[page 235] Abstract: This essay argues that the American author William S. Burroughs had an influence on the Twin Peaks saga created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, and that demonic/archontic possession is an important concept in both Burroughs’s and Lynch’s oeuvres. Burroughs’s impact was insinuated from the beginning of Twin Peaks’ production due to rumors that Burroughs was considered for the role of either Twin Peaks’ Mayor Dwayne Milford or his brother Dougie Milford. Premiering twenty years after Burroughs’s death, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) intensifies the Burroughsian elements of the original installments through an exploration of the metaphysical consequences of atomic weapons (something that Burroughs was concerned with). The atomic bomb as a trope of postwar American culture facilitates a Burroughsian reading of Twin Peaks, particularly regarding the third season’s portrayal of the bomb’s role in creating viral, pathogenic demons and/or gods. Such a reading will utilize several Burroughs texts, including Exterminator! and Cities of the Red Night, in addition to identifying references to Burroughs in Twin Peaks. In light of the fact that demonic possession makes numerous appearances throughout the span of Lynch’s filmmaking career, we can see Lynch as an expression of esoteric spirituality in the Burroughsian tradition.
Keywords: William Burroughs, Mark Frost, Wilhelm Reich, demonology, magic, radiation, ecocriticism, 23 enigma
Filmmaker David Lynch has a famously enigmatic body of work; however, there are tropes that recur, giving ground for theoretical development, such as the Carmilla-esque brunette/blonde dynamic in Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990-91 and 2017), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Perhaps an equally prominent trope is spirit possession. Consider Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead (1977): The Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk) appears to exist inside the main character Henry (Jack Nance). When we see The Man in the Planet coughing and struggling at the end of the film (after Henry kills the baby), it seems to give the title (Eraser-head) an exor-[page 236]cistic connotation. In Lost Highway (written by Lynch with Barry Gifford) the main character Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) has strange interactions with a ghostly “Mystery Man” (Robert Blake), one of which directly precedes Fred killing his own wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette); Fred is unable to remember the murder, implying a type of psychotic rupture where he becomes a sadistic, vengeful double shifting in and out of various bodies. In Inland Empire (2006), Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) is possessed by a character whom she’s playing on a movie set.
The possession trope spans over thirty years of Lynch’s filmography, but the Lynch piece which deals most explicitly with possession is Twin Peaks. In the second season, it is revealed that Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was murdered by an entity named BOB (Frank Silva) who had possessed her father to accomplish the deed. The movie following the initial series run, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), more thoroughly details BOB’s desire to enter and possess Laura. But the origin of BOB isn’t revealed until 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return.
Part 8 of The Return centers around the Trinity nuclear test in 1945. After showing the detonation, the camera’s eye enters the mushroom cloud; fluidic and spermous images dance erratically; a gas station is filled by flashes of light and smoke while blackened-face ghost men (“the bearded men”) circumambulate outside. Then we see an androgynous humanoid being that resembles the entity from the glass box experiment in Part 1, and it sneezes a stream of mucus containing an egg with BOB’s face on it. These images refer to the birth of the possessing entity as a sickness manifested at the atomic level, a sickness generated through humanity’s terrible technological prowess, where the demonology and sociology of the hunger for power articulate within the symbols of nuclear war. Afterwards, Lynch’s Trinity scene moves to the fortress on the purple sea, where The Fireman (Carel Struyken) and Señorita Dido (Joy Nash) observe BOB’s birth on a film screen, then create a golden orb containing Laura Palmer’s image and send it to Earth. Laura is thus created as a response to BOB’s presence, a sacrifice. [page 237]
So, Part 8 sets several explanatory pieces into place. While Laura’s death seems to fade slightly in importance toward the end of Season 2, The Return brings it back to center by situating it in a prophetic motion. Laura’s premonition of her murder in Fire Walk with Me—a prediction that she writes in her secret diary on the last full day of her life, 23 February 1989—takes on metaphysical purpose, the diary prediction in fact tapping into her sacrificial destiny. Part 8 also establishes a theoretical framework for the demonic forces at play. BOB is not just a demon, a disembodied spirit of evil; it’s also an illness that can be passed down from generation to generation. In his epidemiological dimension, BOB is an aberration of natural law because humanity’s dissection of nature causes the perversity that he embodies, the perversity to which he gives sentience. The alienness of BOB’s force is ironically born of humanity’s will to know and dominate. Knowing too much ironically opens up a Pandora’s Box of the unknown that comes flooding through the veil now torn.
