the film, particularly Phillip Jeffries and the Owl Cave Ring, become critical pieces of the new narrative. But it’s the film’s ending that hummed with potential. “Things have harmonics,” Lynch explains, speaking specifically about Fire Walk with Me, “if you’re true to an idea as much as you can be, then the harmonics will be there, and they will be truthful. You could come back in ten years and . . . you may see more in it. You can go back into that world later and get more if you’ve been true to the basic notes.” (Lynch and McKenna 503)
Lynch saw that he could “get more” from the final scene of Fire Walk with Me. He realized the ending could be more than just a conclusion; it could provide an avenue for Laura to return to Earth to fulfill a purpose assigned to her by The Fireman. Yes, the appearance of the angel implies that Laura is in heaven, but why is she in the Red Room, a place fraught with uncertainty? The Return hints at an answer, strongly implying that the Red Room was not Laura’s final destination, but merely a “waiting room” (as The Man From Another Place once described it). Laura went there after death but passed through to another existence. She tells us as much in the Lynch-directed Twin Peaks short, “Between Two Worlds”: “I knew my life was over. And then there was a time that I cried because I was so happy. Because I saw what it was, and it was so beautiful. I was awake” (Lynch, “Between”).
Martha Nochimson also sees the angel as an awakening: “The presence of the angel is a reality of the cosmos that Laura [page 117] cannot see until she moves past the limits of ‘normal’ reality” (Nochimson, Passion 190). To support her argument, Nochimson refers to a quote from author Luce Irigaray, chosen by Lynch (from among other quotes regarding angels) as being “closest to his intention” in Fire Walk with Me: angels “destroy the monstrous elements that might prohibit the possibility of a new age, and herald a new birth, a new dawn” (qtd. in Nochimson, Passion 252). In other words, the angel at the end of Fire Walk with Me represents more than heaven, it points toward a new universe and a new role for Laura.
“Death is just a change, not the end,” the Log Lady tells Hawk in The Return. This line implies that Laura, after seeing her angel and recognizing her divine purpose, returned to Earth in the guise of Carrie Page, returned to Earth in Odessa, where she would wait for the proper time and place to end the dark age. Perhaps Laura reincarnated as new human being, or perhaps she simply returned to Earth to continue a life under a new identity. Either way, Laura’s story was not over.
There is enough evidence in The Return, from the Hindu mythology that Lynch has incorporated, to Lynch’s past patterns of revising Laura’s role in the story, to conclude that, indeed, Laura is “the one,” The Fireman’s tenth avatar, the being who returned to life to bring the circle of ages to completion, just as the Log Lady foretells. (It’s no coincidence that the title to Part 10 of The Return is “Laura is the One.” Here, Lynch cleverly and deliberately encodes Laura’s identity as the tenth avatar through the title of the tenth episode.)
Laura’s powerful role at the end of The Return has been pointed out by other critics. In an essay published shortly after The Return ended, David Auerbach makes a case that Laura was, in fact, a weapon used by Cooper to defeat the entity known as Judy. Despite his careful analysis of the text, however, Auerbach resorts to crude terminology to describe Laura, referring to her as a “bomb” and a “capacitor,” “storing a huge, accumulated charge of suffering which could then be discharged at the precise moment.” In effect, this theory reduces Laura to a mere contrivance; it’s hard to imagine The [page 118] Fireman and Señorita Dido so lovingly creating another life only to send her to Earth so that she can “detonate.” What’s more, it ignores all of the rehabilitative work that Lynch has done over the years to realize Laura and reintegrate her into the story. In contrast, the “Laura-as-avatar” theory allows Laura to maintain the agency and victory that she achieved in Fire Walk with Me. It allows for Laura to have made the conscious choice to return to Earth (either as herself or as someone else) to “awaken” to her larger destiny, the one she hints at in "Between Two Worlds." As Laura-as-Carrie Page and Cooper drive away from Odessa, Carrie mutters, more to herself than to Cooper, “I was too young to know any better,” implying that teenage Laura was not mentally or spiritually ready to accept her larger role. She had to come to terms with it. She may have been created by gods to bring forth a new age, but Laura could not—would not—act until she understood that it was the right thing to do.
While the Laura-as-avatar theory is crucial to understanding The Return, we mustn’t forget that most of the story is about Dale Cooper and his effort to get out of the Red Room, the physical and mental trap in which he has been stuck for 25 years. The Twin Peaks story makes clear that, from the beginning, Cooper’s identity and motivation is entwined with Laura. In Fire Walk with Me, Cooper becomes preternaturally aware of Laura and explains to Albert Rosenfield that he, Cooper, can sense Laura’s presence elsewhere in the world. “She’s crying out for help,” he says. Later, Cooper appears to Laura in her dream to guide her from what he perceives as a danger. Fire Walk with Me clearly establishes a vital connection between these two characters and confirms that Dale Cooper and Laura are the two central figures in Twin Peaks. In The Return, Lynch examines this relationship again, this time from Dale Cooper’s perspective.