These artificial or “unnatural” modes of dominance (in BOB’s case, atomic weapons and/or sexual abuse) fracture the physical world, the illness arising from the wounded glass-box god and self-reproducing in the artificial divisions caused by humanity’s arrogant rage. The sadism infecting the human soul reflects itself back into the physical realm by manifesting as diseases harbored at the connections between industrialized war and sexual perversity. The abnormal violence of nuclear technology, the sick promise of its power, and the pure blind wrath of its alien energy have warped the fluidic lifeforces within humanity's bodily matrix. We become host to a sinister sentience generated by an environmental dominion that reflexively impacts our wills to pain and pleasure.
Before Twin Peaks, Lynch dealt with sexual abuse in 1986’s Blue Velvet. The film’s dialogue makes the argument explicit near the end when Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) says to Sandy (Laura Dern) of Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), “He put his disease in me.” This is similar to something Dorothy says [page 238] to Jeffrey earlier in the film. In an interview from 1986, Lynch says,
The “disease” Dorothy talks about is an abstract sort of thing. It doesn’t mean AIDS, or anything like that. There was, in the script, even more on that theme. Dorothy’s had that done to her before, and she understands that thing, that sickness. People mention William Burroughs to me a lot, but I’ve never read any Burroughs. I know I should, but . . . (Barney 39)
Some dialogue that didn’t make it into the film explains more:
DOROTHY: You put your disease in me. your semen. it's [sic] hot and full of disease.
JEFFREY: There's no disease, I can tell you.
DOROTHY: Men are crazy. then they put their craziness into me. then it makes me crazy. then they aren't so crazy for awhile. then they put their craziness in me again. (starts crying) it's burning me. but I love you. I do, I do. Did you know that? Did you know that I love you?
JEFFREY: (very apprehensive) I'm glad you do.
DOROTHY: There's so much I want to tell you. I'm in so much darkness though with things moving. there is darkness sucking me. It's kissing me and darkness is entering me. in every hole. It's opening me to a death. (Blue Velvet: The Screenplay scene 145)
Here the connections are drawn out: psychic illness is a contagion of sexual fluids. Leland Palmer’s rape of his daughter as a preparation for BOB’s eventual home in Laura draws parallels to the Blue Velvet theory of demonology with bodily secretions as a site of demonic communication and transportation. Of course, Lynch is not the first to propose a connection between demons and sex. Early-modern theories of possession often linked the phenomenon to “hysteria” produced through an excess of reproductive fluids (Brogan). The portrayal of nuclear technology as a catalyst for demonic generation has predecessors as well, including American author William S. [page 239] Burroughs II (1914-1997), and Lynch’s reference to Burroughs is perhaps premonitory of a later inspiration.
Burroughs rose to fame in the 1950s literary world primarily as a character in the works of his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, heralding the emergence of what we know today as “Beat” literature, then went on to finalize his own breakthrough book in 1959, The Naked Lunch. Having gone to art school in the 1970s, Lynch would likely have been familiar with the names of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, but claimed he had not read Burroughs by 1986. Yet, for reasons detailed in the following section, we know that Burroughs was at least on Lynch’s radar by the late 1980s. And circumstances suggest that Burroughs not only played a role in Lynch’s thinking throughout the 1990s, but also had an impact on Twin Peaks’ later emanations in The Return and Mark Frost’s novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016).
Lynch and Burroughs
Comparisons between Burroughs and Lynch have been explored before. Slavoj Žižek writes in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime:
there is a surprising parallel between Lost Highway and Cronenberg’s The Naked Lunch, a film, based more on William Burroughs’s life than on his novel of the same name, about William Lee, a drug-addict cock-roach-exterminator and failed writer who, after killing his drug-addicted wife, enters the “interzone” . . . in which the rules of ordinary reality are suspended and nightmarish drug-induced visions are materialized. . . . Parallels with Lost Highway here are numerous: like Fred, Lee kills his wife in a fit of jealousy; as in Lost Highway, he then encounters in the “interzone” Joan Frost, a wife of the American writer Tom Frost, a different person played by the same actress as his murdered wife Judy Davis. Two narcotics detectives who, at the beginning of the film, take Lee in for questioning, strangely resemble the two detectives who visit Fred’s [page 240] house at the beginning of Lost Highway; even the figure of Mystery Man is somehow foreshadowed in the sinister Doctor Benway who, in order to cure Lee from his bug powder addiction, prescribes to him an even stronger narcotic which makes him kill his wife. (50n22)
Žižek is not alone. Also speaking on the Naked Lunch film, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes,
All of Cronenberg’s recent works are linked by a style and vision that belong to a particular annex of contemporary art, an annex that might be called biological expressionism. Burroughs is a longtime resident of this annex, and so is his disciple J.G. Ballard; Lynch is the most obvious example of another filmmaker of this persuasion. What all these biological expressionists have in common is a certain deadpan morbidity about the body that borders on comedy—and a tendency to depict paranoia, helplessness, and insect horror in such a way that “inside” and “outside” become indistinguishable. . . . The philosophical parallels between Lynch’s Eraserhead and this film are striking. Both movies are often creepy comedies generated by lurid puritanical imaginations infected by guilt and a will toward censorship, echo chambers of projections and disavowals. . . . Lee’s homosexuality and his drug taking provoke comparable disavowals, as he projects his desires onto others. Whether he’s engaged in sex, drugs, or writing, Lee can be seen simultaneously as a voyeur and as an active participant in the diverse intrigues and activities of Interzone, which corresponds to the inner zone of his head. Like “innocent” Henry in Eraserhead, he ultimately figures as both progenitor and victim of the diverse horrors surrounding him. . . . The central tenet in Naked Lunch is that Lee needs his wife in order to live and needs to kill her in order to write, and all the film’s transactions and transformations derive from this appalling fact. He literally has to kill his wife again and again in order to keep on [page 241] writing, and this condemns him to perpetual psychic imprisonment.
Lynch and Cronenberg became acquainted in the early 1980s when they were both working for Dino De Laurentiis (Lewis); when Lynch says that “People mention William Burroughs to me a lot,” it’s possible that Cronenberg is one such person. Yet, as is evident from Lynch’s words in 1986, whatever Burroughsian-isms that were possibly relayed from Cronenberg to Lynch didn’t initially have enough of an effect to make him start reading Burroughs. And Lynch’s meeting with Cronenberg happened years after Eraserhead was released; thus, Rosenbaum’s resonances between Eraserhead and Naked Lunch can only be coincidence.