In the first moments of The Return, when The Fireman appears to Cooper, a phonograph repetitively emits an odd chirruping sound. Though not shown, a record is likely rotating on the machine, stuck in a groove and forced to repeat [page 119] the same sound over and over. Like the cycle of ages that The Fireman must maintain, the spinning record needs to be restarted, needs to be set back on track, and so The Fireman assigns Cooper a task. He directs Cooper toward Laura. He cryptically instructs Cooper where and how to find her, effectively making Cooper his proxy. While we have no evidence that Cooper was created by The Fireman (as Laura was), we see that The Fireman needs Cooper to conduct a critical task, to participate in the plan that The Fireman began when he sent the Laura avatar to Earth. Cooper must find Laura and deliver her to a certain place.
Even if Cooper is not a deliberate avatar of The Fireman, he sure resembles one. The ninth avatar of Vishnu, the one who precedes Kalki to Earth, is Buddha, and in the original Twin Peaks, Cooper is specifically positioned as a character who practices a “Buddhist outlook.” Ken Volante carefully examines Cooper’s philosophical behavior and concludes that, “Through his deep concern for others, his adherence to the ‘no-harm principle,’ his attention to nature, and the extra moments he spent appreciating the seemingly minute details of life. . . . Cooper’s Buddhist outlook comprehends the omnipresence of suffering, the interconnection of all beings, and the necessity to appreciate the moment” (3). A character with such a mindset is the perfect candidate to assume the role of Buddha, Vishnu’s ninth avatar, the being who must prepare the way for Kalki.
Cooper sacrifices everything that human beings most desire—home, love, family and friends—to bring Laura to the exact place and time where she needs to be. Cooper gives up so much of himself that he loses sight of his needs and the needs of others, and he fully commits himself to the mission at the expense of his dearest relationships. Although he may not comprehend what it all means when he wakes up in Texas, he knows that he has a purpose. He finds himself driving Laura into the night toward Twin Peaks, following programming given to him by The Fireman. And Cooper succeeds. He brings [page 120] Laura to where she needs to be so she can do exactly what she was designed to do.
Let’s be clear: David Lynch has not literally adapted the Hindu myths of Vishnu into The Return. He is not explicitly dramatizing the stories recounted in Vedic texts. But we must not forget that Vedic texts have influenced Lynch and his art. Hindu cosmology has steered Lynch’s work in specific directions, inspiring imagery and narrative foundation: “Lynch’s cinematic zeitgeist can be understood in Vedic terms,” Nochimson explains. His work is “inflected by exposure to Vedic wisdom” (David xvi).
If we recognize the import of Hindu theology in Lynch’s life and acknowledge that he has incorporated many of those ideas into his work, then we can decipher many of the difficult elements of Twin Peaks: The Return, specifically the role of Laura Palmer. Hindu cosmology helps us clarify an ambiguous, sometimes contradictory narrative. It provides a map of sorts to navigate tricky terrain. It may not be perfect, and it may not explain all of the baffling elements contained within, but it points us toward revelation.
At the end of The Return Laura Palmer fulfills her destiny, a destiny which originates in Part 8 (and at the end of Fire Walk with Me). She screams, and the world goes black. In that uncertain moment of despair and darkness, the wheel of time turns just as it is supposed to. And the potential for a Golden Age shines in the darkness that remains.
Note
“Ten is the Number of Completion” is excerpted from the author’s book, Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks.
Works Cited
Auerbach, David. “Twin Peaks Finale: A Theory of Cooper, Laura, Diane, and Judy.” Waggish, 7 Sept. 2017, www.waggish.org/2017/twin-peaks-finale/.
Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. “What Is Real Never Ceases.” www.bmcm.org/inspiration/passages/what-real-never-ceases/. [page 121]
Bushman, David. Conversations with Mark Frost. Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2020.
Lynch, David. “Between Two Worlds.” Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery, Disc 10, 2014. Blu-ray.
---. The Prints of David Lynch. Tandem Press, 2000.
--- and Kristine McKenna. Room to Dream. Random House, 2018.
Nochimson, Martha P. David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire. U of Texas P, 2013.
---. The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood. U of Texas P, 1997.
Rodley, Chris, ed. Lynch on Lynch. Faber and Faber, 1997.
Srinivasan, Amrutur V. Hinduism for Dummies. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
Thorne, John. The Essential Wrapped In Plastic. John Thorne, 2016.
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.
Volante, Ken. “Dale Cooper, Buddhist Mystic.” Wrapped in Plastic, no. 67, Oct. 2003.
John Thorne is author of the books The Essential Wrapped In Plastic: Pathways to Twin Peaks, Ominous Whoosh: A Wandering Mind Returns to Twin Peaks, and Devious Dreams: Reimagining David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. He is co-editor and contributor to the book Twin Peaks in the Rearview Mirror: Appraisals and Reappraisals of the Show That Was Supposed to Change TV. John holds a Master of Arts in Television/Radio/Film from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He was co-editor of the Twin Peaks magazine Wrapped In Plastic (1993-2005); and co-editor of the Twin Peaks magazine The Blue Rose (2017-2022). He lives in Dallas.
MLA citation (print):
Thorne, John. "Ten Is the Number of Completion: Laura Palmer as the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 107-121.