However, while Žižek’s and Rosenbaum’s comparisons rest upon resonances alone without any claim of direct influence, there may be cause to see such resonance as both primarily coincidental but also subsequently transmitted through the people to whom Lynch gravitated. For example, Blue Velvet’s star Dennis Hopper could have been a contact point: Hopper was a well-known Beat literature fan and even plays Burroughs in a 1999 movie, The Source. By 1990, Lynch was working with one of Burroughs’s personal friends, Barry Gifford; he adapted Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart (1990) into a film of the same name. And 1992’s Fire Walk with Me featured David Bowie, another friend of Burroughs, in the role of FBI Agent Phillip Jeffries. While the original run of Twin Peaks doesn’t have any well-known Burroughsians in the main cast, there are some curious confluences. For example, Twin Peaks alumnae Grace Zabriskie and Heather Graham had both previously appeared in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), which featured William Burroughs as Tom the Priest. Neither Zabriskie nor Graham share a scene with Burroughs in the film; thus, the casting overlap may seem unrelated. However, Van Sant, an ardent enthusiast for both Lynch and Burroughs (McKenna 10), was invited to hang out on the Twin Peaks set in 1989 and took some polaroids of the actors (“Des polaroids pris”). Harry Dean Stanton, who makes his first Lynch appear-[page 242]ance in 1990’s Wild at Heart and reappears in Fire Walk with Me and The Return (among other Lynch works), is another remarkable casting choice: like Zabriskie and Graham, Stanton stars in a 1989 movie featuring Burroughs, Michael Almereyda’s Twister. Lynch would later serve as executive producer to Almereyda’s 1994 vampire film, Nadja. In 1997, Lynch and Gifford’s co-written Lost Highway premiered as Lynch’s perhaps most Burroughsian film, if considering not only the indeterminate identities of its characters but also that the movie revolves around a man who kills his wife, an event mirrored in Burroughs’s biography.
In an infamous tragedy, Joan Vollmer was shot and killed by Burroughs (the father of her son) with a handgun in a botched impromptu William Tell stunt; Mexico City, 1951. Later, Burroughs would attribute this fatal mistake to supernatural forces, and such an attribution should not be surprising. The Beat Godfather was a dabbler in esoteric spirituality and had been since he was young. He grew up in a house where his mother had prophetic dreams and servants taught him Irish folk spells (Miles). One of Burroughs’s first experiences with possession occurred around the age of five when he was attacked by an invisible entity that drove him to terrible panic (Miles). Some of these childhood scares are recounted in Burroughs’s first book, Junkie (1953):
Actually my earliest memories are colored by a fear of nightmares. I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the dark, and afraid to go to sleep because of dreams where a supernatural horror seemed always on the point of taking shape. I was afraid some day the dream would still be there when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: “I will smoke opium when I grow up.” (1)
These terrifying encounters with evil spirits emerged not long after an alleged incident of sexual abuse at the hands of Burroughs’s nanny. [page 243]
Consistent with this enchanted worldview, Burroughs would later claim a parasitic demon known as “The Ugly Spirit” had possessed him on that fateful night in Mexico City. In his 1985 introduction to the novel Queer, Burroughs argues that writing is a way to fight against demons:
Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: “For ugly spirit shot Joan because . . .” A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed—or was it? It doesn't need to be completed, if you read it: “ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause,” that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. (As if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer.) I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded. And for this reason the possessor shows itself only when absolutely necessary. . . . I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out. (132-135)
While Queer’s introduction perhaps overstates the role of Joan’s death in Burroughs’s art (seeing as he wrote Junkie before 1951), his language here is unambiguous and frequently cited. [page 244]
These Burroughsian elements remain a potential touchstone for Lynch following Lost Highway. Some years after Twin Peaks’ initial run, but well before The Return, internet rumors circulated that Lynch had wanted William Burroughs for the role of Twin Peaks Mayor Dwayne Milford. Fans consequently went looking for connections and noticed many similarities between Twin Peaks and a 1981 Burroughs novel called Cities of the Red Night. The Twin Peaks Explained Tumblr account goes over the connections in a 2013 post:
There are several correlations between Twin Peaks and William S. Burrough’s [sic] novel Cities of the Red Night, published in 1981.
Cities of the Red Night makes specific mentions of Black and White Lodges and features non-linear plotlines regarding space and time–a key feature of the lodges in Twin Peaks. One of the novel’s protagonists, a detective named Clem Snide, is searching for a missing boy and uses the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, to aid in his investi-gation. Likewise, Dale Cooper [MacLachlan] is investigating the death of Laura Palmer and uses ancient Tibetan methods to solve the murder.
Interestingly, it is rumoured David Lynch wanted Burroughs to play the role of Mayor Dwayne Milford in Twin Peaks, before the role went to John Boylan.1
This overlap with Cities of the Red Night seems to intensify in The Return. Similarities between the two works include frequent use of doppelgänger characters; finding a headless body; and using corn as a symbol of demonic power.
If Burroughs indeed had an impact on the show, the idea to cast him as Dougie seems significant since Frost’s 2016 Secret History of Twin Peaks, published one year before The Return, basically positions Dougie Milford as a protagonist. In the book, Dougie sees paranormal phenomena at a young age and goes on to work for the CIA researching UFO sightings; similarly, Burroughs had once applied for the OSS, and conspiracy theories claiming that he was a CIA agent abound to [page 245] this day.2 Burroughs also had a keen interest in UFO phenomena, including visiting the cabin of famed abductee Whitley Strieber (Strieber). Looking deeper into Frost’s novel, Burroughsian characters emerge. It is revealed that Dr. Jacoby is an ayahuasca advocate and a student of bicameral mind theory; not only was Burroughs deeply interested in the bicameral mind (Stevens 57), but he was the first subculture figure to popularize the use of ayahuasca outside South America through The Yage Letters, written with Ginsberg (1963). The Secret History of Twin Peaks includes numerous other interests of a Burroughsian bent, including references to Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Burroughs’s close friend Jack Kerouac. Jacoby thus seems like another Burroughs trope, evoking both Burroughs himself and certain fictional iterations such as Dr. Benway.
Another possible clue in Frost’s novel is that a young Dougie Milford punches his brother Dwayne in front of “twenty-three” other scoutmasters (107), which is an odd detail for Frost to shoehorn in there. The show itself also makes allusions to the number 23. This is potentially significant because the importance of the number 23, as an occult synchronicity, is a numerology that Burroughs is credited with originating. Robert Anton Wilson, an important figure in Discordian philosophy, picked up on the “23 enigma,” detailing its history in 1977’s Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati:
In the early '60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he'd been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody aboard.
In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23. . . . Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. [page 246] To his astonishment, 23s appeared in a lot of them. When he told me about this, I began keeping my own records—and 23s appeared in many of them. (43-44)
Burroughs quickly began incorporating 23 into many of his works, as though he were reclaiming it for magical efficacy. This 23 enigma was picked up by other early Discordianists like Kerry Wendell Thornley, one of the authors of the 1963 Principia Discordia.
Oftentimes, when one is seeing the number 23 everywhere, the number is associated with death and violence, a threatening number. Other allusions to the 23 enigma in Twin Peaks include The Return, Part 11’s closeup of a digital clock reading “4:23” when the Mitchum brothers (Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi) discuss killing Dougie Jones (MacLachlan).3 But most importantly, there’s the critical date of 23 February (1989), the date of Laura Palmer’s last diary entry, and the same night that Agent Cooper travels back to in Part 17 to save her.
In Burroughs’s works from the 1960s and 70s, the 23 enigma explicitly becomes connected to radiation and atomic weapons. The nuclear bomb held a somewhat personal connection for Burroughs because as a boy he had gone to the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico; years later, it was bought by the government and converted into a laboratory for Project Y, part of the Manhattan Project. In addition to the potential for mutual destruction, Burroughs suspected that radiation could have metaphysical consequences. These consequences include the possibility that sufficiently intensified nuclear radiation could literally annihilate one’s soul (Western 7) and/or catalyze genetic mutations.
One of the first Burroughs books to heavily feature these ideas on radioactivity was Exterminator! (1973), much of which was compiled from various pieces written throughout the 60s. In “Astronaut’s Return,” Burroughs posits that radiation is responsible for evolutionary bifurcation:
According to ancient legend the white race results from a nuclear explosion in what is now the Gobi desert some 30,000 years ago. The civilization and techniques [page 247] which made the explosion possible were wiped out. The only survivors were slaves marginal to the area who had no knowledge of its science or techniques. They became albinos as a result of radiation and scattered in different directions. Some of them went into Persia northern India Greece and Turkey. Others moved westward and settled in the caves of Europe. The descendants of the cave-dwelling albinos are the present inhabitants of America and western Europe. In these caves the white settlers contracted a virus passed down along their cursed generation that was to make them what they are today a hideous threat to life on this planet. This virus this ancient parasite is what Freud calls the unconscious spawned in the caves of Europe on flesh already diseased from radiation. . . . When they came out of the caves they couldn’t mind their own business. They had no business of their own to mind because they didn’t belong to themselves anymore. They belonged to the virus. They had to kill conquer enslave degrade as a mad dog has to bite. At Hiroshima all was lost. The metal sickness dormant 30,000 years stirring now in the blood and bones and bleached flesh. (23-24)
Punctuated eruptions of radioactivity resurrect dormant viruses as though summoning old gods for a cosmic coup of ecological devastation. Much later in the book (“What Washington? What Orders?”), this virus is tied directly to language: “You all know what we can do with the word. Talk about the power in an atom. All hate all fear all pain all death all sex is in the word. The word was a killer virus once. It could become a killer virus again. . . . Virus B-23” (113-114). The dividing line between parasite and host is thus obfuscated, the insidious alien eventually interpreted as a trait of the self (language), though it is in fact hiding, lying in wait to cause evolutionary changes that entrench the parasitic relationship.
Virus B-23 makes a return in 1981’s Cities of the Red Night. Demonic possession here is depicted as literally B-23, a [page 248] venereal disease causing amorous frenzies. One character gets infected with B-23 as a child after being abused by their nanny, clearly a direct allusion to Burroughs’s personal life. It is later revealed that a meteor explosion in the ancient Gobi desert introduced the radiation that caused the virus, mutating all of the inhabitants into different races, causing immaculate conceptions, and upsetting the spiritual evolution of the civilizations there. The B-23 virus uses fear to create its sexual frenzy, then uses such frenzies in order to create more fear. In Book One, “We Are the Language,” Burroughs writes:
A form of radiation unknown at the present time activated a virus. This virus illness occasioned biologic mutations, especially alterations in hair and skin color, which were then genetically conveyed. The virus must have affected the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. The virus information was genetically conveyed, in orgasms that were often fatal. It seems likely that the burnings, stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, and hangings were largely terminal hallucinations produced by the virus, at a point where the line between illusion and reality breaks down. (167)
Earlier in Book One, “We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people,” Burroughs drops a wrinkle in his model: “Did the laboratory contain a sophisticated DOR installation?” DOR stands for Deadly Orgone Radiation, a concept from the legendarily deposed psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The links that Burroughs draws between radiation and sexual perversion are thus stemming from a Reichian theorization of the ecosystem. If sickness in the Reichian sense is a prevention of sexual release, then the radiation occasioning biologic alteration must be, for Burroughs, causing some type of obstruction via the splintering of reality. A Reichian reading thus suggests that an irony is born out of the radioactive perversity’s causation of some kind of sexual repression. By this logic, violent [page 249] investigations into the mystery of nature never result in true connections/revelations, but proffer blockage, illusion, and deviance, all in service to the awakening of sleeping masters.
* * *
It’s a compelling similarity that both Cities of the Red Night and Twin Peaks: The Return use the atomic bomb as a catalyst for demonic virology. Overlap between Virus B-23 and BOB includes the following: both were created by radioactive explosions; both cause sexual deviance/perversity; both can be genetically inherited; both can make the host kill someone; and both use fear as a source of nourishment (such as when BOB feeds on Josie’s [Joan Chen] fear as she dies in Season 2, Episode 23).
Another compelling inter-dynamic between the Red Night and Twin Peaks mythoi regards human sacrifice. One trope in Red Night (called The Rape of the Valkyrie) even shares key features with Laura Palmer’s death:
Thirteen dancing boys fuck to Gnaoua drums and clappers. Gnaoua music drives out evil spirits who try to enter the womb. You can see the future child in a rush of liquid gold as the spirit of Hassan i Sabbah, Master of the Djinns, Master of the Assassins, guides the writhing bodies and rapt empty faces riding the drums like a bucking horse of flame. All the boys come at once as the wolfish face of Pan blazes in the young faces like a shooting star.
“The Rape of the Valkyrie,” announces Juanito.
A Swedish girl with long blonde hair is against a backdrop of Northern Lights. She is riding a horse which suddenly collapses under her and two blond youths with Viking helmets wriggle out, tying her hands with a gold rope. One fucks her as the other caresses her nipples. The boys grin at each other showing all their teeth. (109-110) [page 250]
Notable similarities include the abuse of a blonde woman; her hands tied; horse imagery; and group sex. All these features resonate with the circumstances of Laura’s murder.
Laura Palmer’s death could be seen not only as a victory in her struggle with BOB due to a failed transmigration of the possessing entity (possibly as designed by the White Lodge), but also as an appeasement that sets in motion the chain of events leading Agent Cooper to travel back in time and attain his redemption. As the death of Vollmer is often said to have set the stage for the Burroughs whom history will remember, and as the death of Henry Spencer’s child in Eraserhead opens the way for his union with the Lady in the Radiator, so does the death of Laura open the way for Cooper’s salvation. Beyond that, The Return’s flashback connection to the Trinity nuclear test implies that a cosmic reckoning related to humanity’s ecological criminality is also at stake in Laura’s sacrifice.
Ritual sacrifice, a prominent element in Burroughs’ works, is scattered throughout Red Night. In the chapter “Horse Hattock to Ride to Ride,” Virus B-23 is called the “Hanging Fever.” It causes ritualistic sacrifices that combine sex, murder, and magic into a controlled system of reincarnation through possession. This hanging sacrifice threads Burroughs’ oeuvre since Naked Lunch but gets its most explicit theorization as a magical apparatus for transmigration in Red Night. Apart from being a tool of the demonic spiritual elite used to achieve a sort of practical immortality by using a series of human hosts, ritual sacrifice in Red Night is also used as a human technology to transform the self through mergers of identities and projections of will; it is a tool of resistance to be salvaged from environmental collapse.
As a Lynchian trope, sacrifice precedes the Twin Peaks era, predating any interest that Lynch had in Burroughs, yet the comparison is still apt. On the surface of the ecocritical lens that undergirds both Lynch and Burroughs, ritualistic murder makes a befuddling scratch, alluding to a deep and broad concern with sacrificial magic that extends well beyond any analysis of transmission between them. The resonances [page 251] between Red Night and Twin Peaks as shown above evidence that Lynch’s aesthetic treatments of sacrifice certainly get more Burroughsian over time.
In much the same way that seeing Terence McKenna’s 2012 mythology as a response to Burroughs and Ginsberg’s Yage Letters turns his The Invisible Landscape (1975) from an idiosyncratic mystical adventure into a multi-faceted dialogue (Cowan), seeing Twin Peaks partly as a conversation with Cities of the Red Night positions the show’s more enigmatic moments in a certain light. Instead of seeing Laura’s death as mere sadism (though it surely is), it can be taken as a ritual act, as a magical apparatus of spiritual evolution in which the self or selves involved undergo some kind of transmutation. Recall the poem discovered at the crime scene: “Through the darkness of future past / The magician longs to see” (emphasis mine). Laura’s death as magic is not a speculative metaphor, it’s made explicit by the poem: the murder, her Christ-like sacrifice, is a curiously Burroughsian metaphysical mechanism, but to what purpose? Laura’s soul winds up in the Black Lodge, and BOB migrates into Agent Cooper’s body. Was this the ultimate aim of Laura’s sacrifice? For BOB to lure Cooper? However, BOB is not the only possible magician being referenced in the poem. Laura’s existence, as The Return makes clear, and thus also her role in BOB’s ritual, is ordained by the forces of light (Señorita Dido et al.). Perhaps Laura exerts a magical will, one that influences Cooper’s eventual triumph over BOB. Her will would thus be set in motion by angelic beings intent on repairing the psychic ruptures attendant to environmental destruction, drawing attention to the spiritual drawbacks, the demonic proliferations, the sexual sadism, and the lust for power inseminated by unchecked civilization.
As such, Laura’s murder is Burroughsian not just because it is a ritual, but because it serves that double edge so often found in Burroughs, where the tool of oppression is also the tool of resistance. That which imprisons us can also be weaponized towards our escape. Like in Burroughs, Laura’s sacrifice assists the embodied immortality of a demon, but it also sets [page 252] up BOB’s demise and the exposure of the world as a demiurgic illusion born of humanity’s ill will. The Burroughs-Lynch symbolic nexus in this way sets up environmental degradation, demonology, virology, and ritual sacrifice as interwoven concepts, looped into a causal chain of mutual information.
I think that, had he been alive to see The Return’s finale, Burroughs might view the ending as a type of failure. A central theory of Burroughsian gnosticism argues that identity, particularly a fixed sense of identity, is one of the primary prisons constructed by demonic forces for the manipulation of the primordial soul. Since ritual sacrifice is double-edged, being both the tool of demons and a way to escape demons through self-transformation, Laura’s alternate self, Carrie Page of Odessa, Texas, could be seen as not so much the embodiment of an unfortunate forgetting of the truth but a testament to the freedom offered by abandoning the quest for who we are. Forgetting ourselves lets us let go of the past, and our ego. When Cooper takes Laura back to Twin Peaks and she finally remembers, Burroughs might say that her resultant scream is the horror of being stuck, single, unique, fixed, unchangeable, unable to flow through time.
But Carrie does want to leave Odessa, right? Was Cooper’s quest to go beyond just preventing the murder, by returning Laura to herself, a loveable part of his moral purity? Or does the horror that re-emerges at the very end signify Cooper’s foolishness, his inability to relinquish the fixed identities imposed by the Demiurge, his need for the illusions of truth? And how much beauty is there in an indeterminate identity?
For Burroughs, the indeterminacy of the self was an ultimate goal that could return one to the immortal world; for Lynch, the prospect seems more ambivalent. It is fruitful to disentangle Cooper’s second life as Dougie Jones in this regard. Dougie’s inept behavior produces both anxiety and frustration, but to great comedic effect. Cooper does so much good as Dougie, and his departure from his new family is sorrowful, yet the viewer is also excited when the real Cooper comes back to his full senses, when he becomes his “true” self again. This [page 253] ambivalence seeps into the final scene as well, for me. There is a desire for Laura to remember who she is because the memory of the terrible life she once had is prerequisite for appreciating her salvation. Yet, like the power of the bomb, the beauty of salvation carries a heavy price.
Notes
1. Other sources complicate this narrative. According to producer Harley Peyton, who also wrote many episodes of Twin Peaks, Burroughs was sought out not for the role of Dwayne, but for Dougie Milford, the mayor’s media-mogul brother; however, Burroughs was deemed too expensive and they eventually cast Tony Jay (“Dougie”).
2. See Richard Wolstencroft, “Bill Burroughs Joins the Wild Boys at the Alt-Right” (The Unshackled, 24 Sept. 2017, www.theunshackled.net/book-review/bill-burroughs-joins-the-wild-boys-at-the-alt-right/) for an antisemitic, alt-right version.
3. It is interesting to note that Part 11’s allusion to the 23 enigma connects, like Frost’s novel, to a character named “Dougie.”
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Tommy P. Cowan is an alumnus of the University of Amsterdam (M.A. Religious Studies, 2019), where he wrote his thesis on the spirituality of William S. Burroughs. He currently works as an English teacher and Ph. D. student at Florida State University and is an associate editor for Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism.
MLA citation (print):
Cowan, Tommy P. "BOB, the Bomb, and Bill Burroughs: Notes on Lynchian Demonology." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 2, 2026, pp. 235-255.